Alternative facts
Insiders from Chicago’s Hideout music venue offer behind-the-scenes context about ex-booker Mykele Deville’s allegations of racism and abuse
Update 12/22/22, 10:30 AM. Yesterday the Hideout announced that it will be reopening on January 10 after completing an “equity audit” with an outside HR firm, and with new diversity, equity, and inclusion protocols in place. More updates are located at the bottom of this article.
I suspect that many Chicago music lovers who care about racial justice share a sentiment recently voiced on Facebook by locally-based singer-songwriter Nora O’Connor. She’s known for her work with indie rockers like The Decemberists and Iron & Wine, plus legendary soul musician Mavis Staples.
O’Connor, who’s white, was commenting on the controversy set in motion by an October 19 Instagram post by Black rapper, poet, and actor Mykele (“My-KELL”) Deville, who was fired last spring from his job as program director for The Hideout. It’s a small but influential bar and music venue tucked away in an industrial corner of the city’s West Town community, a few miles northwest of the downtown Loop.
In his post, Deville said the bar’s leadership “cited poor work performance” and a “‘disparaging remark’ I’d allegedly made about The Hideout” as the reasons he was let go. But the booker accused the bar’s leadership of maintaining a racially inequitable and otherwise-toxic workplace. “I realized that [The] Hideout never had any intention to set me up to succeed, but only wanted to trade on my racial identity, and the trust and respect I’d built within the arts communities of Chicago.”
(Since this piece centers around viewpoints on an accusation of racism, I’m generally identifying all individuals I mention by race, except in several cases where sources requested that I omit identifying characteristics. I am white.)
After a backlash on social media and boycotts from performers, the bar is now closed for at least two months, and it’s not clear if it will ever reopen.
O’Connor was one of the first public figures to inject some sanity into the extremely divisive online discourse over this issue. “I believe Mykele when he talks about his experience and trauma. [But] as a longtime collaborator with the Hideout, they have all but jumped in front of a bus for me. I believe them when they say they want to do better, and if you know their track record of social justice work, you can see it too. Do we really close the Hideout down?”
The club, which feels like a scruffy old honky-tonk, has long been known for booking popular acts from predominantly white genres like alternative country and indie rock, such as O’Connor’s frequent collaborator singer-songwriter Kelly Hogan (who used to bartend there), UK-American country-punks The Waco Brothers, sophista-pop artists The Aluminum Group, power-poppers The New Pornographers, and members of Wilco, one of Chicago’s most successful rock bands. But it’s also been famous for hosting outside-the-box Black performers like bluesman David “Honeyboy” Edwards, soul singer Syl Johnson, R & B artist Milt Trenier, jazzman Oscar Brown Jr., and even comedian Hannibal Burress.
Deville was hired as the club’s booker in summer 2021, in the wake of the George Floyd protests and after the COVID-19 vaccine became widely available, and let go last March as the pandemic was waning. He’s been widely described as a talented, charismatic performer and impresario, and a likable person. He argued on Instagram that the club is a racially exploitative institution that “[needs] to be eradicated.”
The Hideout’s owners, married couple Katie and Tim Tuten and identical twin brothers Mike and Jim Hinchsliff, who are all white, released a series of statements in response to Deville’s initial allegations. Their first Instagram post expressed sorrow “about his experience and the deep pain he is feeling” and promised to work hard to create a more racially equitable and inspiring workplace, but did not confirm or deny his specific accusations.
People on all sides of the controversy found this message inadequate. Hideout critics, who’ve posted countless disappointed and/or angry comments about the Tutens on social media, said it was cynical damage control: too little, too late. Many Hideout supporters who, like O’Connor, pointed out that the owners have a long history of supporting racial and economic justice campaigns, were frustrated that the leadership didn’t do more to defend themselves, or at least comment on whether Deville’s descriptions of many problematic-sounding issues and incidents were accurate or complete.
I’ve since been told by a couple of people close to the bar who, who like just about everyone I’ve talked to about this issue, requested anonymity, that the owners are essentially muzzled by human resources laws that would put them at risk of a lawsuit if they criticize an ex-employee. But one of the statements from Katie Tuten provided a clue that there might be more to the story: “We have a different perspective on the concerns our former employee has raised.”
