All hail the Pope of Wicker Park

Thax waxes poetic for indie rock bands

"To me, whether a band is good or sucks is a matter of personal taste. So it's kind of a moral issue not to set myself up in that role." Thax Douglas, The Pope of Wicker Park

There are about 2,000 crazies wearing assorted subversive T-shirts assembled on Wabansia Avenue for the Hideout's annual, end-of-summer cavalcade of Chicago indie rock bands. If they're thinking about their lousy day jobs, nobody shows it.

The 4 o'clock sun shoots down the canyon of industrial warehouses and rows of city Streets and San trucks like a shotgun. If the sun were a bullet, it would hit the City of Chicago's Department of Fleet Management. Behind the stage, the Pope of Wicker Park is scribbling abstract blessings into a red spiral notebook, oblivious to the deadline of the sound check.

"You know," someone says to the large, bearded man in a crinkled baseball cap, deep in concentration. "You ought to get one of those hats like the pope wears."

Eleventh Dream Day, another one of Chicago's many under appreciated rock bands that pre-dates the grunge movement, picks up its instruments. Waiting patiently through the hyped-up band intros, the Pope of Wicker Park strolls shyly to the edge of the stage. Hunched over, he begins his blessing of the mic:

the desert

uses its enormous

stores of sand to

build itself into a

castle ­ -- the castle

itself will be a resource

some day, but the desert

can't imagine

for what, having

used its excess

sand for building.

The crowd roars its approval. The mic is blessed. The show goes on.

Despite a teenage "cry for attention" suicide attempt during "The MaryTyler Moore Show" in the 1970s, Thax Douglas, the Pope of Wicker Park, has been more than happy to share the spotlight, and, more happily, let it shine on others. In fact, Douglas has been turning the indie rock world on with his smile for over a decade.

With a published book of poems, "Tragic Faggot Syndrome," a CD of spoken word stylings and the subject of an upcoming film documentary, Douglas has left his blessings on all the undiscovered talent and misfits that have crossed his path. With his belief that anybody can shine on stage with a little blessing and encouragement, Douglas has found himself on the receiving end of respect, reverence and awe by the city's adoring music underground. What more could any pope ask for?

"There's a hiphop term called 'blessing the mic.' I try not to exploit the fact that some bands consider it a rite of passage for me to write a poem for them," Douglas says, eating pie and killing time at the Hollywood Grill on North and Ashland, before heading off to see the Brian Jonestown Massacre at the Metro. "I think well of myself, but I just don't like the idea of being a tastemaker. To me, whether a band is good or sucks is a matter of personal taste. So it's kind of a moral issue not to set myself up in that role."

For Douglas, who's 47, "thinking well of himself" has been a hard-fought battle. An only child, Douglas grew up a lonely, smart kid in Woodridge, one of the many isolated cornfield subdivisions that dotted Chicago's suburban landscape during the 1950s and 1960s, where he skipped several grades of elementary school.

"In 1961, it was rural," Douglas says. "I could literally walk to Downers Grove through fields. To me, the suburbs are really lonely, there are only houses and cars and not many places where people can go and gather. I wasn't able to connect with other kids in any serious way. It was devastating being two years younger than my classmates. I wish I had been one of those smart kids that went into the city."

At age 10, Douglas discovered classical music, particularly the avant-garde composers of the 20th century. "I kind of dropped out early. I only listened to classical music for seven years, so I retreated into that," he says. "I had a collection of45s, like the Beatles. That was my way of retreating from the world."

Playing the role of Murray the cop in his high school's production of"The Odd Couple," was about the only highlight of his years at Downers Grove South High School. He was known more for hanging out at the school's jazz band rehearsals, where he'd imagine he was watching one of his own compositions that mimicked a true-to-life rehearsal, complete with false starts and dropped sheets of music.

"Of course, all these people thought I was really into the jazz band, but I never went to any of the concerts, only the rehearsals," he laughs. "It was one of those artistic conceits inspired by the avant-garde composers."

