Billy Connolly’s Route 66 Read online

  3

  A Royal Route

  I was travelling light. My golden rule for any trip is to clear out my mind before I leave home. Empty it so that it’s wide open to every experience during the journey. It’s like travelling with an empty suitcase that I can fill with things I find along the way. I don’t understand why anyone would want to gather up all the things that surround them at home – pictures and mementoes and life’s little luxuries – and take them on the road with them. The only things from home that are essential to me are my banjo and an iPod packed with banjo music that I listen to when I’m on my trike.

  Riding through the centre of Chicago, almost every time I stopped someone called out to me, like the taxi driver who wanted to know what I was riding. ‘It’s a trike,’ I said. Then a young lad on a skinny bike remarked on the quietness of my engine. ‘It’s got four cylinders,’ I replied. This makes it a lot quieter than the single-and twin-cylinder Harley-Davidsons that usually cruise the streets.

  A woman crossing the road yelled, ‘Hey, Billy!’ I nodded and smiled at her. ‘What are you doing here?’ she asked as she whipped out a camera and took my picture.

  ‘We’re making a film about Route 66. That’s why I’m in Chicago.’

  It was nice to be recognised by fans and passers-by. It made me feel all famous and warm and cuddly.

  At the end of the block I passed under one of the most iconic sights in Chicago – the cast-iron legs of the elevated train system. Or the ‘El’, as Chicagoans call it. Nelson Algren, the novelist who wrote The Man with the Golden Arm, called it Chicago’s rusty iron heart. It works like a subway system, transporting people far away from the traffic of cars, buses and trucks on the roads, but it’s above the ground rather than below. I think it’s absolutely beautiful. It’s like the Forth Bridge to me – all rivets and girders and proof of how clever men can be. And it has the same impact as a red London bus or a yellow New York taxi. As soon as you see any of those things in a movie, you know exactly where you are. Usually there’s a car chase going on under the El. Or people running along with guns, with one guy on the road and another way up above him on the El, trying to hide, legging it up and down stairs, or sprinting along the tracks and past queues of commuters, shoving them out of the way.

  I wish we had an El in Glasgow. We almost did once. In the 1930s a guy called George Bennie built a prototype rail system called the ‘railplane’ at Milngavie, just outside the city. It was on legs and rails, just like the El, but the cars hung from an overhead monorail and had propellers powered by on-board motors at each end of the carriage. They looked like cigar tubes. Bennie reckoned his trains could travel at up to 120 m.p.h., but he couldn’t find someone to finance his great idea and build it in Glasgow. That was a shame, because we Glaswegians could have had something like the El, but even more swanky. Sydney’s got something similar now – the overhead railway – and it’s hugely popular. It makes the traffic flow better and people like it because they can get to work easily. It’s comfortable, it’s funky and it looks great.

  Because I like the El so much, I’d persuaded the director that we ought to film something about it before we set off on Route 66. But when we went to do it I was a wee bit disillusioned because the director took us far down the line, where the El runs along rails at ground level, not suspended above the street. What I didn’t realise was that it’s difficult to get permission to film on the inner-city section that I like. But then the director told me he had a wee trick in mind. We boarded a train a long way out of town and I interviewed a supervisor called Jackie, who is some kind of expert on the system and its history. While I asked her all about her job and the El, the train started to rise above the streets, and before I knew it we were back in the centre of Chicago. I got off the train and walked down the stairs, with the crew filming me all the way. Result.

  It made me very happy, not because we’d found a cunning way to bypass the restrictions, but because I like to celebrate the achievements of the human race. I like to show people at their best. And I think you often see people at their absolute best in engineering. Of course, the El is a staggering feat of engineering, especially the riveting. There must be a zillion rivets in Chicago, and most of them are on the El. Whenever I see something like the El, or a big ship or an impressive bridge, I get so proud of my species. Which makes a change. It’s our fault that the jungle is on fire, although I never set fire to a jungle in my life. It’s our fault that the spotted lemur has got nowhere to live, even though I couldn’t pick out a spotted lemur in a police line-up. I’m a nice guy. I want the world to be beautiful. So I like to point out the beauty of human creations, like the El, to give the human race a nudge, as if to say, ‘Just look what we can achieve if we put our minds to it.’

