Strung Out Episode 190: JIM POST AND THE LOST ERA OF CHICAGO FOLK

Oh, Chicago.   Once upon a time you had the WLS Barn Dance.  Once upon a time you two professional football teams. One upon a time you had the stockyards. Once upon a time you had the world's tallest building.  Once upon a time you had a music scene that was the envy of the world.    People would migrate to Chicago to play here.  Sure, there were other scenes like Greenwich Village and Haight-Asbury, but for a while (and I don't mean that tiny era with Green and Smashing Pumpkins) that Chicago was the epicenter of great singer-songwriters.  Goodman, Prine, Holstein, Smith, Koloc, Dundee, the list goes on. Add to that Jim Post. 
Jim Post is the iconic singer-songwriter of that era now long gone and almost forgotten.  A "self-made man", Post reinvented his style of music, themes of music and in a truly Chicagoan fashion, gave the middle finger to the music industry and set out on his own to make his own. 
Poet, theater director and producer and part-time historian recently held " A Night With(Out) Jim Post" at the SPACE in Evanston, Illinois.   There were the singers still around from that era (and still going strong, such as Anne Hills, Howard Levy and Corky Siegal to name a few) but the tone of the evening was a nostalgic look back to Chicago's Folk Heyday, when clubs like the Earl of Oldtown would bring around luminaries to catch the latest, hottest folk act going on at the time.    Do we mourn what we once had? Or do we suck it up and determine that to be a Chicagoan is to truly go it alone?  Richard and Martin discuss that.  Musical clips from the evening at SPACE are also here to enjoy.  You can enjoy the entire evening here.   And yes, Martin pressures Richard to create a Chicago-centric award, the Posties. 

Transcript

[00:00:00] Welcome to Strung Out, the podcast that looks at life through the lens of an artist. Your host is the artist, writer, and musician, Martin Lawrence McCormack. Now here's Martin. 

[00:00:13] Martin McCormack: All right, hi, and welcome to Strung Out with I'm Martin McCormack and I got with me Capers, our wonder dog. And I also have Richard Friedman who is The Poet Laureate, I would say, of of Rogers Park.

[00:00:33] I want to talk to you because it was back in November. I believe that you did a tribute to Jim Post and for those of you that don't know who Jim Post is or was but feels like an is he's a and I think that was one of those presences yeah a presence yeah he was an amazing midwestern performer and instead of me talking about it I want you to talk about your friendship with Jim start things off with that and Then we'll move on to the show, because it was very unique what you did with that show.

[00:01:11] Go ahead. All right. 

[00:01:14] Richard Friedman: I've known about Jim Post, and I'd heard about the show he was doing down at the Lyric Opera House. They had, not in the main big place where they do the 3, 000 seat operas, but they have a little theater called the, what's called the Civic Theater. And Jim had been running his show, Galena Rose, subtitled How Whiskey Won the West.

[00:01:34] for a year and a half. And I was up at the Organic Theater on North Clark Street. It's unfortunately condos now, but pretty close to the ballpark. And he walked in with a guy who was his manager and said, We're thinking of moving our show to the north side. You guys want to do it? And I said, Sure!

[00:01:53] Why not? A, I immediately liked this guy and I read about his show. I hadn't seen the show and I didn't need to see it to know that it would be good because we just built a new theater at the Organic. We rehabbed our building, which was like a warehouse that became a theater complex. And we had something called the Greenhouse Theater, and it was about 90 seats, but it was carpeted, and it had a rake.

[00:02:19] The audience had a rate, meaning incline. The stage was on floor level, but you could see great. And so we just gleaned a rose in there, and it continued to be a huge hit. We had total rave reviews from the newspapers it carried with the show, so we didn't need to be re reviewed. And Jim had a, kind of a burgeoning audience from years and years.

[00:02:43] He started out with Bonnie Kolak, John Prine, and Steve Goodman at the Earl of Old Town. And so people knew him as a singer, but he made a shift into dramatic presentations. Galena Rose was a musical about his hometown, where he was living for a long time in Illinois, in the northwest corner of the state.

[00:03:04] That's where U. S. Ulysses S. Grant hung out for a while, there's a museum where his home was, actually, Grant's home. But you've been there, right Marty? Oh, Galena, yeah. Yeah, it's a beautiful little town. And Jim just wanted to get into the history of Galena, and he wrote this These beautiful songs, and It was just a magical show.

[00:03:25] It was so successful that what we did was we moved it to the bigger theater in the complex, which was about 300 seats. And ran it for another year or so. And at the same time, Jim wanted to get into writing songs for kids. So he created an entity called the Cookie Crumb Club. The way Jim would start, every Saturday morning we'd do this, maybe two shows, and pack the place with kids from three to ten.

[00:03:51] And he'd be offstage in the back of the theater, and he'd walk in and he'd say, I'm looking for kids, I'm looking for kids, are there any kids here? And the kids would go, Me we're here! And then he'd get onstage and he'd do songs like Never Put a Frog in the Kitchen Sink. Bobber Doo, which was about an African dog.

[00:04:13] And just beautiful songs that kids loved. And he just had one of those personalities that lit things up. Then when I was at Northlight Theater, which at the time was in Evanston. We were actually renting space from Northlight. That Northlight Theatre was arranged by Northwestern because they had two really nice theatres that they didn't fully program with the student productions.