Here I should mention that in addition to working as a transportation news reporter and editor, and freelancing on other topics, I’m also a music fan and amateur musician. Over the past two decades, I’ve attended and played countless shows at the Hideout, and I’m longtime acquaintances with the Tutens.
In the wake of Deville’s allegations and the subsequent social media outcry, many performers canceled their upcoming events at the club. I don’t blame them — so far very little info about what happened has surfaced aside from the booker’s post. So it’s understandable they wanted to avoid the risk of being on the wrong side of a social justice issue before more facts were revealed.
On Halloween, The Hideout owners announced that they were shutting down the bar for the rest of the year, starting on November 7, noting that “in the last two weeks, a large number of our upcoming bookings have been canceled.” They said they had a goal of reopening in 2023 “with new leadership, and a commitment to a healthy, supportive and respectful organizational culture.” However, it’s not obvious that, after surviving long pandemic closures, the bar can endure additional months with no revenue.
Exacerbating matters is the fact The Hideout faces an existential threat from the upcoming, adjacent Lincoln Yards megadevelopment, which is being spearheaded by Sterling Bay LLC. It was originally supposed to include a $5 billion entertainment district bankrolled by event production giant Live Nation, which Chicago club owners worried would negatively impact their businesses. To defend their interests, in 2018 the Tutens co-founded the Chicago Independent Venue League. While the entertainment district plan was canceled in 2019, the bar’s leadership is still worried about gentrification pressures from the new luxury neighborhood.
To read more about what Deville and the Hideout’s leadership have said in statements, along with some commentary from musicians who’ve canceled shows, I recommend checking out these articles by Block Club Chicago’s Quinn Meyers.
Deville stated in a follow-up Instagram post on October 25 that he would not be speaking to reporters about the issue. While researching this piece, I left a message with a person at his current workplace Urban Growers Collective, and sent him a note on Instagram but, unsurprisingly, I didn’t hear back by publication time.
As for Deville’s assertion that he experienced racism and workplace abuse at The Hideout, I basically agree with an assessment by Philip Montoro, music editor of the Chicago Reader, an arts and culture publication where I have freelanced. He’s white. Regarding the booker’s “perceptions of a hostile or racist work culture,” Montoro wrote that it would be a mistake to “[tell] the person who experienced racism that he did not actually experience it.”
That’s generally sound advice for non-African-American folks like myself. As a person who has never personally experienced anti-Black racism, I don’t have the right to say his belief that he was exploited due to the color of his skin is “wrong.”
Montoro made that statement in a long editor’s note he added to a controversial op-ed by Reader music writer Leor Galil after receiving complaints that “Leor and I have taken sides in a dispute without substantiating that conclusion — thus failing one of journalism’s most basic ethical responsibilities.”
In the piece, Galil, who’s white, expressed admiration for Deville and revealed that he had been working on an article about Deville’s firing earlier this year, but stopped researching the topic after Deville asked him to. Galil also asserted that The Hideout was guilty of “failure” in how it treated the booker, and implied that the owners “harm the people who work there,” without providing any evidence of that other than Deville’s statements. His editor admitted the piece had “a tone problem.”
But Montoro’s note also included a statement I strongly disagree with. “It wouldn’t be productive to try to determine what ‘really happened’ during Mykele’s tenure, because we’re talking about his perceptions of a hostile or racist work culture — an area where different people can have radically divergent but equally valid experiences of the same facts. There is no absolute truth here.”
Deville’s fiancé filmmaker McKenzie Chinn, who’s Black, voiced a similar sentiment in a tweet, albeit with less measured wording. She noted that the booker had chosen to forfeit severance pay from The Hideout so that he wouldn’t have to sign an agreement with a clause against criticizing his former employer. “The man literally went without severance pay to be able to tell y’all what happened and some ppl still like “bUT wHaT rEaLLy haPpeNeD??” Bruh. [Eyeroll emoji.] Couldn’t be me.”
In “The Picayune Sentinel,” his Substack publication, former Chicago Tribune newspaper columnist Eric Zorn, who’s white, ridiculed Montoro’s statement implying that digging deeper into Deville’s allegation is pointless. “To suggest [that] is simply to throw up one’s hands and say that perception is reality and facts are irrelevant, which is hardly the take I’d expect from journalists.”
