Michael Clarke Duncan left impression

Michael Clarke Duncan is an actor who doesn’t have the lengthiest list of film credits on his resume.

In fact, I’d say that most people remember him as the big guy from the Tom Hanks film “The Green Mile,” no matter which film he turned up in.

YET LET’S BE honest. Duncan’s portrayal of the character “John Coffey” (remember, “Just like the drink, only spelled different”) was one of those roles that will put the actor into our collective memory for decades to come.

It definitely will outlive the actor himself, since he died Monday at age 54. It wasn’t a long life. But it was good to see that he rose above what were the gang-infested streets of the Kenwood neighborhood (the presence of Hyde Park nearby has helped reduce some of those problems in recent years).

In fact, his story is similar to that of Kirby Puckett, the one-time resident of those public housing towers that used to oversee the Dan Ryan Expressway on the South Side who managed to rise to stardom with the Minnesota Twins, and later the Baseball Hall of Fame.

It is an encouraging tale to see people come out of those parts of Chicago where the depressing overtone is enough to drag anyone down – regardless of whatever innate talents they may possess.

ALTHOUGH IT’S GOOD to see Duncan have a baseball tie more closely related to Chicago – he was one of the few “celebs” who would identify himself as a Chicago White Sox fan.

In fact, in the official Major League Baseball documentary video that records the tale of the 2005 baseball season leading up to the World Series that year, it is Duncan’s bass-toned voice that narrates the tale of how Ozzie Guillen and his crew brought a World Series victory to Chicago for the first time in 88 years.

Probably the next time I pop my copy of the DVD of that documentary into my disc player, I’ll be doing it more to hear Duncan than any tale of the White Sox victory that year (although being reminded of how Orlando Hernandez came into that playoff game against the Boston Red Sox and shut down what was probably meant to be a Red Sox-taking-the-lead away from Chicago is a story that never gets old).

But back to the movie theater – which is where Duncan made his strongest impression on us.

PERSONALLY, I HAVE to confess something. “The Green Mile” is a film I saw once at the movie theater, and have been unable to ever watch again. Not on DVD. Not during times when it appears on various cable television channels.

Whenever I happen to stumble across it, I flip the channel – particularly if it seems like the film is approaching its climactic point where the Coffey character is being put to death by electrocution.

I acknowledge the power of the film (which was based on a Stephen King horror novel). If anything, it gets so intense that it gives me the quivers and the creeps!

It may be too real – even if the idea of a 100-year-old-plus prison guard with no end in sight to his life is fantasy AND the actual execution of the Coffey character is handled in ways that were totally unrealistic to the ways that death by electrocution is carried out.

BUT IT WILL be the way I think of the man whose Hollywood celebrity came following stints as a student at Kankakee Community College and working a laborer’s job for Peoples Gas.

Who knows what people got their gas back because Duncan himself came in to do the work? Kind of like those North Shore suburban families that once employed a housekeeper named Cora – not realizing that at night, she became the legendary blues singer Koko Taylor!

All the more reason why those North Side-oriented individuals don’t know what they’re missing on the Sout’ Side.

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City blues festival not what it once was

There are times I think I got spoiled by the first time I ever went to the Chicago Blues Festival.

I remember it was the Friday night in 1985. Which was a unique night because the blues festival tried to recreate the bill from an evening at the Montreux Jazz Festival from a couple of years before.

J.B. HUTTO HAD since passed away. But the rest of the evening’s performers were all on stage for that Friday night in Chicago (June 7, 1985, and yeah, I had to look it up).

That is how I can say I saw John Hammond, Stevie Ray Vaughan and Koko Taylor, all in one night right after each other.

Any one of those performers are substantial enough that being able to say I saw them at the festival would have been a star-studded night. But to see them, along with Luther “Guitar Junior” Johnson and Sugar Blue?

Any night when Sugar Blue’s harp playing is the weak link in the program is evidence of a particularly strong night.

IT MAY WELL be the biggest concert experience I have ever attended in my life (I generally prefer the thought of listening to music in a small club, rather than anything resembling a stadium setting). It definitely is bigger than what has become of our city’s blues festival in recent years.