[00:04:40] And they rented space to us while we were itinerant. And Jim had been working on a Mark Twain show. So I said we're going to call this a world premiere, Mark Twain and the Laughing River. And we got a band, and Jim was, he was the only speaker. But we had a band, and the music was great. These are all original songs Jim had written.

[00:05:02] And he did a lot of research on Samuel Clemens, Mark Twain, and his writing. So a lot of the dialogue, or monologue if you will, came from Twain's writing. 

[00:05:12] Martin McCormack: Now, did he predate the Hal Holbrook kind of Mark Twain, or no, he was after Holbrook. So Holbrook started it but Post took off with it.

[00:05:23] He took 

[00:05:24] Richard Friedman: it, he took it into music. There's also a local Chicago guy named Richard Hensel who's a great Mark Twain, but he 

[00:05:31] Martin McCormack: never sang. He never sang. I actually saw him quite a bit at the Woodstock Opera House. I was house manager there, and so I, I was very familiar with Richard Hensel. But, Jim Post I knew about.

[00:05:46] It was funny, cause he was people would say, Oh Jim Post does a a mean Mark Twain. And but go ahead and explain. Cause you were running all these theaters. And this one particular guy really kind 

[00:06:03] Richard Friedman: of struck a chord with you. We just Jim used to joke on stage.

[00:06:10] He'd say, Richard, could you get fired from this place so I can go to another place and get another gig? I produced shows by Jim at the Organic Theater in Chicago, Northlake Theater in Evanston College of Lake County in Grayslake, Illinois. We did Mark Twain up there because I was working at a place called the David Adler Cultural Center.

[00:06:32] And then when I went to Munster at Theater at the Center, Munster's right over the state line. We just fell down there. I don't know if you noticed. Hold 

[00:06:40] Martin McCormack: it. Let me fix it. Technical difficulties with our camera, but keep going. Okay. Actually, you know what? I'm just going to let this thing go. Let's just keep talking because it's telling me my storage is full.

[00:06:55] Oh, so 

[00:06:56] Richard Friedman: we'll just do this audio? Yeah, we'll do this audio, which is fine. Oh, I don't have to look at you or the camera. Now we can just keep talking. Okay, yeah, yeah, Jim and I just, I don't know how much we had in common or not, but Jim was just, he loved being on stage. His whole life was a performance, he was one of those guys.

[00:07:21] He'd walk in the room, and if he was checking out at the Jewel, he'd make friends with the cashier or the other people in line. He just had that knack of relating to people. And, 

[00:07:32] Martin McCormack: and, with your, with the tribute. To Jim Post that you did up at Space in Evanston in November. You brought along all these other stars of the Chicago scene.

[00:07:49] And one question I have for you about that, Richard is what was it about that scene that made it so amazing with all these artists, these luminaries walking around. I call 'em luminaries like Bonnie Klock. You got John Prine, you got Steve Goodman. And he had Jim Post, he had, it was Holstein.

[00:08:13] It felt like a new, it felt like a new 

[00:08:14] Richard Friedman: thing. Edol, it felt folk music had been around a long time. Or we got the weavers, we got Pete Seeger, we got Woody Guthrie, of course. And but Chicago had a nexus of people who. Congregated at the center of this place. The Old Town School helped some too, when that came into being.

[00:08:34] But they just, they fed off each other. And it's I just saw Bonnie Collock Saturday night. She was performing at the Old Town School. She said I'm the last one standing from our group. But, she's 80 years old as of today. Wow. Yeah, if you look on Wikipedia, it might say she's 78, but she said when I first met Roger Ebert and he was writing about me and stuff, I lied about my age.

[00:09:01] Sorry, Bonnie, I outed you, but she did it on stage. Only by two 

[00:09:04] Martin McCormack: years, too. That's funny. 

[00:09:05] Richard Friedman: Usually, they take ten off. But Bonnie Kodak's like Marty McCormick because she's also a wonderful artist. She does 

[00:09:13] Martin McCormack: it. I've seen her art And she's now one of these other Chicago artists that moved out to Alamakee County, Iowa.

[00:09:23] Yeah, where Brian Fitzgerald lives and has Taken on that whole Kind of lifestyle too. But yeah but so there's something about the time and the place that made it happen and of course a lot of people know the story about how it was basically Christopher, Chris Christofferson and all people, Paul Inca, who helped discover Steve Goodman and and John Bryan.

[00:09:50] I always heard about Chris Christofferson finding these guys, but how did Paul Inca fit 

[00:09:56] into 

[00:09:57] Richard Friedman: it? I think he was an A& R guy or something. Really? I don't know. He was like a scout. Yeah. And Christofferson definitely was there at the Earl of Old Town and said, Whoever signed these guys, and the only two who really broke out nationally were Prine and Goodman, though Bonnie Kolak she was known for making some really great commercials, I think one of those airplane commercials was her, but you 

[00:10:21] Martin McCormack: know.

[00:10:22] And what was what was Jim Post, he had a minor hit, right? 

