The fifteenth annual New York City Independent Film
Festival was held during the week of June 4 through 11 at Manhattan’s
Producer’s Club on West 44th Street, a few blocks west of Times
Square.The week-long festival would
host the screenings of over two hundred indie films. Co-Directors John Anderson and Bob Sarles' absorbing and
authoritatively assembled music doc Born
in Chicago, screened on the festival’s final day, doesn’t pretend to serve
as the definitive nor most academically-minded treatise on the history of blues
music in America.Such studies as the seven-episode
PBS series The Blues (2003) had
already touched lightly on many aspects of multi-layered history of the blues
in America.This film’s primary interest
lies elsewhere.
The state of Mississippi, the birthplace of the blues and
home of some of the music’s greatest practitioners is, of course, referenced
early on in Born in Chicago.But the fertile musical and agricultural area
surrounding the Mississippi Delta region serves merely as the pregnant preface of
what’s to come.There’s no mention that
I can recall of the high-end music of band leader W.C. Handy, the
self-proclaimed “Father of the Blues,” or of Ma Rainy, “Mother of the Blues” or
even of such a master figure as songster Charley Patton, the acknowledged progenitor
of the rough and tumble country blues.
Alan Lomax’s 1941-1942 Library of Congress recordings of one
McKinley Morganfield (soon to be rechristened as “Muddy Waters”) down on
Stovall’s Plantation near Clarksdale, MS is briefly referenced in Born in Chicago, but only in
passing.The film recalls Waters as merely
one of the many immigrant blues singers who, among non-musical travelers and those
feeling racism and economic hardship, would abandon Mississippi - and neighboring
states - to seek employment in Chicago’s burgeoning meat-packing and steel industries.
The blues singers arriving in the Windy City would often perform
for pocket change on Chicago’s fabled Maxwell Street, and there’s a bit of
historic film footage included in the film to document it.But ultimately Born in Chicago assumes that a knowledgeable blues aficionado is already
conversant with the complex reasons that Chicago would birth the raw and
immeasurably emotive electric blues.Born in Chicago soon time-jumps from a
basic introductory primer to a particular moment in history – a period roughly
encompassing 1964 through 1970 - when public interest in the blues music would peculiarly
shift along color lines.
Though the blues was created by black artists for a
primarily black audience, by the mid-1960s it was lovingly embraced by a cabal
of young, white and often gifted musicians. In some sense these mostly suburban
youngsters were oddballs.Not only were
they complete outsiders to African-American life and musical culture, but estranged
from even their own middle-class heritages.The best of them were determined to apprentice with the real-deal blues masters
whose recordings they had painstakingly studied and cherished.
Such Chicago blues artists as Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf
(aka Chester Burnett), and Little Walter Jacobs were at their musical – if not money-earning
career peaks – in the 1950s.Though
Chicago boasted any number of record labels pressing 78 rpm discs of the talent
grinding their music out almost nightly in such saloons as Pepper’s Lounge, Silvio’s,
Smitty’s Corner, Big John’s, the Blue Flame Lounge, and Frost’s Corner, it was
Chess Records that emerged the most important and iconic.Though label co-founder Leonard Chess appears
in an archive footage interview alongside his son Marshall, Born in Chicago wisely chooses not to revisit
the company’s backstory.That’s a tale
already told in several docs as well as in Darnell Martin’s ill-disguised
Chess-mirror fiction-feature Cadillac
Records (2008).
There’s lots of archival footage threaded throughout Born in Chicago.Some of the film’s moodiest and most intimate
saloon environ images come courtesy of several reels of silent B-roll 8mm color
footage shot by drummer Sam Lay and his wife.Lay is an important figure here due to his key role in the blues tradition’s
transition: he not only worked the South Side taverns with nearly all the blues
giants but was also a founding member (along with bassist Jerome Arnold) in the
inter-racial Paul Butterfield Blues Band.
Though not a concert film by any means – all performances
featured in Born in Chicago are
offered in truncated form - there are extended clips of Muddy Waters and Howlin’
Wolf to offer insight into the power of their stage presence and hypnotic
powers.This inclusion is not
unreasonable as the two singers were the figurehead totems of the Chicago blues
scene of the 1950s.Muddy and Wolf were
also among the most generous and least suspicious of interlopers. They were
appreciative of the enthusiasm and interest of these young, white blues
revivalists and allowed them to share the stage and showcase their talents.
Of course, Muddy and Wolf didn’t singularly or together
create the Chicago blues scene.During
the course of Born in Chicago we’re briefly
introduced to a number of the first and second wave Chicago’s bluesmen, as well
as the iconic sidemen who helped create the sound: Otis Spann, Yank Rachel,
Robert Lockwood, Willie Dixon, Junior Wells, Sonny Boy Williamson, Otis Rush,
Buddy Guy, Hubert Sumlin, Magic Sam, Walter and Big Walter “Shakey” Horton all pass
through the film in either image or musical snippet, all honorably referenced as
“engines” of the scene.
