Remembering the 'Bucket o' Blood'

By their nature, music venues tend to live short lives. No matter the location, running a club is an expensive, complicated, and altogether frustrating business—especially in Chicago. Clubs come and go, acting as just another personality in buildings that have often had several other lives. The A.V. Club looked into the surprisingly disturbing past—murder, violence, Patrick Swayze—of some of the city’s renowned music venues.

Venue: Empty Bottle
Building constructed: Unknown
Years in current incarnation: 15
First show: Scrawl
Previous lives: The Empty Bottle originally opened in 1992 in a “midget wrestling bar,” according to owner Bruce Finkelman. It moved a block over in 1993 to its current location, formerly The Friendly Inn. “Friendly” remained on the building’s old black awning, which Finkelman recently replaced—but with “friendly” on it. Despite its name, the place had a bad reputation. “It was known in the neighborhood as ‘the bucket of blood,’” Finkelman says. “From what I understand, there used to be gun fights in there and knife fights, and at the end of the night when they were cleaning up, they used to pour out a bucket of blood.” The Double Door also had that nickname at one point; police used the phrase to describe rough-and-tumble bars. At the Empty Bottle, bad omens appeared from the start: When Finkelman first looked at the property, he witnessed eight men armed with bats destroy a parked car with two people inside it. On the original Bottle’s first day of business, a man tried to hold the place up with a sharpened screwdriver—a robbery that Finkelman foiled by whacking the guy with a 2-by-2.
Changing it: The Bottle today is essentially three separate buildings (with five basements) that were joined. A pool table initially sat near the bar and a large, accordion-style door closed off part of the room for banquets. Behind the door was a tiny stage. Next door (in Bite’s current location) was an old sweatshop that made bathing suits. While renovating the Bottle, Finkelman took apart the nice walnut sewing-machine tables and used the wood in the bar. Building his new stage was a huge undertaking; it required a massive steel beam for support. “I remember it was about two o’clock in the morning, and we were getting ready to lift this beam up—and we realized no one was going to lift a two-ton beam,” Finkelman says. So he and some others went to the Bottle’s old location, which was still open, and rounded up about 25 people from the bar to help move it.
Staying power: Pretty solid—as much as that’s possible. “I think the number one potential demise of the Bottle is the overall opinions of the Chicago government on the entertainment and music industry,” says Finkelman, echoing the sentiments of other club owners. “I‘ve always felt like the demise of Lounge Ax or any other club has always come from the City of Chicago and their desire not to have live music venues.”

Venue: Metro
Building constructed: 1927
Years in current incarnation: 26
First show: R.E.M.
Previous lives: What’s now known as Metro once housed the Chicago Svithiod Club, a sort of Swedish heritage organization that even had legalized gambling at one point. The Svithiod moved by the ’60s, and the building became known as the Northside Auditorium. In the ’70s, it spawned a club called South American Village. That didn’t last long, and the building then became a multiuse community center with a coffeehouse and artists’ gallery. Victory Gardens Theater (then brand new) used the small theater on the building’s top floor for rehearsals and performances. In 1977, Chuck Renslow, the owner of a prominent gay night club, bought the building and turned it into Center Stage, an “entertainment complex” with a disco in the main room, a cabaret (now Smart Bar), a leather-fetish store called Male Hide and kept the theater on the top floor. Center Stage eventually became Stages Music Hall, a jazz and folk club.
Changing it: In 1982, Metro owner Joe Shanahan opened Smart Bar on Stages’ fourth floor. When that took off, he started booking weekend shows in Stages’ main room. Stages’ owners eventually sold out, and Shanahan moved Smart Bar to its present location in the basement. Bailiwick and Latino Chicago continued to use the fourth floor for rehearsals, but Shanahan planned to use the space as a “members only” bar/mini-club. Today, the area houses the Metro’s offices and the small theater that bands like Guns N’ Roses, Smashing Pumpkins, and Slint have used for rehearsals.
Staying power: About as strong as it can get. The Metro enjoys an international reputation as a Chicago institution.

