That’s what I love about music. It’s immediate. There’s a connection whether you are playing at Hyde Park or Chicago, and it’s been happening since the beginning of time and the troubadours.
Since I was a kid, I’ve had an absolute obsession with particular kinds of American music. Mississippi Delta blues of the Thirties, Chicago blues of the Fifties, West Coast music of the mid-Sixties – but I’d never really touched on dark Americana.
Being from New York, living in L.A., being in Chicago, you kind of get more of the big-city, melting-pot sort of thing. But when you drive through the country, there’s so many small pockets of people that don’t experience people of different backgrounds. So what they’ve seen on television is their baseline.
Atlanta is definitely where it’s at. I still go back to Chicago a lot though, I got family there.
For over 20 years, I have been saying that Chicago is by far one of the greatest food cities in the world.
I have been robbed of three million dollars all told. Everyone today is playing my stuff and I don’t even get credit. Kansas City style, Chicago style, New Orleans style hell, they’re all Jelly Roll style.
I think that what comes through in Chicago humor is the affection. Even though you’re poking fun at someone or something, there’s still an affection for it.
I’d been studying philosophy at the University of Chicago. I hadn’t been doing well, because I was sitting in with jazz musicians at night – it’s hard to read Heidegger, but it’s especially hard if you’re half asleep.
I ain’t expect it. I just expected to be Chicago famous – ‘hood famous. I ain’t expect to be outside-of-Chicago famous.
After New York, Chicago is my favorite city. It’s just this great mix of Europe and America. The friends I have there are smart and witty and fun.
I went home one night and told my dad that an older kid was picking on me. My Dad, a Korean War vet and a Chicago cop for 30 years, told me, ‘You better pick up a brick and hit him in the head.’ That’s when I thought, ‘Wow, I’m going to have to start dealing with things in a different way.’
I was born in Evanston, about three blocks away from the Chicago border. My mother, at the time, was finishing her Ph.D. in African History at Northwestern University. Soon after my birth, my parents split, and my father moved to Wicker Park, which is on the north side of the city.
Chicago’s buoy was a couple of hundred yards astern of Arizona, and I was saddened to look at her.
I’ve been a runner a long time. When I first got into it, I started doing small triathlons in Chicago, and I just did it to get in shape. When I got out of college, I put on a few pounds like everybody does. I did it when I was in my early 20s, but I never really did any long runs.
I will argue with anyone in New York: we have the best pizza in Chicago and the best blues.
I think Chicago people are very special people, and the Midwest’s confluence of East Coast-meets-Midwest sensibilities had to, on a formative level, inform me as an artist and an actor. In that sense, it had to have helped me.
I think the absolute worst job I ever had – not because it was a terrible job, just because I was just so bad at it – was when I worked at a scenic factory in Chicago.
I take the subway to work. I fly coach back and forth to Chicago.
I grew up on the north side of Chicago, in West Rogers Park, an overwhelmingly Jewish neighborhood. When I was 13, my parents moved to Winnetka, Illinois, an upper class, WASPy suburb where Jews – as well as Blacks and Catholics – were unwelcome on many blocks. I suffered the spiritual equivalent of whiplash.
Chicago’s always been known as this meat and potatoes place, and a lot of restaurants play that up. They try to outdo each other by adding another 10 ounces, so their 80 ounce steak becomes a 90 ounce steak with 10 pounds of mashed potatoes on the side.
I couldn’t do what I do without the encouragement and influence of the musicians I played with in Chicago.
My family moved a lot as a kid. We started in Colorado, where I lived for five years. We moved to Chicago for two years, to San Francisco for one year, Connecticut for seven, Oregon for a couple years, and then I went to school.
I want to be more involved outside just my community of Chicago.
When I lived in Chicago, it often felt like the same people who were going to all the little theater companies were the people who were working in them.
I wanted so badly to be in a famous band, and it was not happening. I played drums with different bands and with the Blue Man Group in Chicago, but I definitely felt like, ‘Wow, I did not picture my life being like this.’