Though the blues was derived partly from African musical traditions,
the blues as the world knows it today was birthed in the area of the
Mississippi Delta.Chicago blues was, at
the very beginning anyway, mostly an electric, highly amplified extension of
that earlier homegrown music, improvised out-of-necessity to cut through the
din of celebratory patrons gathered inside cramped and sweaty neighborhood
taverns.
The 1950s was the decade Chicago’s blues scene was at its
creative peak.The musicians who arrived
in Chicago during the great migration from the southern U.S. quickly bonded to
a natural audience.They were warmly
embraced by audiences that were once – and now again - neighbors.The musicians and their fans shared similar customs,
life experiences and musical interests, and such familiarity allowed Chicago’s
blues scene to thrive during the 1950s.
But by the early 1960s, the musical tastes of black
audiences began to shift, particularly among younger listeners.This group held no bonding memories or immediate
connections to blues or rustic southern musical culture.The rhythm-and-blues and soul of Sam Cooke,
Jackie Wilson, and James Brown was in emergence and such artists were now the most
favored of black audiences.It wasn’t
long until the Motown and Stax labels would supplant Chess as the recording
mecca for black artists.
But just as black interest in blues was seemingly on the wane,
there was a sudden curious interest in the art by young, rebellious and hip
Midwestern middle-class whites.Their
passion for the music was often ignited by their discovery of late-night
broadcasts of blues and old-school R&B found on the far ends of their radio
dials.Many of these disciples – which would
include such 1960’s blues and rock luminaries as Barry Goldberg, Michael Bloomfield,
Nick Gravenites, Paul Butterfield, Corky Siegel, Harvey Mandel, Charlie Musselwhite,
Elvin Bishop, Steve Miller and Bob Dylan – are all featured in Born in Chicago.It could be argued they were actually re-born in Chicago.
In any case, this is the time period under analysis in Born in Chicago.Liberal and open-minded students attending (or
merely hanging on the fringes) of the University of Chicago – the campus itself
nestled within the city’s Southside – played a role in the blossoming blues
revival.Through the interventions of on-campus
folk music clubs Chicago U. would stage not only small folk-music gatherings
but several important folk music festivals – several showcasing such blues artists
as Willie Dixon, Memphis Slim, Big Joe Williams and blind street singer Arvella
Gray. This new interest in folk-blues
music brought many students and scene hanger-on’s to Chicago’s pawn shops in
search of guitars and friends and subsequent musical fellow travelers.
The most dedicated – and talented of these musicians –
would reverse “integrate” these black-only Southside blues taverns - often under
the suspicious and unwelcome gaze of black patrons in attendance.But both Muddy and Wolf and their respective
band members would embrace such musicians as guitarist Michael Bloomfield and blues
harpist Paul Butterfield et.al. once they realized these searching white
youngsters – many demonstrating superlative musical talent – were looking to absorb,
as best they could, the essence and emotional comport of the blues.
Muddy Water’s contention “The
Blues Had a Baby (And They Named It Rock and Roll)” was
completely true.Though birthed in
Chicago by way of Mississippi, the blues would ultimately become an
international phenomenon.The film lightly
touches on the role of such British bands as the Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds
and the Animals had in bringing American blues music to international
attention.But a crusty Nick Gravenites –
an early white Chicago blues disciple and author of the song “Born in Chicago” –
defiantly points out that it wasn’t Eric Clapton nor the Stones who breathed a
second life into the blues.The British
bands – no matter how popular and rich they would become – had not paid their
dues.It was only the kids in Chicago,
working alongside the genuine blues masters on cramped saloon stages, who did.
There is no denying that the rock music culture of the mid-1960s
brought opportunities for the blues to re-blossom before an expanding audience.The 1965 edition of the Newport Folk Festival
featured a blistering electric set by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band.The latter combo – minus Butterfield - would also
infamously back Bob Dylan’s first-ever electric performance at Newport ‘65, a
performance that unleashed a thousand derisive catcalls from the tradition-minded
folkie audience. (The film features a clip of Bloomfield standing aside Dylan
on the Newport stage while playing dazzling licks on “Maggie’s Farm”).
The Newport gig led to the Butterfield’s band being
signed by New York based Elektra Records, the group releasing a pair of seminal
albums in 1965-1966.Following the
departure of guitarist Bloomfield from Butterfield’s band, the former would form
(with Gravenites) The Electric Flag, an experimental blues-based rock band with
psychedelic underpinnings. By 1967, most
record companies, artists and bands went West where a new scene was
developing.Bloomfield’s appearance with
The Electric Flag at the Monterey Pop Festival in June of 1967 – a performance included
in fragmentary form here – remains dazzlingly brilliant.
Butterfield would enjoy similar success on the West Coast,
though the young musicians who received their training under the hard scrabble
tutelage of Waters and Wolf weren’t terribly impressed with the level of musicianship
of their west coast peers.Likely
unaware of this cold dismissal, such then-emerging west coast artists as
Santana, Jorma Kaukonen, Country Joe McDonald and Bob Weir all appear in Born in Chicago to praise the Chicagoans
for raising the musical bar.
