The Bluesman and the Bar

Rockin’ Johnny Burgin and his band will be playing at Bernice’s this Saturday, Sept 24th. You should go and hear them, they’re a fresh blues band with traditional roots. And you should show up before the music starts to get a feel for Bernice’s, it's a thinking man's drinking bar.

I walked in and saw Johnny playing there last year – I couldn’t believe it. The last time I saw him play was in the 90s, we were both in our 20s, and he was probably playing at the old Checkerboard Lounge – a respectable venue at 43rd and Vincennes.

People used to say he was really going somewhere with that guitar. He’d learned blues at clubs that don’t exist anymore, playing with older black guys, many of whom have died. He built his own following at Smoke Daddy’s as Wicker Park’s “urban hipster experience” was taking off. “All the blues musicians came out,” Johnny says. “People who didn’t like blues liked our band.”

Then sometime around 2001 he dropped off the face of the earth. Or he seemed to – he’d settled down into a quiet suburban lifestyle for awhile.

Now he’s back. He’s got a band with as much “classic upbringing” as he had, and they’ve been accumulating great reviews. They play all over Chicago and the Midwest, from BluesFest to Berwyn, with occasional European tours.

But it seems most appropriate to see them at Bernice’s. Johnny says a lot of people from his Smoke Daddy days have turned up there. They have things in common, the bar and the bluesman. The most literal one being that they’re both making comebacks.




The Bar:
There’s been a bar at 3238 S. Halsted since Prohibition. It was called Adam’s Place, until John Badauskas bought it in 1965. He named it after the woman who would be his wife. There’s a painting on the wall of a black haired beauty they say is the spitting image of young Bernice – it was already there behind the bar when John bought it.

Halsted was a different street back then. It was filled with stores and bustling with traffic. You could go outside and hail a cab, John’s son Steve recalls. That was significant, because the bar was also situated in a different drinking culture.

Steve Bedauskas grew up in his father’s bar. He recalls 9 other bars between Bernice’s and the 4 corners of 31st Street. He can name at least another 7 to the south. And Bernice’s opened at 10 in the morning: patrons would come in on their lunch break, or they’d come in to drink before work.

There weren’t a lot more people in Bridgeport then, they just spent more of their time drinking in bars. And maybe no one would argue the neighborhood was better off when half the population patronized taverns every day, starting at 10 in the morning.

But the culture where people came out regularly to rub shoulders, not to preen and pose the same way you might at a Saturday night club, but to shoot-the-shit and build tavern-style camaraderie, seems good for the civic cement.



Steve took over Bernice’s 12 years ago, after his father died, with help from his brother Mike, who mans the bar 2 nights a week. By then, the regular crowd had dwindled down to 1 or 2 guys. “It was depressing,” Steve admits, recalling long lonely evenings behind the bar.

Before he was a full-time barman, Steve was a machinist -- he specialized in equipment for binding books -- he’s good with his hands. He took up painting around the time he took over the bar. He’d paint on the cardboard the beer came in.

Paintings on cardboard were a genre for a series of art shows, “Bridgeport Primitive,” as Steve put it once. Some of his early works are on the wall of his bar.

Meanwhile, he set about building a new base of regulars. He started an open mic night right away, drawing on his musician friends. More recently he launched Stingo on Wednesdays – that’s Bingo, MC’d by Steve. It turned out to be wildly popular.

Now Steve doesn’t have time to paint. He jokes that he still runs the bar basically as a non-profit. But he has created a bar that draws one of the best assemblies of character in Bridgeport.

I was just there last week. I spent an evening talking to Chopper, a union carpenter with impressive mustaches who favors the vehicle his name implies, and to Carl Segvich, Bridgeport’s most persistent Republican candidate, and to John Salhus, an artist, who pays the bills with a job doing fine art restoration for a company on Cermak Road.

I first walked into Bernice’s 5 years ago. I’d walked by it for a year before I went in. It looked dark through the window, and the door is locked, you have to ring a bell to get buzzed in. But that night I had conversations I can still repeat to you now.

One of them was about Bridgeport’s racist reputation. I was still new in the neighborhood. I can’t remember how I brought it up, or why I thought it was a good idea. But my fellow conversationalist wasn’t perturbed. He thought a second, then he said “A lot of that reputation’s deserved.”

