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 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.

Cinematically Cataloguing the Recent Past

This year is my 14th living in Chicago. I’m a transplant, yes, but the city’s become my home. I’ve put in my time. I’ve stared down Rahm and won. I’ve gone to The Waco Brothers’ Holiday Show at Schubas (more than once). I know how to do a Peter Francis Geraci impression. I got married here! So it surprised me that I was so surprised this past weekend, having lunch in Chicago’s Chinatown neighborhood with My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife, when a black double-decker bus rolled by outside bearing the words Untouchables Tour. “There’s an ‘Untouchables’ tour?” I incredulously asked. Somehow, despite having been here since 2005, I had never seen one of these buses. Turns out, after a little research, this is not a tour of the filming locations for Brian DePalma’s 1987 film but a tour of gangsterland Chicago sites with dudes dressed as Prohibition Era mafiosos for tour guides. Frankly, that sounds a little too Tony n’ Tina for me, and so I preferred imagining the Untouchables Tour as a movie tour, spiriting tourists from the Great Hall at Union Station to the Our Lady of Sorrows Basilica where one by one, just for $5 extra, you can kneel at one of the pews and exclaim “That’s the Chicago way, and that’s how you get Capone!”

My own hang-ups aside, this Untouchables Tour, the real one, would be about seeing Chicago of the present but imagining Chicago of the past, which is sort of what “The Untouchables” itself is doing, the magic of the movies transforming South LaSalle into a Roaring Twenties recreation. Any movie from that era set in Chicago would have been filmed on a studio backlot, and so this is as close as we’re ever gonna get. Movies, after all, musn’t merely be transportation to another time and/or place but an evocation of the way a place once was, which is why even the Windy City postcard that is “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” can be importantly historical. The Sears Tower is cited as “the world’s tallest building” and as the famous 1961 Ferrari 250GT rolls down Michigan Avenue you can spy, over the characters’ shoulders, a pre-Millennium Park Loop.

This visual archive is evident in other films too. “The Fugitive” captures the city’s downtown St. Patrick’s Day Parade along its old route on Dearborn passing the Daley Center. And if, as the Chicago Cubs have transformed from lovable losers into a Nuveen-sponsored monolith, Wrigleyville has gone from odd, uneasy merger between daytime baseball and nighttime punk to bro-infested frat party to burgeoning family-friend theme park, John Candy’s “Only the Lonely” exists to bring that old, faded Wrigleyville back into focus, freezing its less spit and polished self on screen forever.

Almost 10 years later, “High Fidelity” encased Lounge Ax, a famed Lincoln Park music club where every notable indie band performed throughout the nineties, in cinematic carbonite before it was, ahem, axed, ensuring it would live forever in the ether as the low-lit space where Marie de Salle improbably makes magic out of Peter effing Frampton. I always wished I could have seen a show at Lounge Ax. Funny thing is, I did see a show at the Double Door – a lot of ‘em – which was where Jack Black performed as Barry Jive and the Uptown Five for “High Fidelity’s” climax. But Double Door closed when it was evicted after a long, contentious dispute with the city in 2017, leaving Barry Jive’s cover of “Let’s Get It On” as a kind of unintentional eulogy.

Jack Black on stage at Double Door

“The Weather Man”, which intrinsically captured Chicago’s soul-deadening winters better than any movie, froze the Esquire Theater and its vintage, picturesque marquee on Oak Avenue in time before the 1930s movie house was gutted in 2011. Joe Swanberg’s ode to Chicago’s superb craft beer scene, “Drinking Buddies”, was released only in 2013 yet found itself archiving the Black Rock, the bar a couple blocks west from where I used to live, home to a gluttonous mac & cheese burger, and which was demolished in 2017. And in “Princess Cyd” (2017), which intrinsically, lovingly captures my current neighborhood, evincing how Chicago can be just as restoratively leafy green in the summer as it is soul-deadening in the winter, has a scene at Lincoln Square’s Brauhaus, where so many of the faux-fabled, so-called “German Nights” I’ve had with friends tradtionally concluded. The Brauhaus closed at the end of 2017.

The Brauhaus in Princess Cyd

“Princess Cyd”, whether it meant to or not, spiritually preserved the Brauhaus, just as “Drinking Buddies” preserved the Black Rock, “The Weather Man” preserved the Esquire, “High Fidelity” preserved Double Door, and so forth. And I realize: if the Untouchables Tour, or just “The Untouchables”, is about conveying a historical Chicago, I have now lived here long enough to see Chicago places I knew so well become history, perhaps not a symbol of our sped-up society so much as a reminder of the way it’s always been, wrecking, planning, building, breaking, rebuilding.