Venue: Schubas
Building constructed: 1900
Years in current incarnation: 19
First show: Big Head Todd & The Monsters
Previous lives: The building originally began as a Schlitz bar with a dining room in what is now the music room. The side door that opens onto Belmont is a remnant from when women weren’t allowed in bars; they could enter the dining room without going through the bar. Between World War I and World War II, the bar briefly served as a meeting place for American Nazis; after the start of World War II, men could register for the armed forces there. But the building has more or less been a bar its whole life—even, at one point, a Mexican cowboy bar that left bullets lodged in the ceiling beams and footrail. Immediately before it became Schubas, the building housed Gaspar’s, another music venue that hosted bands like Squeeze, Big Star, and Big Black before closing in 1983.
Changing it: Mike Schuba and his brother, Chris, sunk $150,000 into refurbishing the building, but they didn’t offer live music right away. “We initially just wanted to get the doors open and create some revenue at first and see how the music thing panned out,” Mike Schuba says. Schubas served breakfast, lunch, and dinner in its back room, with bands playing occasionally. That changed when music proved more lucrative than food. “The biggest thing with the dining room was that it wasn’t visible from the street—you really couldn’t tell it was a restaurant.” Food reappeared in 1996 when the Harmony Grill opened in the adjoining space.
Staying power: Solid. There are no threats besides the maintenance required with a 105-year-old building.

Venue: Beat Kitchen
Building constructed: 1900
Years in current incarnation: 18
First show: Sgt. Bilko’s Memorial Orchestra
Previous lives: Bars under various names. In 1933, a streetcar struck and killed a track inspector for the Chicago Surface Lines (the streetcar network that predated buses) in front of the building. In the ’40s, it became the Elm Tree Tavern, which was frequently robbed—most notably by Richard Carpenter, a notorious tavern bandit who worked the North and Northwest Sides. In the mid-’50s, he robbed at least 70 establishments. It eventually took 30 police squads to catch Carpenter, in the largest manhunt in city history (at the time). Eventually, the bar became Sam’s Saloon, named after owner Sam Navarro, a former prizefighter and jazz musician. Sam’s Saloon became a jazz venue, Woody’s Tavern, in the ’80s.
Changing it: Beat Kitchen founders Alan Baer and Jay Kent originally owned a popular, long-running music club called Orphans (located at 2462 N. Lincoln Ave., now The Gin Mill), until a deteriorating relationship with their landlord forced them to close the club in April 1990. Five months later, Beat Kitchen opened.
Staying power: Stable. House Call Entertainment, which also runs Subterranean, bought the place in 2005.

Venue: Double Door
Building constructed: 1895
Years in current incarnation: 14
First show: Lloyd Cole
Previous lives: Rumors claim it served as a speakeasy during Prohibition, but Double Door’s history is pretty spotty for most of the 20th century. Although it served as a rooming house during the ’40s, it was a bar and liquor store for most of the second half of the 20th century. For part of the ’80s, it was the Main Street Bar, a rough-and-tumble country-western place that had live music on the weekends. The liquor-store area up front was called Double Door Liquors. The place’s overall sketchiness caught at least one location scout’s eye: The 1989 Patrick Swayze film Next Of Kin filmed some scenes there.
Changing it: In 1994, Metro owners Joe Shanahan and Joe Prino joined the owners of Delilah’s with the intention of creating a “mini Metro” in the rapidly gentrifying Wicker Park area. Originally, the owners planned to serve food every night of the week and restrict live music to Thursdays through Sundays, according to a Chicago Sun-Times article from 1994. The other nights of the week were reserved for “performance art, poetry, film, and theater”—because if anything will pay the bills, it’s performance art and poetry. Unsurprisingly, that didn’t last long.
Staying power: Safe until next year. In 2005, the building’s owners planned to quadruple the club’s rent, supposedly to price the Double Door out of business and bring in a retail chain. Outrage and legal action followed, but both parties worked out their differences in court that year. Double Door’s rent increased, but not by as much as the building owners wanted. Come 2009, the club will have the option to renew for five more years.

Venue: House Of Blues
Building constructed: 1965
Years in current incarnation: 12
First show: James Brown
Previous lives: The building was part of the original Marina City project, which included the two corncob towers and a 10-story office building (now the Hotel Sax). In the beginning, it was a movie theater, and in 1972, theater manager Gloria Kirkpatrick was brutally murdered in the theater’s office. She was stabbed nine times in the chest, once in the groin, and three times in the right arm with what police determined was a butcher knife. The case was never solved. The movie theater closed in 1977, but WFLD used it as a television studio until 1986. For the next decade, the deteriorating, vacant building changed hands regularly until developer John Marks and entrepreneur Isaac Tigrett introduced plans to open the House Of Blues.
Changing it: Developers spent $15 million renovating the theater for the House Of Blues. The entire project, including changing the office building into the House Of Blues Hotel (which has since become the Hotel Sax) cost $70 million.
Staying power: For $15 million, the place had better be on solid ground.