[00:10:27] Richard Friedman: Yes, no, it was actually an international hit. It was called Reach Out. In The Darkness. And but they mis they misnamed it. It was supposed to be Reach Out Of The Darkness. But they got the article wrong there. The preposition.

[00:10:44] Yeah. It went through history with the wrong name, the song, but the reason people remember it is it's got the incredibly catchy refrain I think it's so groovy now that people are finally getting together. It's so groovy how people are finally getting together. And it was Jim had a group with his wife at the time called Friend and Lover.

[00:11:06] Huh. And as Randy Sabine, who was one of the guy, our music director for this event in November, said, no one could ever figure out who's friend and who's lover. 

[00:11:18] Martin McCormack: That's a great name. We 

[00:11:20] Richard Friedman: love it. Yeah. And we were in Cleveland. We went to the Rock Roll Hall of Fame and Jim was in there because they had that song in the Wonder Exhibit.

[00:11:29] And so we can always say Jim made it to the Hall of Fame with that song. And they still play it on the oldies radio. And Jim used to say. There's mailbox money coming because they used it in a TV show or they used it in a movie and you 

[00:11:42] Martin McCormack: get a royalty. See, I didn't realize it it went international.

[00:11:47] Oh it was huge. I always thought it was the only other guy that, besides like Goodman and that, but would be like Ronnie Rice. Yeah. The new Colony Six. Those guys hit. 

[00:12:02] Richard Friedman: The Buckinghams were a local group and they had a drag and Peter Rick and the Hides of March had a vehicle and and when you get that one hit, you almost never can follow it up in pop music and this was folk music though, right? Or was Jim over in the pop? It was Rocky. Oh, Rocky. I like that. 

[00:12:21] Yeah, it was definitely Rocky and he could have You know, he opened for a lot of people. I he tells a lot of stories according to Jimmy, he opened for cream and opened for Jimmy. I don't know.

[00:12:34] I don't know. Jim Ville was a great storyteller, and I think a lot of 'em might have been 

[00:12:37] Music: true . 

[00:12:40] Martin McCormack: I wonder if we can verify that if that'd be wild if he opened for yeah, I guess Jim Jim played a lot of festivals too. I don't think he cared about fame and being a rock star.

[00:12:55] Richard Friedman: He just he's a guy who never had a straight job in his 

[00:12:58] Martin McCormack: life. But that kind of goes hand in glove with the whole, the only person John Prine, but very much later on if you want, broke through, but not really broke through. 

[00:13:16] Richard Friedman: John Prine moved to Nashville.

[00:13:19] And he made a lot of his living writing songs for country stars. And Jim's songs would have been great. And he had songs he said, Oh, I wish I could get this to Willie Nelson. And he never made the effort to move where they were and just insinuate them and play the Bluebird Cafe and do all that stuff.

[00:13:37] But Pride became a legend as a writer, even more so than as a performer. And so Jim he was content living up in Galena. And he'd tour and he was just a guy who was comfortable being who he was. He was in his own skin and happy to be himself and just spread joy. He really did. 

[00:14:02] At the event, it was a combination of a few, it wasn't any eulogies. It wasn't a memorial. It was a celebration of Jim Post. So we had, I hope I get them all, but people who'd worked with Jim, had recorded with him knew him like Moe Dixon. lives in Portland, Oregon, and he heard about it and flew himself in.

[00:14:21] He said, I gotta be there. Ann Hills, we actually scheduled it because we knew Ann Hills was going to be in Skokie the weekend before, and she just stayed over a couple of days. Howard Leary lives in the northern suburbs, and he's one of the world's great harmonica players. He's also a great keyboard player.

[00:14:40] Him and Corky Siegel Corky didn't want to be announced because he wasn't sure he was going to make it. He didn't worry about COVID and that, and because he had some other gigs he didn't want to conflict with. So anyway, so I saw Howard Levy do a show at Space in Evanston, was the venue we had this Jim Post.

[00:15:01] And I said, there just might be another Jewish harmonica player making a scene. Of course he knew Emmett Corky because they were old friends. Howard he's just a great And Randy Sabine, the music director. can play any stringed instrument. He's just a genius. He sings a little bit. So he was there, and then we we needed someone to do reach out of the darkness.

[00:15:26] And Randy said Dawn Ferris can do it. She just sung that with Jim. So she lived in Wisconsin. Randy lives in Twin Cities, and he came in, and Dick Penny, was an old friend of Jim's, and he's a great songwriter. I didn't really know Dick before we started this. And he came up with an idea that we would call it An Evening Without Jim Post.

[00:15:50] Which was great. Yeah, and then we had we had some graphics we were showing. We showed a little video of Jim. And then we We had a corner of the screen with Jim as an angel looking down on the whole proceedings. The great thing about this is we're talking about anything. Man, I'd love to see that.

[00:16:09] You can see it. We put it out on YouTube. We had this great guy. He brought three cameras. Mark Holman was his name, national Video Documentarians or something. And and he was a, he almost volunteered his time and he came in and he did this professional shoot, and it's available on YouTube, just an evening without gym post.

