My Kinda Town

Chicago is.

Once a month, Tony Fitzpatrick and Kelly Hogan lunch together at Hot Doug's, which, if not the best, is certainly the most upscale (upscale being relative) of the city's famed hot-dog joints. The fare ranges from your traditional dog -- in Chicago, that means with mustard, onion, sweet-pickle relish, tomato wedges, peppers, a dash of celery salt, all topped with a pickle -- to a special game sausage (this week, it's elk). On Fridays and Saturdays, you can get fries cooked in duck fat.

Tony, an old friend, is an actor, raconteur, deejay, and artist. His boisterous collages, some of which are in the Art Institute's collection, are on exhibit through July -- "The Wonder: Portraits of a Remembered City," the show is titled -- at the city's Cultural Center. In these collages, Chicago's lives, moods, and politics collide; he once told me, "This place gets in your bones and ruins you for anywhere else."

Over the years, he has also told me about Hogan, a singer whose voice, Tony says, "makes me see colors." So the three of us spent a lunch hour at Hot Doug's talking music, much of it about a band Hogan sings with, the Struts. It's a collection of musicians who play in at least 20 other bands, including Poi Dog Pondering (alternative, with touches of Polynesian and house) and Wilco (indie rock/alt-country). That's Chicago, a city that pushes boundaries, a city where genres hold little sway. A punk rocker from Wales once declared that he avoided L.A., because there they talked about whom they were going to play with; and he avoided New York, because there they talked about the projects they were going to do. In Chicago, he said, they come to work -- without regard for what others might think.

One recent evening, Hogan met me at the Hideout, where she bartended for more than nine years and still sometimes performs. It's hidden in a small industrial corner on the north side, so when Hogan gave me directions, she instructed me to go over the river, past the railroad tracks, across the street from the city's fleet of garbage trucks. If you get to the old U.S. Steel plant, you've gone too far. She paused. "I guess it's a good place to bump somebody off," she laughed.

The Hideout is a wood-framed house built at the turn of the last century, probably by squatters, when the neighborhood was mostly working-class Irish. After prohibition, the downstairs became a drinking hole for steelworkers. In 1996, it was purchased by four partners who did little to change the look -- photos of the original owners, Angelo and Phil, still hang over the bar -- but brought in musicians. The thinking was that musicians could experiment here, and they have; on any given night you could stumble upon a jazz quartet or a rock band or a folk singer. Neko Case played the Hideout before winning wide acclaim. Fiddler/violinist Andrew Bird worked his way from swing to indie rock here. And when the Frames passed through town, Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová used the place to test some songs they were writing for a little movie called Once -- one, "Falling Slowly," won Best Song at this year's Oscars.

One of the Hideout's owners, Tim Tuten, told me, "We're conscious of what made Chicago great. We have a historical reputation to uphold. This is the city of Sam Cooke, Curtis Mayfield, Lou Rawls. It's from the ground up." It was past midnight, and Tuten, who speaks with the drive of a Hendrix guitar riff, expounded on the 1893 Columbia Exposition (The Devil in the White City made everyone feel like an expert on it) and the time Wilco played at one of their block parties (kick-ass block parties being a city tradition) and how he recently discovered that in the 1960s Nelson Algren would down a beer at the Hideout. On the drive home, I listened to a CD Hogan had burned for me. She's singing covers -- from Allen Toussaint to the Violent Femmes. Her voice, rich and eclectic as the city's neighborhoods, wanders throughout an exhilarating range. As Tony Fitzpatrick once told me of Chicago, "It's a place that allows you to run."