Yesterday’s Back

In the mid-1980s, my wife and I attended a concert at a night club on Laclede’s Landing, the oldest part of the city of St. Louis and adjacent to the Arch and downtown.  The concert was the return of the British Invasion, and featured many of the bands that had followed in the wake of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones in the 1960s. Those British bands collectively had an enormous impact on American music.

We heard several groups – Freddie and the Dreamers, Gerry and Pacemakers – and a duo named Chad and Jeremy, who were the real reason we were there. They were/are my wife’s favorite singing group. And Chad and Jeremy accomplished something at that concert that had never happened before in our married life, and only once or twice since.

 

We were on time for the concert. In fact, we were early. We were so early that we were first in line at the night club to get in.

Fast forward to 2008. A few days before Mother’s Day weekend, I was scheduled to speak at a conference in Chicago. The planets aligned, and my wife discovered that Chad and Jeremy would be in Chicago for three concerts that weekend – a Friday night house concert, a concert Saturday in Wilmette Auditorium, and a concert at Bill’s Blue Bars in Evanston on Sunday.

We did all three concerts. And we did it again Mother’s Day weekend in 2009. And we saw them at the Sheldon Theatre in October of 2009 when they came to St. Louis. And back to Chicago for Mother’s Day weekend in 2010.

And this coming weekend, they’re back in St. Louis for a benefit concert for the Animal Protective Association of Missouri. Would you be surprised to know that my wife been involved in getting them here, finding a hotel for them to stay, is working with the APA, delivering promotional flyers all over town, and creating two posters for the venue on Saturday night and a banner currently hanging in front of the APA’s offices? Or that we will be having dinner with them while they’re here?

Why does my wife have this commitment and devotion? Because Chad and Jeremy’s music – songs like “Yesterday’s Gone” and “Summer Song” got her through a difficult adolescence and the change of the teen years. Their music also helped shape the young woman that I would meet in early 1973 and marry some nine months later.

I suppose I owe them a debt as well.

And if you listen to their music, I think you’ll find that yesterday isn’t gone. In fact, yesterday’s back – and may never have left.

                            

Top photograph: Chad and Jeremy performing at Space in Evanston, Illinois, this month.

Pilgrimage To Chicago

Last week, my wife and I did our third annual Long Mother’s Day Weekend Pilgrimage to Chicago. We go with one primary purpose – a singing duo named Chad and Jeremy. She first met them when she was 12, which was at least, uh, well, a fairly long time ago. For the last three years, they’ve performed two or three times in Chicago during the Mother’s Day weekend. This year, the Friday night concert was at Fitzgerald’s in Berwyn, and the Saturday night concert was at SPACE in Evanston. We stayed downtown, just off Michigan Avenue.

We love Chicago. We got to eat at Emilio’s Tapas in Streeterville, a short two blocks from our hotel (I had small plates – salad, grilled calamari and a black bean soup that was spectacular; my wife had grilled salmon). And a bottle of LAN, a Spanish wine that’s sort of like merlot but isn’t. Sitting at Fitzgerald’s Friday night before the concert, we were catered by Wishbone Restaurant, adjacent to and part of Fitzgerald’s. Wishbone specializes in something called “Southern Reconstruction Cooking,” and I don’t know if the reconstruction refers to how they’ve redone southern food or the period after the Civil War. Either way, I had the crawfish etouffe, which was good but I had to scarf it down in record time because the concert was due to start and we were sitting right in front.

We did shopping on Michigan Avenue (Johnston & Murphy and Nordstrom’s, you’re welcome). And we walked, oh, man did we walk. Fifteen blocks to Navy Pier, then at least that or more to the Art Institute, and then about 10 blocks home. And we walked around the huge exhibit of Matisse at the Art Institute – I had to sit and rest four times. The exhibit is worth its own blog post; it was about how Henri Matisse reinvented his art from 1913 to 1917. On Saturday, undeterred by rain and wind, we went to the Celtic Festival in Millennium Park.

Chad and Jeremy were great. The music leans to the ballad form, but these guys are professional entertainers – telling stories about the 1960s, being on television shows like Dick Van Dyke and Batman, singing beautiful love songs and occasional funny ones, like a riff on an Eagles’ song entitled “Avocado.” Chad and Jeremy are still making great harmony – and they first sang together in 1960. The two concerts in Chicago were hosted by Lilfest, which brings a lot of cool music to the city.

