Nights at the Chez

I knew David Roth had a Chicago connection before I started preparing for his return to Wesley's Place. I didn't know quite what that meant until I asked him about growing up here.

David's father was the maître d' at the Chez Paree, the legendary Chicago nightclub that once stood near Water Tower Place. His mother was a professional big-band singer. David and his sister were children in a world filled with performers whose names would eventually become part of American music history. Frank Sinatra played there. So did Nat King Cole, Danny Kaye and a long list of others.

I wondered what a childhood spent around that world taught him about performing.

His first answer surprised me. It made him a night owl.

David remembers the late nights, the colors, the sounds and what he calls the "non-conventionality of it all." Even as a child, he could feel the fun and merriment of those clubs. He also understands now that it wasn't necessarily an ideal environment for young children and that there were downsides to it. Looking back, though, he sees something else in what was happening around him.

"We were surrounded with people in search of joy and connection."

David told me that the same thing holds true for him today.

I think there is a fairly direct line between that childhood and the life he eventually chose, although it took him a while to find it.

David spent the 1980s in New York City, part of a remarkable community of young songwriters that included Suzanne Vega, Shawn Colvin, Lucy Kaplansky and John Gorka. None of them knew what their careers would become. David remembers moving from gigs to part-time jobs to songwriting groups, then returning to his fifth-floor walk-up in Chelsea and working on his mother's manual Royal typewriter late into the night.

The night owl from the Chez Paree was still there.

He was also beginning to write very different songs.

David told me that he had spent his earlier years writing songs he thought were clever and amusing. Looking back, he doesn't have a particularly high opinion of them. More importantly, he realized that he had been hiding behind his guitar.

During his years in New York, he began dealing with parts of his childhood and the experience of growing up with a single parent who was struggling. As he did that work, something changed in his songwriting. He became less concerned about what others thought of what he wrote and more interested in expressing himself honestly.

Then something unexpected happened.

Listeners began coming up to him after concerts and telling him that he had somehow written about their lives.

That was when David discovered that writing something deeply personal didn't make a song narrower. It could make the song universal.

Years later, those two parts of his life, Chicago and the songwriter he had become, came together in a song called Nights at the Chez.

In the early 1990s, Christine Lavin (yes, Jim Lavin's sister, IYKYK) invited David and a group of songwriters to Martha's Vineyard for a retreat and a couple of concerts. Shel Silverstein happened to be in the audience when David performed Nights at the Chez.

David had grown up with Silverstein's work. He knew songs including A Boy Named Sue, and books including Where the Sidewalk Ends and The Missing Piece had meant something to him. (I am also a big Shel fan and sing several of his songs including Living Legend and Tequila Sheila.)

Nights at the Chez was David's own story. It included Sinatra, Nat King Cole and Danny Kaye, but it wasn't really a song about celebrities. It was also about a young family trying to find its way through a changing world.

After David finished, Shel Silverstein came over to tell him how much he liked the song and invited him to his place for coffee the following morning.

David's description of his reaction was considerably less elaborate.

"Kinda blew my mind."

I understand why.

There is something wonderful about the path that song traveled. A little boy absorbed the sights and sounds of a Chicago nightclub without knowing what any of it would mean. Years later, after he had learned to stop hiding behind his guitar, he turned those memories into a song. Then one of the writers he had admired since childhood was sitting in the audience listening to it.

David has now been a full-time musician for 38 years. He has lived far from Chicago for much of that time, but Chicago never really left the story.

When he returns to Wesley's Place on September 18, we'll get to hear what happened next.

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