David Grazian remembers his years as a graduate student at the University of Chicago as “a huge grind.”
Such a grind, in fact, that Grazian was eventually driven to the blues—and Chicago’s famed blues clubs, where Grazian found he could escape, at least for a short while, from the rigors of academia.
Ironically, it was in those clubs that he also found the idea for his dissertation.
“I never intended to do research on blues clubs,” says Grazian, a Penn associate professor of sociology. “But the grad program was such a huge grind that I found myself escaping to the city to unwind. Eventually I came to realize that these clubs were great sites to observe sociology come to life, in a way that the dry esoteric reading I was doing in my studies couldn’t match.”
Grazian’s revelation paid off in a big way.
The dissertation earned him a Ph.D. and eventually turned into the book, “Blue Chicago: The Search for Authenticity in Urban Blues Clubs,” that both launched Grazian’s career and landed him a job at Penn. Now, Grazian has returned with his second book, “On The Make: The Hustle of Urban Nightlife,” in which the author and New Jersey native examines how the city’s young people navigate and experience the bars and clubs of Philadelphia.
Q. Tell me about your research interests.
A. My last two books have been about the experience of nightlife in the city, the role that urban entertainment plays in the political economy of a city, and the ways in which nightlife is illustrative of the dramatic shift in the role that cities play—from being centers of manufacturing to being centers of cultural production and tourism and entertainment.
Q. When you started work on the Chicago book, was there a model out there for you to follow?
A. There’s actually a great tradition of studying culture and entertainment in the city that dates back to the 1920s and 1930s in Chicago. That was the heydey of what is considered the Chicago school of urban sociology. During that time the Chicago faculty and grad students wrote hundreds of [texts] on the cultural underbelly of the city—the dance halls, jazz cabarets, the bohemian enclaves, the tearooms. I saw my own work as continuing that older tradition that I felt had been lost and was in need of rediscovery.
Q. How was your Chicago book received?
A. It was received very well in my field. It was received so well, in fact, that I got my job at Penn through that. It was also received very well by my faculty advisors. It was less positively received in Chicago itself. I don’t mean the University. I mean by people who were connected to the Chicago blues scene and local journalists. I think they felt as though I was an outsider trashing their city. Part of it was that it was a critical portrayal of [something] that is very dear to the public image of Chicago.
Q. Why did you decide to write “On The Make?”
A. Philadelphia had changed in a very, very short period of time into a 24/7 nightlife economy. I was very curious about that. Philadelphia is a city of neighborhoods and corner taverns and bars, but then you have Center City, which seems like an island onto itself, and very much distinct in its kind of anonymity, particularly with its highly stylized restaurants and bars and the number of transients there. I began this project as a means of trying to understand how strangers interact with each other in public, and inhabit these places, and the role that anonymity plays, and the experience one has in these places.
Q. Was your research for “On The Make” similar to what you did for “Blue Chicago?”
A. It was a lot like “Blue Chicago.” I relied on some different kinds of research methods. I did four years of intensive [study] of over 175 nightclubs in the city. I conducted interviews with key industry personalities. I also collected first-hand accounts of nights out on the town by [young people]. I collected over 800 over those and then did focus groups too. I tried to do this to get as natural and impressionistic feel as I could in a systematic way of how people experience the city in very private ways.
Q. The book was only recently released. How has it been received?
A. The book has gotten great press among academics. There was a huge piece in the Chronicle about it, for instance. And it’s gotten very good reviews everywhere outside of Philadelphia. It’s getting mixed reviews here. And that’s for a lot of the same reasons, I think, as the mixed reviews in Chicago. Part of the problem when you write about local culture is that locals feel like they’re experts, and they’ll challenge everything that an academic will say. They wonder why they need a book about it—it’s mundane to them. And because it’s very near and dear to them, they’re suspicious of an everyday treatment of it. But I’ve been happily surprised by the warm reception the book has gotten among my colleagues.
Q. So now that this book is done, what’s next for you? Any ideas?
A. Well, I don’t think anyone who is interested in stories of the human experience will lack for ideas in this city. I don’t think someone like me could want for a better place do this kind of research.
Originally published Feb. 21, 2008
