Growing up in Chatham, Gina Barge often listened to her father–saxophonist Gene “Daddy G” Barge–reminisce about his days at Chess Records in the 1960s. There, he produced and performed with the Dells, Fontella Bass, and Muddy Waters, including on the latter’s notorious Electric Mud, the psychedelic 1968 record that enraged blues purists. Gene often played his daughter records and showed her pictures of his bandmates. But because he’d spent the bulk of his time at Chess before Gina was born, she couldn’t really connect to the photos. “To me,” she says, “they were just men with Afros.”
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Though Gene encouraged her to take piano lessons and brought her to London when he toured with the Rolling Stones in 1982, she never pursued a career in music. Instead, after getting a media communications degree at DePaul, she worked as a management consultant for ten years. Currently she’s a freelance writer and has penned skits for five Second City shows, including last year’s NomMo Remote Control. She also writes an online column about relationships called “The G-Spot” (www.ginabarge.com), and earlier this year self-published a collection of articles called In Search of the G-Spot and Other Adventures in Dating.
As part of the job, Barge helped set up a shoot at Eddy “the Chief” Clearwater’s recently shuttered Reservation Blues in Wicker Park. There she oversaw a roundtable discussion on the old days at Chess that included her father, Marshall Chess (son of company cofounder Leonard Chess), bassist Louis Satterfield, guitarist Pete Cosey, drummer Morris Jennings, and guitarist Phil Upchurch as well as Chuck D and Common. The former Chess hands recalled Satterfield’s penchant for playing future Earth, Wind & Fire founder Maurice White’s drums during session breaks, and how Upchurch often brought caged boa constrictors and mice to the studio. Chuck D talked about how Electric Mud inspired him.