And my night sitting in Grant Park was a freebie. I didn’t have to pay a dime to get in. I still remember a conversation I had with a young woman from out-of-town who couldn’t get over the fact that Chicago was capable of staging such an event of big names (by blues standards, everything is relative) without extorting us for every penny we have.

Now I am the first to admit that I comprehend the city’s financial constraints. I realize that other aspects of business that the city tends to has a higher priority than putting on a Top Quality lineup of entertainment.

But it just seems like the blues festival isn’t what it once was. I couldn’t help but notice the reports about how one of the side stages at this year’s blues festival was sponsored by Mississippi state officials.

WHICH MAY MAKE sense in terms of authenticity. After all, the blues is a music that originated in the delta and wound up in all those clubs because of the Great Migration of black people from the south to the South Side, where the musicians here followed the lead of Les Paul and put electricity to their instruments – creating a unique sound from the country blues native to places like Tupelo.

It almost makes me wonder if the fate of the blues fest is to become a joint affair. Perhaps it will be passed back and forth between the two states, hosted in alternate years in Millenium Park and requiring us to travel down south in other years.

Which is why I’m all the more likely to cherish that night when I got to hear Koko and Stevie Ray one right after the other – Taylor belting out songs with that gravelly, powerful voice she had and Vaughan showing just how well he could play the guitar.

How well?

BOPPING ABOUT THE Internet, I have discovered that one of my fellow festival goers from that night managed to make a recording of Vaughan’s portion of the evening, and a bootleg album of that performance can be found if one is persistent enough in their Internet search.

Find it yourself! I don’t want to be encouraging bootleg purchases.

Now why am I reminiscing about an evening I had 26 years ago this week?

Part of it is because I didn’t go to the blues festival this year. So anything I would write about the performances or their significance would be second-hand or based off the work of someone else – which some people would take an absolutist attitude toward and use to try to denounce me.

AT LEAST THAT’S the lesson I got from the Chicago Sun-Times last week when they dismissed their television critic (and long-time featurey, fluff writer) Paige Wiser for only watching part of a show, and trying to look up information about what was in the rest of the program that she missed in order to fill out her review.

As though there would have been no problem whatsoever had she confined her review to the part of the show she saw. I doubt that! I wonder if this is a newspaper cost-cutting measure being disguised as an ethical lapse.

So to avoid any similar convoluted accusations against myself, my admission is that even though I enjoy listening to jazz and blues music, I didn’t catch any of this year’s festival.

Although based on the bills I saw for the weekend, I don’t think any of them came close to comparing that night back in ’85 – a year that in my mind was more special for that night than for the eventual championship the Chicago Bears brought to the city come autumn.

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Peraica "gets" it!

It was totally in character for the Cook County Board on Tuesday to pass a resolution praising the memory of the recently-deceased blues singer Koko Taylor.

It also was not at all surprising to see the main sponsor of the resolution was county Commissioner Jerry Butler. Considering that "the Iceman" has his own stellar reputation as an r&b singer, he would be the appropriate choice to pay tribute to Taylor.

BUT WHODATHUNK IT that the most vocal blues backer on the county board would turn out to be Anthony Peraica?

The county commissioner from west suburban Riverside spoke out in saying he doesn't think Chicago and Cook County do enough to celebrate the blues resources that reside here.

"They are more celebrated on other continents than they are appreciated in our midst," Peraica said of blues artists such as Taylor, who has a generation of North Shore types who think of one of the great female blues singers of all time as their maid.

"These are international ambassadors of Chicago, not just part of our local scene," Peraica said. For what it's worth, Butler's resolution cites Taylor's eight Grammy Award nominations, her 25 W.C. Handy awards, and her appearance in that otherwise dreadful film "Blues Brothers 2000."

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Taylor a throwback to old Chicago

I saw blues singer Koko Taylor perform several times during my life, but the occasion I recall most vividly occurred in a place far removed from the South Side atmosphere that her rough, rugged voice brought to mind.

