“I’m Gonna Shoot the MF’ers!”
“I’m Gonna Shoot the MF’ers!” is all he kept repeating over and over. Probably not the best thing to be shouting as we both sat on hard wooden benches, in our very own cage, inside the Main Headquarters of the Chicago Police Department downtown.
He was about 45 years old, drunk and had a very thick ethnic accent. What I think he was really saying was that he was “going to sue” the city for wrongful arrest. All I knew was that I could visualize the “lock keys” (guards) coming in to quiet us down with a good ole 70’s Chicago style beat down.
If you are wondering whether I’m exaggerating here, think a few years back to the bloody riots in Lincoln Park in August 1968 at the Chicago National Democratic Convention. The mayhem inflicted on rowdy protesting youth by the infamous Chicago “pigs” Police Department is now well-known. But as I sat there in my cell totally depressed, it was my fault not the cops, and this my friend just added up to another cherry on my then-current life disaster sundae.
As the night went on most of the yelling drunks in other cells quieted down. All that I heard was the loud passing of the CTA elevated train (called The Big Green) every ½ hour. It was getting cold and in my terrified mind at 23 years old all I could think about were two things:
- How did I wind up in here?
- How long was I going to be locked up in my new home after being homeless for about 4 months?
So before you abandon me and reading this blog, chocking it up to another stupid kid statistic. Let’s ask how a 24 year old... who was once a top high school winner in the Chicago Board of Education’s Science Fair, contender for scholarship awards at the Illinois Junior Academy of Science at University of Illinois Urbana- Champaign, eventually a Chemistry Pre-Med Major student at Loyola University of Chicago... wound up homeless and then incarcerated.
Add to this mystery that I wasn’t using drugs or drinking. So what was it? I blame it on Mickey Dolenz of The Monkees, I blame it on Ringo Starr of The Beatles, I blame it on John Bonham of Led Zepellin, I blame it on Peter, Paul & Mary, I blame it on every singer who sang a Top 40 hit in the 60’s on Chicago’s WLS, WCFL and WVON AM radio station. I blame it on my biological 16 year old mother who sang and played piano, I blame it on that old Stella acoustic guitar that was in my Uncle Lou’s closet only played once and sat for 5 years buried behind some overcoats, before I discovered its magical qualities. I blame it on 12 notes in the Western diatonic scale, I blame it on every rhythm that ever evolved from a heartbeat, walking or a horse’s trot. I blame it on the “Wipe Out” or “Gene Krupa” beat, I blame it on sound wave propagation through a medium called air and mostly I blame it on really talented good looking guys who sang, played in a band and got all the chicks!!!
Looking back, I never had a chance. I was a doomed nerd from the start. Most people I’ve ever met have some backstory of family dysfunction, divorced parents, growing up lower middle class, growing up with your relatives, not feeling loved, putting on a fake smile to get through those tough interview questions from elementary grade school kids:
“Oh, why do you live with your aunt & uncle?” “Where are your parents?” “How come you are wearing pants with the zipper on the side? That’s for girls...”
Yes, while others might have had it worse, I felt I was the poster child for all of the above but miraculously found solace and escape in activities like long bike rides, reading at the Chicago Public Library on 91st & Commercial Ave. and listening to my little 9 volt battery powered Magnovox AM radio complete with ear plug and an endless supply of hit songs that changed every week with the Sunday countdown sponsored by the Great Lakes Dragaway in Union Grove, Wisconsin. Funny cars, dragsters and muscle cars...
Like any young kid who played drums or guitar in a local band anywhere in the USA during the 60’s & 70’s, I wanted to be one of the chosen ones who heard themselves on the radio.
Ready, set go!
Songs were being formed and poignant lyrics being created in my jail cell, but it would take another 10 years for them to find their way out of my thick skull. At about 6am in the morning all the inmates were awakened and I found myself being told to sit on the floor of a huge holding room. Once inside I got a good look at the 250 males that got arrested the previous day. Many were drunks, drug addicts, homeless mixed in with a few armed robbers, "gang bangers" and other violent criminals who would find themselves on a bus heading for Cook County Jail.