[00:16:30] If you put that in Google and you go to YouTube, you'll, you can see the whole thing. We'll, 

[00:16:35] Martin McCormack: we'll make sure that we put the link in our production notes to that and we're going to take a little break right now. And we are talking to my dear friend, Richard Friedman, who is a legend, I would say by virtue of the fact that you've, you are like a true Chicago artist.

[00:16:55] I feel that you've just, you've stayed in Chicago. And you've made a name for yourself by just working really hard. 

[00:17:03] Richard Friedman: I'm still alive, man. What can I tell you? That's what 

[00:17:06] Martin McCormack: counts. And it's just funny. It sounds like with Jim Post artists Al Rose, I always think of down in Andersonville with the Kopi Cafe, he has a song My Posthumous.

[00:17:19] release where he talks about making it big after he dies. Why don't you read to us some of the reminiscences that you've written, some poetry about Jim Post.

[00:17:32] I'm assuming that's what we're going to hear, right? Yeah, 

[00:17:36] Richard Friedman: I was gonna do my translations of Dostoyevsky, but I'm still working on my Russian. All right, 

[00:17:41] Martin McCormack: man. I really am, man. I just didn't know if you were gonna throw me a curveball and say Yeah, by the way, no, I don't know I was gonna 

[00:17:49] Richard Friedman: do readings from Finnegan's 

[00:17:50] Martin McCormack: Wave.

[00:17:51] Finnegan's Wave. Oh, nice. Because I'm Irish. Yeah, we got one more month. 

[00:17:56] Richard Friedman: Yes, okay. Jim was being celebrated. I said at the event is It's nice to be celebrated while you're still alive and can hear what people say about you. So Jim in Galena, there were two events. One was his 80th birthday party where a bunch of great local musicians played.

[00:18:15] And the other was they named Jim Post Day in Galena. Gave him the I don't know if they have keys, , but they gave him the entry to the city and was at city council and they did a proclamation and they named him the official poet laureate of Galena. Which he was for sure. So I figured I had to write some poems.

[00:18:36] And I said previously if you watch the Mr. Marty show that I like to re write poems for events. to celebrate them. And it's called occasional poetry, which means to celebrate an occasion. So on this occasion, I said actually I wrote this in the car while my wife drove us to Galena. 

[00:18:58] So I figured, how can I get something that gets the essence of Jim without going on forever? So I wrote haikus. Now, for those who haven't studied their Norton's Anthology lately, a haiku is a three line poem, five syllables, seven syllables, five syllables. And, of course, the the Chinese poets were experts at it, and and I dabble in it.

[00:19:22] I think the key is you got to have some sort of hook to put a wrap on the three lines. So some don't. Okay, Sixteen Haikus, The Adventures of Jim Post. Which is of course is a take off on The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, since he was known for his Mark Twain. We're gathered today to thank gods and spirits for Jim in our world.

[00:19:44] Very few who've met Jim will forget that day or time or wish they hadn't. Texas Kid Preacher, radio talent show win, set Jim on his path. Earl of Old Town Born, Prime, Goodman, Kolak, and Post, songs for the long haul. What kind of man can say he never punched a clock? Made his mark with art. A great storyteller, his trick is repetition.

[00:20:10] The fifth time is the best. Reach out in darkness, Jim's eyes provide clear light to guide you home safe. Bard of Galena, the bewistered troubadour spirit of the town. Believes in marriage. His mantra is no secret. I do, I if you don't know, Jim was married multiple times. Galena Rose played the lyric.

[00:20:33] Pavarotti called Jim an angel. That's a true story. That since he was in the building, they said, let's go see the show in the other theater. Someone took Pavarotti to see Galena Rose. And he was only, he was on a tight schedule. They were gonna go out for dinner or something. And he said, I can only stay for the first act.

[00:20:51] He told Jim a hundred times. But he was so entranced by Jim's performance, he stayed for the whole time. And he told Jim, you should have been an opera singer, you're the voice of an angel. Your range is incredible, which it was. And Jim could sing high, he could sing low, he just had a voice from well up above.

[00:21:09] Magic in his twain, music of old Sam Clemons revealed on stage. Flows like a river, words, jokes, songs, and sweet music. Jim, a source of truth. Highway 20 runs straight to Jimmy Davis heart. Win sings Galena. I would try to get you right to Galena. So that's it. And of course I was playing off of Jimi Hendrix.

[00:21:30] The wind cries Mary, right? Okay. No one hit wonder. Those in the know better. Groovy then and now. In more just world, every town a Galena. All your friends like Jim. Simple equation. Jim loves his life more than most. Most of us love Jim. That was one of his famous songs albums, I Love My Life. And the cover is a, when Jim was much younger, a bare chested Jim under a waterfall.

[00:22:00] And it's been renowned on quite quite a few times on television as one of the worst album covers ever. It was on Jimmy Fallon and also Ellen DeGeneres. And he's actually, he looks great. He's got a handlebar mustache. And and Jimmy Fallon was, it was his segment was called, Do Not Play.

[00:22:19] And so actually they played some of it, and then Jimmy and his sidekick Higgins, whatever his name is, they said, Hey, that's pretty good. And it was good. Everything he did was good. And he's written an autobiography of sorts, stories, from his childhood, which was in the woods of outside Houston.

