JIM SCHWALL TODAY

JIM SCHWALL TODAY

Jim Schwall, the other half of the old Siegel/Schwall Blues Band, has been appearing with a new band on the coffeehouse circuit. He’s been doing a lot of gigs in the Chicago area and offered us his insights into what’s happened to that once flourishing scene.

“A lot of the blues clubs are off limits about half the time. There’s a whole lot of shit going down, see? And even though the neighbors are cool, the cops aren’t. It’s a very sticky scene. Old Town is just about burnt out.” According to Schwall, this means that there are almost no places for young, white bluesmen to play in Chicago. As a consequence a lot of them have left.

There are a couple of places left to play if you want to eke out a living; and, as Boot Hill says, if you’re into blues you’re not into money. So guys pick up jobs at Beaver’s once in a while, the Aragon (which just re-opened for Fred Fried’s Triangle Productions) and every few month s a date at Aaron Russo’s Kinetic Playground.

The Aragon, says Jim, is in bad need of new management. “We played there once with Buddy Guy and the Edwin Hawkins Singers. What a freak show; like, 50 people! The whole first set nobody could hear me sing except the first two rows that were within range of my shouting. Because the dude upstairs couldn’t figure out how to turn the vocal mike on loud enough. He could figure out how to turn it up loud enough for Wayne King’s alto but not for me to sing over amplifiers.

“But there is a place called Beaver’s that opened up just because there’s no place left for the hip scene to go. They’ve been havin’ some pretty good acts, blues bands, rock bands, some of the local bands,, the better ones, like Aorta, which just broke up. And some out of town bands; Buddy Miles, Keef Hartley.”

Schwall’s new band, which includes a drummer and bassist, have been playing together around three months. They’ve been talking with Chess about recording. “I don’t think we’re gonna turn into a fab pop star or anything like that. I can still play blues but hire my own producer and that sort of thing. There’s people around Chicago that could do it. Mike Melford, for one. He produced Mike Broomfield’s new album. Although that album doesn’t have the best songs on it. It’s called Assholes, You Assholes, or something like that. The assholes are just “they” in general, you know. They with a capital T ... it says fuck you at the end and CBS wouldn’t use it.”

The fame his former Chicago cohorts, Bloomfield, Butterfield, Elvin Bishop, Steve Miller, have gathered doesn’t seem to upset Schwall. “I don’t dig to play concerts for one thing. One place that I disagreed with almost all the people that came from Chicago is I don’t like to get up and play your fast half hour and split. It’s not half as much fun as working in clubs.”

Of the Siegel-Schwall rift, Jim could only comment, “Every band has things going down. Little arguments and stuff. And ours was sort of not worth straightening up because we are screwed up on a lot of things. We got ourselves signed up with people and we din’t know what we were doing at all.” Siegel now has his own band, out on the road while Jim has moved to the country.

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“I found a town that has only three cops. One night we sawtwo of them in the same place and we thought it must be a riot or a killing. It’s a Very quiet town. It’s sort of okay. We go bowling with the neighbors, drink beer and play cards.” This is very close to being idyllic for Jim.

What Schwall would like to do, it seems, is make records that sell well enough so that he could make more records and buy a farm. “Until then, I’ll just keep playin’ the club gigs. That’s where all the fun is. 1 sort of dig travelling around a little bit. It doesn’t take much to keep me happy.

I car that runs good, an old lady, a dog, that’s about it.”

Dave Marsh