Gotta Go Gotta Flow

“It was a living self-contained theater.”

That’s how Michael Abramson described his

years photographing Peppers Hideout, Perv’s

House, the High Chaparral, the Patio Lounge,

and the Showcase Lounge on Chicago’s South

Side in the 1970s.

Bump contests and blues. Love goddesses and

shake dancers. The Sexy Mamas and Their

Mack. Funky. Sexy. Music and voodoo. Every

night like New Year’s Eve.

This was the scene that Abramson recorded.

Wrote British novelist Nick Hornby, an

admirer of Abramson’s work: “One tiny corner

of the world over a handful of evenings a long

time ago; but that tiny corner of the world has,

for decades now, meant a great deal to an awful

lot of people scattered all over the world.”

Enter Patricia Smith, a poet who grew up not far

from these South Side clubs. She took a look at

Abramson’s photos nearly four decades later

and brought his night world back to life. “These

fiercely breathing visuals are a last link,” she

says, “to the unpredictable, blade-edged and

relentlessly funky city I once knew.”

Her words and his pictures open the doors

and give us a front-row (or a back-row . . . even

better) seat to a time and place long gone.

So: Watch. Listen.

That’s how the publisher describes this breathtaking new collaboration between a great photographer and my brilliant poet-wife, Patricia Smith.

A small sample: 

Chicago men got a swagger that says they

know alleyways and a hundred ways to tame

salt pork. They know how to cut loose, how

to double a negative and clear a room,

Chi-town men mean every explosive thing they

mutter to a woman. The shock in their words

is real. They smoke a sweet particular poison.

Afraid that the eyes might really be windows

to the soul, they wear shades smudged dim.

Behind the glasses, their wants are wide open.

Chicago women got a swagger that says they

know the ways of Chicago men. They come up

in the shadows of lumbering boys, the women

built themselves up on doubledutch and swigs

of cooking grease from sinkside jars. When they

dance, their unbridled hips bellow like fists,

overwhelming whatever the music thought it was.

What did the music think it was? In charge.

But no Chicago woman has ever met a dance

floor, or a man, she couldn’t buckle and break.

She smiles because she knows that

You can order the book here.