  Thinking about celebrating the beauty of mankind’s creativity got me thinking about another of my pet theories, which is that newspaper obituaries should be closer to the front because they are often stories about the great unsung heroes of the world. I realised this when a pal of mine died some years ago. I read his obituary; then I read all the others in the paper that day. And I thought: My God, these are extraordinary people. How come I’ve never heard of them? They had found cures for diseases or helped children and innocent people escape from dictators all over the world. But we rarely took any notice of them because they were old. If we saw them in a supermarket, we’d never give them a second thought.

  So I’m on a little one-man crusade to bring the obituary closer to the front of the paper. Let’s sing a bit louder about the unsung. Rather than spending all our time watching stupid people doing stupid things and being filmed by other stupid people on reality TV shows, why don’t we spend a few minutes each day reading about good people doing good things? I’m not being a hippy. It’s just that we’ve got to improve ourselves as a species or we are absolutely doomed.

  I was thinking about all of this as I passed under the El. As I slipped between its massive iron legs, a train hurtled overhead, as if to say: ‘Look what you’re capable of. Look at this.’ It really is a magic noise – the sound of trains right in the middle of town. I bet the wee boys in Chicago just love it. I reckon they’re crazy about it. But not everyone’s as jolly and happy about the El as I am. Way back in 1892, the New York Academy of Medicine claimed that ‘the elevated trains prevented the normal development of children, threw convalescing patients into relapses and caused insomnia, exhaustion, hysteria, paralysis, meningitis, deafness and death. And pimples on the willy.’

  I’m sure you can guess which of those ailments I added to the list.

  Continuing on down Adams Street on the trike, I was enjoying every yard of it. The concrete canyons, where you have to look straight up to see the sky, are really amazing to ride along. But I was soon twisting and turning to follow Route 66 out of the Windy City, passing down streets and avenues with names like Ogden, Cicero, Nerwyn, Harlem and Lyons. I think a lot of people are a bit disappointed when they discover that Route 66 isn’t just one long, straight road but all broken up into various chunks and sections.

  Not so long ago, in the days of prohibition, these outer parts of Chicago were once undershot with a spider’s web of tunnels used by gangsters and bootleggers to distribute their wares to the speakeasies. Chicago is such a beautiful town these days – good and interesting and clean and lovely – and the city authorities now seem very embarrassed by all that Al Capone stuff from the 1920s and 1930s. When you ask them about it, they say, ‘Well, it was a long time ago. It was a period we’d rather just put behind us … blah-di-blah-di-blah.’ But the truth is that the prohibition era was one of the most interesting periods in Chicago’s history, which is why we stopped to investigate it. I reckon you have to go to a speakeasy if you’re in Chicago, so we did.

  The American government made a criminal mistake in the late 1910s, when it bowed to pressure from the Anti-Saloon League and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and enacted legislation to shut down boozers everywhere. Can
you believe it: every bar in America was shut. For thirteen long years, until 1933, it was illegal to make, sell or transport alcohol. As a result – you know everybody needs a wee drinkypoo – speakeasies sprang up everywhere.

  Everyone imagines every speakeasy had a wee hole in the door. You know, knock twice, wait for the wee hole to open just a whisker, whisper, ‘Joe sent me,’ and sneak inside. But there were thirty thousand of them in New York alone – twice the number of bars there had been before the ban on booze came into effect in January 1920 – so there was no such thing as a standard speakeasy.

  The one we visited in Chicago was on Wabash Street, not far south of Adams Street and the start of Route 66. It’s now a very good restaurant called Gioco, but you can still see remnants from its prohibition days, when the front was a restaurant but the rear was a boozer that became more and more secretive, and much more interesting, the further back you ventured.

  Something many people don’t realise about that period in America is that, in the midst of all that prohibition, you were allowed to brew a hundred gallons of beer and fifty gallons of wine in your own house, but you couldn’t sell it. No one was allowed to distil hard liquor, but that didn’t stop the bootleggers. They called it bathtub gin in northern cities like Chicago. In the rural southern states it was known as moonshine.

