If you believe rock ‘n’ roll lore, backstage is Satan’s waiting room: a playpen of bad behavior where scantily clad groupies run wild and assorted drugs are snorted off gold records.
Mostly, says Metro nightclub’s publicist Jenny Lizak, the stories are tall tales.
“It’s not like the movies would have you believe, with lots of crazy things going on,” she says. “Usually, it’s a bunch of people tuning their guitars, going over their set list, eating pizza and drinking beer.”
Except for a few places, says alt-country rocker Brandi Carlile, backstages aren’t anyplace artists want to hang out.
Typical decor evokes a dirty “high school locker room,” she says. “There’s usually some couch in some poorly lit part of the room that you really don’t want to sit down on.”
Others resemble sterile convention rooms, junkyard shacks or hotel rooms that rent by the hour. Very few even provide comfort or decent munchies. But every venue has its own traditions, its own legends, its own style — often stitched (or soaked) into the very fabric of a place.
As part of Tempo’s Unauthorized Access series, we take you backstage in some of Chicago’s fabled venues, where musicians lounge and others fear to tread, but where few others have ever been.
House of Blues
329 N. Dearborn St., Chicago
Posh, eclectic music hall
They’re not really dressing rooms, but miniature art galleries.
Still, River North’s House of Blues green rooms function as sanctuaries, islands of comfort, sanity (and showers!) before and after the stage.
On a recent night, singer/songwriter Brandi Carlile and her band settle into adjoining Suites C and D, two of the four dressing rooms in Chicago’s House of Blues.
“It’s got the best vibe, for sure, of any of the backstage places we’ve been,” she says, sipping tea from a Styrofoam cup.
Though a counter of food has already been laid out, artists even get a personal server from the club’s restaurant downstairs. Red walls display colorfully framed folk art under a blue ceiling. From that ceiling, star-shaped aluminum cans, by Chicago artist Mr. Fantastic, shine between rays of pink light. (It should be noted here, perhaps not-so-coincidentally, some prisons use pink lights to calm inmates.)
Above two deep, velvety chairs, a large painting depicts Adam and Eve, their bodies entwined like snakes. (The House of Blues chain has one of the largest collections of folk art in the world, says publicist Mary White.)
The bathrooms hold the only signs of rock star behavior: walls scribbled with thousands of autographs. Where else can you find the signatures of metal band GWAR next to boy band Hanson? In one corner, a heart traces the words “Cameron + Justin.” On the door, someone chose to carve “Ministry” (an industrial band) into the wood rather than write it. Signatures are impossible to verify, however. Someone even wrote “Britney Spears,” though Spears never played here.
Ex-husband Kevin Federline, however, did — and infamously wrote a curse-laden message to her on the shower tile the day Spears asked for a divorce. It read, in part, “Today I’m a free man Ladies … look out … Give me my kids.”
The entire message was erased — not for content, but because it’s written in Magic Marker on an immaculately clean shower, the one place artists are asked not to deface.
But mostly it’s quiet here, with the distant boom of a sound check rumbling a few floors beneath.
Now that Carlile headlines her own band, couldn’t she let out her inner heathen?
“I guess we can,” she says, then pauses. “But we don’t.”
Metro
3739 N. Clark St., Chicago
Low-lit, legendary rock mecca
Kurt didn’t meet Courtney here, but it’s where their romance blossomed.
The Smashing Pumpkins crashed here after their first gig.
Metro’s green rooms (actually painted a deep, dark blue) are unique because the suite of three rooms leads to a common area, a space to gather, eat, imbibe and socialize.
“A lot of people think it’s all about partying, but musicians work hard,” says Metro publicist Jenny Lizak.
Above the main space, a blue, bald figure watches over the area. This sculpted, armless torso emerges out of the wall, the only remnant of a mural painted over long ago.
Though Courtney Love met Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain in 1990 at a Portland, Ore., club, they hit it off here in Oct. 12, 1991, just after Love parted ways with boyfriend (and Smashing Pumpkins frontman) Billy Corgan.
