Eventually I woke up . . . took some more antibiotics and recalled how well they had mixed with Guiness the previous evening and resolved immediately to try the combination again.
I struggled with the concept of getting up and walking around Chicago and instead elected to watch some American TV to gauge how America is doing. After 20 minutes of Fox News, and some shopping channels I decided that America is taking too many drugs and needs to spend some time at the funny farm. How people watch TV in America is just frightening. If you have a mental age higher than four and a half then I challenge you to stay lucid after 45 minutes. . .
I moved on to movies.
A morning / afternoon of celluloid indulgence included The Sentinel (Secret Service thriller), Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Johnny Depp excellent as usual in a great remake) and Fracture - another thriller starring Anthony Hopkins. Also very good.
Feeling much refreshed and relaxed the next step was to venture out into downtown Chicago and wander around before heading off to Buddy Guy's again for the evening Blues sessions.
Chicago is certainly one of America's architectural marvels - some stunning buildings around the centre of town flanking the Chicago river and this is the home to the world's first skyscraper built at the end of the 19th century.
The city has a pleasant feeling and the inhabitants are intensely proud of their city and all that it contains from media to music, food to fashion, art to architecture. And rightly so.
One of the city's famed foodstuffs is the Chicago version of the Hot Dog more usually associated with New York. Indeed there are Gourmet Hot Dogs in this city . . . .but they will have to wait for my next visit - my mission was the Blues.
Walking down Wabash avenue (which runs parallel to the main drag of Michigan Avenue - shopping galore), you run under the "loop" which is the raised metro line which provides much of the characteristic metalwork running above the streets in downtown and made famous in every car chase and gangster movie set here. Wabash starts fresh and nice and progressively gets more and more down market as you head towards the South Side.
As the neighbourhood starts to crumble in quality, so the character increases and the dirtier but more interesting side of urban America starts to feature. 754 Wabash Avenue is Buddy Guy's Legends club and I started in around 7.30pm - in time to catch the first set on Saturday nights which is a semi acoustic set. Tonight featured Jimmie Johnson - an old bluesman with the polka dot shirt to prove it and a voice which began slightly lower than his boots. He was accompanied by Big Dave (another one) whose girlfriend Kellie was sitting next to me at the bar.
Kellie is a designer and perhaps the only person I had yet met on this trip to the States who knew where Dubai was. Mainly because she had heard that folks were wealthy in Dubai and so was keen to hear how she could start doing business there. One of her best questions was: "Do those Arabs hate the Americans?". Nicely indicative of the black & white nature of the majority of American "thinking". She did go on to apologise for the US President (the first of many!) and promptly blamed him for all ills foreign and domestic. Not a huge surprise in predominantly democrat Chicago.
The second set was a band by the name of Stan Skibby and his Love Soldiers. The name hadn't given me cause for huge enthusuiasm in the run up to them appearing on stage, but it just goes to show that you can't read much into a name.
Stan is a genius. Full stop. And the Love Soldiers are an incredibly tight band - especially the bass player who was a knock-out. Stan is much inspired by Jimi Hendrix and played several tracks including Fire and Hey Joe. If you shut your eyes you would swear to God you were listening to Jimi at Monterey - but then if you shut your eyes you would miss Stan playing the solo to Fire with his teeth in original Hendrix style and leaping around the stage with his guitar smoking with his amazing solos.
Stan was the real deal I discovered. He came over to the bar during the last set to chat with a guy who knew him. He was wired and worried. When the guy next to me asked him how he was, he replied "I am messed up man. I got me some problems with the State and I'm real messed up. Gotta get me some money man and straighten' mysel out. I am real messed up." But on stage he was anything but messed up and played some of the best live guitar I have ever heard.
The last set was Jimmie Johnson with his band - some very cool cats with outrageous headware including a giant white Stetson for the bass player who must have weighed about 300 pounds.
Jimmie is old school, but his "2nd" guitarist, Chico, was new school and he blew the doors off the bar with the first three numbers with powerful, screaming electric blues of the kind that made Chicago famous. I sat and listened to the Blues for about 5 hours washing my throat with American WoodChuck cider and eating one of Buddy Guy's signature "You're Damn Right" burgers . . .
A couple of middle aged women hung out around the bar - on a business conference in Chicago I later learned in conversation.
One of them struck up a conversation having barged into me by accident as I was sitting minding my own business at the bar and enquired as to where I was from. When I said "Dubai" - I may as well have said Ulan Bator. She not only had never heard of the UAE, she didn't even know where the Middle East was. She then mentioned that she had been thinking of getting a passport at some point - although she had no desire to travel outside of the US. Scary stuff. And this is typical of Americans. Despite their super high technology and highly progressed way of life, many of them are blind, backward and isolated when it comes to anything beyond their borders. Indeed some people can't even stretch their brains beyond the state line. Anyway, the lady went back to her girlfriend, not before apologising for President Bush and the way I had been treated at immigration, and welcomed me to America. Hallelujah and Amen to that.
After the quantity of WoodChuck cider that I had consumed went beyond the recommended sanity levels for those taking super strength antibiotics I managed to fall outside and eventually into a cab back to the hotel. Sleep was almost instant but unfortunately ruined by a 3.30 am call from a client in Abu Dhabi (my fault for not turning off the phone) and then sleeplessness was maintained by a crowd of drunken shitheads shouting in the corridor from 4.00am to 4.30am . . .
Tomorrow -Route 66 begins in earnest with Stage 1 to St Louis...but I'll definitely be back to Chicago some time. Nice place and very good blues.
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