I come from a working-class family in Pittsburgh, whereas ‘Mike & Molly’ deals with the working class in Chicago. I swear a little, but I pretty much talk the same. It’s not like when you see someone like Tim Allen and he’s a lot bluer onstage.
I lived in Chicago until I was about 12, and then I moved to Dallas until I was 19. So I think both were probably the time right when I was about to get an accent, or I lost it right when I moved.
I’ve always wanted to do theater in Chicago. Chicago is a big theater town-and, in some ways, I think this city is savvier and smarter than New York. Sometimes, I think it’s a little too chic to go to theater in New York these days.
Chicago fans cheer and boo who they want. They’re great fans whether they like me or not. They show you how they feel. I don’t like crowds that sit on their hands.
I am both delighted and honored to return to the University of Chicago as a Distinguished Senior Fellow and embark on this new journey with the students, faculty, and wider Chicago community.
Chicago’s neighborhoods have always been this city’s greatest strength.
People of my generation who became photographers in the late fifties, early sixties, there were no rewards in photography. There were no museum shows. Maybe MOMA would show something, or Chicago. There were no galleries. Nobody bought photographs.
I grew up in Dolton, just south of Chicago, about a 20-minute drive from old Comiskey Park.
The studio that we mix in is still in Chicago.
I love Chicago. I lived there briefly for three months and kept a boat under one of those space-age buildings. It was very Jetsons.
Chicago is my home. And the way Chicago sounds will always be a part of who I am.
Every black man in Chicago walks through the world differently, and I think what young black boys do is observe, and that’s what gives them their road map.
My dad was very excited about me doing ‘Laguna Beach,’ and he thought it was a great opportunity. My mom, however, living in Chicago, was a little nervous. I mean she had some reservations about MTV. I think there was a point in my life where I wasn’t even allowed to watch MTV!
The Great Migration changed American history not just for the migrants but for all of us. It made possible American cultural milestones like the Harlem Renaissance, Chicago blues, and Motown, just to name a few.
If you take into account prisoners, a large majority of African American men in some urban areas, like Chicago, have been labeled felons for life. These men are part of a growing undercaste – not class, caste – a group of people who are permanently relegated, by law, to an inferior second-class status.
My roots really instilled Chicago values in me.
The best creative no longer has to originate in Chicago or London; it will be coming from Stockholm, Tokyo, and Seoul as well.
Representative Willis has introduced a bill, modeled after a Chicago law, to hold gun stores accountable for flooding our streets with weapons. Thousands of guns recovered by the Chicago Police Department can be traced back to just a handful of stores.
I did a bunch of commercial voiceovers in Chicago before I left. For Balducci’s pizza, I did a whole series. Actually I was making a good living with voiceover before I left.
A lot of people get Chicago wrong. I’ve developed this protective feeling about how we’re portrayed, and at the same time, I’m acutely aware of the issues we face and the root causes of these issues.
When I was four, we moved to the house on the west side of Chicago where I grew up. My earliest memories are of that first summer.
I moved from Chicago to New York in 1984 for ‘Biloxi Blues.’ In 1989, my wife and our then-baby daughter moved to Los Angeles to try to get in television.
When I finished grad school, I moved to Chicago proper, and I was at all the different improv schools, taking classes or interning.
I love Chicago. It’s such a great town, and it’s got great culture and great history, and it’s not as extreme as LA or New York, and it’s just- it’s hard for me for work, because I don’t live and work in the same place and that’s tough. But I’m- I love it.
The people of Chicago have made it very clear that they favor sensible restrictions on gun ownership.
I was not a great guitarist, so I sold my 1960 Fender Stratocaster in exchange for a Shure Microphone, made in Chicago, and a flute.
Chicago has a burly, action-oriented but still self-assured and relaxed confidence to its stride. The city has a lot of wide-open space and all the possibilities that suggests. There’s a lot of horizontal grandeur here.
I really value what Closed Sessions is doing to build the Chicago music scene and am excited to partner with them for my first solo project.
