This is the story of two black bars and how they changed the lives of two white men.
The bars were Pepper’s, in various incarnations, and Perv’s House. They have been gone for a long time and, if you think about it, and have some familiarity with the city’s night scene, they really were more clubs than bars. You should be able to gather that from the high spirits and snappy styles captured in the photographs here and elsewhere in the Magazine. People did not dress like this for a trip to their corner tavern for a shot and a beer and a couple of tunes on the jukebox.
These photos were taken by Michael Abramson when he was a young man. That would have been in the mid-1970s.
A New Jersey native and graduate of the prestigious Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, he was later working in Boston when, compelled by the anti-establishment, do-your-own-thing vibe in the air, he took a night course in photography.
“I was exploring,” he says. “I also took some drawing classes. But a teacher named Pamela Edwards gave me the confidence in my photography and the permission to throw the dice.”
He quit his job, came to Chicago to study photography at the Illinois Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology, slept on friends’ couches and wandered the city at whim.
“The camera gave me a tool that seemed to justify my going anywhere. Yes, I went places that some white Chicagoans wouldn’t go, but I think my naivete was empowering,” Abramson says. “One night in 1974 I walked into Pepper’s. I had heard about it from a friend. I didn’t go there with the intention to photograph anything. Still, after hanging out for 10 minutes, I felt too intimidated by the crowd and walked out the door.”
A man followed him onto the sidewalk.
“Where you going?” he shouted. “Get back in here.”
Abramson walked back into the club and started taking pictures. He would take thousands.
“I was there, on and off, for two years,” he says. “I definitely was interested in shooting photos but the experience was sometimes cooler than any photo could capture. The scene was cigarette smoke-menthol; alcohol-bourbon; music-the blues. I was part of the stage set for another era, another world, and that was a gold mine for a 23-year-old turned on by the camera.”
Blues great Lonnie Brooks would come to call Abramson “The Picture Man.”
Abramson is one of the white men in this story.
The other is Corky Siegel, who grew up on the city’s South Side.
“I first heard the blues on the radio and on some 45 r.p.m. records that had been given to my sister and me by an uncle who ran a Tastee-Freez on 63rd Street and Stony Island Avenue,” he says. “In the early ’60s I began playing saxophone and I based my vocal style on Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, Elvis . . . the rock ‘n’ roll people of the day.”
Increasingly his music fell under the spell of the blues. He started playing harmonica and attending Roosevelt University, where he met another musically minded student, guitar-playing Jim Schwall.
“We decided to play together and would drive around searching for clubs in the black neighborhoods of the South Side,” he says. “I think the reason so many white kids at the time were searching out black jazz and blues clubs was not only because we loved the music. There was something else. We were told by our parents that America was a country that treated its black people justly. We looked out our windows and saw the unbearable injustice. I think we wanted to be part of that culture, not only because we loved it but because we wanted to be on the side of what was good and right.”
They were making a move that few attempted. Social consciousness was difficult to exercise in the severely segregated city that was (and in many ways remains) Chicago. Even those sympathetic to the plight of blacks and drawn to participate in the burgeoning civil rights movement had no firsthand familiarity with blacks and their culture. Neighborhoods and their residents did not mix.
Blues-and Abramson’s camera-provided a key, but it was necessary to find the door.
In 1965, near the corner of 43rd Street and Vincennes Avenue, Siegel found Pepper’s Show Lounge.
“We walked in and asked for the owner,” says Siegel. “Johnny Pepper came over. We told him we wanted to play there. He said we would have to audition and suggested we set up right there on the floor and play for him and some of his customers.”
They played and-even though, as Siegel admits, “I had only been playing the blues for less than a year so I was a beginner and to some extent so was Jim”-were hired as the Thursday nights house band, starting at 9 p.m. and playing until 2 a.m.
But Pepper didn’t want a just two-man band.
“So every week there were different players, great players, joining us,” he says. “Little Walter, Willie Dixon, Hound Dog Taylor. The next week it was Howlin’ Wolf, Otis Spann and James Cotton. Another week it was Junior Wells, Piano Red, Lefty Diz, and it continued . . . Buddy Guy, Johnny Twist, Magic Slim. It was magic.”
It lasted for nine months.
“All these guys took us under their wings,” says Siegel. “Wolf even came up to the North Side later when we were playing at Big John’s and Mother Blues to sit in with us, and later he took us on the road with him. Muddy was always friendly to us and I got to spend some time on one trip traveling with him. It all started with, would never have happened without, Pepper’s.”
As an example of the precarious and nomadic nature of nightclub ownership, Pepper’s would move in 1971 to 13th Street and Michigan Avenue and become the New Pepper’s Lounge. When Abramson walked into Pepper’s a few years later it was called Pepper’s Hide Out, at 23rd Street near Congress Boulevard. There were a lot of other clubs in those days, now all gone.
“I probably heard about Perv’s House [914 E. 79th St.] from Norma Hinton, the daughter of Mac Simmons who was a part-owner of Pepper’s,” Abramson says. “I had become friends with many of the patrons and workers, especially Norma. On my birthday, the band devoted a set to me and Norma and I danced in front of everyone while the band played blues. I can still remember her asking me, “Mike, what are you doing, the cha cha?”
