Mayor Richard M. Daley announced Tuesday that he won’t be running for re-election in 2011, and he will leave behind a decidedly mixed and often controversial legacy as the city’s de facto overseer of the local music community.
For decades, the city under his administration treated the local popular music scene – and by extension the artists, businesses and fans who make it go – as a second-class citizen. A Radiohead show in Grant Park in 2001 was a triumph, but the city blocked Grant Park shows by the Smashing Pumpkins in 1998 and Grateful Dead spinoff band the Other Ones in 2002, citing crowd management fears – this despite hosting major, densely populated events such as Taste of Chicago and Jazz Fest on the same property.
In 2000 and 2001, legislation was passed that effectively quelled after-hours dance parties in a city renowned for its dance music. The relationship between the city and its nightclubs took another backward step in the wake of the E2 nightclub disaster in 2003 that claimed 21 lives. The fire department conducted more than 2000 spot night inspections that year alone and closed 16 clubs at least temporarily, most for exceeding occupancy limits. One club, Martyrs, was forced to end a show by the Spanish band Ojos de Brujo prematurely and fined $2,500, even though the show was sponsored by the city and the band had been flown over from Europe for the performance. Club owners who had been in business for decades with clean records said they were being scapegoated for oversights made in monitoring E2, a club that was operating despite numerous building code violations.
In 2007, a University of Chicago study highlighted tension between City Hall and the music community, describing Chicago as "a music city in hiding."
The economic survey found that Chicago ranks third among U.S. cities in the size of its music industry, third in the number of concerts and fifth in the number of music groups and artists employed, yet noted that most of the world doesn't identify the city strongly with music the way it does smaller cities such as Austin, Nashville, Atlanta, Seattle, Memphis, New Orleans or Las Vegas. It suggested that city and tourism officials have not done enough to "transform music into a more significant economic and social engine for the city," and that Chicago is missing an opportunity to generate considerable tourist and trade-convention revenue.
The tide has started to turn slightly. City parks, long averse to hosting events such as rock or hip-hop concerts that would draw big crowds of young people, started hosting major festivals such as Lollpalooza in Grant Park and Pitchfork in Union Park. The Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park began opening its stage to rock concerts in recent years, with a number of free and paid events throughout the summer.
Yet little has been done to nurture the grassroots music scene of independent labels, clubs and working musicians. In the last couple of years, a Daley-sanctioned ordinance that would have severely restricted the ability of independent promoters to hold events, even at long-established clubs, twice surfaced, only to be tabled after a public outcry. It was yet another long-in-the-making response to the E2 disaster that appeared oblivious to the realities of how clubs and promoters actually stage shows and work to ensure their safety.
The latest version of the ordinance would have required independent promoters to obtain $300,000 in liability insurance and pay fees ranging from $500 to $2,000 even if they were working with fully licensed clubs.
Those events help the city's music scene generate $84 million annually and employ nearly 13,000 people in 831 businesses, the U of C study found. Those are the kind of numbers that should have made a meat-and-potatoes mayor such as Daley pay closer attention, but too often the city's most powerful official has treated that scene like an afterthought at best and a nuisance at worst. For at least one significant segment of the city population, he won’t be missed.
greg@gregkot.com