A dose of Chicago blues for some white boys from Dunwoody

When I was still in high school, but old enough to enter a bar (back in the days when you could drink alcahol at the age of eighteen), a bunch of my buddies and I went down to Underground Atlanta. We were stepping down the streets and looking at the sights when the sound of r & b came wafting up from a nightclub below the street level (which means, of course, that the music was coming up from the sub-basement, since we were below street level in Underground). The sound of the band sounded pretty good, so we headed down the steps toward the nightclub.

When we got down to the level of the nightclub we encountered an older black gentleman in a suit taking cover charge payments. He grinned at us and said, "Five dollars, gentlemen."

With this, we looked past the bouncer and peered into the darkness at the interior of the club. You couldn't see much, but there was an implication that there weren't too many patrons from Dunwoody sitting around the room.

We looked at the bouncer and looked at each other and slowly turned around and headed back up the steps to the main level. The bouncer smiled and said, "I didn't think so."

I suppose the inference was that there wasn't much of a chance that ten high school boys from Dunwoody would want to enter a black night club in Underground Atlanta on a Friday night in 1975.

A little bit later in the year, we were sitting around Gary Defilipo's kitchen and Gary decided to call the information line at the Great Southeast Music Hall in Broadview Plaza to see who was playing that night. The voice on the recorded message asked the following question, "Do you want to hear three hundred and fifty pounds of the best Chicago blues?"

I remember the look on Gary's face when he turned to us after listening to the message. There was a look of amusement and slight wonder as he let us listen to the message as it replayed itself. With this, we piled into a car and headed down toward Broadview Plaza.

When we got there, the early show had already started, so we headed downstairs to the bowling alley below the level of the Music Hall. We began playing several games and John deposited about eight quarters in the juke box so he could hear "Down South Jukin" by Lynnerd Skynnerd about sixteen times in a row. At some point, one of the other patrons had had quite enough of the boys from Jacksonville, or was it the boys from Dunwoody, and pulled the plug on the juke box. I remember specifically John getting ready to release his ball down the alley when the juke box went "whirr" and the music came to a stop.

Later, we exchanged our own shoes for the bowling alley fashions and headed back up to the Music Hall. That night there were about twenty of us in the venue and we bought our metal buckets of cheap beer and carafes of cheaper wine and sat down on the floor, Music Hall style, and waited for the opening act, a young bearded fellow named Gove Scrivenor. A little later the pa announcer came on and announced the arrival of said Gove Scrivenor.

With this, a young guy walked up to the stage, leading a dog, and carrying a burlap sack on his back. He sat down, deposited the dog at his feet, and pulled a guitar from the sack. For the next hour he played traditional folk music and original songs for us, as his dog calmly sat at his feet. At the end he pulled an autoharp from the bag and played a few songs on that.

After he finished his set, several of the patrons departed and the room was left to us and another couple. A little later, the announcer came on and announced the Chicago Blues All-Stars. With this, several African American musicians took the stage, plugged in their instruments and began playing a blues instrumental. It was great.

After several instrumentals, one of the musicians stepped to the mike and asked for applause for Willie Dixon. With that, we clapped and whooped and a very large black man came from offstage up to the stage, climbed the two steps to the stagefloor, and took possession of a stand-up bass fiddle. At this, the band began to play some of the best Chicago blues, no the first Chicago blues, we had ever heard.

Now when I say that it isn't quite accurate, since Willie Dixon is responsible for a large catalog of songs which were recorded over several decades by blues singers and British musicians like Eric Clapton and the Rolling Stones and white rock bands like The Allman Brothers. However, we had never heard it live and done by the author himself, with his own band. The experience was amazing.

When we were in high school and college we used to refer to such experiences as "cosmic" in that they were so new and different that they changed the way we thought about music and reformed our musical preferences. This particular night was such a night. Afterward we were scrounging around record stores and such trying to find anything by Willie Dixon, something that wasn't that simple in the modern world.

However, by the end of the evening, we had migrated down to the front of the room and were clapping and yelling and whistling for everything they could play. We were a small, but very appreciative group and Willie Dixon and his band seemed to enjoy the whole experience.

At the end of the concert, we jumped off the floor and shook hands with the band. I will never forget how huge Willie Dixon's hands were. They seemed to wrap around mine twice.

We went back to listen to Willie Dixon and his band at the Music Hall later and it was really something, but the crowd was much bigger and the experience not so immediate as our first encounter with the Emperor of Chicago blues.

Music has amazing powers to move you and change your point of view. There was such a difference between our first, aborted foray into black music and the second one. Only several months separated those two incidents, but such a difference. I still love the music, and would probably not hesitate to enter the night club now. A lot of things have changed.