They keep one eye on the cash register and the other on the music scene.
Their job is to bring in acts that will draw a crowd, but they often do much more. Sue Miller, Joe Shanahan, Leo Krumpholz, Leigh Jones, John Lochen and a few like-minded peers in Chicago`s entertainment booking business help expand the city`s cultural horizons by introducing new artists and nurturing unheralded ones. They routinely book acts that would make a pure businessman weep with anxiety.
Miller at Lounge Ax, Shanahan at Cabaret Metro and Krumpholz at Southend Musicworks all began to play an important role in Chicago entertainment in the early to mid-`80s.
Jones at Club Lower Links and Lochen at the Edge of the Lookingglass are relative newcomers, but have already distinguished themselves with their against-the-grain bookings.
This weekend is typical of what these five offer Chicago: a punk-folk concert by the Minneapolis quartet Boiled in Lead at the Edge of the Lookingglass; a reading, accompanied by music, of Allen Ginsberg`s ”Howl” at Club Lower Links; go-for-the-throat rock `n` roll by the Geardaddies and Killbilly at Lounge Ax; a slice of alternative-rock heaven at Cabaret Metro with the Silos, Vulgar Boatmen and Jayhawks; and music for winds and percussion performed by Cube at Southend Musicworks.
Rather than catering to expectations, these five bookers often challenge their audiences by presenting relatively unknown acts or alternative art forms. The risks they take as a matter of routine aren`t just artistic ones-Miller, Shanahan and Jones all have an ownership stake in their clubs, Krumpholz is part of a corporation that runs Southend and Lochen`s ”salary” is determined by paid admissions for each act he schedules. If people don`t show, they`re the ones who pay the price.
Sue Miller
`I`ve been working in music clubs since I was 19, and it`s in my blood-I can`t fathom working someplace without music,” says Sue Miller, whose care and feeding of road-weary bands have made her something of a legend on the tour circuit, first at the defunct West End, then the Cubby Bear, and, since last September, as co-owner at Lounge Ax, 2438 N. Lincoln Ave.
With her trusty dog Moishe, a stray who wandered into the bar one bleary- eyed morning and decided to stay, Miller built long-lasting relationships with bands, agents and, not least of all, Chicago music fans at the West End. ”Moishe was the best music critic in town,” Miller says. ”He`d come upstairs for bands he liked, and slept downstairs for everybody else.”
Moishe also was part of the cozy, family atmosphere at West End, a tradition carried on at Lounge Ax, which includes such amenities as couches, end tables, abstract paintings courtesy of a bartender, and a barful of Elvis memorabilia too tacky for words.
”It`s long, it`s black, it`s a rock room,” Miller says of Lounge Ax, which often packs in as many as 400 fans to see some of rock`s finest alternative acts. Local bands such as Eleventh Dream Day and the Service thank Miller in album liner notes, and Minneapolis rockers Trip Shakespeare have a song on their new album that sounds suspiciously like a homage to their favorite Chicago booker. It`s no surprise that alternative favorites Poi Dog Pondering of Austin, Texas, chose Miller`s club to perform a surprise after-midnight show recently.
”When bands are on the road and they feel all dirty and disgusting, they remember the people who treat them like human beings,” Miller says. Her taste in music is equally all-embracing, and each night the club books a different style of musical act.
”People don`t always get the same thing, like at a blues club or at Fitzgerald`s, where the acts are all good and all have that roots-oriented, roadhouse kind of sound,” she says. ”Here we`ll do an acoustic band one night and a (loud) Sub Pop band the next.”
Miller says the thing she misses most about her old job as full-time booking agent at the Cubby Bear is the paycheck.
”I book a lot of bands knowing full well we`re going to lose money, because I want to establish the credibility of the club,” she says.
Her commitment has taken a personal toll as well.
”Instead of coming home at 4 in the morning every day of the week, I also would`ve liked to have had a somewhat normal life, with some kids hanging onto my knee,” she says. ”Sometimes it makes me sad to think I can`t make both my dreams come true.”
Sometimes one dream is enough.
”When a crowd is really into something I`ve booked, it gives me goosebumps, and every once in a while, strangers come up to me after a show and say, `Thanks,` ” she says. ”That moves me.”