He grew up in Canaryville, which isn’t known for racial tolerance either. He described chasing black kids out of his neighborhood with his friends, but then he described getting beat up himself by the kids at Armour Park, and knowing while it was happening that it was basically the same thing.

He also had happy memories – of hunting rats in the ruins of the stockyards. “That was our wilderness!” he told me warmly. And touching present concerns. His 16 year old daughter wanted to get her face pierced. He was against it; she thought he was a tyrant.

“What do you think about that?” he asked, as if I might have some insight into the custom. I thought he should hold her off as long as he could – who ever regrets that they didn’t get pierced sooner? But I don’t know how it turned out.

And that’s still one of the best examples I can think of what Bernice’s is like. It isn’t the "hippest" bar in Bridgeport. It’s probably not the most authentically “Bridgeport” of bars. But it’s like the pumpkin patch where Linus might finally have been justified, it’s the most sincere.




The Bluesman:
As a kid learning guitar in South Carolina, Johnny Burgin didn’t know a career in music was possible. Then, as a college student in Chicago, someone brought him to a west side blues club and he heard Taildragger play. “It changed my whole direction,” Johnny says.

Soon, he was playing with Taildragger at his west side gigs; then he was touring the country with Howlin’ Wolf drummer Sam Lay. He describes it as a “tried and true career path,” learning by playing with the older guys who’d mastered the form.

“It’s a conservative style of music,” Johnny says, describing the blues. “It’s not incredibly hard to understand. A lot of people can play it. It’s how you choose to execute a simple set of rules.”

That’s where the musician’s individuality comes in, “to play with style, with feeling,” that’s what the west side audiences loved. “You listen to records, and there’ll be a riff, and you think ‘The audience must have been going crazy when he did that!’”

Blues music doesn’t play on popular radio anymore, it hasn’t for a long time. But when Smoke Daddy’s opened in Wicker Park in the mid-90s, Rockin’ Johnny (a nickname he acquired as a college radio host) got a regular gig there Monday nights, just as Wicker Park was booming. He built a following, introducing an unlikely crowd to a traditional form.

Ten years later, Johnny emphasizes the ways the scene is the same. When he began playing shows on the road, he says fans showed up with CDs he’d made in the 90s. And there’s a new crop of exciting young musicians out there.

But he admits some of the clubs have closed. Some of the musicians he knew have died. Or more alarming, they’ve gotten old. “I have a vision of them, playing strong like a bull!” he says.

Maybe Johnny is reluctant to focus on what’s changed because blues aficionados have been mourning the blues for decades. In the 60s and 70s, some fans fetishized the pre-war players; in the 90s, some fetishized the guys who’d been around to play with Little Walter and Howlin’ Wolf.

It’s a sentiment that’s easy to ridicule. And when I first saw Rockin’ Johnny at the Checkerboard, I ridiculed it. I’d just ducked out of divinity school, I was looking for an article to write. I thought the “real feeling” that was supposed to animate the blues sounded like a gnostic concept, something rarefied, and recognizable only to the select. Which seemed wrong, if blues really got its power from being a working man’s music.

Since then I’ve seen the same sentiments better treated in books: sociologists parsing the Chicago blues “scene,” and historians tracing the white man’s re-definition of a popular black form. I wouldn’t argue that they’re wrong about social dynamics.

But I’m more sympathetic to the experience of the person who loves the sound. I can imagine the same critiques applied to the sphere of Bernice’s – it would discern social posturing in the conversation I just described, or in my claims to know sincerity when I see it. But that critique always brackets the feeling of the buzz from the beer, and the impact of the conversation itself.

Johnny admits the “classic upbringing” he enjoyed, touring as a sidemen with the masters, is less available today. “But it’s not all over now, just because Honeyboy Edwards (the last guy who could claim to know Robert Johnson) is dead.” There is still a new crowd picking up on the form.

His west side heritage still helps him. When he flies into Europe for instance, having a leading guitarist from Chicago is a big addition to a club’s line-up -- a link to the style of Howlin’ Wolf.

But his own favorite guitar player is Django Reinhardt, an ethnic gypsy who recorded in the 30s and 40s. He brings it up as an example of how older forms persist, they get picked up and absorbed by younger players. If the old clubs close, new fans find it on YouTube.

If anything, Johnny is optimistic there’s more opportunity now. Recording technology is cheap, and social media puts marketing power in the musician’s hands. “My last CD cost $3,000, and they played it on XRT. So it was engineered well enough to play on a major radio station.”

