Pioneers of the Blues Revival

Ray Flerlage

Ray Flerlage Interview First of all, Ray, how do I correctly pronounce your last name? Well, it’s up for grabs in our family. But we say Fler-laydge. We used to say Fler-ledge, and then every time I was on radio for about fifteen years, every announcer would say Flerlaydge . And my present wife liked Fler-laydge better than Fler-ledge, so we compromised and now it’s Fler-laydge. [chuckles] With me is Ray Flerlage, and Ray has a brand-new book. It’s mostly photographs, but there’s also some light text. It’s called Chicago Blues as Seen from the Inside. Ray, if people dig into this and read just the first opening pages, the thing that I recall was that you were going to do this many years ago. When were you going to do this originally? Originally we were talking about this in 1965. It was a very specific project to do a book on Chicago blues. The people involved in it were people you would have heard of: Mike Bloomfield , Pete Welding, and a guy named Willie Hopkins , who was the editor then, the art editor, of Chicago Scene magazine, one of my best outlets for photographs until it folded. Everything that I was selling to folded, you know, during that period. But in any event, we won some prizes from—I forget—one of the local printers. And design prizes for a cover in which some of my minimalist-type shots of Pete Seeger were featured . And so Willie and Mike and Pete Welding and I would huddle together and had very definite plans about a book on Chicago blues, and we all had the wherewithal to do it. They finally decided to leave Mike Bloomfield out of it, because he was so enthusiastic that his enthusiasm would bubble over and lead us away from reality. So as it turned out, Pete Welding had a chance to go to the coast and work on his doctorate in folk music. He left Chicago. Mike Bloomfield had a chance to work Ray Flerlage. Photo James Fraher. r ay flerl age 189 with Bob Dylan and later with Paul Butterfield and all these people where he won his great fame and fortune and killed himself with dope. And Willie Hopkins had a chance to become art editor of Look magazine. So they all skipped Chicago, and I was sitting here with plans for a book and nobody to plan it with. So I didn’t really do anything about it except dream for a great many years. And then I started to get calls from various people. And a man named Charles K. Cowdery called me and said he’d seen some of my stuff when he was working with one of the companies that used my things in advertising. And he liked them and was thinking of doing a book himself, and he’d like for me to work with him. Well, you know, I’m a little tired, you know, not too ambitious at this point. And I wouldn’t want to get involved in a lot of stuff for no rewards. So we talked and talked and talked. And finally he gets a publisher who would come up with printing costs and he leaned on me real hard—and Charles is pretty good at leaning on people hard. And we ended up doing a book called Blues Legends. And so people started to see some of the things, and I started to get more calls and more interest in my work. And then in 1995 a film editor saw some of my stuff when she was working on Eric Clapton: Nothing but the Blues with Martin Scorsese. She saw some of the things that I’d done at the Trianon Ballroom with Bobby Bland and with Jackie Wilson. And the Trianon Ballroom was a fascinating vast expanse, and the thing that caught her attention was the . . . were the scenes with heavy smoke and the spotlights cutting through the smoke. A very dramatic effect. She said, “I’ve never seen anything like it before.” And she said, “It opened a whole new world to me.” And I thought it was the usual flattery of people, you know, like to make you feel good. But she kept calling. And over the next five years she kept calling. And she finally came to Chicago with half a ton of gear that she carried in...