Bob Sirott asks: Why isn’t Chess Records a tourist mecca?

By Bob Sirott, as published in Crain’s Chicago Business.

It’s one of the best kept secrets in the city: Chess Records, the historic recording studio building where modern electric blues was born. Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones recorded here, and this is where Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters, Etta James and Bo Diddley, to name a few, launched careers that influenced countless recording stars to this day.

Today, Europeans who flock to Chicago for Blues Fest want to see it. And when rock stars like Eric Clapton come to town, they are thrilled to walk the same backstairs where blues legends would once carry their instruments up to record. But Chicago has never properly promoted this great international musical legacy, born at 2120 S. Michigan Ave. A small plaque is all that currently marks this storied spot.

Chess Records is our forgotten landmark, founded by Leonard and Phil Chess, Jewish immigrant brothers from Poland, in 1950. They recorded unknown black blues musicians from the South and got their records played on radio stations, exposing their sound to a worldwide audience. Many of England’s young musicians of the 1960s grew up emulating the “Chess sound.” In a 1960 encounter at a railway station, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards first bonded over the Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters Chess albums Jagger was carrying. They would later take their band’s name from the Muddy Waters song “Rollin’ Stone,” record the first version of “Satisfaction” at Chess, and name an instrumental track “2120 South Michigan Avenue,” one of five songs they recorded at Chess for their second album.

Read the rest of the story here and find out about efforts to restore this landmark.

@ 2017 WLS-AM

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