The Blues Address the Stones Could Not Resist

On your right, inside what looks like an unremarkable brick storefront, a British rock band once recorded a tribute song named simply after the building's own street address.

This is two one two zero South Michigan Avenue, home of Chess Records, where Muddy Waters and Chuck Berry cut some of the most influential recordings in American music. The sound coming out of this small studio helped reshape rock and roll before rock and roll had fully named itself. When the Rolling Stones toured the United States for the first time in nineteen sixty four, the young British musicians insisted on recording here, treating the address itself as sacred ground. Out of that session came an instrumental track they titled, simply, two one two zero South Michigan Avenue.

The reverence the Stones felt for this place sat uneasily beside how some of its own artists were treated. During the nineteen seventies, several of the blues musicians who built the label's reputation took Chess Records to court. Muddy Waters sued the company and its publishing arm over unpaid royalties and won. Willie Dixon, the songwriter and bassist behind many of the label's biggest hits, pursued a similar claim. Howlin' Wolf went further, seeking two and a half million dollars and alleging he had been defrauded of his own copyrights, a case finally settled only after his death.

Today the building houses Willie Dixon's Blues Heaven Foundation, a nonprofit his family created to support blues musicians and preserve this history, including its uncomfortable parts. The studio that gave the world so much of its blues and rock and roll vocabulary is also a reminder that the people who created that sound did not always get fairly paid for it.