DUAL-THREAT ARTIST | Fascination with light and color is reflected in the perspective she brings to her music and paintings
The colors of the blues are not lost on Liz Mandeville. Her latest record is called "Red Top" (Earwig), her band is the Blue Points. Mandeville is red-haired and blue-eyed, and when she describes herself as the last of the red hot mamas, you believe her.
The guitarist-vocalist arrived in Chicago in 1979 from Oshkosh, Wis., to study theater at DePaul University.
(Jean Lachat/Sun-Times)
LIZ MANDEVILLE CD RELEASE PARTY
When: 9 p.m. Saturday
Where: Tencat Productions, 1316 Sherman, Evanston (enter through alley)
Admission: $10 donation suggested
Phone: (847) 475-3200
She was green.
Besides writing original songs ("Scratch the Kitty," "Guilty of Rockin' All Night"), Mandeville has articulated her life in the blues through acrylic-on-canvas paintings. She paints steamy Delta juke joints and a depiction of her mentor, Chicago bassist Aron Burton, who appears under noble shading. There's a Near North cathouse and a Mexican cantina where the talk is short and the nights are long -- like a good Chicago blues club. The paintings reveal a restless heart of gold.
The first career retrospective of Mandeville's artwork goes up in conjunction with a "Red Top" CD release party Saturday at Tencat Productions fabric and print-stitching studio in Evanston. Mandeville has been painting since 1983. There will be 48 pieces on display, and they sell between $500 and $4,000. A portion of her art sales will be donated to the Children's Place Association, which assists youth and families confronted by HIV/AIDS.
Her paintings are generally made from a composite of events.
"I've spent 30 years in bars," she said during an interview at the studio. "In the 1980s I spent four or five nights a week in a bar. I was either working, sitting in, looking for potential band members or watching people I admire to try and pick up tricks. I would see Otis Clay. Koko Taylor. Son Seals. I would see who had the most prowess. Sexual or otherwise."
One particularly evocative painting is titled "No Credit."
"I couldn't get arrested in Chicago in the 1980s," Mandeville said. "Muddy Waters was still playing. Who was going to hire some freckle-faced 18-year-old from Wisconsin? I made this painting loosely based on B.L.U.E.S. on Halsted."
She looked at the painting that leaned against a studio column. Her stage is packed. A male bartender is ready to cash in near a vintage register. Five people are squeezed together on barstools like guitar picks. A band is crowded into the background. There's no room for Mandeville. A small sign hangs above the harp player. It says, "No Credit."
Mandeville took matters into her own hands. She booked her band the Supernaturals at heavy metal bars. They played the now-defunct Iron Rail. For the first three years of her Chicago career, Mandeville played the bucket-of-blood Deadwood Dave's Wild West Saloon. She knew nearly 120 cover songs ranging from James Brown to Etta James. "But I didn't know how to make a deal," she said. "Like, 'You can play for the door, but the first $50 goes to the sound man. I learned on my own."
Mandeville also held day gigs. In the early 1980s she worked the phones for the National Organization for Women in the Loop. She also took private voice lessons at the Fine Arts Building. During a two-hour break between her lessons and her shift at NOW, Mandeville wandered off to the Art Institute of Chicago.
"I'd sit in one of the galleries and wait for docents to walk through with a group," Mandeville recalled. "Each docent had a different story to tell about a series of paintings. This was how I learned about the Monet haystack series. His fascination was with how light interacted with color. That began my fascination with light and color. I learned each painting is a comment on a situation and emotion. That same feeling can be translated to music.
"Each song is a snapshot. My songs and paintings are very similar in that way. When I write a song, I'm looking at how the light hit this subject at this one time. Because if you were sitting in a different part of the room or in a different part of that relationship, you might view that in a whole different manner."
That's how her 2005 tune "He Left It in His Other Pants" was a winner in the USA Songwriting competition.
Earwig Records founder and owner Michael Frank discovered Mandeville in 1994 when she was woodshedding with Burton.
