In my early twenties I was struck with a feeling of grandiosity that bordered on a messianic complex. I was living in Chicago’s Logan Square neighborhood in a flophouse with a parade of strangers as roommates. My room consisted solely of a twin mattress on the floor with a stack of John Steinbeck Penguin Classics stacked beside it. Rent was $300 a room (which, as I write it now, makes me feel like my grandfather swearing that Cokes used to cost a nickel!).
Working construction during the day, I was scrawling lyrics in carpenter’s pencil on the discarded cut-ends of 2×4’s. Whenever my boss would find one, he would lob it at me, and threaten to dock my pay. At night, I was hopping from one club to another, singing those lyrics out loud. The songs that I was writing felt raw and powerful. They felt like the start of something; they felt like the start of something big.
The most dangerous part of grandiosity is having it confirmed by the outside world. It’s one thing to have a delusion; it’s another to have the outside world participate in it. Maybe this is why so many world-famous people become frozen at the age they achieved stardom. My rise to musical notoriety hit a natural ceiling, which spared me that dangerous feedback. But there was a fleeting moment when there was no ceiling in sight. And that moment took place in, of all places, Urbana Illinois.
Until then, I had been touring around the midwest on short self-booked tours. Almost always playing to empty rooms. That was until a radio station in Urbana- with the providential anagram WPGU- started playing my music. I say music, and not “album”, because I had yet to even release one. They were playing a burned CDR of my earliest songs. Whenever they played the songs on air, the switchboard would light up (“Cokes were only a nickel, I tell you!”)
So I went to Urbana to see what all the fuss was about. We booked a show at their legendary rock joint, The Canopy Club. This wasn’t the typical singer-songwriter venue I was used to underselling. Smashing Pumpkins had played The Canopy on their way up, so had the Flaming Lips.
When I arrived at the load-in doors, I was greeted by a full staff. There were five hundred tickets sold for the show that night. This was new to me. I was accustomed to walking in the front door and asking a stoned bartender where I could stash my guitar before the gig. The Canopy had sound engineers, loaders, security guards, and a house manager. They had even stocked the greenroom with my “rider”. For what it’s worth, my rider at the time consisted of:
-Two packs of Marlboro Reds
-A lighter
-A case of Budweiser
-A fifth of Jim Beam
-Two sharpie markers
-A pack of athletic socks (laundry is hard to come by on the road!)
That night, as the openers plucked away to the boisterous crowd, I prowled the wings of the stage sensing utter vindication. I had not been wrong to be grandiose, you see. No! It was was all of those past nightclub owners who never booked me, they were wrong. The record labels that didn’t sign me, the other radio stations that didn’t play me- they had missed a diamond in the rough. I was standing on the precipice of every young man’s dream: society fully participating in his delusions. The pilot light of my grandiosity was meeting a river of fuel.
The show that night was a dream of cinematic proportions. A packed room of undergraduates sang along to what seemed like every word. But I wasn’t focused on the experience of the night itself. Already, I was looking ahead. I was focused on what it meant; what it foretold. Before me I saw an endless string of sold out Canopy Clubs around the nation. I saw late night television, and festival main stages, and a million bucks.
But none of that came to pass. The pattern that I had followed that far did not play out into the future. It would take years before I was able to admit that to myself. And it broke my heart. But the heart that was inside of me at the time- vain and small- was a heart that deserved to be broken.
The Rose Bowl Tavern, on North Race Street in Urbana, opened in the former building of the town’s U.S. Post Office. It opened in 1946 but they didn’t officially get a liquor license until 1948. Apparently in the post World War II glow, no one was sweating the small stuff.
Eventually, the club was bought by its own janitor, a man named Sunny Norman who sometimes moonlighted as the entertainment. Sunny and his wife Ruth operated the club; he ran the music, she ran the bar. Sunny Norman & The Drifting Playboys played country music there six nights a week, with Mondays off. It became officially and colloquially known as “The Home of Country Music” in Urbana.
In the early years, they hosted a who’s-who of Country Music greats: Faron Young, Gene Watson, Johnny Russell, and Bobby Helms. Bluegrass legend Allison Krause is a native of Urbana. Local legend has it that she used to loiter in the alley behind the club before she was old enough to enter, listening to the music through an open window. In later years the Rose Bowl welcomed progenitors of the Americana sound- Ray Wylie Hubbard, Bill Kitchen, Elizabeth Cook, and my old pal Justin Townes Earle.
Upon entering the club on a bright and sweltering June afternoon, a patron feels as if they have been welcomed into the cool oasis of their grandfather’s basement. The dim overhead lighting meets the bright neon on the walls like the freshwater of a river meeting the saltwater of the ocean, a perfect brackish vibe. The ceiling is low-slung in a manner that feels snug rather than confining. The capacity of the club is officially 150. Though when you walk inside, you get the feeling that number was arrived at by an unusually benevolent fire marshal.
The bar itself is an island in the back of the room, patrons can sidle up to any side; think of a pool bar on dry land. It’s the platonic ideal of a bar to watch a game- nothing to do but swill $3 Coors Lites and nosh Beer Nuts. Locals say that whenever broadcaster Dick Vitale would come to town for an Illini basketball game, he’d stop by the Rose Bowl for a beer.
Its cultural influences, too, are singular. The Rose Bowl is the best parts of a Wisconsin Supper Club mixed with a Texas juke joint. That is, faux-wood paneling checkered with portraits of Patsy Cline and Hank Williams. Vinyl booth seats along the window. Vintage light sconces straight out of “Dogs Playing Poker”. This blend is a microcosm of the town itself. Urbana is a college-town speck in the vast agricultural ocean that is Southern Illinois; the second largest producer of corn, and the largest producer of soybeans in the nation. The surrounding country brings to mind more Amarillo than Chicago.
I arrived there last week, guitar in hand, to play my first concert in Urbana since my conquering Canopy Club days, a decade gone now. Assessing the layout of the club, a smile crossed my face. It had the grizzled nightclub musician’s holy trinity- ample parking, a good sound system and a private bathroom.
I plunked my guitar on the stage and bounded down to the basement dressing room. My rider, fifteen years later as a father of three, looks decidedly different than it used to:
-Trail Mix
-Nut Thin Crackers
-Cheese
-Beef Jerky
-Olives
-A bottle of wine
(It’s weak, I know. You either die a rockstar or live long enough to become a calorie-counting villain.)
That night, I stepped onto stage to do the job that I love to do. Only this time, I wasn’t focused on the future. I wasn’t imagining the next step or extrapolating some imagined trajectory. I wasn’t interpreting the moment, I was enjoying it. It turns out that a perfect Midwestern bar on a Friday night in the summer is easy to enjoy. No grandiosity necessary.
Human beings, we seek patterns. When that pursuit it well-ordered it helps us stay alive. When it is disordered it becomes a kind of paranoid hyper-vigilance. I mistook my initial experience at the Canopy Club for an epiphany; a sudden realization of a grand destiny. Instead, what I experienced was an apophany: a perceived meaningful pattern about things that are not interconnected. A slightly more sophisticated version of looking at a burnt piece of toast and seeing the face of Jesus.
Heaven is the Rose Bowl Tavern. I lived for so many years without eyes to see that. How many others did I miss? How many Rose Bowls in plain sight did I stare right through? How many times did I mistake a paradise for a small dot in a pattern that didn’t exist? How many holy moments did I treat as transactions? A single one is too many.
If you need me, I’ll be in the vinyl booth by the window, peering out for a glimpse of Allison Krause; scanning the corner of the bar for Dicky V.