His next album will be produced by Delmark, a Chicago label that’s home to Junior Wells and Magic Sam, to bring a traditional form to a new audience. “Every 10 years, a new group of musicians discovers the blues,” Johnny says with confidence.

It’s true, he admits, some people think of it as another generation’s genre. “In the 90s I proved that was wrong,” he says. “I’m going to do it again in the 10s.”

Filbert's Real Glass Bottled Soda Pop

The north wall of Filbert's Root Beer at 3430 S. Ashland is lined with the beer can collection Ronald Filbert began in high school, and still improves with occasional flea market acquisitions. It includes cans for a couple flavors of champagne, and for Genesee Cream Ale, named for the river that flows through the town where I grew up. It also includes a few glass bottles with tap dispensers.

Otherwise, the collection is only tangentially related to what Filbert's does today as a bottler of soda pop, though Filbert's did distribute beer when Ron's grandfather Charles ran the business. Filbert's was formally established as a producer of barreled root beer in 1926.

The 20s and 30s were the glory days of root beer, before cola overtook it. Ron says Filbert's root beer was available on draft at most Chicago bars – they brewed and barreled root beer for Berghoff's for over 50 years, until 1988 when Berghoff wanted it bottled. Filbert's wasn't a bottler back then.

But if you're curious what Berghoff's original root beer tasted like, you can still pour a draft of Filbert's. They take walk in customers at the Ashland plant, and they sell root beer by the half and quarter barrel. Now they also sell it by the bottle, along with 16 flavors of fruit soda – everything from black cherry to blue raspberry to grapefruit. “Not their biggest seller,” as one taster observes “but very true to grapefruit flavor.”


Ronald Filbert with some extract samples for a new flavor he's working on

Originally, Filbert's operated out of 2 buildings at 2996 and 3033 S. Archer – one suffered a fire and the other was a tight space to run the business. Their current building on South Ashland belonged to Newport Beverage Company. When Filbert's first began to sell bottled soda, they hired Newport to bottle it, then when 2 of the Newport partners were ready to retire in 1998, Ron Filbert bought the plant, along with its bottling equipment, and their line of fruit soda flavors. Dennis Antkowiak, Newport's 3rd partner stayed on with Filbert's.

Now, Filbert's is one of 3 glass bottling companies left in Chicago. They also rent space to Bridgeport Coffee Shop, who roast their beans upstairs.

Dennis has been in the bottling business for 40 years. He says it used to be that virtually every neighborhood had a bottling company – it was one of those businesses people went into when they came back from the war, they'd open a restaurant, a tavern or a bottling company. Filbert's lineage matches the gradual distillation of the bottling business.

Dennis says the company that became Newport Beverage was founded as a German Austrian brewery in 1907. The original Mutual Brewing building still stands at Cermak and Spaulding – they became Mutual Bottling during prohibition, and were eventually acquired by Mr. Newport. Newport Beverage bought the Ashland Plant in 1952.

When Dennis started working there in 1971, the Chicago bottling business had boiled down to a dozen companies. In the mid-1980s, most of them went out of business in the span of a few years. Dennis recalls the big soft drinks launched aggressive retail promotions the smaller companies couldn't match. Ron Filbert says that's also roughly when the big bottlers switched from glass to plastic.

Today, Ron can name just 3 companies nationally that produce glass bottles at all. And there are just 4 bottling companies in Chicago. Including Pepsi, which bottles Pepsi's own brands; and Clover Club, which bottles private label product for other people. Goose Island brewery also bottles a Goose Island root beer and orange cream soda.

Ron says glass bottles retain a significant advantage: they hold carbonation and flavor better than their plastic counterparts, which “leak like a balloon.” Soda in plastic bottles has to carry a “best by” date; you don't need a “best by” date for a bubbly beverage bottled in glass.

Ron says he receives a truck of 4,000 cases of bottles about once a month. He says Filbert's has over 200 accounts in the Chicago region; he used to say they have 300. The recession has been hard on their business, not because people stop drinking soda pop, but because it's put mom and pop stores, bars and restaurants that carry Filbert's out of business.

So a couple months ago, Ron Hazucka joined Filbert's to build up the customer base. He's an old high school friend of Ron Filbert's; he used to drive delivery trucks for Filbert's when they were both still in school. Hazucka says even in good times, they might expect to lose accounts to attrition, but they're a small operation and Ron Filbert's too busy making and distributing soda pop to pursue new accounts.