"My label had a lot of old folks and was Afrocentric [Honeyboy Edwards, Jim Brewer] in approach," Frank said. "I liked her voice, and she was a great performer. When I did 'Aron Burton Live' [in 1995], I had her as a guest. It was my way to check her out. She wanted to do blues covers for her first album, and she does great covers. But she had so many songs I loved that she wrote. They're a variety of moods, and she tells great stories. I relate to them on a personal level, which is what a good song should do. She wound up being the first female artist and white artist that I released."
Mandeville holds a music degree from Columbia College in Chicago. She is a self-taught artist, learning broad strokes from her father, Robert, who painted under the name Winston Krebs. He also was art director for Country Beautiful magazine. The family lived in a fake red brick bungalow on a two-lane highway in Milwaukee.
"All our neighbors worked at [manufacturing plants] Allis-Chalmers, Allen-Bradley or the Schlitz Brewing Co.," she said. "My dad was in the basement making paintings, going to the Art Institute on the GI Bill after Korea. My mom [Virginia] loved the symphony and theater. She taught college teachers to teach in Stevens Point."
Her mother died in 2001, her father the next year.
Mandeville has been to the Louvre in Paris eight times. Earlier this year she appeared in Riga, Latvia, and had an extra day in the city before she was to head home. She was assigned a young chaperone to take her around. "They expected me to say, 'Let's go play pool, let's go get drunk.' I asked, 'Where's your national museum, and who is the big artist here? Let's go look at paintings.' This kid had never been to the gallery before. And it was filled with stuff."
Stuff not unlike Mandeville's repertoire, an evolving world of images on a blue canvas.
The Liz Mandeville art opening and CD release party launches a year's worth of activities commemorating the 30th anniversary of Earwig Records. Her album "Red Top" is Mandeville's fourth project for the Chicago-based label, which also includes historic recordings of Cincinnati's H-Bomb Ferguson, Louisiana Red and David "Honeyboy" Edwards.
Earwig's depth in recording contemporary blues is only surpassed by Bob Koester's Delmark Records.
At its first session in November 1978, Earwig founder Michael Frank recorded the Jelly Roll Kings (Big Jack Johnson, Frank Frost, Sam Carr) in Memphis, Tenn. "Their music was so different from Chicago blues, it haunted me," Frank said. "Little bit of country, little bit of soul, some rhythm and blues. A lot of blues. ... I didn't leave there thinking I would start a record label."
Frank's background is as eclectic as his label. After coming to Chicago in 1972 from his native Pittsburgh, Frank was a social worker who also worked part time at the Jazz Record Mart. Koester's store was a training ground for today's Chicago blues labels. Alligator's Bruce Iglauer worked there, as did Bruce Kaplan, the late founder of Flying Fish Records, and Blind Pig co-owner Jerry DelGiudice.
"All of us who worked for Bob and who started labels will tell you the same thing," Frank said. "He'd say, 'One record doesn't make a catalog. You have to have two.' " So Frank next recorded a supersession of Edwards, Sunnyland Slim on piano, Floyd Jones on vocals, Big Walter Horton on harmonica and Kansas City Red on drums.
Frank's sister helped name the label after she saw a creepy earwig insect in a "Night Gallery" episode. "The earwig crawled into this guy's ear and laid eggs on the way through," Frank said. "I liked the symbolism. That's what the blues did to me."
Frank, 59, has a degree in sociology from Lehigh University and a master's in social work from George Williams College. His late father, Morton Frank, was publisher of Family Weekly magazine. His mother, Agnes Kinard, 94, is a Pittsburgh area historian who also worked in real estate.
Frank worked in child welfare for 25 years, first at the Lawrence Hall School for Boys. In the '80s, he was a child abuse investigator for the State of Illinois.
Besides running Earwig, Frank is harmonica accompanist, manager and booking agent for the 93-year-old Edwards. Frank is co-author of Edwards' oral history The World Don't Owe Me Nothing (1997).
"When Honeyboy hit 89, I had to choose between going on a tour of Germany with him or staying with the agency I was with at the time, which was struggling," Frank said. "I decided these could be the best years of my life. Honeyboy was more and more in demand. So I put my career in child welfare on hiatus. I still have my clinical license."