Kenning and Arvey: Takin’ it to the Streets

Chicago is a place of paradox: a Midwestern city without a corn-field, a working- class town with one of the world’s greatest research universities, a symbol of gangland corruption and the home of social work pioneer Jane Addams. The city that works, works in strange ways: a bluesman should not expect a straight-forward relationship with his bittersweet home. After all, years before Chicago electrified the delta and brought the blues to the world, it let one of the music’s earliest and most famous practitioners, Blind Lemon Jefferson, freeze to death in a South-Side alley, penniless.

The ambiguity continues with Grant Park’s Blues-Fest. Of course, the event itself is quite laudable, and although there have been years when the Fest has been criticized for lacking both big names and local artists, the city’s seventeen-year tradition is nevertheless a nice shift from the crass commercialism of the summer’s other main event, The Taste of Chicago. The six stages’ concurrent performances offer a variety of blues styles and give many artists--from oft-forgotten elder statesmen like Homesick James and Honeyboy Edwards to up-and-coming musicians like Fruitland Jackson and Eric Noden-- exposure they may be hard-pressed to find elsewhere.

Two local musicians who have benefited from such exposure are Kraig Kenning and Steve Arvey, but not by doing it the way most of the performers have. While both have played the fest in the official stage setting, they’ve made their mark doing marathon Fest-long sets next to the Buckingham Fountain as street performers.

Kenning and Arvey are both accomplished musicians whom the city should be proud to have playing it’s streets. Arvey is a Chicago blues-scene veteran who got his start playing bass for Bo Diddley and whose former band, The West Side Heat, took time away from their own gigs to back up such luminaries as Hubert Sumlin and Screamin’ Jay Hawkins before reaching their summit with a performance at 1990’s Blues-Fest on the Crossroads stage; Kenning is an accomplished slide guitar player, the winner of National Guitar Company’s 1st Annual National Slide Guitar Festival.

“Steve and I started playing the Fest together about ten years ago,” Kenning says. “It was really laid back, we’d just go out and play next to the Buckingham Fountain, with me on slide and Steve finger-picking. We’d be there from morning ‘til night, taking turns going to get food and drinks.”

“Every year it got to be more and more of a hassle,” Kenning relates. “Now, instead of being able to go and play with a city permit, you need to get a separate permit for the fest. Then the fest directors point you to one of the few spots were you’re allowed to play. You can’t be there too long. The city tells you where to go and they tell you when to leave.”

Barry Dolins, Blues-Fest Coordinator explains it this way: “I understand that busking and street-performing is a substantial part of the blues tradition. The policy is in effect to both assure safety for the crowd at the fest and to create a fair environment for all the street-musicians by limiting the performance time of each player.”

“They’re very good in the way they phrase it--very political,” Kenning says. “They say that by telling the musicians where to play and making them move around, they give more performers access to the crowd. But that law came from nowhere. We never had a problem with any of that. I never heard anyone have a problem with that. It’s the way street music works. There was never a problem with people finding a place to play.”

Arvey too is troubled by the city’s policy. “Last year we went to set up in the place that we always set up at. The security guys come up and basically tell us: ‘We’re sorry, but you’re going to have to keep moving from spot to spot, to make it fair to all the musicians.’ I could see that in a way, that’s a kind of a nice democratic thing. Maybe that’ll give different people a better chance to be heard. Still, there ought to be some kind of criteria. I mean, there’s guys there who aren’t even playing blues--and it was hard for us to move, we had a lot of people around us. The people liked what we were doing.”

“It seemed like every year they come up with some new reason to kick us out,” Kenning says. “They’ve said the generators we used for our equipment were fire hazards. But there were beer-trucks right next to us, using pretty much the same generators.” Other years Kenning and Arvey have been told they’re playing was too loud for regulations. “But look at Petrillo Bandshell,” Arvey says, “they’ve got that cranked really high--it’s not like we’re bringing noise to a quiet area.”

Avery thinks a lot of the resistance from the city has to do with the outsider status of their performance. “The special events people spend the a long time planning the festival and each time it’s like, “Here’s Kraig and Steve, ruining our party.’ They don’t look at us as an official part of the festival.”

“Of course there have been times we’ve played with the city’s approval,” Arvey adds. “I don’t want to come off being against Chicago or Blues-Fest. This year we’re playing the Best Buy Stage, but it’s not the same thing. We’re proud to be part of the Fest, but it’s not the same as sitting there all day in the sun. When you play all day long, when you play on the streets, it’s a good thing.”

“When we first started playing there in ‘91, we didn’t even have a CD together,” Kenning says. “People would come by and hear us playing, doing those old-time blues songs, and they’d buy one of my records. Then they’d come back next year and say, ‘We really liked the album, Kraig, but we want the blues stuff, we want Kenning and Arvey.’ That’s what Pass The Hat came out of.”

Until the 1997 release of Pass The Hat, Kenning had been (and continues to) release well acclaimed singer/songwriter albums that have received airplay from the likes of WXRT, featuring both Kenning’s full band and his song-writing. After Pass The Hat, Kenning gained a reputation for himself as bluesman of a talent only hinted at by a few of the guitar centered tracks on his earlier albums. The album also helped solidify Arvey’s growing reputation, winning both critical praise and air-play on blues shows from Spain to Australia.

Both Kenning and Arvey feel Blues-Fest was as important a means of exposure as the CD itself. “I still get e-mails from guys from Germany, from all over the world, telling me they saw us playing by Buckingham Fountain, that it was their favorite part of the Fest.” Arvey says. “It was the best exposure we could get.”

But the harassment by the officials has gotten to be too much. “I told Barry Dolins I’m not going to play on the streets this year,” Arvey said.

Yet thankfully, this is not the end of Kenning and Arvey’s marathon blues. Kenning says he still might try to play a bit after doing The Best Buy Stage, and while Arvey doesn’t feel it’s worth the trouble this year, he has his aims set for the future: “What I’d like do is gather enough support from our fans by next year to get together with the city and convince them this is a good thing--or maybe get some other guys out there too. Get guys like Devil In A Woodpile. It’s not just me. I have no problem promoting other guys. I know that Eric Noden and a lot of guys like him would be great. Why not set up acoustic players all around, in places like Buckingham Fountain, where they aren’t interfering with the stage music? And it’d be free. We aren’t even charging anything. We just ask for a few donations.”

“But,” Arvey continues, “I’m not going to keep being treated like an outlaw. I want to do this the proper way. I understand crowd safety is very important. You’ve got to make spots for people to move through. You’ve got a million people coming through a day. It’s a lot of people. I understand that. I want to do it in a way that the city approves of. If they want us to move around, we can move around, I’m not going to say that we need to stay in the same spot the whole time, that everyone needs to hear me. But the city needs to learn that people want to hear street musicians at the fest. It’s what Lead Belly was doing, it’s what Blind Lemon Jefferson was doing, it’s what Robert Johnson was doing. That’s the roots of the music. When we started out there were street performers all over the place--lots more than there are now. There was this guy called Mudbone that used to come from Alabama to play the Fest. He was really good. He doesn’t come anymore. It’s not worth it for those guys anymore. They pin all that stuff on you--vagrancy, all that. It’s not worth it for them to come out. The city shouldn’t be minimally accommodating a few street-players, they should realize they’re an important part of the fest.”

Kenning broods over the issue: “Not a lot of people want to see a musician succeed. Now that we’re at a certain quality, and getting a lot people out to see us, they make it hard for us to play. It’s a real let-down. It makes you understand why so many musicians get snotty when they get popular. It’s tough to be pushed around for so long.”