Chicago Tribune, February 23, 1999
`RED HOT'--AGAIN
BLUES MUSICAL BRINGS NEW LIFE TO STORIED SOUTH SIDE SALOON
"Because so many great artists whiled away the small hours at the Palm Tavern, it would be difficult to overestimate the room's role in nurturing black musical culture in Chicago and beyond. This was the place where ideas were exchanged, tunes discussed and collaborations conceived."
After having one too many doors slammed in his face, Fernando Jones -- a fiercely determined young Chicago blues musician and would-be playwright -- hit on an ingenious idea.
If local theater companies wouldn't touch his first play, "I Was There When the Blues Was Red Hot," why not skip the legit theaters altogether? Why not stage his blues musical not in an off-Loop house but in a South Side saloon much like the bar that's at the center of his drama?
The idea proved golden, for from the moment the play opened last fall in a historic but decaying bar on East 47th Street, it began to attract a growing following of South Siders and, eventually, North Siders as well.
Moreover, the show has begun to remind Chicagoans that Gerri's Palm Tavern -- where Jones' musical drama plays on Friday and Saturday nights -- is something of a sacred site in this city's musical culture. For the first time in years, people are converging again at 446 E. 47th St., once one of the liveliest gathering places on the South Side.
Though Jones, 35, plans to give his cast a couple of richly deserved weeks off in the middle of March, the success he has achieved at Gerri's Palm Tavern has raised the distinct possibility that his play eventually will turn up in a bigger, perhaps more conventional venue.
But were it not for his tenacity, as well as one saloon owner's ardent belief in him, neither the play nor the Palm Tavern would be enjoying this moment in the spotlight.
"When we asked theater companies about producing this show, they would say, `Well, how dare you?' " remembers Jones, still smarting at the rejections. "Or they would say, `We have to first solicit the script, then have you come and read it. Who do you think you are?'
"But Mama Gerri was different."
As nearly everyone in the neighborhood knows, "Mama Gerri" is Gerri Oliver, longtime owner of Gerri's Palm Tavern, a fabled bar that stands across the street from where the old Regal Theater used to be. After shows at the Regal, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Muddy Waters, Quincy Jones, James Brown and practically every other star of black music eventually found his way to Gerri's place for food, drink, conversation and, of course, music on the jukebox.
Because so many great artists whiled away the small hours at the Palm Tavern, it would be difficult to overestimate the room's role in nurturing black musical culture in Chicago and beyond. This was the place where ideas were exchanged, tunes discussed and collaborations conceived.
Unfortunately, with the demise of the Regal in 1973 and the economic decline of the South Side, 47th Street -- once the focal point of black culture and commerce in Chicago -- withered as well. Visit after dark today, and it seems hard to believe that the street once overflowed with crowds pouring into the Regal, the Metropolitan Theater down the street and restaurants, bars and other attractions.
Though plans to build the new Lou Rawls Theater and Cultural Center on the site of the old Regal have been in the works for years, and though an official groundbreaking attended by Mayor Richard M. Daley last May drew wide media coverage, not a single brick has been placed on the empty plot of land. Issues of financing and local politics continue to stall the project, while area business owners such as Oliver wonder whether the emergence of the theater would help them or displace them.
Yet the decline of 47th Street in general, and of Gerri's Palm Tavern in particular, made the place an ideal setting for Jones' play, which explores good times and bad in a mythical Chicago saloon called T's. As the play unfolds, saloon regulars converse and carouse, along the way exploring the rise and fall of blues music on the South Side.
By the time the play ends, with a tragic eruption of violence and an unexpectedly comic follow-up, audiences have learned a great deal about the South Side and the starring role it has played in the evolution of jazz, blues and gospel music.
"Every artist that has appeared at the Regal Theater, before they died, they called me up to say goodbye," says Oliver, who is as much a part of the lore of this neighborhood as the saloon she operates. "The amount of money that the artists borrowed from me over the years is astronomical, but I didn't mind."
