Bitten by the Blues

The Alligator Records Story

The University of Chicago Press

Contents

Virtually nothing in my early life equipped me to start an independent record label devoted to the blues. I was a lonely, nerdy kid with few social skills. Although I could play a few chords on a guitar, I couldn't sing in tune or read music. I had no interest in business. I had almost no exposure to African American culture, and I didn't know a thing about the blues. I had no knowledge of its history, no understanding of its cultural significance, no familiarity with its rhythms and textures, and no clue about its creators. Yet something in my life prepared me to fall in love with the blues and find within it a source of inspiration, emotional healing, and a sense of belonging. A lot of older black blues DJs would say on the air, "If you don't like the blues, you've got a hole in your soul." The blues filled a big hole in my soul.

Just before my sixth birthday, my father, John Iglauer, died as a result of a medical mistake made during routine surgery to have a kidney stone removed. He was thirty-five. Although I have few memories of him, he was always present in my life because my mother and paternal grandmother raised me to be the same kind of ethical, outspoken, driven man that he had been. He had grown up in a prominent, secular Jewish family in Cincinnati, Ohio, and as a young man he rebelled against his insular, well-to-do upbringing. He was a liberal idealist with a passion for fighting against corruption. He chose a career as a city manager committed to cleaning up city government at a time when most big cities were still run by strong mayors and political machines doling out city services, jobs, and contracts based on political connections.

His first job after graduating from Syracuse University was at the International City Manager's Association in Chicago, an organization battling corrupt city governments. It was in Chicago that he met my mother, Harriett Salinger, who came from a well-established Jewish family in South Bend, Indiana. After her family lost almost everything in the Depression, she won a scholarship to the University of Chicago, where she was studying for a master's degree in social work at a time when few women attended college. She was immediately taken with my father; he was energetic and talkative and seemed to have a boundless passion for everything from world affairs to baseball.

In the spring of 1941, they married and moved to Montclair, New Jersey, where my father took a job as the Montclair assistant city manager. When World War II began, he tried to enlist but was turned down for health reasons. He and my mother moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1944, where he took a job with the Michigan Municipal League writing charters for newly incorporated towns. My mother gave birth to my sister, Carol, in 1944, and I came along in 1947.

I later learned that not only was my father passionate about clean government, he was also publicly outspoken about racial issues and civil rights. During my childhood he wrote to the local newspaper to complain about their policy of describing African Americans (but no one else) by race. He also took flying lessons from two black pilots, who may well have been Tuskegee Airmen, at a time when many white people would have assumed that no black people were competent to teach them anything as technically complex as flying.

During the summer of 1951, when I turned four, we moved to Grand Rapids, Michigan. My father had taken a job there as deputy city manager. We settled into a comfortable home and I began attending nursery school. Our friendly neighborhood was full of families raising large broods of postwar children. Life was good: there were lots of kids to play with, school was fun, and my parents loved each other. Then two years later, my father died.

Shortly after his death, my mother, sister, and I flew to Cincinnati to stay with my paternal grandmother, Clara Senior Iglauer. When we arrived at my grandmother's big house, my mother, devastated by my father's death, went to bed and stayed there through most of the summer. We hardly saw her. It was then that my grandmother began nurturing me. Like my mother, she was a college-educated woman, which was unusual for someone of her generation. Every morning she and I sat on her porch and read the newspaper aloud to each other. I loved being with her; we spent most summers at her house from then on. In 1958, when I was eleven, we settled permanently in Wyoming, Ohio, a suburb of Cincinnati a few miles away from my grandmother's home.

My grandmother employed an African American cook and housekeeper named Mittie Evans. I became devoted to her. Mittie was a heavyset, down-to-earth woman who often tied her hair up in a bandana and thought nothing of removing her dentures while she worked. My mother and grandmother loved me, but they both had a hard time showing physical affection. Mittie always had a hug for me. I spent hours in the kitchen (often sitting on the floor, under the table) while she prepared meals, talking with her and listening to soap operas, adventure serials, and gospel music that played on the radio. Besides Mittie, I had almost no contact with African Americans. There were no black kids in my neighborhood, and only a handful attended Wyoming High School.

When we moved to Ohio, I entered seventh grade, but I found it hard to adapt. There seemed to be unspoken rules about how to be a teenage boy, and I knew none of them. Raised by women, I was in every sense a mama's boy. Imagination games in which I acted out being a cowboy, spaceman, or soldier had always been much more interesting to me than baseball or football. I became an easy target for bullies.

