I am posting this old ad for WBMX here just because: it is weird and wonderful. In the 80s, WBMX was the Electro/House/Italo-disco/club station, not only in Chicago. The radio station (and its DJs) gained an international reputation for being tastemakers in the burgeoning house community (whose pulsing heart was here in the Windy City).
Jive on….
“Evil”. A fundamental Howlin Wolf record, created here in Chicago, back in the 1950s. A platter of standard electrified Delta Blues. Now, add Marshall Chess (son of Chess Records’ Leonard Chess), the turbulent and psychedelic 1960s, and some of the best jazz, funk, and soul studio players in the city. Remake and enjoy.
Well that’s not exactly true. Howlin Wolf (above) didn’t like the remake. Actually, the first album of such remakes, released on Chess Records’ Cadet Concept label was called:
‘This is Howlin’ Wolf’s
new album.
He doesn’t like it.
He didn’t like his electric
guitar at first either.’
The album, the brainchild of Marshall Chess, was a product of the times. In the sixties, white rock groups from America and the UK were gangstering Chicago Blues records. They remade them nearly word for word and listed themselves as artists, thus robbing originators like Howlin Wolf and Muddy Waters out of royalties. Chess decided to re-record the artists performing their own compositions in a then-contemporary psychedelic blues style. The albums were panned by purist critics, the same critics that called white psychedelic blues artists like Cream “visionary”.
But, I like it. And I hope you do, too. For info on Muddy Waters’ psychedelic blues remakes, click here.
Black bongo player performs at the International Amphitheater in Chicago as part of the annual PUSH [People United to Save Humanity] ‘Black Expo’ in the fall of 1973. October 1973
Chicago’s PUSH Black Expo was a powerful tour de force for Black Businesses nationwide at the time this photo was shot. Time magazine stated in a 1971 article: “When the five-day trade fair opened in Chicago last week, there were representatives of nearly 400 black firms on hand to prove the premise. But before the week was out, Black Expo proved to be more than a display of the products of America’s fledgling black capitalism. It turned out to be an unofficial convention of entrepreneurs and politicians in search of power at the polls as well as in the marketplace.“ Wow. There was even a major motion picture shot to document one year’s occurrence, entitled “Save the Children” (after that year’s theme). So what happened?
Almost exactly twenty years after the above photo was shot, the following was published in the Chicago Reporter:
(originally published in the Chicago Reporter in September 1993)
When about 250,000 people, most of them African Americans, turned out for this year’s Chicago Black Expo, many were offered fried chicken and menthol cigarettes…
(click the link below for original footage of Marvin Gaye at the PUSH Expo)
Here’s the original caption that accompanied the above shot:
25 Oct 1967, Evanston, Illinois, USA — Northwestern Homecoming Queen…Daphne Maxwell, 19, of New York, has good reason to flash that bright smile; she was named Northwestern University’s Homecoming Queen October 20th. Daphne, a sophomore who is studying design, is the first Negro ever to be named Homecoming Queen. — Image by © Bettmann/CORBIS
You heard that right: the second Aunt Viv from the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air… the one you said you didn’t like as much as the first one… she was the FIRST black homecoming queen at Northwestern. Wow. Much respect for that one. She was also a well known model in the late sixties who was featured in a 1969 Life Magazine issue that heralded “Black Models Take Center Stage” as the cover story. She also starred in Frank’s Place: an 80s TV series that was (and is) highly revered in the black community.
According to the Museum of Broadcast Communications, “Frank’s Place…. deserves a continuing place in programming history. It did, as Tim Reid [Daphne's husband and co-star] told New York Times reporter Perry Garfinkel, present blacks not as stereotypes but as “a diverse group of hard-working people.”
So there.
NOTE: According to a fairly recent article in the Times-Picayune (out of New Orleans):
A DVD release of “Frank’s Place,” the New Orleans-set sitcom that aired on CBS in 1987 and 1988, is apparently growing closer.
No timetable is set, but star and co-creator Tim Reid said he has convinced CBS to allow him to release the show’s 22 episodes on DVD. However, purchasing rights to the music used in the series is still prohibitively costly.
Sonji Clay and Muhammad Ali (then Cassius Clay), circa 1965. Awwwwww. Note his puppy dog gaze…
Here in Chicago (back in the mid-60s), Cassius was flirting with the Black Muslims, superstardom and love (with a local singer named Sonji)…. According to Ali’s one-time doctor, Ferdie Pacheco, “[Ali's first Wife,] Sonji was a pert, very pretty gal. She had a sister who was even better than her, with an outrageous Anita Ekberg body to go with her face. But she was too much woman for the boy-wonder Clay. He was still looking for a high-school romance. Kissing and petting, going to the movies and eating ice cream.” They were married in 1964, 41 days after they met. By January 1966, they were divorced. In a 2003 Observer Sport Monthly article, Pacheco continues, “As Ali went to the temple, and as his enchantment with [her] waned, Sonji saw the handwriting on the wall. She was in no place to make deals and demands with the Muslim muscle offering a harsher and more ‘permanent’ deal. Sonji split, with some cash, her jewels – and her life”.
But it was a wild (if short) ride for the nightclub singer and the boxer-who-would-be-king.
Below, Sonji Clay’s version of “I Can’t Wait Until I See My Baby’s Face”, a local Chicago cut. It’s a mid-sixties sweetheart of a record arranged by the mighty, mighty James Mack. Swoon….
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Electric Mud: Electrified Delta Blues got a New Jolt
(“Tom Cat” by Muddy Waters)
Roaring blues, sophisticated jazz, gritty garage rock, smoothed out vocal pop, and shimmering soul (among other genres) all “jus grew” here. Chess Records (based near 22nd and Michigan) was, in fact, the epicenter of the Electrified Delta Blues that changed the sound of popular American music FOREVER. That was the music that served as rock-and-roll’s bassinet. So it was no surprise that Chess Records, nearing the end of the 1960s and reinvigorated with fresh young talent (producer/arranger Charles Stepney, drummer Morris Jennings, and guitarist Phil Upchurch among them), decided to have their living legend artists (i.e. Muddy Waters and Howling Wolf) re-record their groundbreaking 1950s work in an updated funky psychedelic blues style.
White psychedelic rock artist had been ripping off their artists’ work for years. Now they were, in effect, reworking their own art. Muddy and Wolf weren’t feeling it. Critics of the day panned the works. Yet, today, the albums born out of this time (including “Electric Mud” have an almost cultish following. Just another example of good old Chicago invention….. For a sample of Howlin Wolf’s psychedelic blues tryst, click here.
Drummer Morris Jennings discusses Muddy Waters’ album “Electric Mud” with Ethnologist Jeff Thomas.
4 comments | tags: 1968, Blues, Cadet Concept, Charles Stepney, Chess Records, Chicago Blues, Chicago Cultural History, Electric Mud, Howlin Wolf, Local Chicago Music, Morris Jennings, Muddy Waters | posted in Arts & Culture, Chicago Cultural History, Commentary, Jive Culture, Local Chicago Music, Music, the Goodness