That was the address of the Quiet Knight nightclub where Siegel-Schwall played many times. This was the band’s seventh record of ten, so if it seems to be uneven, I suppose they knew it and liked it that way. They seemed to have fun when they recorded this. I love I Think It Was the Wine, as in ‘It may have been the greasy pizza, but I think it was the wine.’ It’s another song that equates all wine with fortified wine and fighting. ‘I never hit anyone with a 2 X 4 before last night,’ Jim Schwall sang. ‘My daddy said a couple of beers are okay/but that wine is just no good.’ Denver must have been a special place—Bob Seger did Get Out of Denver, Canned Heat did a song that criticized the police in Denver, and this record had a song about a young woman’s leaving her parents’ house in Chicago for Denver without saying goodbye. They were the only blues band I know of who recorded some material on Deutsche Grammophon.
The record cover has a drawing of the Belmont L stop and a poem by Eddie Balchowsky, a Chicago poet, artist, composer, and certified character. His Wikipedia entry has a clunker in it, saying he went to Spain in the mid-1930s to fight for Communism. The way most people put it is that leftists of various sorts, including socialists and anarchists, fought to defend the Spanish Republic from the Nationalists.
converselyspeaking 