Sweet Home Chicago

Like any kid growing up in the late 80s, ABC’s TGIF anchor “Perfect Strangers” was appointment television. It was filmed in Burbank, but it was set in Chicago, just as “Friends” was filmed in Burbank but set in New York. The latter’s establishing shots skewed conventional, but I enjoyed them, especially when it would start wide and then zoom in on its Greenwich Village apartment building exterior. I liked imagining it that way, all these friends and their antics occurring amid so much NYC hustle and bustle just as I liked imagining unlikely cousins Larry Appleton and Balki Bartokomous getting up to their ample hijinks in real live Chicago. Indeed, the “Perfect Strangers” opening credit sequence employed actual Windy City locations, like Larry buying a newspaper (buying a what?) on Washington Street just outside the Cultural Center, and both he and Balki exiting the Red Line underground station on State Street across from the Chicago Theatre. When I moved to Chicago and eventually found a job, it was on Michigan Avenue, right around the corner from the Cultural Center, and on mornings when the Brown Line was moving slow and I’d change to the Red, if I remembered, and even though it made little sense because it was on the wrong side of the street for where I needed to get, I would use the same exit as Larry and Balki, imagining myself tuxedoed as I did. Here I was, that same clueless kid watching “Perfect Strangers” all those years ago, in Chicago, standing tall on the wings of my dreams. 

I moved to Chicago 20 years ago this June, a few years after retreating to Iowa when my Phoenix move didn’t take but still knowing I wanted life in a big city. I had a couple friends in Chicago who offered to let me sleep on their (broken) couch while I got myself settled in the couple months before a three-bedroom apartment would become available atop their current place. I arrived on a Saturday afternoon and strolled right into the backyard where my pals and a host of others that would also become my pals were drinking beer and playing Bocce Ball. Looking back on it, I was essentially walking right into a new community. I lived for a long time in a classic Chicago three-flat where everybody knew each other, a co-star in my own “Perfect Strangers”-ish sitcom, just one with a wood-paneled old man bar down the alley. I watched the 2006 NFC Championship Game there when the Bears made the Super Bowl, eating the cocktail wieners from a crockpot provided by a regular, listening to The Blue Brothers’ “Sweet Home Chicago” when another regular played it on the jukebox at game’s end. It was snowing outside and despite the dim lighting inside, the whole place seemed to glow like Valhalla. I remember thinking something like, “If ten-year-old Nick watching a Bears game in the basement could see me now.”  

Almost instantly, I knew moving here had been the right choice. That only made it more ironic when at the end of 2005, my health nosedived. It was strange, being so emotionally happy but so physically miserable, and though 2006 was one of the worst years of my life, I survived it because it was also one of the best. And once I finally got my health under control in the twenty-tens, that’s when all the pieces of me finally began to coalesce and settle into place in a way that I didn’t even realize was possible until it happened. That correlated to meeting My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife, the two best decisions I have made in a life that has been jam-packed with dumb ones dovetailing. In 2012, when Tift Merritt, one of my favorite singer-songwriters, was promoting her album “Traveling Alone,” she told NPR that she had to realize you don’t just arrive in a place where things make sense; “you have to build that place for yourself.” And though I think she’s right, I also know that I might never have built my own place if I didn’t come to Chicago. 

Sydney’s first apartment in Chicago on The Bear that may or may not have also been my first apartment in Chicago.

When I originally moved here, I really only had one goal, and it wasn’t to find a job, though I grudgingly did, but to see as much live music as possible. After all, I came from a middling music scene to one of the best in the world, as evinced by the Chicago Reader concert lists I would pore over each week. Boy, did I. For my first few years in Chicago, I was seeing a show once a month, and some months I was seeing two or three. Though this might have exacerbated my seeming hearing loss, I have no regrets. It was a glorious time. I saw so many singer/songwriters and bands I had longed to see, like Tift Merritt, as a matter of fact, and Kathleen Edwards, and Rilo Kiley, and I saw so many more that I did not even know until I saw them, like Adrienne Young, and The Avett Brothers (who were opening for someone else), and Ra Ra Riot, back in the aughts when onstage they were an explosion of youthful joy until they got older, alas, and became something calmer and comfortable (and boring). As Lisa Bonet wistfully observed in the Chicago movie classic “High Fidelity,” “Ah, and so it is.”

The first show I saw as a Chicagoan was the blues and roots-inflected rocker Shannon McNally at Schubas Tavern, a place I would come to know as well as the Music Box Theatre or the Landmark Century Cinema. Back then, Schubas got all the shows that Lincoln Hall or Thalia Hall would get now, and Schubas was only a couple train stops away. It was only some years later that I realized McNally had cut a live album of that concert called “North American Ghost Music.”

 

Well, there you go. That’s Shannon McNally, alright, standing in the middle of the empty Schubas floor. That table up there along the right wall in front of the stage is where I posted up with my friend Daryl right in front of the dude playing pedal steel. McNally appears to be wearing the bootcut jeans that my mind remembered her wearing, because those were trendy in those days, and then weren’t, and now are again, and I have lived here long enough to see that glittering view of the Chicago skyline from the Brown Line when it curves around from North Avenue toward Sedgwick become obscured by tree growth in the spring and summer, and the wood-paneled old man bar rehabbed into a cooler young person’s bar (and it’s always been burning since the world’s been turning). And that song, “Pale Moon,” that’s the one I remember most, the sort of live music moment where all of a sudden you seem to ineffably leave your body. I have seen so many great shows in Chicago, and I saw more shows in that three-year span of 2005-07 then I think I can even remember, and even the ones I do remember, well, they’re gone, ephemeral, as is generally intended with live music. But what a fortunate cosmic coincidence to have my inaugural show in the city that changed my life documented for the historical record.