THIS ISSUE: Herb remembers Chicago in the 1960s and tries out a diamond-anniversary CD player from Rotel.
Trance dancing on Maxwell Street
Everyone knows I’m a lucky guy. I was born in Chicago in nineteen-hundred and forty-nine, and as far as I can tell, that was the perfect year to be born. I missed the war, plague, and Depression horrors of the first half of the 20th century, and I witnessed the art, music, and cinema inventions of the second half. Best of all, I was in the right city at the right time, walking down the right streets with the right people, to experience America’s new electrified blues—as it was being born on the sidewalks in front of me. At least that’s how it seemed looking through my WWII aviator glasses.
I stole those green-tinted shades on the first day of my first job, at Marko’s Surplus City on South State Street. Surplus City was a sleazy, filthy mess of a store, sandwiched between the Rialto and Gaiety burlesques. A block north was the Monroe bookstore, where I and my best pals, the Marko brothers, would go to speed-read dirty books on our way to the Greyhound bus station. We had to sneak in and hide behind racks, because you were supposed to be 18 to enter, and we were only 15. But even when they caught us, we were treated with respect because the Markos’ dad, the thick-lipped, cigar-mouthed Alfred Markowitz, owned Surplus City, and he was a founding member of this sleazy South State Street business community.
Every Sunday, old “Al” made me and his “boys” come to work with him because Sunday was his busiest day, and he needed us to keep the record racks full and spy for shoplifters.
Surplus City sold switch-blades, a hodgepodge of army surplus, fake ruby rings, and records mainly (but not exclusively) from two Chicagobased record labels: Chess and Delmark. There was a gin game in the back room, and a real giant named Tiny (the “human forklift”) who
