Letter

Over the past month or so I’ve been working on an article about Roseland in 1970. It has caused me consider how I view my own past, to ask whether my younger days were formative or memorable the way Paul’s, John’s, and Bob’s obviously were to them. 

A couple days before I had to turn a draft in, I met with Paul and John at John’s place to watch a twelve-year-old DVD of the footage they’d shot forty-eight years before. They took turns pointing at people and places flickering by on the screen, each triggering memories, stories. They were twenty-year-olds at the time, with their whole life ahead of them. I wondered sitting there whether I’d be as happy watching footage of myself at that age. Then again, 1990 was no 1970, so maybe that’s not a fair question.

Freezeframing scenes from the video to use for my article, I was struck by the many older people dressed in styles more in vogue in the 40s or 50s than in 1970. The generational split was loud and clear in shot after shot. I doubt the 1990 version would seem nearly as stark. By that time there was already a sizable contingent of older people acting and dressing young. It was already difficult to tell generations apart. It’s virtually a lost cause today. I doubt it’s possible to tell ages apart anymore, except for in the broadest terms. 

Meeting with John a few days later, I remarked that though I’m pushing fifty I can’t point to a single moment in my past I’d want to return to. I’d love a twenty-year-old’s metabolism but not much else. That’s not to say that my entire life up to writing this sentence has been an abject, miserable slog; only that I can’t imagine reliving to any of it. 

One of the great fringe benefits of sharing other people’s stories is how it causes you to reflect on your own. Just the name Old Fashioned Days makes one fall into reverie, to think of some far-in-the-past time. To be sure, not all of John’s, Paul’s, and Bob’s memories are rose-colored, but they sat on this old footage nearly fifty years to save it for today.

I hope that when I reach their age I’ll have a relic or two to look back on fondly as well.

I didn’t know about Francis Chapin (1899-1965) until a few years ago, but once I saw his pictures it was like I’d known them my whole life. He painted and drew Chicago cityscapes in a style somewhere between French Post-Impressionism and the Ashcan School. Those are two of the boxes often checked off when my own work is described.

Chapin painted views from Chicago windows which I recognize so instinctively that I might as well be looking over his shoulder as he did them. But the man died five years before I was born, so how can that be? 

Friday morning it was finally cool enough for me to ride my bike, after a week of oppressive heat and humidity. I pedaled downtown to the Merchandise Mart. Richard Norton Gallery, on the sixth floor, was opening a Chapin retrospective that day. It was my first chance to see a big group of his work all at once.

I did a thing I hardly ever do: I introduced myself to the gallerists. Now that I write about art I’m bombarded with press releases so it behooves me to keep my distance. But I wasn’t here in any professional capacity. I just wanted to look at some paintings and drawings I felt close to. The gallery people couldn’t have been nicer. I’ve never had such an easy, enjoyable time in an art gallery in my life.

They told me to come back and they’d show me stacks of Chapins they had no room to include in the show. They even asked about my paintings. I gave them a bunch of postcards. Their focus is Modernism and the cutoff seems to be around the middle of the twentieth century, so I doubt there’s much chance they’d take on my work, but it was flattering that they took an interest anyway. 

One of my favorite pieces in the show was a small ink of a six men on barstools at a counter. It looked like some of my drawings done in bars over the years. In the few photos I’ve seen of Chapin, he’s a smiling Jimmy Stewart type. I’m nothing like that, but otherwise I feel a lot of kinship with the guy. I look forward to going back to the Merchandise Mart and pouring of more of his stuff and finding a few more that look like I could’ve done myself.

When Matt Lux asked me to write something for his record, we met in the Bridgeport neighborhood of Chicago. He parked right where the sorely-missed Lithuanian restaurant Healthy Food used to be. When he was just starting to play, older musicians would take him around town to discover all the special spots. He calls one of his tunes “Paw Paw” after a native fruit which has never gained widespread popularity because it doesn’t travel and must be eaten within days of being picked. Lux passes on knowledge as it was passed on to him.

What do you call this music? I ask and he just shrugs. This isn’t because he doesn’t know what he’s doing or lacks the language to explain himself. Opposites attract him. There are horns, drums, and bass and non-bass guitars on this record but it isn’t jazz. There are electronic blips, wheezes, and barely audible echoes filling the imaginary rooms these numbers conjure. There’s even a human voice or two now and then.

“Space-folk”, he offers, half-joking, I think. This from a guy who’s come to couch his opinions with the caveat that they come from someone who hates Sonny Rollins but loves Culture Club. He tells me that some of the titles of these tunes refer to Biggie Smalls, Colin Kaepernick, and Lester Young, among others. But I won’t tell you which is which because no one wants their work explained away by influences and inspirations. Besides, where one starts is rarely where one finishes, so identifying jumping-off points won’t necessarily help you appreciate where it will end up. I didn’t know any back-stories the first couple dozen times I listened to this record either. Songs must fly on their own wings to survive and his fly their own way whatever he calls them and wherever they came from. 

The places they go are sometimes loud, other times quiet, but they always move around in a ruminative sort of way. When they meander, they meander with purpose. Lux named his band the Communication Arts Quartet after a building devoted to that discipline at Walt Disney Elementary, where he went to school as a child. I have to believe the old imagineer himself would be transported were he to hear the music made by this graduate of his namesake institution of learning.

While Lux’s compositions don’t bludgeon you upside the head with their messages, they aren’t willfully obtuse or obscurantist in the way some contemporary instrumental music can be either. Communication’s in the name for good reason. Lux isn’t about making listeners suffer. He wants to make something his mother would enjoy listening to rather than to impress some self-appointed musicologist. He and his bandmates have done the heavy lifting. Drop the needle and let them take you places.

Get yours here.