Howlin' Wolf At 1815 Club 1975

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Memories of hearing Howlin' Wolf at the New 1815 Club are so strong that no one could ever forget what a privilege it was to be able hear such an iconic bluesman up close in a West Side club setting every weekend. But few may remember how few weekends he actually played there. Living Blues magazine reported on Wolf's appearance at the club's grand opening, June 6-8, 1975. Wolf's bandleader, saxophonist Eddie Shaw, had leased the club and was presenting Wolf on weekends and Jimmy Dawkins, Casey Jones and Wolf imitator James "Tail Dragger" Jones on weeknights.

The big club at 1815 West Roosevelt Road was, for a while, a mainstay of the 1970s Chicago blues scene. Usually just called the 1815, it became the New 1815, also known as Eddie's Place or Eddie Shaw's Place. It carried a West Side blues legacy as the Club Alex (or Alex Club) before that, when it moved from a location four blocks east where a blues fan once made tapes Magic Sam that ended up on a Delmark album. I was told that the long, sturdy bar on the east wall of the club had been salvaged from another historic club where Sam played, Mel's Hideaway (the namesake of Freddie King's hit single "Hideaway"). In 1963 the 1815 building served as the hall of the "Prestige Social Club of the Near West Side" and in an earlier era that block of Roosevelt Road was a residential zone.

Wolf had been hitting the road with Shaw and the rest of the Wolf Gang in the 1970s, in between playing Chicago clubs on the North, South and West Sides, as he traveled to nightclubs, colleges and festivals in Canada, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, New Orleans and elsewhere and sometimes taking time off to spend in the West Point area of Mississippi where he was born. An enthusiastic, predominantly white audience often flocked to hear him, but he also put black venues like the Harlem Dukes Social Club in Prichard, Alabama, on his schedule, as well as festivals promoted by disc jockey Pervis Spann that attracted a black following.