Leo Krumpholz
After living up to their name for years, the Nomads of Modern Music-otherwise known as Southend Musicworks-have finally come to rest at 1313 S. Wabash Ave. Though Leo Krumpholz isn`t resting much these days, between booking acts and helping to rehab the loft space, he`s delighted not to have to do business out of the trunk of his car anymore or to be constantly hunting for a stage for his next gig.
Southend`s new home is ”a common ground between the ivory tower mentality of going to a concert, where the performers sort of pontificate from a proscenium, and a noisy club where the primary activity is getting drunk and picking up women,” he says with a laugh. ”It`s relaxed, yet focused on the music.”
Krumpholz abandoned an Ivy League education in comparative literature and moved to Chicago in 1982 to be with his future wife. A professor at Northern Illinois University (De Kalb), she`s the family`s sole bread-winner.
Her income and empathy have enabled Krumpholz to pursue his second love:
music.
”Music was a constant throughout my life; I play everything from a viola to a banjo, all of them badly, but I have a musician`s ear,” he says. ”I finally found what I was meant to do when I came to Chicago.”
The home of such avant-garde jazz giants as the Art Ensemble of Chicago and Anthony Braxton proved to be more ”insulated and isolated” musically and culturally than Krumpholz realized while growing up in Philadelphia.
”Carl Sandburg wrote its motto and its epitaph: `City of big shoulders . . . Hog butcher to the world.` Well, the stockyards are gone, but the city still clings to that image. It`s partly refreshing, because it says, `We don`t take no stuff.` But it`s a show-me attitude that doesn`t accept culture outside of the Art Institute and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra too readily.” Krumpholz took Chicago`s indifference to new music as a challenge, and in his three years as a founder and driving force behind Southend has provided a forum for local legends such as saxophonists Roscoe Mitchell and Ed Wilkerson, as well as international talents such as modern big-band leader George Gruntz, the Arditti String Quartet and Czechoslovakia`s avant-garde rock band the Plastic People of the Universe.
”There are times when I`ve questioned whether I`ll even get my expenses reimbursed, much less make enough to live on,” he says. ”But it`s thrilling to see this music performed live and rewarding to see that audiences are responding to it. I`ve had a variety of so-called `real jobs` in my life, but this is the realest job I`ve ever had.”
Leigh Jones
As one descends the steps to Club Lower Links, 954 W. Newport, it`s like entering a new world-a dark, basement hideaway, a haven for sights and sounds that one doesn`t normally encounter at a yuppie fern bar:
The tortured wailings of a saxophone played by David Murray and the bumpty-bump of Kahil El Zabar`s drum kit in a show featuring two of the world`s greatest jazz improvisers; rock singer-turned-poet Lydia Lunch battering an audience into submission with her rantings on world affairs; a
”porn-free” performance art piece on erotica called ”Smut Fest,” or a reading of black women writers by Kelly Tice.
Yet Leigh Jones doesn`t come across as some sort of art snob who caters to the ”in” crowd at the exclusion of everyone else. Born and reared in Wyoming, she comes from an arts-oriented family, and her wildly eclectic bookings are fueled more by curiosity than intimate knowledge.
”I`m a fan more than anything else, and I think a city of this size needs and deserves a forum for all the arts,” she says. The for-profit Club Lower Links was an outgrowth of the biannual not-for-profit Links Hall performance series, held upstairs for several years under the direction of musician Michael Zerang.
”I learned a lot from Michael-he booked Lower Links for a year before I took over last spring,” Jones says. ”I like bars-I think they`re nice meeting places for people-but I wanted to own a place that`s more than a place to go drink. So now we do totally unrelated events seven days a week.”
It makes for unpredictable crowds, and it keeps Jones hustling to make sure the word gets out about her less-than-world-famous acts.
”It`s not a carefree existence,” says Jones, who sometimes moonlights as a waitress or bartender to pay her electric bill. ”When you go to a comedy club, you expect comedy. When you go to a music club, you expect music. Here, you take your chances: You could be offended, or maybe your life will be changed forever.”