  Even though people were allowed to make all the beer and wine they could possibly drink at home, they still wanted to go out for a bevvy. Just like now, they enjoyed mixing and doing the how-do-you-do when they were drinking. Seeing a good business opportunity, a guy in his twenties called Al Capone, with a big scar on his face and a white hat, convinced the authorities to let him sell non-alcoholic beer.

  I mean, what a lame story.

  Capone made thousands of barrels of non-alcoholic beer and delivered them to the speakeasy on Wabash Street, among others. As soon as the police had inspected the non-alcoholic hooch, Al’s mates would show up with big veterinarian syringes – the type that you usually shove into a cow’s bum – full of ethanol. Pure alcohol, in other words. The ethanol was sourced from all over America, but the bulk of production took place in the countryside. Capone used Route 66 to transport the moonshine from rural areas to Chicago in false petrol tanks. The ethanol would be injected into the barrels and – Ta da! Off we go! – happy days were back again. If the cops turned up when the speakeasy was in full swing, there were escape routes through which the VIPs could make a swift exit. The rest of the clientele would have to face the music. And probably stop dancing.

  Prohibition was hugely counter-productive. It actually increased alcohol consumption and promoted crime by igniting the bootlegging moonshine and beer wars fought by the Chicago gangs. Capone became the biggest and most notorious gangster in America when he took over the running of the Outfit – the syndicate of Chicago organised crime gangs. He was a major villain – in addition to bootlegging, he was involved in prostitution and bribery of government figures – yet he didn’t lurk in the shadows. On the contrary, he became a highly visible public figure. Many Chicagoans even admired him, seeing him as a self-made success story. And Capone responded by giving some of the money he made from his illicit activities to charity, creating the image of a modern-day Robin Hood.

  He kept plenty of the cash for himself, though, and lived ostentatiously. He held meetings in the Jeweler’s Building, a forty-storey neo-classical office tower in the heart of Chicago with an automated car lift that jewellery merchants used to make safe transfers of their merchandise. Capone would drive his car into the lift, rise to the top floor, and enjoy a few drinks in Stratosphere, the speakeasy with the best views in town.

  But on St Valentine’s Day 1929 Al Capone made a big mistake. He sent his boys down the road to wipe out seven Irishmen. Disguised as policemen, Capone’s gang showed up with machine-guns and mowed down their Irish rivals. (Curiously, one of the Irish gangsters wasn’t a gangster at all, but a doctor. He was a kind of hoodlum groupie – he liked to follow the gangsters around town and act tough.) When the press published pictures of the massacre, the people of Chicago thought Big Al had gone too far and started to turn against him. Eliot Ness and his ‘Untouchables’ in the Bureau of Prohibition took a look at Capone’s activities, but they found it impossible to link him to any serious crime, let alone the massacre. He’d covered himself pretty well and had the police in his pocket. Then they had the bright idea of taking a look at Capone’s tax records.

  Here’s a thing. In 1927 Capone had made $106 million, but he hadn’t filed a tax return. So they hauled him in for that. He was fined fifty thousand dollars and sent away for eleven years, most of which he served in Alcatraz. While in prison, he contracted syphilis, which affected his physical and mental health to such an extent that he was no longer able to run the Outfit. By 1946, he had the mental capacity of a twelve-year-old. Eventually, at the age of forty-seven, he died following a stroke and a heart attack brought on by the syphilis.

  Amazingly, Al Capone left us with a legacy that has nothing to do with booze. One of his charitable donations was a million dollars to provide milk for schoolchildren. But he insisted that a use-by date must be put on each bottle because he’d always hated the sour milk he’d been forced to drink as a child. It was the first time that anyone had had this idea, and it set a standard that’s endured to this day. Isn’t that the strangest thing?

  The side-effects of prohibition weren’t all bad, particularly its influence on the music industry and specifically jazz. Because it was the music of the speakeasies, jazz became very popular very fast, and it helped integration by uniting mostly black musicians with mostly white crowds. Chicago played its part in the development of jazz, but it played an even bigger role in rock’n’roll, which you could say was invented by black men (and women) in a little room in South Chicago, where Muddy Waters and all the other greats – including Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley and Etta James – made their first records.

