Chicago: Where the Music Took Hold - TWICE

I am willing to bet good money that the first music I ever heard was my mother singing to me in Chicago, the city where I was born and where I lived for the first three months of my life before we moved to Boston. 

The year I was eleven, life went pretty cattywumpus. I'd been living with my mother for the previous year, and that pretty much imploded due to my special needs as an undiagnosed bipolar person. I returned to my father's home, and since he was in the middle of relocating across town and setting up housekeeping, he asked his mom, my Gramma Mary, if I could come to Chicago and stay with her for a month or two. Gramma said yes...

In Chicago, to keep me occupied, Gramma got me a membership to the Y so I could swim every day. She also let me keep her bedroom radio next to the sofa bed I slept on.

It didn't take long for me to find a good radio station, though damn if I remember its call sign now. It was an FM rock station, while in Boston I had listened to AM top 40, as my radio only got AM stations.

Late nights I would listen to the radio and discovered a lot of music WRKO in Boston never played. RKO played the pop stuff. This station played pop, but it also played the heavier rock.

I remember hearing Rock and Roll All Night by Kiss for the first time  and just being blown away. I'd never really experienced that kind of musical energy before. I became a major Kiss fan for a few years, until I figured out that they were pretentious gits with no real originality or talent. They were formulaic and meaningless. The only song of theirs that ever had any real meaning was Detroit Rock City, about a fan who died in a car accident on his way to one of their concerts.

Another band I discovered during my Chicago sojourn was Aerosmith. Walk This Way and Dream On were both in heavy rotation on the station, and I tried to memorize every word. Of course, I got half of the lyrics wrong: the line "It went by from dusk to dawn" was indecipherable to me, I would go all phoneticish "Eee when bah fa dust oo Don", and instead of "Sing with me.." I thought the lyric was "Sing women". And I know I had a bunch of Walk This Way wrong, but I can't remember what I would sing instead. 

I also first heard Yes, Chicago, the Eagles, and many other classic bands on that station.

After a year where everything felt upside down, that winter in Chicago gave me something solid: music. It was the beginning of who I was becoming. It was an education and an experience. It was my awakening.

And here’s the kicker: deep down, I must have known Chicago wasn’t finished with me, because years later it opened me up all over again.When I was thirty‑five, I spent a summer there with my then‑husband and fell headfirst into another wave of music: Gin Blossoms, Matchbox 20, Goo Goo Dolls, and a handful of other incredible bands. It cracked me open in a totally different way; it was a whole second awakening.

The city of Chicago and music are intertwined in my mind, joined together in memory and in my bones, part of my very soul. My first home, my musical nursery school, my discovery center.

I think I will always have Chicago and music tied together in memory.