I stared at the green magic marker number that was written by a guard on the inside of my fore arm. Avoiding too much eye contact with any one person in that room, I decided that if I ever got out of this mess, I was never going to come back to this place. This would be the designated low point of my life story.
In this room there was no Bill Conti “Rocky Theme” song running through my head, no one’s voice like Master Po of the hit TV series “Kung Fu” giving Grasshopper a secret life mantra. Nope... it’s only you hoping to stay alive long enough to see the judge before one of the gang bangers decides to pick a fight with you and now you both will be on that bus going to Cook County. They called our numbers like lambs heading to the slaughter as we entered a small musty court room.
Was it going to be worse than Bowen High’s Assistant Principal Mrs. Franklin sentencing me to a one week suspension for selling a small test tube of homemade flash powder to a knuckle head named Ronald who decided to light a small pile of it on the table in the lunch room?
Yes, Mrs. Franklin had a dilemma. What do you do with this kid who looked like a bad version of hippie John Lennon who concocts a magnesium and chlorinate based rocket fuel but also represents Bowen High being #1 in the Citywide Science Fair? It really bothered Mrs. Franklin that she and my Chemistry teacher Mr. Keane had no idea what was in the powder, but this 16 year old kid did. Probably the same tortured question when a worn out disgruntled city high school music teacher tries to analyze one of those previously mentioned “Top 40 Hit Songs” and asks “Why couldn’t that have been mine?”
But here in a courtroom nine years later, in the downtown Chicago Police Headquarters, nobody cared about my past merits, nobody cared that I was a decent drummer who could read music or could read trigonometry equations, I was just another number on an arrest report.
Alright so you want to know what they had on me? or “I’ll kill him with my bare hands!”
Before being arrested while homeless, I spent my days looking for a job, any job. I had no money, Only a few food stamps and too much pride to come crawling back to my uncle’s house who probably would have not let me back home anyway unless I enlisted in the military. I was coming off of a terrible ending to a four year music quest that was supposed to launch our band into the stratosphere.
That story will be a whole two album collection called “Trapped In The Bandleaders Mother’s Basement”.
So here I am homeless, I had one nice shirt, a tie and a shopping bag with my papers, high school diploma, grade sheets from Loyola University, T-shirts, cheap aluminum flashlight and a wind up alarm clock. I hid the shopping bag in some basement storage room in one of the more famous downtown hotels on Michigan Ave. I found a discarded mattress in that storage room that I used to get some sleep before job hunting the next day. More important I had access to their locker room showers at 3am. Unbelievably I was able to stay hidden and no one knew I was down there for about 2 months.
Then like every miracle that ever happened in The “Twilight Zone” TV show, I first got a letter at my post office box to come in for a job orientation at the Chicago Main Post Office the next day and then magically within an hour I ran into an old drummer friend from high school who was moving and gave me the keys to his old apartment, trusting me to pay him after I got my first pay check. Truly a miracle!
After viewing his old apartment, I loved it and took the CTA elevated train to go
retrieve my shopping bag from the downtown hotel. While riding on that train, elated about the start of my new life, I see
this drunk guy is yelling in the aisle and all I can think of is “This poor guy, I’m so
lucky to be starting a new chapter in my wretched little life.” Little did I know that
out of 3 million people in Chicago at that time, this drunk would be sharing a jail cell with
me that night.
This is where we cue up the "Twilight Zone" music.
I’m in the hotel basement, I grab my bag, I’m walking down a corridor to get to the lobby and I hear a voice from behind call “Sir Stop!!” I pretend to ignore it. I’m within 100 feet of the front lobby. As I hear the sound of a “walkie radio”, another hotel security guard jumps in front of me. Now I’m being handcuffed and brought to the manager’s office. As I cried like a baby, they go through my shopping bag and the hotel manager pretends to understand my situation but says in a reprimanding way that I should have asked him to use the shower first.
Okay? How many of you reading this would have let a homeless kid use your fancy hotel maintenance locker room shower?