Joe Shanahan
`When I took over the club (in July, 1982), my taste ran very alternative,”
says Joe Shanahan, leaning against one of the ornate pillars that frame the stage at Cabaret Metro, 3730 N. Clark St.. ”What was then alternative-R.E.M., the Cure, New Order, Love and Rockets-is mainstream today.”
So in recent years, Shanahan has helped carve out a new ”alternative”
scene, booking bands such as Einsturzende Neubauten, Lenny Kravitz, Red Lorry Yellow Lorry, the Mission U.K., My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult and Sisters of Mercy. He turns over Wednesday nights-a $4 cover, with women admitted free- to up-and-coming local talent and obscure out-of-town bands.
”I had a dream the other night about having a `Basement Night,` which would be a series of bands who`d never played to anyone but their friends in their basement or garage,” he says. ”Then I woke up and realized that`s kind of what Wednesday night is like at the club.”
Wednesday night acts who have ”graduated” to a wider audience include the Royal Crescent Mob, Galaxie 500, Big Dipper, Die Kreuzen, Killdozer, Sonic Youth, Out of Order, and locals such as Smashing Pumpkins, Material Issue, the Poster Children and Eleventh Dream Day.
”We lost a lot of money booking some of those bands,” he says. ”But they gave us such an edge-no one else would touch those bands the first time through town. We`ve put our necks out there more than once with `new` music, which to me means music that hasn`t been heard before.”
Metro has become a profitable venture after nine years, but his bookings remain on the cutting edge and his philosophy unchanged: ”People with ears who like music are around a lot longer in this business than people who like money.”
Shanahan was an art student at Columbia College downtown and tended bar in the Division Street area in the early `80s, but his real love was playing music meister for his pals.
”I threw a few parties on Oak Street and invited my friends,” he recalls. ”I knew I was creating some kind of energy,” by mixing an eclectic array of music and people.
”Everything from Iggy Pop to James Brown. Between those two, you`ll find me,” he says.
That range encompasses many more styles of music than most people can absorb in a lifetime, but Shanahan firmly believes that if people are exposed to good music, no matter how new or ”different,” they`ll respond.
”It was a thrill to see the first time I booked R.E.M.-they just had one single out and nobody knew who they were-and 300 people came and danced in their stocking feet,” he says. ”To fill a room with that kind of energy, that kind of excitement, that sense of discovery-that`s the foundation this place is built on.”
John Lochen
John Lochen is the new kid on the booking block, and Edge of the Lookingglass, in the shadows of the South Loop at 62 E. 13th St., isn`t exactly on the main thoroughfare of Chicago`s night-life scene.
But the yearold club, which schedules poetry readings, theater, art exhibits and performance art as well as music, is steadily gaining a following.
”I can`t compete with Sue (Miller) and Joe (Shanahan); I don`t even try,” says Lochen, who had no experience as a booker when one of the club`s partners offered him the job last spring. ”But we can and are establishing a track record-showing artists we have a good room and can promote a show at the grass-roots level.”
The payoff, he says, ”is that more people are returning my calls.”
Such as Clive Gregson and Christine Collister, the formidable British folk-rock duo who first came to prominence in Richard Thompson`s touring band. ”I was aghast to find as I was looking through the tour itineraries in Rolling Stone (magazine) that they didn`t have a date in Chicago,” Lochen says. ”I was proud I ran into that, because we ended up booking them.”
That show helped put Lookingglass on the map with many Chicago music fans, 200 of whom packed the room that night. Collister and Gregson left singing the club`s praises, especially after playing to only 35 people the night before in the supposedly hip environs of Madison, Wis.
Lochen has made connections in the recording industry through his full-time job with an independent record distributor, and he has booked a variety of ethnic and alternative acts in keeping with the club`s experimental atmosphere.
”Lookingglass is there to have a certain shock appeal at times, to keep people on edge a bit,” he says. ”What may seem like a horrendous mistake is really just a learning experience.”
Of course, sometimes even Lochen`s free-wheeling tastes are assaulted.
”I booked a noise band, Hypno Love Wheel, that pretty much cleared the room by laying down their guitars and turning up the volume, creating a howl of feedback that lasted 20 minutes,” he says. ”I did like their album, though.”