It was during his first stint in college where the "smart kid" started succumbing to a then, undiagnosed condition known as "cerebral allergies" that led to Douglas's first and only suicide attempt during an episode of"The Mary Tyler Moore Show" on Oct. 26, 1974.

"Even though my parents didn't have any money, they were willing to send me to Centenary College in Shreveport, La.," he explains. "That's where it all started. I was allergic to 80 percent of all foods. All I did was listen to classical records for half a year. I never went to class. I kind of ground to a halt and then that's where I did the suicide attempt. I'd like to find out which episode of 'Mary Tyler Moore' that it was during. I can probably find it on the 'net."

In 1988, Douglas finally broke free of the suburbs where he had discovered the Top 40 while working as a newspaper distributor, dropping off bundles of papers at news carriers' homes. After moving to the city, he began going to performance art shows at the fabled Lower Links, then Links Hall. When Lower Links closed, he moved on to Lincoln Park's Lounge Ax, another legendary club that has since been shuttered. There, he began staging a variety show called "Thax After Dark," that featured a mishmash of angry standup comics, Rod McKuen crooners, Funk-Accordion acts, contortionists, bitter divorcees, and the occasional Loretta Lynn drag acts. Douglas, who emceed the shows, would keep the variety show moving and breakup the controlled chaos with his poetry.

"The big thing then was variety shows. That's how I got started," Douglas says. "People would do weird stuff, poets, local eccentrics who'd get up and babble for 14 minutes. I started doing my band poems the summer of 1997. A band would always be the last act and I started doing it as a novelty and that's the way it stayed. Gradually, I found out it suited my aesthetic needs as a poet."

Today, Douglas has written about 1,200 band poems that he's read blessing the mic for acts at the Hideout and Empty Bottle in Wicker Park, which serve as his main bases of operation, not counting the ones he lost prior to 2001 before he started recording them in spiral notebooks.

"I really love 20th century Russian poetry and writing band poems is a good way to write in that style," Douglas says. "I knew somebody who always wrote poems about her garden, so a poem would be called 'Morning, March 14.' This is the same thing, except my garden is bands instead of flowers. I write them spontaneously and thenI read them from paper. I like the instant gratification of writing a poem and reading it before an audience. I really prefer it this way than to submitting a poem to a publisher."

Chicago-based Red Walls, one of the country's hottest indie rock bands, was so grateful to Douglas that they recently flew him and recovering band groupie Cynthia Plaster Caster, known for her plaster casts of famous rock stars' male anatomy, to Hollywood to be in one of its music videos.

"It was really glamorous to be flown out on Southwest Airlines and hang out in L.A. for a few days. Unfortunately, the video wasn't any good because the director was a hack. It's just [Red Walls] doing their song and me and Cynthia and all these extras bobbing our heads," he laughs. "But I'm always grateful to Red Walls. I haven't worked a regular job for eight years. People say it's a real accomplishment but I don't feel that way because I'm so poor. Fortunately, my rent's real cheap."

Although various small, indie publishers have expressed interest in publishing a book of his band poems, the offers have yet to pan out. Douglas says he winces when he reads his first collection of poetry, "TragicFaggot Syndrome." He wishes he had published a book of his band poems instead of the self-confessional stuff that dwells on the low points of his life, circa 1987 to 1991, when cerebral allergies often forced him to lie down on the floors of L cars with migraines.

"That's so not me anymore, I wince when I read it now. People come up to me and say, 'were you just trying to be offensive,'" Douglas says. "I'm a lot happier now and less insecure and self-hating. I worked hard during the '90s to make myself a more emotionally secure person. I've felt very lonely most of my life and if you don't mind my saying so, now that I'm a celebrity in Chicago, people come up to me all the time."

For more information about Thax Douglas, visit www.thaxdouglas.com.

The story above appeared in Pioneer Press' Wicker Park Booster, Sept. 21, 2005.