The bottle washing portion of the assembly line

You can get a good idea how he makes it from a video Chicago Revealed posted on YouTube. He mixes the soda syrups upstairs, where he keeps cupboards of extracts in plastic jugs. He'll mix the extracts with a sugar solution in agitating tanks, then the syrup's fed through a plastic hose to the bottling line downstairs. A conveyor caries a long line of bottles to be rinsed, dosed with syrup, filled with carbonated water, capped, mixed by shaking, and affixed with a paper label, before Filbert's personnel pull them off the line and pack them in a box.


Stations for adding syrup, seltzer, and bottle caps

Ron Hazucka is enthusiastic about capitalizing on Filbert's heritage – people remember the product, it's been made the same way for 85 years, crisp and clean with real cane sugar, unadulterated by vanilla or other novel supplements. Eighty-five years, he says, how many other local companies can make claims like that?

When he first Googled the brand, he was astonished to see pages of results even though they didn't have a web-site yet. There were strangers from as far away as Washington State selling Filbert's root beer on Amazon for $25 a case. There were people doing taste tests on You-Tube – even the reviewer who taste-tested the Filbert's pineapple soda while eating green apple jelly beans said she couldn't put the soda down.

Meanwhile, the soda pop world seems to be sprouting small companies again, boutique label soft drinks with medicinal herbs, or an extra spicy bite, or an old-time appearance. Analysts say a lot of that proliferation is “pseudo-diversity,” a multitude of choices that can be traced back to a handful of owners. Philip Howard, a professor at Michigan State, surveyed 94 retailers across Michigan and found they carried 993 varieties of soft drink across 195 brands. But 41% of them are owned by the big three that dominate the soft drink market – Coke, Pepsi and the Dr. Pepper Snapple Group.

On the other hand, almost 60% of them aren't. And if you're blending your own flavor of soda pop, you're going to need someone to bottle it for you, because bottling equipment is big – “It isn't something you can set up in your kitchen,” Ron says.

In addition to the flavors they bottle under their own label, Filbert's bottles soda they mix for other private labels, like Gale's Rootbeer, Route 66, Druther's, and Starr's Original Ginseng. And Ron's in the process of mixing a new ginger beer for Maria's Community Liquors, who are realizing the advantage of having one of Chicago's last bottling companies in their own backyard.

Maria's Community Liquors and Bridgeport's Other Arts Empire

When I first moved to Bridgeport, Maria’s was the little bar at the top of Morgan Street with a sign that said Kaplan’s Liquors out front. I went in there looking for Ed Marszewski, Maria’s son. Ed is the kind of guy who seems to be everywhere, but he’s nowhere to be found if he’s not sure he wants to talk to you. I spent a few nights on a bar stool, chatting up drunk city-parks workers and guys my own age who’ve lost all their teeth. And while I waited, Maria told me about how she launched a modest business empire by doing ladies’ hair.

She had come to the States as the bride of a former US Serviceman, who’d met her in Korea and gone back for her after his tour was up. [The story of how he courted her, coached by the local priest, is one she should tell you herself.] Back in the States, her husband was diagnosed with bone cancer while they were both still young. He was astonished to find she had saved enough from hairdressing to take him on a tour around the world. After he died, she stepped in to run his bar. That was a different bar, on the north side.

Over the years, she kept adding businesses while she raised their 2 sons. She bought buildings, apartments, hotdog stands, she even started a construction company to do her own renovations. She bought Kaplan’s Liquors in the mid-1980s. Its clientele tended toward the tougher side of Morgan Street, until it got shut down temporarily this summer, over a mistake in the sale of a pack of cigarettes. Ed Marszewski saw the set-back as an opportunity to re-open as a different kind of bar.

Maria’s son has built his own modest empire, but in an entirely different kind of enterprise. He went to art school. He settled in Wicker Park in the early 1990s, back when it was gaining momentum as a creative hotspot – back before it was gentrified. He interned at the progressive paper In These Times and launched his own paper, the Lumpen Times, with some friends.

You could call the Lumpen the first step in Ed’s career as an instigator - a news and arts monthly with a sympathy for conspiracy theories and the DIY arts – he has published it faithfully for almost 20 years now. And meanwhile, he has also developed 2 separate annual arts festivals, launched Proximity, a fine arts journal, opened a couple gallery/event spaces, and generally served as both patron and participant in what Proximity describes as a Chicago tradition of “interventionist” art.

