Early in his recording career, whenever Lonnie Brooks’ songs aired on the radio, Bruce Iglauer immediately called the Brooks family’s Chicago home. “Tell your dad it’s on the radio! Turn it on! Turn it on, now!” he told Lonnie’s 8-year-old son, Wayne. “Every single time,” recalls the now 51-year-old singer and guitarist who goes by Wayne Baker Brooks. “We would be like, ‘Oh, that’s Daddy.'”
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Iglauer, who founded the pioneering Chicago blues label Alligator Records in 1971, a year after Wayne was born, had that kind of excitable personal touch with the artists he signed. Back then, Lonnie Brooks had been working a day job and spending nights as a pool hustler, but after he placed four songs on Alligator’s “Living Blues Chicago” compilation in 1978, he was able to move his family out of an apartment, buy a home and enroll his kids in private school.
“Alligator Records is one of the most important blues record labels of our time, as Chess Records was back in their day,” says Wayne Baker Brooks, who will perform his late father’s songs as part of the label’s 50th anniversary concert at the Jay Pritzker Pavilion this weekend.
Iglauer, 74, has spent his career as an independent record executive signing and recording the world’s most influential blues stars — Alligator’s new “50 Years of Genuine Houserockin’ Music” compilation album tours Hound Dog Taylor, Koko Taylor, Big Walter Horton, Son Seals, Johnny Winter and Albert Collins before moving onto contemporary talents like guitar phenoms Christone “Kingfish” Ingram of Clarksdale, Mississippi, and Selwyn Birchwood of Orlando, Florida.
Iglauer created the label, at first, simply because he’d seen Hound Dog Taylor perform at Chicago clubs like Florence’s Lounge and wanted to use $2,500 he’d inherited from his grandfather to make a record. “Whenever he hit the high notes on his guitar, he threw his head back and squeezed his eyes shut,” Iglauer wrote of Taylor in his 2018 book “Bitten by the Blues: The Alligator Records Story” (University of Chicago Press). “With his stomping feet, flying slide and comic facial expressions, you couldn’t take your eyes off him.” Iglauer had traveled from college, at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin, to experience music like this in Chicago, and once he saw it, he made it his life’s work.
“My mother probably thought, ‘Well, he’ll get over this and get a real job,'” Iglauer recalls. “She didn’t think this was going to be my career.”
Born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Iglauer grew up mostly in a suburb of Cincinnati, where he saw jazz giant John Coltrane perform at a festival, then took a 200-mile bus trip to see the University of Chicago’s folk festival in 1966. Intrigued by the local blues scene, which at that time starred South and West Side heroes from Muddy Waters to Buddy Guy to Magic Sam, Iglauer returned to the city in 1969 and looked up Bob Koester at the Jazz Record Mart. After an initial grumpy encounter — Koester passed him to a young employee for a tour of local clubs and festivals — the late founder of Delmark Records became a friend and mentor.
Iglauer camped out in local blues clubs, first befriending and signing Hound Dog Taylor, then working with local fixtures such as Junior Wells, the late harpist who, at South Side club Theresa’s Lounge, as Iglauer wrote in his book, “often took me outside to drink gin out of a bottle in a brown paper bag and chase it with orange juice.” Iglauer was present during Wells’ recording session with his longtime collaborator, Guy, for 1970’s “Southside Blues Jam.”
In these sessions, Iglauer learned how he wanted albums to sound. “I want it to feel live in a club,” he says. “I don’t want it to feel live in a stadium or an arena or an auditorium, I want the listener to feel like they’re right there, ten feet away.” Plus, Iglauer turned out to be an adept scout, pulling artists like Son Seals and Koko Taylor out of the clubs to help them make landmark albums like 1976’s “Midnight Son” and 1975’s “I Got What It Takes,” respectively.
“Bruce came in and introduced himself and shook my hand told me he was interested in making a compilation record,” says Lil’ Ed Williams, who leads the Blues Imperials, a longtime Alligator-signed band. “I just started playing like I normally play at a club. In the booth they were saying, ‘Do another, do another.’ After a while, Bruce came out and said, ‘You all did 30 songs in three hours already.’ That was when we came up with ‘Roughhousin’,’ the first album.”
The label’s sound extends to many different genres, from boogie-woogie to folk to zydeco, but its core emphasis is a certain kind of electric-guitar hero, raw but virtuosic. “Bruce has a clear vision of what Alligator should be and he hasn’t deviated too much,” says Nick Moss, an Alligator guitarist who grew up listening to the label’s music. “Bruce wants artists that are true to themselves and true to the blues — it could be jump blues, party blues, big-band blues, bands with horns, bands that were more rockabilly. But it has to come from the artist’s soul.”
In interviews, Iglauer is most enthusiastic about discussing contemporary Alligator talents, such as Toronzo Cannon, the Chicago bus driver who happens to be an electrifying guitar player. He also mentions the Alligator anniversary concert, including Brooks, Lil’ Ed and the Blues Imperials, the Nick Moss Band and Shemekia Copeland. “These are people who’ve known each other for decades, and I’m hoping for some really spontaneous fireworks,” he says.
Of course, he’s happy to reminisce about the old days, ending on a sad but touching note. In his later years, Taylor, an experienced smoker, wound up at Cook County Hospital at age 60 with lung cancer. Years earlier, he’d taken offense to something blues guitarist Brewer Phillips said about his wife, left the room, allegedly returned with a .22 and shot Phillips twice. Phillips wasn’t badly hurt, but the two stopped speaking — until Taylor was laid up at the hospital. Iglauer was visiting Taylor, the service elevator opened by the stairs and Phillips appeared dramatically in the doorway. Taylor hugged Phillips so hard, as the guitarist said later, that his fingernails cut into his back.
The next day, Taylor died. “My feeling was Hound Dog needed to hang on with life to get that settled,” Iglauer says. It is Taylor’s raw signature, “Give Me Back My Wig,” that opens the new Alligator album. “I had made a rule I wasn’t going to repeat songs on anniversary collections,” says Iglauer. “But I thought this one was so important, it had to start with this song.”
“Chicago In Tune — Blues” with Lil’ Ed and the Blues Imperials, Nick Moss Band, Cash Box Kings, Shemekia Copeland, Billy Branch and others will be 5:30 p.m. Sept. 18 at Jay Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park, 201 E. Randolph St.; more at 312-744-3316 and www.chicago.gov