[00:22:40] And I'm hoping someday to get it together and see if we can get someone to publish it. Because he was great storyteller as well as The thing is, besides for being a great singer, when he acted, and the great thing about it was, he'd written the play, so if he messed it up, who cared? No one knew.

[00:23:01] If you're in character as Sam Clemons, Mark Twain, you just can go with it. One time I went to the Earl of Old Town, not the Earl of Old Town, the Old Town School of Folk Music, and Jim said, we're going to tape it today. I got a guy, we're going to make a first class video, maybe we'll put out a DVD. And the show's going on and on, and it was almost three hours long.

[00:23:19] I said, what happened, Jim? He said I guess I was doing two shows at the same time, Galena Rose, not Galena Rose, I was doing Mark Twain and Laughing River, and then Mark Twain's Adventures Out West. Since he Twain went out west, he was, wrote for the San Francisco Chronicle, he had Adventures, and Jim had done a play about that, and he put the two shows together.

[00:23:39] I can understand when you get in a loop, you just go with it. So yeah, unfortunately, that tape never saw the light of day, but that was Jim and He just he loved people. He just did he have a, did he have a real big following or what how? He was not good at marketing, he never had a great website. He used to mail out his stuff himself. He and his wife at the time, Janet Post, they put out a series of tapes to help kids learn how to read phonetically. And so they wrote a bunch of songs about the alphabet and stuff. He did all sorts of stuff, but he never really clicked on, How am I going to monetize my talent?

[00:24:24] And he would do his Galina Rose show by himself as a one man show. in Galena, almost year round. He was there was a little place called the Train Depot Theater that I saw him do it several times right on Main Street in Galena, so he would make his living doing that, and every so often he'd get a good gig, or someone would, or they'd use his song in a commercial or something, and he was happy.

[00:24:49] He was 

[00:24:49] Martin McCormack: happy. So he, he was satisfied with that kind of lifestyle. He wasn't like going, Man, if only I would have had 

[00:24:57] Richard Friedman: Yeah. No, I don't think he regretted much, he would, when he's on Jimmy Fallon, he'd say, We gotta get on Jimmy Fallon. Say, I'm still alive. That guy's still alive. And couldn't get through the layers to, to get to it.

[00:25:09] And, it's difficult. It is. It is to break out. And who knows. Now if you go viral, you got a chance. And Jim never really exploited it. And he never really put that much effort into it. But he put on his last album that he did. In the studio, it was called Reach Out Together.

[00:25:29] He got permission from was it Jesse Collin Young, the guy who wrote Come On People Now, Let's Get Together? So it was what we call, I guess in today's nomenclature, a mashup of Jim's song, Reach Out of the Darkness, and that song, Come On People Now. It's great! So the album's called Reach Out Together, and he got a guy who was an old acquaintance or friend of Jim's called Jerry Miller.

[00:25:55] who became known as one of my favorite San Francisco scene groups, the Moby Great. And Jerry Miller was a great guitar player who was the lead guitarist for the Moby Great. And Jim reached out to him and got him to come to Galena, where I think they made the record. So it had a lot of good songs on it some new stuff.

[00:26:14] And he did a lot, he did beautiful covers. He did a Shenandoah, they'll break out now, Marty. You're known for your Danny Boy, which brings people to tears every May, every March, April, and May. Yeah. Whenever you do it. Yeah. And he could do Shenandoah like you do Danny Boy. Oh, wow. Cool. And he loved traditional music.

[00:26:34] He could do Sixteen Tons, and he loved people, he'd do Steve Goodman songs, there was a writer named Kendall Cardy, loved to sing his songs. He did a show in Oak Park, at the community theater there, where it was all songs by Steve Goodman and a writer he knew named Gamble Rogers.

[00:26:54] Okay. Yeah, and So he loved to celebrate other artists too. He didn't say I'm only gonna do my own stuff. You know if it was right for his voice, he'd do it. 

[00:27:04] Martin McCormack: Let's take a little break here. We're with Richard Friedman and we're remembering the great Jim Post and celebrating his life and and his music.

[00:27:15] You are listening to Strong. Go 

[00:27:19] Richard Friedman: to martin mccormack. com and sign up for our newsletter. You'll get the latest blog from Marty information about upcoming podcasts and what's happening in the gallery. That's martin mccormack. 

[00:27:32] Music: com.

[00:27:37] Deep within, there's a vision.

[00:27:44] The time is nothing but space. But within every minute, and mile that's within it, somehow, there's a beautiful face. And it's 

[00:28:01] Richard Friedman: all 

[00:28:01] Music: such delicate balance. The sport of infinity we give, expect The temptations we have may lead down the path of the devil of discouragement.

[00:28:22] telescope, but I might be wrong. Yours, I've never been anyone who's fallen fast in place. Yours, never mentioned one at the end of the race. And

[00:28:52] we're back, 

[00:28:53] Martin McCormack: and I've got Richard Friedman with me, and I, just hearing you talk about Jim Post and reminiscing about him, I feel there's a sense of nostalgia, sadness actually in a way, because that era, But that's long gone now and nothing really replaced it in Chicago. 

[00:29:16] Richard Friedman: Artists who stay in Chicago are amazing, like you've stayed in Chicago we, my family's like big fans of Wilco and Jeff Tweedy, and they live in Chicago.

