TCD1972 Special Edition: Jim Post
September 25, 2022
“In time we will all claim Jim Post.”
That’s Bruce Vilanch’s timeless lede to his mini-profile of acclaimed folk singer Jim Post for Chicago Today on September 22, 1972, as Post settled in for two weeks at the Earl of Old Town.
Fifty years later, Jim Post died at 82 on Sept. 14 in his adopted home of Galena. Chicagoans learned about his death in sweeping tributes by Rick Kogan in the Tribune and Maureen O’Donnell in the Sun-Times. Jim Post’s voice was so astounding, we learn from Kogan, that he enthralled Pavarotti.
O’Donnell’s piece ends with a look at the song “Three Soft Touches,” which Post wrote about his grandparents’ courtship and his grandfather’s death, including the full lyrics. It’s the song Post was listening to when he died, she writes. You’d be a stone-cold sociopath if you don’t get teary when you read the lyrics or listen to the song.
I’d planned to cover the coverage of Jim Post’s two-week stand at the Earl in next year’s trip through 1972, having gone long enough on this week’s TCD1972. But this calls for a special edition. Read Rick Kogan’s and Maureen O’Donnell’s articles for a true overview of Jim Post’s life and talent. Here you’ll see how Post affected three Chicago writers in his prime, and how Post described himself and his work at that time.
“He’s as much a part of the Chicago landscape as John Prine or Steve Goodman or Bonnie Koloc or any of the other superfolk we make a home for,” Bruce Vilanch told 1972 readers.
By then, Texas native Jim Post had left Chicago, spent months camping in Colorado and settled in San Francisco, “but that doesn’t mean he’s not one of us,” Vilanch insisted. “He has the look and the sound of a really friendly hill rat after his first ride on the L. Frazzled, but clings to his hopes.”
“There’s a chance Jim Post will be considered part of the Great Chicago Folk Revival,” wrote Mike Gormley in the Sun-Times on Sept. 20. “Joining the ranks of Prine-Goodman-Koloc, etc., isn’t bad and, although he lives in California now, is legitimate in the case of Post.”
“I spent 10 years in Chicago,” Post told Gormley. “I still love the city because of the activity, but I’d only want to live here a couple of months at a time….I love wandering.”
Post was “deeply involved in protest music and the events surrounding the [1968] Democratic convention upset him. He left Chicago immediately afterwards for the Rockies,” wrote Les Bridges in the Tribune on Sept. 15, adding these lyrics from “Colorado Exile”:
I’m gonna go live by a river until my soul is cleansed I'm gonna live by a river, let life walk right in.
Post met the Trib's Bridges in Old Town. "Now I know I'm back in Chicago," he said at one point, looking out the window at the rotating blue lights on two Chicago police cars. "It's good to see a real bust again."
Post was welcomed back to Chicago in 1972 as a neighbor, wrote David Witz in the Daily News on Sept. 18, which was only right due to his “contributions to the local music scene, through his early work with ex-wife Kathy in Friend and Lover, to his days at the Old Town School of Fold Music”.
Gormley sat with Post at the Earl’s bar, “the sound of an afternoon baseball game blasting”. Post is a “folkie,” wrote Gormley, but “a label such as folkie should describe, not limit, an artist. Post is more comfortable at this time in that field, but it needn’t stay that way.”
“I do what excites me now,” said Post. “If I found an excellent jazz group that needed a singer, I’d sing jazz for six months….I was born with a range of 3 1/2 octaves, and I can move my voice. I love my voice, love to work with it. I enjoy its versatility. Therefore, you don’t find me packaging myself as Jimmy Blues or Jimmy Country. It would be. a lot easier to do that, but I don’t.”
“Jim’s throat is his strongest mark,” wrote Witz. “Just when you think his quicksilver voice can’t go any higher, he zooms up about 17 octaves and hits a note so high, clean and pure that ringsiders faint.”
“With Post, every song becomes a tour-de-force,” Witz added. “His version of the ‘Midnight Special,’ with Bo Diddley guitar chugging under his jetstream vocal, and his big number, ‘Colorado Exile,’ with its hightail ending, are just amazing.”
Jim Post, Vilanch announced, “is getting ready to become one of the most entertaining, showiest performers in the folk field.”
“I spent three months putting my first album together,” Post told Vilanch, speaking of “Colorado Exile.” “We spent hours, I mean hours, in the studio to get just the right sound and just the right balance you know and nobody would play it. Nobody. Then I changed my whole way of living. The new album [“Slow to 20”]. we recorded nonstop in 10 hours straight. It’s rough and it’s full of good, honest mistakes, but it’s real and it’s music, not studio….we just went in there and DID IT.”
That ten hours producing “Slow to 20” was spent with local Chicago blues guitarist Jimmy Schwall, Post told Les Bridges. “Jimmy and I really cooked thru it. To get that 3 a.m. Chicago feel on one cut, I had to get Schwall drunk by 10 a.m.”
That same vibe “is exactly what happens every night at the Earl,” Vilanch concluded. “Jim gets up there and just does it. He makes up songs as the mood strikes him. He scares away drunks by arguing politics with them. In rhyme.”
“In between, there are the songs. Lovely ones, talking of life on the road and the joy of good friends. Jim’s own growing band of them, led by John Prine and Bette Midler and Liz Danzing, mother hen to all young folkies, sail along on the gentle waves.”
Checking for Jim Post on YouTube, I discovered to my amazement that Howie Samuelson and the Underground News crew filmed an evening of Jim Post at the Earl of Old Town during this two-week 1972 stand—on a night when Post was joined by Rita Coolidge and Steve Goodman!
By the way, Chicago had a whole string of local talkshows in 1972, with Kup’s show just the tip of the talk iceberg. As performers and authors came through town, they stopped at a number of local studios to chat, along with our town’s own newsmakers, intellectuals and celebrities. This is all to set up our last graphic, a regular item in the Tribune listing notable talk shows from network shows to locals.
Jim Post appeared on Channel 44’s “Underground” hosted by Chuck Collins.
I know you wish you could see that episode of Dick Cavett, too.
Did you dig spending time in 1972? If you came to THIS CRAZY DAY IN 1972 from social media, you may not know it’s part of the novel being serialized here, one chapter per month: “Roseland, Chicago: 1972” —FREE. It’s the story of Steve Bertolucci, 10-year-old Roselander in 1972, and what becomes of him. Check it out here.
Great stuff on Post!
WFLD was/is Channel 32. 44 was WSNS. Just sayin'.