“Apparently,” Lizak says, “they were making out on one of the couches by the end of the night.”
One of these exact couches?
Lizak laughs. She doesn’t know. Metro’s couches certainly look 16 years old. Some, maybe older.
“They’ve been recycled many times,” she says. “Most are from employee apartments, whenever they needed to give away a couch.”
Velvet Lounge
67 E. Cermak Rd., Chicago
Intimate, low-key jazz club
The sign on the door reads “Star Treatment,” black words on a silver star in the South Loop’s Velvet Lounge.
“Backstage” is actually side stage at this jazz club, a red door that opens to something more than a closet, though less than an actual dressing room.
It’s a room caught between coming and going, a foot from the stage, a foot from the exit — a pit stop providing just enough room to stretch, burn through some scales, get your reeds wet, then step into the spotlight. On a recent night, in addition to holding musicians’ instrument cases, it also stores some extra tables, stacked to the ceiling.
As drummer Isaiah Spencer III lounges against the wall, he points out: “This is the Velvet; it’s not even about the dressing room. The last [Velvet Lounge location] didn’t even have a dressing room.”
Two or three musicians could jam in here, between sets, if bags and cases were arranged right, but “some cats are claustrophobic,” says Spencer, 28.
On the left wall hangs a painting, purchased “circa 1982” on the old Maxwell Street, a Picasso-like number with musicians and instruments melding into geometric shapes. The slight smell of cigarettes clings to the walls, which is strange, says owner Fred Anderson, because the Velvet started out non-smoking in this location a year ago.
There’s a shelf built into the wall, low enough to be used as a bench. Longtime jazz photographer Jimmy Jones provided the only other artwork in the small space: a color photograph of trumpeter Malachi Thompson.
“It gets hot back here fast,” Spencer says. “But it serves its purpose.”
Double Door
1572 N. Milwaukee Ave, Chicago
Vintage rock, Wicker Park wickedness
Black walls are so rock ‘n’ roll.
But then, so are kicked-in doors, band graffiti and — unfortunately for Double Door production manager Joelle Maggert — cups of urine.
“You have to be used to seeing that stuff,” says Maggert, who had to dispose of such an item the morning we visited. “It’s not exactly a church here.”
There’s where Maggert may be wrong. The Double Door, with its three black-walled dressing rooms, comes with its own set of rituals and iconography.
Take, for example, the Wall of Ham — not actual meat — but a giant wall of band puns, left by visiting artists, more than 770 of them. “Newt,” a former employee, started the ham band wall roughly eight years ago on a lark, says general manager Lorri Francis. Some older entries are written in black marker, others scrawled in the margins. No. 23 is “Jimi Hamdrix.” No. 400 is “R.E.O. Hamwagon.” No. 1, of course, is “Durham Durham.”
Three dungeonlike dressing rooms sit on red, concrete floors in the basement, directly under the bar. With the lights low, each is a perfect little privacy cavern, ideal for napping. In a few spots, temperamental musicians have punched holes in the walls. IKEA furniture, in different stages of decline — usually two or three love seats a room — supplies the decor. A couple of worn chairs and the odd chipped coffee table fill out the rest, although the main dressing room gets its own tabletop glass refrigerator, a promotion from Red Bull.
Most bands, though, get a cooler of their preferred beer, a bowl of chips — whatever they like, provided they keep requests reasonable.
Only occasionally does the club have to deal with cups of urine (there are no restrooms in the dressing rooms themselves). And surprisingly, it’s not even enough to get you banned.
“We’re not happy about it, but we’re not not inviting them back because of that,” says Francis. “If someone starts a huge fight or beats the [stuffing] out of someone, yeah, but you have to do something pretty bad. We don’t want people to come in here and kick the walls, but we take it one thing at time.”
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Details, details
Match the backstage photo with the club. Your choices: Velvet Lounge, Double Door, House of Blues, Metro.
Answers:
1. Double Door
2. House of Blues
3. Velvet Lounge
4. Metro