[00:29:32] And it's great, and when they come to Chicago, we could sell out the Auditorium Theater for three nights because they connect with the people in Chicago. And they're all from other places, I think Jeff Tweedy might be from Bellevue or something like that. Yeah, he's downstate. Yeah, and it's just when people feel Chicago fits them, and they stay, then it gives them a license to create art.

[00:29:58] that isn't always around the corner there's an A& R guy telling you gotta change this or not. You can make on your own, and I think Wilco has their own studio, and I think that's a great way, the means of production, so to speak. But not too many got to it to that point where they could. 

[00:30:16] And 

[00:30:17] Martin McCormack: Wilco's a good example of a band that was signed. And then they got off the label and now they're just independent for the most part, I believe that they never signed to another album. And that's all also like a Chicago thing, isn't it? 

[00:30:36] Richard Friedman: Yeah, I think so. I think so. Let's think of the people who, as far as we know, believe in Live in Chicago, who got to some national prominence.

[00:30:45] You got like for, I'll say an example how a levy is not a household name. But he's played all over the world. He's played with Bella Fleck, he's backed he's been on 40 albums probably, either as a leader or as a sideman, and he feels comfortable being in Chicago. Corky Siegel one of the great blues guys, and yeah, he lived in San Francisco for a while, so did Jim. 

[00:31:10] And or I'll take one of my favorite guitar players, Mike Bloomfield. He grew up on the North Shore, near where I grew up. Actually, I have a picture of him from his bar mitzvah in 1956. And here's a kid, he's 14, 15 years old, and he just loved blues. So here he is, with the guts, somehow he got himself to the West Side and the South Side and going to the blues clubs to learn from the masters.

[00:31:33] And they embraced him because he was so good and he was such a sponge for knowledge. Like Paul Butterfield Blues Band, those guys so there's something, I have a poem called Deadline USA, and it ends with as long as there's been art, there's been a point of origin, the newspaper's called Chicago.

[00:31:58] So there's something, some people started here and went all over the world, and others decided to stay. Now, John Prine, who You know, I love his music, I love his writing, and he's also, like me, a former mailman. 

[00:32:12] Martin McCormack: I didn't know that, see? Yeah. Wow, cool. You 

[00:32:14] Richard Friedman: knew about him, right? I knew that he, yeah.

[00:32:16] Yeah. I was in near Sauganash neighborhood of Chicago. I was a mailman. And so anyway but he went to Nashville and as I said, made a lot of his living as a writer and also performing. There's different ways to do it, but it's I saw Patti Smith a couple of months ago, and she's so proud of being born in Chicago.

[00:32:42] But she never had an artistic career in Chicago. Her goal was to get to New York, and she got there. And Patti Smith started out as a poet. And, or Jim Carroll was another great poet who became a rock star of sorts too. So poetry is a good starting off point, and not that many people can make a living just staying and being a poet.

[00:33:01] I always had other jobs, you 

[00:33:03] Martin McCormack: know. Chicago is funny in the sense that, even with country music, the Grand Ole Opry started here, the barn dance, WLS barn dance. Oh, really? And a lot of this It started here? It started here and a lot of a lot of the music scene started here, and then It's or it was taken like all the blues artists and the Rolling Stones came in and yeah, there's videos of them playing with Muddy Waters and stuff, yeah. 

[00:33:37] And, but the Chicago scene is a difficult scene. And you know firsthand from theater and everything, it's just hard to put it, to keep it I don't know what it is about it. Yeah, you can live Yeah, there's a bit of pride in the fact like, oh yeah, I survived that one there's a funny sense of there's not like that camaraderie, it's more like survival of the fittest here, isn't it?

[00:34:05] Richard Friedman: I hope it's not that. But there's an old expression, showbiz expression. You can make a killing, but you can't make a living. So you might catch a rocket and get a hit song or something and and be able to do it. But I think you can live more comfortably in Chicago. You can raise a family better here.

[00:34:23] I have friends who were young poets and they split for New York. And early on we had a collective of poets and, we those who stayed in town maybe didn't care as much about getting published and success. They just wanted to live a life and figure out a way to make enough money to pay the bills.

[00:34:45] I don't know, but I do think Chicago is got an energy in the Midwest because of our location. We're getting forces from all sides of the country. People, the Blues guys came up from Mississippi and Alabama and made Chicago our home. Rock and Rollers. It's never really been known for a huge rock scene now.

[00:35:07] Martin McCormack: Let's take a little break. You are listening to Strung. 

[00:35:11] Music: Out

[00:36:02] Richard Friedman: Braveries town near the county, down one day, 

[00:36:05] Music: pastor. My 

[00:36:08] Richard Friedman: morning rain came with my colleague, she smiled 

[00:36:10] Music: as she passed me by. And she looked so sweet in her two bare feet, did she not burn up brown hair? Such a winsome elf I catched myself, to see I was standing there. Here in primary bay, to the terry gate, from Galloway to Dublin town.

[00:36:28] The old maid I've seen, like a brown collie, I met in the county town.

[00:36:58] As Yon 

[00:36:58] Richard Friedman: works paid, I scratched my head to the 

[00:37:01] Music: feeling that was rare. 