Perv’s House was opened in late 1974 by Pervis Staples [with an s], of the Staple [without an s] Singers family, in what had been the Colonial House, a pillared building known for its Sunday socials. It was an ambitious venture: three bars, two levels, bumper pool, air hockey, a putting green and various other diversions as well as live entertainment. On opening night Staples wore a green leather suit and thanked his family “for a whole lot of money that I’m going to pay back.”
Abramson was wowed: “It was an amazing place, the Cadillac of the South Side clubs I visited, sort of like a South Side version of the Playboy Club, but vastly cooler.”
The fact that Siegel and Abramson were able to move so comfortably in the black club world says a great deal about the friendly, welcoming and nurturing nature of Pepper’s and Perv’s, but also about the young men’s eagerness and sincerity.
Racial tensions-especially in the wake of the riots of 1968-were manifested in disturbing incidents.
Bruce Iglauer, who was in the process of founding Alligator Records, the important independent blues record label, once recalled a 1971 night when he was threatened by a gang outside of Pepper’s. “They had already trashed my car,” he told the Tribune’s Greg Kot. “But then [blues giant] Junior [Wells, all 5 feet 3 inches and 125 pounds of him] arrived and backed them off.”
In 1976, the soon-to-be Chicago Bulls center, Artis Gilmore, 27, all 7-feet 2-inches of him, was refused entrance to the Bombay Bicycle Club, a popular singles bar at 9 W. Division St., because he did not have five photo IDs, a common if outlandish “rule” at the time that allowed a club to control its clientele.
“Of course, there were tensions,” says Abramson. “But I was never fearful. The only photographers I would run into at the clubs would be African-Americans shooting Polaroid nightclub pics for sale to the patrons. Sometime there would be a white musician on stage or an interracial couple in the crowd. I did not give the race thing much thought. I didn’t have to.”
Some of the groundwork for Siegel and Schwall being accepted had been laid a few years before by local, white, young and hungry-for-the-blues musicians Paul Butterfield, Mike Bloomfield and Charlie Musselwhite.
“They were the pioneers, made it easier for us no doubt,” says Siegel. “But just imagine us, two young white kids just learning to play the blues and having this mind-blowing experience. It was nothing less than outrageous. I listen to my contemporaries that rave that they once got to sit in with Muddy or Buddy Guy or Otis Spann for a few minutes here and there. Then it becomes clear to me how fortunate it was for me to be able to be on stage every week with these blues masters coming and going all night long.”
Abramson and Siegel have never met. The names of the people in the photos have faded with time. But the times and place they shared bind them in special ways.
For Siegel, who has remained in Chicago while attaining international renown as performer, composer and the author of a new book titled “Let Your Music Soar: The Emotional Connection,” Pepper’s remains an ever-present and profound influence.
“I owe my whole musical life to this experience and to those blues masters and to Johnny Pepper who had an open mind to have us beginners get up on that stage night after night,” he says. “When I am composing and/or performing with symphonies or chamber groups, I feel that strong connection from Pepper’s Show Lounge. It’s the fuel behind everything I do.”
Abramson now lives in what was an old telephone switching station on the Northwest Side. He has been here since 1984 and the place, spacious and distinctive in ways no new construction can match, is filled with art works, many of them paintings created by, he says with tears in his voice, “all friends who are deceased . . . . There is a story behind everything on these walls.”
But there are also photographs on the walls, pictures that attest to Abramson’s successful career as a globe-trotting photographer for corporations and such publications as Time, Newsweek, Forbes and Sports Illustrated. (His work has previously appeared in this magazine.) There is a photo of Ron Howard, another of Steven Spielberg and many of powerful, if less well-known, business tycoons. But the most arresting photos on the walls are some of the same you see on the pages of this magazine, huge and evocative.
“I met a lot of people and gave out a lot of photos,” Abramson says. “I was not a fly on the wall grabbing pictures but thought of myself as a participant. I remember Georgie, one of the members of a group of women who called themselves the Sexy Mamas Social Club, phoning me sometimes if I wasn’t at Pepper’s and something was going on and telling me I should get down there. And I remember people asking me to photograph a brother’s fashion show, which I did. Or being invited to parties in people’s apartments. People loaned me money when I was short.
“At the time I was shooting those, I never thought about photography as a career. I never had any plans for the photos I shot at Pepper’s or Perv’s. But they eventually became the basis for my master’s thesis, and I also received a National Endowment for the Arts grant in response to some of these pictures. Some were also exhibited at my first major one-man show at the Milwaukee Art Museum. Some are in collections. The Art Institute has some.”
Why did he stop?
“I stopped going when the picture possibilities were exhausted for me,” he says. “And I think I began to question my place in that scene. I realized I could never really be part of that world. Now I look back over all these years and realize I have been to every part of this planet taking photos but I have never been as far away as I was when I was on the South Side of Chicago. Not because it was exotic in the misused sense of that word, but because it was so exhilarating.”
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IN THE WEB EDITION:
See more of Michael Abramson’s photos at chicagotribune.com/abramson