ghost riders travels with american nomads

'You can't tell my grandmother this one,' begins another story. The Rolling Stones wrote a song about the building and when they recorded an album here (12 x 5), Mick Jagger was so overcome by nerves and feelings of inadequacy that he stood facing the back wall and asked for Chuck Berry to be removed from the building. The tour guide is Keith Dixon, grandson of legendary bluesman Willie Dixon, and he regales us with stories he heard growing up. Beef (666 North Orleans), we make a pilgrimage to the old Chess Records recording studio (2120 South Michigan Avenue), where Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley and many others cut their best stuff. After a fortifying Italian beef sandwich at Mr. The next morning, with the afterglow shining through our hangovers, we spend more money than we were intending at Dusty Groove (1120 North Ashland Avenue), a wonderful emporium specialising in soul, funk, jazz and hip-hop, mostly on vinyl. When live music is this good, you lose track of yourself, and maybe that's a kind of freedom. White-haired Carl Weathersby complains about his sciatic nerve but, once he gets limbered up, he has 40 years of stagecraft and musicianship to draw on, a smoking-hot band, and a powerful voice full of aching soul. The blues can sound stale and dated in the wrong hands, but that won't be a problem tonight. We shuffle past the bouncers, pay $12 apiece, and enter a big low-slung building with two stages, and a kitchen serving ribs and Cajun food. We step out of a taxi at Kingston Mines (2548 North Halsted), a family-run club with live blues on seven nights a week. I say no to demon-infected thrash metal and the Rev doesn't like hip-hop, which rules out a visit to the South Side clubs where Kanye West and Lupe Fiasco got started – that and the 40-odd murders down there in the last month. At the normally reliable Cubby Bear (1059 West Addison), we walk out on a lame indie pop band. Chicago, where the blues got electrified, Curtis Mayfield honed his funky soul, and house music was invented, is proving tricky. We intend to stay drenched in regionally appropriate music and our hope is to find a good live show every night.

We're revving ourselves up for a 1,000-mile road trip through the 'wheelhouse of American music', as my travel companion Rev Timmy James puts it starting here in Frank Sinatra's kind of town, and swinging down through Louisville and Nashville to Memphis.

We've downed Old Style beers at a great old dive bar, the L&L Tavern (3207 North Clark Street), where you can buy a legal spirit made from distilled coca leaves, the raw ingredient for cocaine. We've eaten hotdogs at a joint on North Clark Street where a 'chocolate milkshake' costs $20 and the cashier gets topless.

Ghost riders travels with american nomads