[00:37:04] Richard Friedman: So I said, I 

[00:37:06] Music: tore a passerby, who's the baby?

[00:37:11] And he said, she's the bride of Dublin town. That's Rose McCann from the banks of the bend, star of the county down. From Brainerie Bay to the Tabby Creek, Galloway to Dublin town. No maid I've seen like a brown 

[00:37:30] Richard Friedman: collie, I met 

[00:37:32] Music: in the county town.

[00:37:58] Richard Friedman: Now I travel a bit, but I've never been back. It's been more than three years, yeah, And 

[00:38:03] Music: fair and 

[00:38:04] Richard Friedman: square, I surrender 

[00:38:05] Music: that to the star of Kent. With a heart, no champion, no need to start a row. And she came, and she made 

[00:38:16] Richard Friedman: Loretta, the 

[00:38:17] Music: star of the county town. Near Brinery Lake to the Terry Lake, and Galloway to Dublin town.

[00:38:25] No maid I've seen like the Broccoli, I led to the county town.

[00:38:56] Richard Friedman: And at the Harvest Fair, she'd surely be there, and I'm dressed in my Sunday 

[00:39:00] Music: clothes. With 

[00:39:01] Richard Friedman: my shoes shine bright, and me ant cog bright, for a smile from the nut brown rose. No pipe I'll smoke, no 

[00:39:08] Music: horse I'll yoke, till my plow turns a rust color bound. And a smiling bride by me fire's side, star of the cow town.

[00:39:17] Near Brannery Bay to the Terry Gate, From Galloway to Dublin Town. Oh, made I seem like the Brown Colleen, I'm meant to be counting down. Near Brannery Bay to the Terry Gate, From Galloway to Dublin Town. Oh, made I seem like the Brown Colleen.

[00:40:22] Richard Friedman: That I met in 

[00:40:23] Music: the county down.

[00:40:31] Hello, 

[00:40:32] Richard Friedman: everyone. My name is Polly Chase. I am the gallery director of Marty's Online Art Gallery at martinmccormick. com. If you haven't done so already, I invite you to go check out his artwork. He works in several different formats, painting, illustration. Drawings and a very unique way of doing scratch art, which I think you'll find very interesting.

[00:40:58] So go check it out, martinmccormack. com click on the gallery, look at the art, and when you're ready to start your own collection, send me an email at martyfineartatgmail. 

[00:41:12] Music: com. Thanks for listening. 

[00:41:17] Martin McCormack: Let me ask you this the last question is, do you think Such an era that you experienced with Jim Post and all these other great artists and we, there was guys like Tom Dundee and there was a whole bunch in that era.

[00:41:36] Do you think that is something that we'll ever see again or do you think that's just one of those Camelot kind of moments? 

[00:41:46] Richard Friedman: I've got a feeling it's not likely to repeat itself. I don't know, it's I know good friends who won't leave their houses. They're scared to death of COVID. And I actually say to them, You're one of the most depressed cats I know.

[00:42:01] You're just trying to prolong the agony. Go out and experience life. I thought of another great Chicago artist who's been all over the world, John Langford. And he lives in the Edgebrook, Sauganash area. And it's just a base for him. And he's like you in body collect. He's also a wonderful visual artist.

[00:42:21] And I've seen him play so many times, and it's either by himself or with a different group that he embeds on the spot. I think he finds it a place where, you know, sometimes, he's got a group called the Mekons, where half the members are in the UK, and half are here. So he can not get the visas and stuff to work, to play very often.

[00:42:41] But when they do, it's But yeah, they just fall into the same thing. So I do think Chicago can be a real fertile ground to nurture a young person in their art, whatever it is, but maybe it's hard to hang in here and make a living and stay in Chicago. 

[00:42:57] Martin McCormack: And I don't want to beat a, beat it to death, but it would be interesting the Grammys just were last Sunday and I think to myself, why don't we have something like that?

[00:43:10] Yeah. Just Chicago based like the Chicago Music Awards. Why you know because we're missing out on a lot of other genres that Chicagoans are participating in I, I went to a Martin Luther King celebration in Evanston and the pastor who got up to talk about King it turns out his congregation he, Produced, he got four Grammys for gospel, gospel music.

[00:43:39] And I'm like, wow and And this is the kind of, and I'm like, Yeah, 

[00:43:45] Richard Friedman: and there's things that you and I don't necessarily know, but house music started in Chicago, and that's gone across the world. So I guess think about it, Gary Davis, Common, those guys.

[00:43:56] It's not the genre I understand. But you're 

[00:43:59] Martin McCormack: a promoter, man. You're a mover and shaker. Why are we why, I'm giving you I'm tossing the gauntlet down to you, man. No. Put together the Chicago Music Award. The Windy City Music, or whatever you want to call it. I think it would be something that would draw attention back to Chicago. 

[00:44:19] Paul von Mertens one of the great composers, arrangers, worked for Brian Wilson. And he's in Poydoc Pondering. There's 

[00:44:31] Richard Friedman: so many. What was that guy's name? Steve Albini, is that it? 

