It’s somewhat ironic that the year the city of Chicago set aside to honor its musical heritage also saw the onset of a great pandemic, and all of the events held to honor the past had to be held virtually.
The truth is that you have to dig pretty deep to find landmarks to Chicago’s musical history. We don’t just pave paradise and put up a parking lot here. Sometimes we don’t even pave it over.
Following in the footsteps of cities like London, Music Lives Here is a project created by Chicago graphic art studio Sonnenzimmer and Maya Bird-Murphy of Chicago Mobile Makers, and commissioned by the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs & Special Events. The project was originally planned to honor “The Year of Chicago Music,” which was supposed to be 2020 but wound up spilling over as lockdowns prevented most face-to-face gatherings.
The project placed markers at sites of historical importance for Chicago music — for instance, the two locations of seminal blues label Chess Records and the studio where Soul Train was filmed. Chicago house music is also well represented among the “50 sites that shaped Chicago music,” with markers noting the site of Chicago’s Music Box, The Warehouse (on Jefferson) and several record labels.
But all too frequently, the markers are the only bit of history you can find at most of the sites. Lots of parking lots and sometimes just empty lots mark buildings where Stevie Wonder, Frankie Knuckles and Muddy Waters once made magic. You can peer through a chain link fence at a paved basketball court where DJ International Records shipped the newest creations from Chicago to destinations around the world. A lot of them are like that.
You wouldn’t expect everything to look the same, but it’s remarkable just how little of anything is left. It turns out that the project actually draws attention not just to music history but to how poor preservation of it has been.
Knowing how many people would quibble over the list of 50 sites, the creators of the project also created a template to install your own marker for places that are no longer there (though they suggest you should ask permission before placing it). When it comes to house music, one can think of a dozen other addresses — a marker for Red Dog, or LaRae’s, or 3257 N Sheffield in honor of Dave Medusa would have been nice. But while looking through the garage doors and nondescript offices that now occupy the spaces where geniuses once worked, I thought about something Miguel Ortuno wrote when announcing Medusa’s last incarnation in Elgin would be closing after Dave’s passing in 2020.
“Just like Dave had his original location on Sheffield and then the Congress Theater and then parties at Shelter, Karma, etc. etc. etc,” he wrote. “It isn’t the building that made us ‘Medusa’s’, it’s the people, the party, the atmosphere, the music.”
Music Lives Here can be viewed at musicliveshere.site and via a print guide available at Chicago Public Library branches.