Unfortunately, there’s basically been zero previous investigative reporting on the circumstances behind Deville’s departure.
A few other Chicagoland-based journalists besides Galil have piled on, posting “guilty until proven innocent” statements about the Hideout on Twitter, without citing any hard evidence besides the booker’s social media posts. Injustice Watch’s Maya Dukmasova, who’s white, tweeted that the owners were culpable for “workplace abuse.” International Women’s Media Foundation staffer and freelance journalist Taylor Moore, who’s Asian-American, suggested that the Hideout is guilty of “chew[ing] and spitt[ing] people out.”
And music writer Jessica Hopper, who’s white, implied on Twitter that Deville was “treated like [a] human Band-Aid” to address the club’s racial inclusion challenges, adding “lived experience is ‘actual facts.’” Three or four other local reporters with whom I shared these tweets noted that public comments like these would probably get a writer fired from a traditional news outlet.
I’ve been vocal on social media about the questions raised by Deville’s post, and my disappointment with the lack of investigative reporting on the subject. I’ve also vented about the many, many otherwise-intelligent people who seem to have made a final judgment about whether The Hideout is worth saving, or if its owners deserve a permanent stain on their reputations, based on one unhappy ex-worker’s Insta post. (I regret that my frustration over this phenomenon has occasionally been expressed via sarcastic comments.)
Ultimately I decided to research this matter myself, reaching out to dozens of Hideout workers, performers, longtime regulars, and others who might have inside information about what took place. Although I contacted Tim Tuten, I did not receive a single word of communication about this matter from any of The Hideout owners.
It was no surprise that, due to the radioactive nature of this subject — testifying that Deville’s account of the events is factually inaccurate or is missing crucial context could easily lead to accusations of racism or “selling out” against the source on social media — almost no one I heard from was willing to have their name included in the piece. Many asked that I not directly quote them or attribute their statements in a way that would make it easy to identify them.
As such, the following responses to the specific allegations in Deville’s post are mostly anonymous. Understandably, the handful of news outlets I pitched this story to were uncomfortable with running the piece, although a couple of the editors encouraged me to proceed with a self-published article.
So this article is a bit of a leap of faith for me. My hope is that over the near-quarter century I’ve been writing news stories and op-eds in Chicago, including many involving social justice issues, I’ve built up enough credibility that readers will trust I didn’t fabricate these unattributed statements.
I know publishing comments that raise the question of whether an African American omitted key info that might undermine some of his allegations against non-Black bosses and coworkers will probably lead some to accuse me of being an anti-Black racist. But hopefully my own track record of writing about racial equity matters will help dispel that notion.
“Hundreds of folks have thought it appropriate to viciously attack the Tutens on social media,” one journalism colleague noted when I told them what I was up to. “We’re living in a modern-day Reign of Terror, and everyone is afraid of the mob turning on them next. That would be my main caveat to you, to know what might come at you. But I think your instinct is the right one, and it might be a force for good.”
So with that in mind, let’s take a look at some of the specific allegations in Mykele Deville’s original Instagram post, in bold, and the responses to them from about half a dozen Hideout insiders, including people from a few different races. Please keep in mind that the individual statements I received from them are not necessarily any more or less credible than the booker’s comments. However, in several cases multiple people independently told me the same thing.
While I realize that many people who read or hear about this article will be dismissive of a piece that largely consists of anonymous statements, hopefully it will provide some breadcrumbs that will encourage other journalists to do additional inquiry. I also hope that it will also help embolden more people with inside knowledge of these incidents to speak publicly about them.
“Once on the job I was tasked with booking close to 30 shows a month, filling the venue’s calendar even during the Delta and Omicron waves of the pandemic, using systems that were frequently outdated and ineffective.
Within a month, Hideout’s leadership began testing the boundaries between work and home life that I’d been explicit about maintaining in my interview. When I asked for support, I was told it was ‘cost-prohibitive.’ I asked other venues how they structured booking and by comparison I found it was common that bookers had assistants, interns, and secondary bookers to help with the immense load of submissions and scheduling.”
Multiple Hideout insiders I communicated with said Deville was well-liked by people who worked at the bar. But I was also told that, months before he was fired, coworkers were jokingly laying odds on when he would quit, due to his difficulties keeping up with his workload and his frequent organizational errors. Some said the issue wasn’t that the systems were outdated, but rather that he never got around to learning them.