[00:44:34] Martin McCormack: Steve so Steve Albini, and then there's also Oh, God. You got Nicholas Tremliss. Thank you. I was just trying to remember Nicholas Tremliss.

[00:44:45] Irish Music World, you got Liz Carroll, you got John Williams. You got Sean Cleland. You got you got a bunch. I would throw Jackie Moran in there as far as just towering figures. I think we need a Chicago Music Awards to reinvigorate the 

[00:45:04] Richard Friedman: scene. The greatest music organization to me is the AACM, the Association of African Creative Musicians.

[00:45:13] Excuse me if I got it wrong, but they're jazz, basically jazz music, and their music's gone all over the world, and they still have a base here in Chicago. And there people are. 

[00:45:27] Martin McCormack: Maybe instead of calling it the Chicago Music Awards, we call it the Jim Post Awards. 

[00:45:34] Richard Friedman: the posts. Yeah.

[00:45:35] The Post You won, the Post you wanted. Jimmy David. Jimmy David, the Jimmy Davids. So the gds watch for the link on to watch that show. You'll love it. And you don't have to watch it all. It's two hours long. You don't have to watch it all. But my son Howard reads a great poem and, get him on here or have him recorded for the Mr.

[00:45:53] Marty Show. We will get Howard. The King of Joy. Yeah. He's your other poet laureate of the show. Yeah. 

[00:45:59] Martin McCormack: He is great. He 

[00:46:00] Richard Friedman: wrote this great poem 

[00:46:02] Martin McCormack: about Jim called The King of Joy. And, Jim Pulse was his godfather. Yeah. So that, I think that's so cool that that just shows so much of a friendship you guys had but we're out of time for this time, but we will have Richard Friedman back and yeah, don't worry I'll keep after Richard.

[00:46:25] Music: For starting the post awards. 

[00:46:27] Martin McCormack: I'm not sure, you know what, 

[00:46:29] Richard Friedman: Okay, let me get into a little philosophy. A little philosophy. There I have people! David Bowie, man, I just watched the David Bowie documentary, Moon Age Daydream. I highly recommend it if you're listening to this. You don't have to be a Bowie fan.

[00:46:43] What an interesting guy. He gets into his philosophy of creativity and reinventing yourself, which is good for all artists. You have different genres. I know you do the Gaelic thing, you do the Americana, you do the straight folk music. I think that's great as I'm not a professional writer.

[00:47:03] I don't get paid for it. I just want to do it for myself. And I gave up a long time ago saying, Oh, I gotta submit to the big magazines. I need a poem in the New Yorker and all that. And I just write them and send them out to people I think might be interested. And I just think that there's creativity for yourself and creativity because you think you're going to get somewhere.

[00:47:24] I'm just where I'm supposed to be and that's alright. I don't know. I don't know. But but my theory was that you don't judge an artist. Success by if they won an Academy Award, or if they're EGOT, or it's by if their art moves you. And awards maybe put a little spotlight on something that wouldn't get it otherwise they're phony as hell.

[00:47:51] Now, I watched the Grammys, I gotta admit, I watched the whole thing, and there was a great cartoon maybe in New York or something, that's two baby boomers like me, alright, I was born in the fifties. And they're sitting watching and they go, Who? Who? Who? Who? And then all of a sudden they're exclaiming, Jody!

[00:48:06] Jody Mitchell! Cause that was the only person I know. But when When Tracy Chapman came on to sing with Luke Combs he made a song, a huge country hit. Yeah. It was great. It was magical. Cause you the energy of two artists, one who highly respected the person, it was just fantastic. And and Joey Mitchell singing with him.

[00:48:31] Great artist, some of whom were from Chicago, at least one was. It was just great to see she could still sing and one of the great songwriters of all time, I think. And also, an artist. 

[00:48:45] Martin McCormack: There you go. Maybe there is something with that. David 

[00:48:47] Richard Friedman: Bowie, Marty McCormick, Bobby Kolak. Maybe, 

[00:48:52] Martin McCormack: instead of those Chicago words, we'll just have an art showing. 

[00:48:55] Talk about, I could go on how tough that business is, but spoken like a true Chicagoan. That's what I'm gonna say. Spoken like a true Chicagoan. Do it for the love, don't do it for the glory. Folks we're gonna wrap it up here with Richard. And as always, so great to have you here.

[00:49:17] Richard Friedman, my friend, and a great poet, a great I'm serious when I Talk about his efforts at theater and everything else in the Chicago area. And you were in the press. You had you had your yellow press going for a long time. Yeah. Yeah. So you're a, you're a true Chicagoan in that sense.

[00:49:39] And so if I had the award show, I would be giving you like the lifetime achievement award right now, man. So there you go. Thank you. Thank you. Alright folks, listen. That's it for this weekend. As always, thank you for listening to Strung Out, and we'll be back with more next week. Buh bye. Thank 

[00:49:57] Richard Friedman: you for listening.

[00:49:58] For more information about this show or a transcript, visit martinmccormack. com. While there, sign up for our newsletter. See you next time on Strung 

[00:50:09] Music: Out.

[00:50:15] It's oh so wrong, this pain we feel, makes no sense at all. The swan song was a part of the deal, was no good at all. Giving no choice, giving no 

[00:50:26] Martin McCormack: step.