Despite the lack of male role models, I have no doubt that my mother and grandmother were raising me to be like my father. My mother frequently spoke about how ethical he was and showed me the scrapbooks he had kept throughout his life. Both my mother and grandmother taught me by example to have an inquiring mind and to be unafraid to question authority. As my grandmother grew older and more forgetful, she sometimes called me John, my father's name. It was the greatest compliment she could have given me.

From early on, music became a way for me to soothe the loneliness I often felt. My mother loved music. She would often sing Broadway show tunes or 1930s and 1940s pop songs around the house. We would sometimes sing them together, although not very tunefully. Recognizing that I had almost no friends after we moved to Ohio, my mother bought an acoustic guitar for me in the hope that it would provide some consolation. (I never learned more than a few basic chords and licks.) The folk music revival was in full swing, and folk music had captured my interest much more than rock and roll. I began trying to sing and play polished popular folk songs by commercial groups like the Kingston Trio and Peter, Paul and Mary without knowing the unvarnished folk traditions from which their music sprang.

I was also intrigued by edgy, experimental jazz. I saw John Coltrane perform at the 1965 Ohio Valley Jazz Festival at Cincinnati's Crosley Field and was amazed by the intensity and angst of his playing. It seemed as though he was searching for the perfect note, and after conventional notes failed him, he wrenched different sounds out of his saxophone, ones that had never before been attempted. Looking back, I realize his performance had all the raw passion that I later discovered in the blues.

I eventually gave up my own aspirations of being a musician. I had the guitar and I had a harmonica, but if my guitar playing was bad, my harmonica playing was worse. Nonetheless, I liked being around music. If I couldn't succeed as a performer, perhaps I could make things happen for musicians who had talent but lacked promotional skills. I took my first stab at helping a musician when I talked a coffeehouse owner into booking Barry Chern, a teenage folksinger and friend from Columbus. I even pitched Barry to Fraternity Records, which was distributed by the Cincinnati-based King/Federal label, whose roster included Freddie King and James Brown. (Fraternity's biggest hits were by Lonnie Mack, perhaps the first blues-rock guitar hero. Lonnie later recorded three albums for Alligator.) Harry Carlson, who ran Fraternity from an office in a seedy building downtown, turned me down, but he took the time to meet with me and listen to the reel-to-reel demo tape I had brought.

In the fall of 1965, I headed to Lawrence University, a liberal arts college in Appleton, Wisconsin, with my acoustic guitar, my commercial folk records, and my awkward social skills. There were fraternities at my college, but nobody wanted to pledge me. I tried to learn how to live in a dorm with a bunch of guys. Although I had a difficult time blending in, I enjoyed academics and studied hard in the classes that interested me — English, history, and theater.

In late January 1966, I rode a bus two hundred miles south to attend the University of Chicago's annual folk festival. It was a trip that changed my life. On the bill was Mississippi Fred McDowell, a traditional blues guitarist who performed Mississippi hill country blues. I had never heard of McDowell, but when he began to play and sing, it felt as though he reached out to me over twenty rows of seats, grabbed me by the collar, slapped me, and yelled, "Wake up, boy! This is for you." His music seemed more honest, more direct, and more authentic than anything I had ever heard. Here was an illiterate southern black man, forty years older than I was, playing guitar with a slide on his finger. It seemed we had almost nothing in common. Yet somehow I felt he was speaking directly to me. Back in Appleton, I went to the town's only music store and ordered Mississippi Delta Blues, released on the tiny Arhoolie label and the only McDowell record the store could find in a catalog. It took more than six months for the store to locate a copy. I listened to it almost every day.

Two other records were crucial in pointing me and many others of my generation toward blues music. Toward the end of 1965, Elektra Records issued a budget-priced sampler LP called Folksong '65. Although the record featured established folk musicians like Judy Collins, Tom Rush, and Tom Paxton, the album's hard-edged lead track, "Born in Chicago," was by an unknown group called the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. Led by Butterfield, a good singer and electrifying harmonica (or, as most blues musicians call it, harp) player, the band understood how to play electric blues Chicago style, having learned not from records (like the Rolling Stones did) but from playing with black blues musicians in the city's South Side clubs. In fact, Butterfield hired the group's bass player and drummer, Jerome Arnold and Sam Lay, away from Howlin' Wolf. Just as the music of Mississippi Fred McDowell had seemed so direct and honest, the music of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band seemed gritty, powerful, and more grown up than any of the rock and roll music I was hearing on the radio or the folk music on the rest of that sampler.

