You’ve probably seen Jimmy Whispers‘s street art around town. Since spring 2012 he’s been pasting up his crude and blocky cartoonlike drawings, which usually involve one or all of the following: a handgun, the Chicago Bulls logo, a pot leaf, an ice cream cone, a shark, and the phrase “Summer in Pain.” He’s also a musician, though you might not know it unless you’ve happened to see one of his shows—he hasn’t released anything, and unless you count two Chic-a-Go-Go clips, none of his lo-fi pop songs are online.
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This is how he comes to tell me the story that in late February he was assaulted by “some white kids” while walking home drunk from a friend’s place on a side street near the 14th District police station in Logan Square. He says he got jumped and kicked in the mouth; he lost one tooth, another broke in half, and a permanent implant got messed up. Shocked and numb, Jimmy holed up—he didn’t even report the attack. “I just went into work every morning and came home and drank a lot to keep myself from feeling that pain, ’cause it was, like, exposed nerves and stuff,” he says. Eventually a gig opening for Parenthetical Girls at the Empty Bottle at the end of March forced him out of the house. “I still smiled,” Jimmy says. “But yes, it was terrible.”
Shortly after the attack, Jimmy saw The Interrupters, the 2011 documentary by director Steve James and author Alex Kotlowitz that follows several of CeaseFire’s violence “interrupters” as they try to stop killings in high-risk Chicago neighborhoods. The film struck a chord with Jimmy, whose idealism had already found an outlet in his music. Since summer 2011 he’d been using his iPhone to record airy, accessible love songs animated by his life-affirming vigor and almost childlike sincerity and whimsy; he belts out his lyrics while playing an old multikeyboard Thomas Californian electric organ in his apartment.
A couple months after he saw The Interrupters, Jimmy got in touch with Cure Violence director of development Patricia Broughton to set up a benefit show. Not every request passes muster, but Broughton approved Jimmy’s—she liked the antiviolence content of his street art, and she was persuaded of his bona fides by a loving Gossip Wolf item that my colleague J.R. Nelson wrote last December. “His mission is very much in sync with our mission,” she says.
Fortunately, Jimmy’s music keeps the mood light. His songs are so jubilant and catchy that it’s easy to get swept up in the performance. When I first saw him, at the Whistler last December, I noticed Love of Everything’s Bobby Burg singing along to nearly every word. “I loved it instantly,” Burg says.
Advance Base, Plastic Crimewave Syndicate, Cool Memories, J Fernandez Fri 11/1, 10 PMHideout$10, $18 for a two-day pass21+.
Jimmy Whispers, Chandeliers, Yawn, Mines, Ono Sat 11/2, 8 PM Hideout$10, $18 for a two-day pass21+
