The past ten days or so have been some of the strangest, most eye opening  days of my life. To start, I went to Coachella quite last minute thanks to a gifted ticket. My time at the festival was mostly unrelated to this project, although I certainly applied an understanding of many of the performance and listening skills Andrea taught the program. Since there were artists from all over the world there, I wasn’t able to focus directly on Chicago music. I ended up meeting my family in California and because of our different locations and schedules, we all had to leave at different times and have different kind of tickets (standby and regular). Because I was on a little bit less hectic schedule as the rest of them, and I had some of my reading with me, I agreed to take a standby ticket and hopefully get on the first flight I could. I tried to get on the 6 am flight and saw each one of my family members leave to get on a flight home while I was trying to remain positive after being stuck in LAX all day. I wasn’t able to leave until that Tuesday (5/13) in the afternoon. After that painful 40 hours in Los Angeles, I don’t wish my worst enemy to get stuck in LAX and it’s surrounding areas. That whole fiasco certainly put a funky start to my independent research and set me back two days without access to the internet.

It’s as if the big D-O-G in the sky planned it out, because the book I selected for myself to read the first week of the research study was barely resourceful at best. It is titled, The Chicago Music Scene 1960s and 1970s. It was a large collection of photos with small to medium blurbs attached. The blurbs provide some basic history as well as the artists connections to other artists and venues. There was a lack of real insight or intelligent writing. I suppose I could have done a better job of determining that this book was more of an encyclopedia than a narrative book, but the amazon.com subscription definitely did not match what I understood this book was.

It was not all a waste, though. While there was no nitty gritty information contained in the pages, I was able to collect a list of names and venues that kept popping up in the blurbs. One trend that I noticed consistently was that a lot of the folk and acoustic artists of Chicago music scene emerged from universities and colleges above any other music. My immediate thoughts on why this is leads me to Bob Dylan. There were absolutely non-college aged folk and acoustic musicians, but this era of the 60s and 70s saw a population of young students be so influenced by Dylan and other folk masters and wanted to turn it into something of their own.

In addition to the lackluster reading, I have been having a somewhat difficult time getting in contact with DJs and other people in the Chicago music scene. I find it vital to this project that I speak and communicate with the people involved from the ground up, so that I can get the fullest understanding possible. I have gotten one response from Rachael Cain, a House music vocalist from the 1980s, who now runs Trax Records, which was arguably the most important House label in Chicago back in the 80s to now. I have been texting her, but unfortunately, she seems flaky and goes for days without emailing me back. I hopefully will get her on the phone or meet her in person when I get to Chicago. I have also contacted three DJs from Chicago who were heavily involved in the scene. One DJ, Derrick Carter told me that  he doesn’t do interviews but wished me luck. Thanks, Derrick. The luck is cool but your words would have been cooler. The other two DJs have not responded despite my email and Facebook messages. I know the other two have done interviews in the past and I can probably gain some understand from those.

This time period since my last post has been good for me to do a lot of taking care of business things for my upcoming trip. I have been solidifying my sleeping arrangements and planning my days ahead. I can work the best when I have all of my actives laid out in a concrete way, and so in doing that for my trip to Chicago, I hope that I can best utilize my time there.