Indeed, Gerri's Palm Tavern always was much more than just a place to get a beer and a plate of Mama Gerri's famous rice and beans. The entertainers who starred at the Regal Theater regarded it as a home away from home, a place to catch up with old friends who similarly spent their days on the road. Glance at any of the several volumes of photo albums that Mama Gerri keeps behind the bar, and you'll see Count Basie schmoozing with Dorothy Donegan, Johnny Griffin hooting it up with Von Freeman, Duke Ellington savoring a plate heaped high with food.
Mama Gerri took pride in owning a famous saloon on one of the greatest streets in black America.
"When I tried to buy (the building), they refused to let me have it, because I was a black woman," says Oliver, who couldn't get a loan from a Chicago bank. Instead, in 1956 she scraped up enough money from relatives in Jackson, Miss., to purchase just the Palm Tavern business (which still rents space in the building).
When the neighborhood eventually started to slide, Oliver could not bring herself to sell the glorious old saloon.
"I could not close my eyes on the continuity of this place," she says.
So when Jones proposed to stage his blues play in her club, he hardly could have found a more willing landlord -- or a more fitting setting.
"Here you have a black woman who has owned a club without mob influence, without the Blackstone Rangers' influence, a woman who has stood the test of time," he says. "Just by the proud way she presents herself, those negative elements didn't come through this club and try to take over.
"And I think that's worthy of being celebrated. This club is Mama Gerri, and Mama Gerri is this club. The fact that we're able to do our play in such a historic place I think validates the play."
The Palm Tavern gave Jones and his cast a set so authentic that even the most affluent theater companies would be hard pressed to match it. From the ancient jukebox in the corner to the somewhat dilapidated spinet piano nearby, from the seemingly endless variety of bottles stacked behind the bar to the original, wood-carved booths, the room exquisitely conveys an earlier time and place in American urban life.
To his credit, Jones shrewdly uses every inch of it, his actors conversing casually at the bar and strolling throughout the saloon during the course of the play. All of Gerri's Palm Tavern, in fact, serves as the stage for "I Was There," the audience at once surrounded by the action and immersed in it.
If the skeletal plot -- about a blues musician who sells out and eventually pays a high price for it -- is not exactly groundbreaking, it serves well enough as a springboard for Jones' beautifully written, poetic soliloquies on the blues. Perhaps inspired by Jones' script and by the gloriously historic setting, the actors turn in performances that are as believable as any real-life scene that might have played out at Gerri's in its heyday.
"When you come in this place, it's like an automatic energy rush," says Carl Vanoy, a 20-year-old actor who plays the role of a moocher named Two Dollars. "It brings energy to myself and the other cast members -- we've talked about it."
Whether that energy can translate to another space, and whether so many visitors will drop in at Gerri's after the play has moved on is anyone's guess. For all the optimism that "I Was There" has generated in audiences, the future of this storied block is precarious at best.
Should the Lou Rawls Theater eventually go up, Oliver wonders whether city officials will allow her weather-beaten but historic saloon to stand. Certainly she knows that she cannot match the clout of developers who might want to demolish her place to make way for, say, a strip mall.
"Sure this place has historic value," says Oliver, who knows exactly how Chicago works. "But the historic value doesn't mean anything to a politician if there's a dollar to be made."
As for the play, Jones and his cast seem determined to perform it periodically at Gerri's Palm Tavern even if the show goes on to achieve the success it deserves in larger and more prominent venues.
"It's important that this play and this music be heard here, because when blacks migrated from the South -- as my family did -- they came right here, around the 47th Street area, the Bronzeville area," says Jones, who also wrote the music for the play.
"Blacks weren't allowed in certain places, so this was the foundation, the bedrock of what happened, and Mama Gerri's was in the heart of it.
"So even if we succeed with this play and get to take it around the country, when I get off the plane at O'Hare I should be trying to figure out how to get my butt back here to 47th Street.
"This is where it all began."
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Showtimes for "I Was There When the Blues Was Red Hot" are 9:30 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays at Gerri's Palm Tavern, 446 E. 47th St. (773-373-6292 or 773-995-6389). Parking is available on the street and in an empty lot across from the tavern.