And yes, we drove, to, from and in Chicago. We even drove in rush hour traffic (aka motorized insanity) in 5 o’clock rush hour traffic on Friday, to get to Fitzgerald’s in Berwyn.

The most sobering sight was the Chicago Tribune newspaper on Sunday. Chicago is truly one of the great cities of the world – with an Illinois state legislature refusing to make the hard choices to avoid bankruptcy, the head of the Cook County suburban school district in a plea bargain over alleged theft charges, and the head of the transit authority killing himself by jumping in front of one of his Metra trains; he was being investigated for financial irregularities. Chicago is a neat city, but its politics make my home state of Louisiana look like a paragon of governmental virtue.

In spite of the political muck, we still love Chicago.

Painting: Bathers by a River by Henri Matisse, 1909-1916; Charles H. and Mary F.S. Worcester Collection, Art Institute of Chicago.

Related post: A Love Affair with Chad and Jeremy.

A Love Affair with Chad and Jeremy

(From left, Anita from Albuquerque, Chad Stuart, my sweet wife Janet, Jeremy Clyde, and Nancy Emrich of LilFest in Chicago.)

Last night, about nine months of planning, anticipation and work by my sweet wife came to fruition with a concert by Chad and Jeremy at the Sheldon Concert Hall in St. Louis.

If you’re not familiar with Chad Stuart and Jeremy Clyde, they are a singing duo who were part of the “British Invasion” of the 1960s. My wife met them when she was 12, after a performance at the Louisiana State Fair in Shreveport. She’s been in love with them ever since. I understand, and I am not jealous. I also know the words to all of their songs, because I’ve heard them enough over the years. If I knew how to sing, I could probably do the karaoke version of everything they ever recorded.

They broke up in the late 1960s. Jeremy went to pursue an acting career (playing lots of villains, oddly enough) and Chad pursued music. Today Jeremy lives in London and Chad in Sun Valley, Idaho, and they get together several times a year to perform.

We’d seen them in St. Louis in 1986, when they were touring as part of the “British Invasion Tour Part 2.” I remember it well because we were early for the event. I mean, like an hour early. So early we were first in line at the door. If you think I’m emphasizing “early” because we’re usually late for everything, you’d be right. Chronic lateness in my family is not a problem; it’s a condition. You can’t solve it; you have to endure it.

In May 2008, I had to give a talk in Chicago at a conference, and it happened to be right before Mother’s Day Weekend. And guess who was doing three concerts in Chicago? My wife found about this from the Yahoo message board on Chad and Jeremy, where she was also meeting fans like herself all over the country. Coordinated by Nancy Emrich of LilFest, the duo did a house concert in Wilmette, which was the coolest thing ever, then an auditorium concert, also in Wilmette, and finally one at Bill’s Blues Bar in Evanston. My wife was thrilled, so thrilled she began to work on how to get them to St. Louis. And she knew the perfect venue, too.

She knew one of the marketing people at the Sheldon Theater through an old neighbor of ours. She contacted him, and then connected him to Chad and Jeremy’s booking agent. It took some period of time but one day, there it was – they were coming to St. Louis Oct. 23, 2009.

We saw them again in Chicago this past May, and our next-door neighbors in St. Louis joined us for the concert at Bill’s Blues Bar (they have grown children in Chicago; he’s also an gifted musician). Ever since, my wife’s been plotting how to help the Sheldon promote the guys who recorded “Summer Song,” “Distant Shores,” “Willow Weep for Me,” and a bunch of other songs that spoke directly to my wife’s teenaged heart in the late 1960s and continue to speak to her heart today. She worked tirelessly, handing out and posting flyers on every bulletin board in St. Louis, tweeting it on Twitter, bugging me to retweet and post on Facebook. Me, I go along for the ride. It’s magic to watch my wife be transformed into a 14-year-old again.

And magic reigned at the Sheldon last night. The theater seats 700; about 600 people were there, an unusual number, given the economy, according to the people who know this stuff. And it was a wildly enthusiastic audience – you could literally see the audience energize Chad and Jeremy and vice versa. And I watched all the concerns my sweet wife had for this being a success melt away, and she became a fan again.

That’s about as cool as it gets.