Then in 1966, Vanguard Records released the groundbreaking three-LP series Chicago/The Blues/Today! This set was my awakening to real Chicago blues. It introduced a young rock and folk audience (including me) to the music of Buddy Guy, Junior Wells, James Cotton, Otis Spann, J. B. Hutto, Johnny Shines, Johnny Young, Big Walter Horton, Charlie Musselwhite, and more. The liner notes described the tough blues clubs on Chicago's South and West Sides, and the music sounded as tough as the clubs. I began searching for every blues record I could find, although there weren't many available in Appleton, Wisconsin. I volunteered to do a blues show on the college radio station, WLFM. I was given a slot one evening a week to play music from the station's tiny library of blues albums and my own small but growing personal collection. Although my blues knowledge was next to zero, I knew more than most of my listeners did. What I learned came primarily from LP liner notes and articles in folk music magazines.

I wasn't spending every moment listening to blues. I also stayed busy going to class, chasing girls, protesting the Vietnam War, marching for civil rights, and carrying on late-night conversations with the friends I was finally making. I was becoming a sociable young adult with a scruffy beard who liked to wear corduroy bell-bottoms and cowboy boots. I studied almost anything that didn't involve math or science. I finally majored in theater. I wasn't a good actor, but I was fascinated by how theater and society had interacted over the centuries. I envisioned myself as a career academic. Teaching theater history in college seemed like a good, safe, fun way to spend my life. The blues was a passionate hobby. But a career? The thought hadn't yet entered my mind.

As I entered my final year at Lawrence in 1968, I was scared. Like many young men of my generation, I desperately wanted to avoid being drafted into the war in Vietnam. With the date of my draft eligibility approaching, I signed up for a series of education courses and decided to delay my graduation until December 1969 so that I could become a student teacher and eventually earn my teaching certificate. Teachers weren't being drafted, and teaching high school seemed a better fate than getting my head shot off in a war I didn't believe in.

In the spring of 1969, I talked the college into letting me book a blues band for the fall homecoming concert, which gave me an opportunity to make my first blues pilgrimage to Chicago, the center of the blues world. I knew only one way to enter this world — through the door of the Jazz Record Mart. I had read about this mysterious place in the pages of the Canadian folk magazine Hoot, which I had picked up at the Mariposa Folk Festival outside of Toronto a few years earlier. In that issue, writer Richard Flohil capped his review of a number of blues albums with this life-changing advice: If you want to hear live blues in Chicago, find your way to the Jazz Record Mart at 7 West Grand Avenue and ask the owner, Bob Koester (who is also the head of the Delmark Records label), to take you to the clubs on the South and West Sides of the city. On a Monday morning, armed only with this information, I boarded a Greyhound bus for Chicago.

The Jazz Record Mart didn't look like much. Located in a seedy area north of downtown, it was housed in an old storefront building with dirty windows. The floors inside bore the scuffs and gouges of years of use, and the dusty wooden bins of LPs and old 78s had seen better days. The wall behind the counter was covered with cheaply printed handbills and handwritten scraps of paper. Stuck to the peeling paint with curling pieces of tape, they announced shows like, "Junior Wells Every Sunday at Peyton Place" and "Earl Hooker, Pepper's Lounge, Tuesday Nights." I knew I had come to the right place.

Holding forth behind the counter was a stocky, square-faced man in his midthirties with black hair and black-rimmed glasses. It was Bob Koester, the near-mythical figure I had read about in Hoot. He had started the Delmark label in his dorm room at Saint Louis University, and over the years he had recorded Deep South bluesmen like Big Joe Williams and Sleepy John Estes and seminal Chicago artists like Junior Wells, Magic Sam, and J. B. Hutto. My first impression of him was that he was always "on." He talked nonstop, leaping assuredly from topic to topic. While lecturing on why 1930s jazz and blues producer Lester Melrose was an underappreciated hero of American music, Koester interrupted himself to berate one of his long-haired employees for sweeping the floor improperly, then resumed with a sharp left turn into a critique of US foreign policy followed by an overview of Chicago blues in the 1940s as a prelude to a review of the bands he had seen perform in the South Side clubs the previous weekend, then interrupted himself again to instruct a customer as to which Gene Ammons record to buy — a decision requiring a summary of who the key musicians in jazz history were — only to be sidetracked by the need to yell at one of his employees again, leading to a complaint about hippies and their deadbeat ways, and then a return to the subject of jazz history with an explanation of why Frank Teschemacher and the Austin High Gang of the early 1920s were the first white musicians who actually understood traditional jazz and played it with real feeling (because they were hanging out on the South Side, sneaking into clubs to listen to Louis Armstrong). Koester seemed to have an opinion about nearly everything. Dazzled, I thought, "I'd like to grow up and be that guy."