There is a book about Wicker Park during the period Ed was out there. It’s called Neo-Bohemia, by the sociologist Richard Lloyd. It describes how artists created a “scene” in Wicker Park, one that defined itself against mainstream consumer culture and its corporate profiteers. But one that would also, along the way, attract music scouts, internet startups and new media firms eager to tap the neighborhood’s edgy caché. The new firms would hire neighborhood artists to do creative piece work. But they would also lift the rents and eventually price the artists, and their blue collar neighbors, right out of Wicker Park.

There’s an unflattering sub-plot about how artists themselves cultivated their bohemian tastes as a form of cultural capital, or “subcultural capital.” It gave them the illusion of status over the Lincoln Park yuppies, to whom they found themselves serving beer on the week-ends at the hip Wicker Park bars, to compensate for their lack of real power.

To be fair to the artists, sociologists study social dynamics -- if they seem to reduce even the most earnest human efforts to a lot of vain strivings for status, it’s because that’s what they're interested in, not because that’s all that's going on.

The Lumpen was a vocal critic of gentrification in Wicker Park. It ran stories on the machinations by which factory jobs were being squeezed out to make way for condominium conversions. Though when I eventually found Ed, he’d tell me it bothers him to think that the Lumpen was complicit in the neighborhood’s demise. “We wrote about all those band,” he says, “we hyped all those cool bars.”

By 2006 or so, Ed himself had moved the center of his operations from Wicker Park to Bridgeport. “The Community of the Future,” he likes to call it. That was the year the former department store at 32nd and Morgan, with the dusty old radios in the windows, opened its doors and turned out to be packed to the rafters with fabulous junk. The old owners tried to sell off some of it to the public, but ended up carting most of it away by the truckload.


For a month, you’d walk by at night and there’d be a crew of guys in there making midnight renovations. Around Halloween, Ed opened the doors for the unveiling of the Co-Prosperity Sphere. It’s an art gallery and event venue. It’s a home base for mischief -- like Rueben Kincaid Realty, which posted window advertisements for properties “available for squat” as the foreclosure crisis overtook the overpriced housing boom.

Recently, Ed has had his second brush with sociological literature. Some students of “scene theory” wrote a term paper comparing the scene at Co-Prosperity Sphere to one at the Zhou Brothers arts complex down the street. Scene theory sounds like an elaboration of some of Neo-Bohemia’s themes. It proposes to define the elements of different kinds of social scenes, and measure their impact on the cities that have them across a nationwide database. If it works, city planners could, theoretically, attract specific kinds of workers to live in a neighborhood by developing the right amenities there.

In fact, it seems obvious Ed Marszewski’s arts conglomerate must work as an economic development engine, even though he’s not eager to brag about it that way. Single events at the Co-Prosperity Sphere draw hundreds of people from around town; the arts festivals, which include Version Festival in the spring and Select Media Festival in the fall, draw thousands. Artists from the Netherlands and Scandinavia fly to Chicago to attend.

Will that mean Ed’s arts empire will fuel a Wicker Park style gentrification of Bridgeport the next time a development boom comes around? It might. But in the meantime, there’s another model next door. In Chinatown, revenues from restaurants are reinvested through Chinatown based banks, into home loans, development projects and other neighborhood businesses, helping to make Chinatown one of the most stable, and most prosperous, ethnic enclaves Chicago has ever had.

Artists don't always have money to invest. But the Co-Prosperity Sphere seems to have a special sympathy for arts projects that build alternate economies, networks of reciprocal exchange. Proximity describes new ones every month, and recently published a catalogue of them – soup suppers held to raise money for micro-grants, community gardens in scraps of vacant land, lending libraries, skill swaps and “generosity give-aways.”

The Co-Prosperity Sphere appears to be a vehicle for financial reinvestment too. Progressive newsmagazines and arts journals are expensive to print. When you ask Ed how he pays for them, he says he does it by working three jobs. And if Ed can cross-subsidize within his own conglomerate, use revenues from music shows and beer sales to publish Proximity, for instance, that could be a good reason to visit Maria’s, in its new incarnation as purveyor of cocktails and artisanal beer, and make a micro-investment in the Lumpen, Proximity, and whatever happens next at the Co-Prosperity Sphere.