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Handy to Metro, Schubas and the Vic, the Days Inn has become the accommodation of choice for rock acts at a certain level of fame. The Mekons even sang a lyric about the hotel being “a very nice place to stay.” | Brian Jackson~Sun-Times
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For mid-level rock ’n’ roll bands, the door from a hotel lobby doesn’t always open to a stairway to heaven.
During the mid-1980s, the Cramps and Ramones stayed at the since-razed Spa Motel, 5414 N. Lincoln. Rooms went for $38.95 a night, and I know because I stayed in a pea-green room that had a radio in the wall that did not work.
By the 1990s, bands no longer wanted to be sedated by North Lincoln Avenue sleaze, and the Days Inn Chicago, 644 W. Diversey, began cutting deals with the nearby Metro and Schubas music rooms. This launched its current legacy as Chicago’s rock ’n’ roll hotel.
The Days Inn is not the Ambassador East, where Bob Dylan has crashed, or the Ritz-Carlton, which at one time found Jimmy Buffett and Jerry Garcia as guests on the same summer weekend. Nor is it the historic Hotel Sutherland, 47th and Drexel, which hosted Miles Davis, Billie Holiday and others as one of the first integrated hotels in the city (and is currently slated for renovation.)
A quaint accessibility lives at “The Daze,” as rock bands have called it:
† In the early 1990s, singer-songwriter Beck greeted fans hanging around the front door of the hotel. He jumped in a cab with them and took them to his gig at Metro.
† Sheryl Crow rollerbladed through the Days Inn lobby, a practice still frowned upon.
† No one has written about the Ambassador East the way the Mekons did by crafting a line about the hotel on their 1994 autobiographical album “Retreat from Memphis”:
The Days Inn on Diversey/Is a very nice place to stay
When you’re stuck in Chicago/with nothing to do all day...
”
† The child of Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love likely was conceived on the fourth floor of the Days Inn, as Charles R. Cross hints in his biography Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain (Hyperion).
Elizabeth Osowska-Nowik has been housekeeper at Days Inn since 1988.
“I hated Nirvana as a housekeeper,” Osowska-Nowik said. “They didn’t care. Courtney Love came back a couple times after [Cobain] committed suicide. She mentioned she didn’t want to go to the room she stayed with him. I think it was 410. Lots of bands stay on the fourth floor. On the last visit she said she couldn’t stay at all and moved downtown.” (Love’s publicist said the rock singer was out of the country and unavailable for comment.)
Nirvana, however, was better behaved than the punk band Offspring.
“Somehow they got on the roof,” Osowska-Nowik said. “One guy was peeing on the street. The night auditor called the police and got them out. The bus driver stayed. Because bus drivers are always very nice.”
The hotel dates back to 1918, when it was the Diversey Arms Hotel and the New Rendez-Vous Cafe, a hangout for jazz musicians. Jazz trumpeter Bix Beiderbecke lived in the Diversey Arms in 1925. Funnyman Joe E. Lewis opened at the cafe on Jan. 28, 1927, just 11 weeks after his throat was slit in a gangster-related rendezvous. Lewis had moved his booking from the mobbed-up Green Mill, a couple miles north for the Rendez-Vous.
Days Inn general manager Stefanie Hrejsa said, “Louis Armstrong practiced downstairs in what is now Jamba Juice” — which sounds like the name of a Satchmo song.
“They lined the walls with burlap sacks for sound. Rock bands came because the rates were low. And even in the late ’80s we always had a free breakfast. Bands liked that.”
Rates now start at $82 for one bed. The 123-room hotel is in its third generation of ownership from the Beider family of Chicago. Hrejsa’s late uncle, Bill Contos, owned the famous Chez Paul nightclub. He knew the Beider family, who hired his niece in 1997.
Nick Miller is head of the club buying department at Jam Productions. Over the years he’s networked bands with Chicago hotels. “The Days Inn mostly has to do with location, especially if you’re playing Metro, Schubas, the Vic or Park West,” Miller said. “It’s a clean, affordable hotel. It’s as simple as that. City Suites around the corner from the Vic is also a good place. Lots of bands like to stay there.”
The Spa? Not so much.
“Boy, that was a weird place,” said Miller, who has been with Jam since 1986. “We didn’t send people there, but I had to pick up people to bring them to interviews at WXRT. Tons of bands used to stay there. I picked up Mojo Nixon and Skid Roper there on a Saturday afternoon. Skid and Mojo were laughing and like, ‘Wherever, as long as it’s not in our van.’ ”
Osowska-Nowik, 60, is a native of Czeskochowa, Poland, who came to Chicago in 1981. She was hired at the Days Inn through a friend of the Beider family in 1988, when it became a Days Inn.
She befriended Kiss’ Ace Frehley, who in 1993 accidentally stained a vintage bathtub with his hair dye. “He was very nice about it and kept saying he was sorry for making a mess,” she said. “George Clinton was here. Each of his dreadlocks was a different color. He looks like a peacock! I kept hoping he wouldn’t dye his hair. Sometimes I’ve found spoons bent and burned hidden behind a radiator. One time I found a Bible burned into a carpet. We never had furniture overturned, things like that.”
The 40-member Sounds of Blackness gospel group stayed at the hotel several times, taking up portions of all four floors. “They gave me and my husband a concert in the lobby,” Osowska-Nowik added. Autographed photos from musical guests include Living Colour, the late Del Shannon, Peter Frampton and the Dead Milkmen. The photos used to hang in the hotel restaurant before a recent renovation.
The Mekons’ Jon Langford remembers the Days Inn as a transition point in the band’s career. It was 1992 and the Mekons were in turmoil. Langford had not yet moved to Chicago, which he since has adopted as his American hometown.
“We were battling with lawyers,” Langford said. “Things were completely mad. I think we were on Diversey when we fired our manager. It’s hard to believe now, but back then that neighborhood was the center of everything. I thought going to Ashland and Fullerton to go to [the Mexican restaurant] El Sol was being an urban explorer. Gaspar’s [now Schubas] seemed a long way west. People I know still stay there. Maybe Alejandro [Escoevedo] doesn’t stay there anymore, but even a couple years ago I’d be sitting around the lobby waiting for him. It’s always been the rock ’n’ roll hotel.”
Local hotel gets rock
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