  That room was the recording studio of Chess Records, a legend in the blues and rhythm’n’blues world. In 1928 two Jewish brothers, Leonard and Phil Chess, arrived in Chicago as Polish immigrants. They started a few bars and by the 1940s had a nightclub called the Macomba Lounge. One of the singers who performed there was a certain McKinley Morganfield, who boosted his earnings by busking around South Chicago during daylight hours. He was better known to everybody by his nickname – Muddy Waters.

  The Chess brothers already had an interest in a record label called Aristocrat, so they used it to record Muddy’s raw singing style, which perfectly reflected the spirit of the Chicago blues bars. The recordings were a great success, and soon Leonard and Phil were able to buy out their partners in Aristocrat and change the company’s name to Chess Records.

  Muddy’s increasing fame drew other young Mississippi bluesmen to Chicago, such as Little Walter Jacobs and a twenty-stone farm worker named Chester Burnette, who soon became known as Howlin’ Wolf. In their footsteps followed Sonny Boy Williamson, Memphis Slim, John Lee Hooker and Willie Mabon. All legends.

  In 1955 Muddy introduced the Chess brothers to a twenty-eight-year-old singer and guitarist who was on holiday from St Louis. He sang ‘Ida Red’, a song he’d written himself. Leonard and Phil liked the song but suggested a new title. Renamed ‘Maybellene’, it was the first of many Top Forty hits for the guy from St Louis – Chuck Berry – who went on to write and record a string of hits that became signature songs of rock’n’roll: ‘Roll Over Beethoven’, ‘Johnny B. Goode’ and ‘Sweet Little Sixteen’.

  The studios and offices of Chess Records were based at several locations in South Chicago, but the most famous was immortalised by the Rolling Stones in their song ‘2120 South Michigan Avenue’. Nowadays, it’s home to Willie Dixon’s Blues Heaven Foundation. It’s in a rundown neighbourhood that probably has never seen better days. It has that air of always having been a bit on the skids, but it’s a real place with a proper sense of identity and a community that holds together when times are tough.


  Walking up to the old Chess Records building produced a strange sensation in me. In a nondescript street with a wee garden on one side, initially it felt like a non-event. But then I noticed some iron figures set into the garden railings – like a guy playing guitar, who just happened to be Chuck Berry. Wandering along a wee bit further, I spotted another, recognised the guitar, and realised it was Bo Diddley. Before I knew it, I was standing outside the birthplace of rock’n’roll.

  As soon as I stepped through the door, I knew I’d arrived somewhere special. It’s holy ground – the Taj Mahal for anyone who likes rock’n’roll. Hallelujah central. And they let me in even though I’m about as black as snow. Then the funniest thing happened. Me and several of the crew all went very quiet and treated the place like a church. Nobody said ‘Ssshhh!’ or anything like that. A silence just fell upon us when we realised we were standing in the actual building where they recorded all those fantastic songs.

  There’s a wee museum with some posters on the wall from the old Blues Caravan tours. I remember those posters from when the tours came to Scotland in the sixties. They always looked great and the line-ups were terrific. I mean, can you imagine a show like the one I spotted on one of the posters: Jimmy Reid, John Lee Hooker, T-Bone Walker, Big Joe Williams, Curtis Jones and the Taylor Blues Band, all on the same bill? Even wee Mississippi John Hurt was there. And Memphis Slim. My God – what a night out. We used to love it whenever they came to town.

  From the museum, I moved on into a large whitewashed room at the centre of the building. It was the room where all those hits – ‘Johnny B. Goode’ and the rest – were recorded. I touched a key on a piano, just to be sure I’d definitely touched something that one or more of the greats had once touched. Then I imagined Etta James and Bo Diddley singing, and Chuck Berry duck-walking across the floor, and all the others creating magic in that little room. Some of Ronnie Wood’s drawings were hanging on one of the walls, but it was still quite hard to believe that the Rolling Stones had made an album in there. Can you imagine how that little room must have rocked over the years? I felt precious and churchy and I’m sure you would too if you visited Chess Records. It’s a very special place.