But it was, most importantly, through the insistence of
Bloomfield and Butterfield and others from the Chicago scene that rock-promoter
Bill Graham - of Fillmore and Winterland Ballroom - fame was convinced to
“introduce” such artists as Muddy Waters and B.B. King to the young, mostly white
audiences who frequented his venues.In
the film, King – who had played almost exclusively for black audiences on the
so-called Chitlin’ Circuit – recalls being
moved to tears when he was warmly received by this young, white audience once
unavailable to him.
During his post-film screening, Born in Chicago co-producer Bob Sarles addressed the touchy issue
of “cultural appropriation.”True
“appropriation,” Sarles noted, assumes “no payment:” no recognition nor financial
remuneration to the original creators. In every instance, the revivalist
musicians from Chicago did everything
in their power to open once-closed doors and secure well-paying gigs to the
genuine blues artists who had carried the flame through the tough times.In April of 1969 Gravenites, Bloomfield and
Butterfield would appear with Muddy Waters at a Fathers and Sons benefit concert at Chicago’s Auditorium Theater.Excerpts from that concert were mixed amongst
recorded in-studio tracks and issued by Chess Records as Fathers and Sons in late summer of 1969.It was the highest charting album of Muddy Water’s
long career.
Following the IFF screening in Manhattan of Born in Chicago, both Sarles and co-producer-director
John Anderson took the Producer’s Club stage to talk a bit about the film and
take questions.It was promised that the
film, which has been long in-the-making, will be made available on several
streaming platforms beginning August 1 of 2023.The true “genesis” of the film was initially prompted by an earlier
documentary of Anderson’s, Chicago Blues
Reunion – a concert tour film of 2008 featuring a number of the white
“blues revivalists” from Chicago. That film would premiere at Austin’s SXSW
festival in March 2013.As wonderful as
the music was, it was apparent that the film’s inserted interview segments of
the participants – especially such memories as shared by keyboardist Barry
Goldberg – were worthy of a doc of their own.
Anderson certainly had the bona fides to bring such a
documentary to the screen.He had earlier
directed no fewer than four films in collaboration of Beach Boys founder Brian
Wilson.In addition to Chicago Blues Reunion, Anderson also
directed two films focusing on Chicago blues artists: Sam Lay in Bluesland and Horn
from the Heart: the Paul Butterfield Story.The result of his interest in the blues was the genesis of the Born in Chicago project.Joel Selvin, a veteran music writer-critic for
the San Francisco Chronicle was
brought on to script the film, with the former “Blues Brother” Dan Aykroyd to
narrate. (Jim Belushi, brother of the late John (“Jake Blues”) Belushi would
serve as one of several Executive Producers on the film).
There were, to paraphrase a blues terminology term, Stones in the Pathway.At the Producer’s Club screening, Anderson
and Sarles sighed there had been a number of delays and hurdles in the mounting
of the production.They described the
film’s lineage as being broken into three separate waves.The first work on the film commenced roughly in
a period lasting from 2008-2013, with Anderson often sidetracked as he worked concurrently
on several other projects.(In fact an
earlier cut of the film had been screened at Manhattan’s Lincoln Center as
early as the summer of 2013).But the
film was ultimately pulled for re-thinking and re-editing until 2016 when work
began anew on the project.There was a
second languishing in 2018, this mostly due to the time and cost of clearing the
best – but still affordable - music and film rights from varying copyright
holders.
Bob Sarles and wife and co-producer Christina Keating
would come onto the project during the film’s third wave. Sarles’ Ravin’ Films, a television and film
production company, was similar to Anderson’s since it primarily - though not
exclusively – was engaged in documentaries involving music industry artists and
business.Sarles’ company had produced
docs and concert films on soul and psychedelic music, as well as a series of films
for the Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame. Ravin’ Films would also produce a number of
docs studying such pivotal musical figures as John Lee Hooker, Jefferson
Airplane, Phil Lesh, Ozzy Osbourne and – quite relevant to Born in Chicago - Sweet
Blues: a Film about Mike Bloomfield.
Though Born in
Chicago had gone through a succession or working cuts, it wasn’t until Britain’s
Sky Arts Television and Richard Foo’s Shout Factory label provided “weight
bearing walls” assistance to bring the film to completion.With Born
in Chicago set to go into general release in a few months’ time, Anderson
is now free to direct his attention to a film on the Manhattan Transfer vocal
group, Sarles to produce a film on the life of iconic counter-culture
journalist and satirist Paul Krassner (1932-2019).While waiting on those two films, historians,
blues aficionados, and ‘60s pop-culture chroniclers will find Born in Chicago a welcome and important
entry to the ever-growing cinematic canon of Americana music studies.On the day following the IFF screening I was
compelled to pull out a number of my dusty Chicago blues LPs for a fresh
listening session.I imagine you will
too.
The film will be available on all major digital platforms on August 1.