At this point they have to charge me with something so that I won’t sue them for false arrest. They decide to call the Chicago Police Dept and a foot patrol officer appears within 5 minutes. There is a whole discussion and one of the meaner hotel security guards isn’t buying my tears. He’s suggesting pinning a recent unsolved room burglary on me. Thank God the hotel manager had a heart and decided to charge me with misdemeanor trespassing but I still had to go to jail.
My whole dream of starting a new life looked like an old movie where the cracking film
gets stuck on the projector sprockets and you see the film fry out in a bubbling mess on the big screen. Essentially my life was
frying out.
I was marched handcuffed through a very fancy hotel lobby with all eyes on
me. Everyone had that “Oh my God” look. “What did he do? Glad they got him
off the street!” Maybe one day they will read this blog, hear my music and think.
”I remember that young lad, crying like a baby in his surplus army jacket.” I went from looking like a bad John Lennon to a bad Alice Cooper.
Dream killed. No more apartment, no more job at the post office, just sinking deeper into the cracks of the system because I chose not to stay in school become a doctor and have a two and half kid car garage in the posh suburb of Wilmette. Forget wanting to be a rock star on Dick Ebersol’s “The Midnight Special”.
Congratulations if you got this far...we should have a beer or a coffee soon.
As many of you reading this know the one thing that travels with you through your brightest moments and darkest days is " YOU", your personality. I was kind of a nerd, a good kid at heart who could make someone smile or laugh, I had this weird optimistic bent. As I was handcuffed and being loaded onto a small CPD police van called a “Paddy wagon” or “meat wagon”, one of the three officers had to ride in the back with me, as he was on foot patrol, had no vehicle. It was his arrest and they only had two seats up front. I remember him upholstering his gun and handing it to one of the officers in the cab. “Here, hold this for me.” That receiving officer looked surprised and asked “What are you going to do if he tries something?” His reply “I’ll kill him with my bare hands!”
Yep, the prospect of my life in Southern California down the street from Neil Young, Tom Petty or David Geffen was that worm hole that just closed up forever. I was done. Finished at 23 years old. A goner. But remember the optimistic guy? So I’m sitting in the back of the paddy wagon with this uniformed middle aged cop.
Mr. Optimism here with a face full of dried up tears asks the officer sitting about 10 feet from me, “How’s your day going?” He looks over at me with the smug delight of a wolf with the rabbit in his jaws. “Better Than yours.”
Incidentally I was glad he was back there because I heard rumors that sometimes they will “roll you around”. If nobody is back there but the prisoner and you’ve given them reason or sometimes no reason other than to have some good ole cop fun, they will speed up, hit the brakes, make hard turns and you roll around on hard metal floor hand cuffed in the back.
“A Life Sentence.”
So what does this Steven Barry real life drama have to do with Urban Americana songs and their creation? Everything! Our life paths of almost making it or making it out alive is the very bedrock of creating stories and songs that have a real meaning for you. Something that you can listen to and say “Sounds like something I went through”.
So the greater powers that be gave me a "Life Sentence" of being grateful and to continue to make good music for people that need to hear that music.
Is the above story my only saga? No, there are many, many more that have been
the foundation for my writing and eventually choosing the style of writing that
may be a million miles from the brilliant Tommy Hart & Bobby Boyce songs for
The Monkees, Carole King - Gerry Goffin or even Neil Diamond but it gives the music offered here depth and real substance as
opposed to trying to write a song just to please an imaginary market.
Since that fateful day in a downtown jail, I've never gone back there. I left Chicago and made a living in the music business ever since. I still play four basic rhythm section instruments (drums, keyboards, guitars and bass guitar) good enough to be in someone’s wedding band, I’m a certified recording engineer, music producer, avocational DJ and Emcee, SAG/AFTRA Commercial actor, ex-tour manager and now a performing singer-songwriter. I think I've honored the vow I made in that jail cell not to ever return there and to this day I haven’t.
In wrapping up this intro to my life sentence...Come take a journey with me. Let me show you that being a little different from what society might suggest you do with your life is not necessarily a death sentence but a life sentence of discovering and joy. Thank you and I’ll talk with you again soon.
With much gratitude.
Steven Barry