The situation the owners of Lounge Ax have found themselves in is an example of the repercussions the city’s strict liquor laws can have on valuable and law-abiding institutions. The situation seems intractable. Since there’s little money to be made in rock ‘n’ roll, the live-music industry–on the club level at least–has become a subset of the liquor industry. Since most bars, even most of the ones that provide live music, are little more than watering holes, it makes sense for the city to monitor them closely. Alcohol causes a lot of problems, and there’s nothing wrong with the city keeping a clamp on drunk people and the businesses that feed them booze. Still, you wish there was a way for the city to say, well, this venue and that venue contribute a lot to the city and seem to be pretty cleanly run; let’s give them a break. But what’s the city going to do? Treat bars differently based on their booking policies?
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Yet by not doing something the city has brought Lounge Ax to its current position, which is tenuous. A yearlong funnel of trouble, which began with a neighbor’s complaints about noise and escalated into a Byzantine mess, has cost the club thousands of dollars and put its existence in peril. According to one reading of city regulations, the club is operating without a necessary license and should be shut down. But everything’s unclear. Ask the city what exactly the club is up against and you get an ominous answer: “The case is in the law department for filing of charges,” says liquor czar Winston Mardis. Charges of what? “I can’t comment on a case that’s under investigation.”
For his part, the neighbor says he’s not trying to shut Lounge Ax down, noting that he and others who are disturbed by the noise could have hired a lawyer, taken a petition around, or harassed the club about the noise nightly. “It’s not our intention to put them out of business,” he says. “It’s about sleep.” I asked both him and another complaining neighbor the obvious question–how they differed from someone who moves into a house beneath an O’Hare flight path and complains about the planes. Neither had much of an answer. “We have not imposed on them,” one of them said. “We never said you’ve got to stop playing music.”