It was at Illinois State University, the Normal-based college that was within walking distance of my own alma mater – Illinois Wesleyan. Back in what was most likely 1984, Taylor and her Blues Machine band was earning a living performing the blues, and they gave a concert on the college campus.

WHAT MAKES THAT event stick so strongly in my mind is the fact that I literally got a front row center seat. I was probably about 10 feet away from her in what was a packed (several hundred, maybe up to 1,000 people) hall of people whose idea of a study break was to spend a Saturday night listening to Koko giving us her take on “Wang Dang Doodle” and other blues songs.

Now I don’t listen to the blues as much as I used to back in college. I still have all my old LPs of Taylor’s music, but the most recent recordings on CD are ones I haven’t gotten around to buying yet.

But back in the days when I did manage to blow much of my spare cash on music and recordings, I remember that a Koko Taylor record was always more valued than some of the other stuff that passes for blues these days.

I still own some of my old vintage recordings of music by artists such as Muddy Waters, Magic Sam and B.B. King (who once gave us a recorded concert performed from our very own Cook County Jail).

BUT THERE WAS always a difference between listening to something like “I Just Wanna Make Love to You” by Muddy Waters, and anything recorded by someone like “Lil Ed and the Blues Imperials.”

Whether it was in the writing of the songs or just the fact that so much of life and our society has changed that no one could possibly come up with a song like “Hoochie Coochie Man” these days, the modern-day “bluesmen” all too often sound like a parody of the real thing.

Too much worried about getting the right “sound” to their guitar solo, rather than trying to catch the earthy feeling that is what makes the blues legitimate.

That is what always, to my ear, made Koko Taylor unique.

THE LADY FROM Tennessee who followed the migration of black people from the South to the South Side and who once was the cleaning woman for rich white people (who probably had no clue of her “night” job and its cultural significance) was one of the few blues singers I ever heard who had a sense of the real earthy feel that used to be heard in clubs all throughout Bronzeville some 70 years ago.

None of the guitar-oriented nonsense that can overwhelm a true blues singer, which at its best should be some of the simplest music played.

And definitely none of that bleached out sound that too often comes from listening to white rock ‘n’ roll types trying to play the blues because they like the guitar sound.

I’d rather hear Muddy Waters any day than any of the cover versions recorded back in the 1970s by Led Zeppelin or Eric Clapton – even though I know of people who feel just the opposite (they view the newer versions of the songs as “polished and improved” versions – I say they’re nuts).

THE WORST PEOPLE, in this regard, are the ones who think that “the Blues Brothers” film had anything to do with blues music. My reason for getting into that film is seeing the grittiness of a now-gone Chicago on film. The music itself is too pop oriented at times.

No one would ever call Koko Taylor’s music polished or pop. And that was its beauty.

What made her special is that she was still with us even into the 21st Century, giving us a taste of what used to echo from clubs along East 43rd Street (the old Checkerboard Lounge) back in the first third of the 20th.

Plus, she was still in her prime physically until recent years. So we got to hear the earthiness of the blues at its best.

THAT WAS PARTICULARLY rare. I can claim to have seen both Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker perform live. But by the time I saw them in the 1980s, they were old men who didn’t sound anything close to what they were in their prime.

Seeing Hooker, in particular, was like listening to one of those oldies revival tours, with bands such as the Buckinghams trying to pretend they can turn the calendar back some 40 years. In Hooker’s case, he was trying to go back about 60 years, and it wasn’t convincing.

It made me wish I could have seen him in his prime. But in the case of Koko, I got to see and hear her in her prime.

Those occasions will be among the moments I recall of an older Chicago likely for the rest of my life.

NOW EXCUSE ME while I walk over to my turntable (I still own a functioning one) and put on my copy of “Queen of the Blues.” (And I don’t want to hear arguments about how I ought to own the CD instead).

At this particular moment (which is about one day after I first learned Taylor died following complications from surgery performed a couple weeks ago), I think I need a jolt of “Queen Bee” to brighten my day.

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Listen and learn for yourself about the musical career of the late (http://www.kokotaylor.com/index.html) Koko Taylor.