People I communicated with also noted that the Hideout only accommodates 100 people indoors, and it’s a scrappy shoestring operation, with only two full-time salaried positions, the manager and the program director. They added that the venues Deville referenced where the booker has assistants are larger spaces with more revenue. Some peer Chicago performance spaces include Schubas Tavern (capacity 165 people), The Empty Bottle (300), Lincoln Hall (507), and Metro (1,100).
“He needed to be a smaller cog in a bigger wheel,” one person argued.
One reported problem for Deville, who didn’t have a driver’s license, was his commute to the club from his homes in Hyde Park and Bronzeville, on the South Side, which played havoc with his schedule if he used unreliable CTA service, but put a dent in his finances if he took expensive ride-hail trips. (As a transportation reporter, I can’t help but wonder, if riding a personal bike or an electric Divvy bike-share cycle from Bronzeville had been a practical option for him, might that have solved his problem?)
Some argued that the booker should have been aware of what the commute entailed when he took the job. But they said Hideout leadership tried to help out with this issue, although they didn’t specify how.
A bigger problem, multiple people told me, was that Deville constantly failed to use proper booking protocols, which caused regular double-bookings. That created major headaches for the bands, comedians and rappers whose “booked” shows had to be canceled or rescheduled.
I was told The Hideout hired a consultant in an attempt to help him do his job better. Nonetheless, leadership eventually found dozens of unread work emails to Deville, and they discovered he hadn’t been checking his voicemail at all. The result was that the club missed out on booking several desired acts, and the associated revenue.
I heard that staff weren’t upset about the double-booking, as much as the fact that Deville was creating more work for them, and he reportedly often blamed others for his own mistakes. Ultimately a handful of workers asked the owners to fire Deville because they were tired of picking up his slack.
One insider told me that there was cause to fire the booker as early as December 2021, but manager Alice Blander, who is of Arab ancestry, suggested giving him a six-month trial period followed by a performance review. However, by March several workers were calling for him to be fired and Blander agreed that it was time for him to go. That’s not surprising, since multiple people told me the manager was the one who most often had to deal with the mini-crises he created.
“Not only was I tasked to program the shows, often times I had to clean and set the performance space up before and in between shows, work the door, check Covid cards, wristband entrants, clean and maintain the greenroom, and do other time consuming tasks that diverted from important communication time from artists, managers, and agents that comprised the core of my role as a program director.”
Again, insiders told me that The Hideout is such a small operation, there’s not enough staff capacity for employees to have narrowly defined roles, and all personnel are expected to help out with menial tasks around the bar. “No one has an assistant, and everyone moves chairs,” one person said.
“In our shared office, the leadership team often communicated by shouting, crying, and bickering, creating a tense and distracting office culture. I would tell them that I found the ways they communicated harmful, yet they persisted.”
People I talked to noted that the Tutens are known for being loud and dramatic. Tim’s interminable, rambling introductions for performers are a running joke at the club, and the bane of visiting bands who are unfamiliar with his schtick. Some noted that Katie is 63 and Tim recently turned 60, and there may have been a generation gap issue involved, with the Tutens, younger Baby Boomers, favoring a hard-boiled communication style, while Deville, a Millennial in his early 30s, placed more importance on tact and sensitivity to others’ feelings.
“I was programming live performance during two of the deadliest waves of COVID, while working as diligently as I could to maintain practices to keep audiences, artists, and staff safe. I insisted that we stay outdoors during the fall but the inner team made it evident that they would be returning indoors no matter what and we would just have to figure out how to do that safely.”
Multiple insiders said the notion that Deville tried to stand his ground against the Hideout leadership’s reckless attitude towards pandemic safety is laughable, because in reality it was the other way around. “No one was more COVID-cautious than Katie,” one person said. A musician told me, “The Hideout carried out their own COVID protocols, the most stringent I encountered, and well beyond what other venues did.”
In contrast, I was told, Deville was in the habit of sitting at the bar with his mask hanging below his mouth, haranguing the bartenders for long periods of time. That annoyed them, both due to COVID safety issues, and because it distracted them from serving customers.
“Maybe in response to the safety practices, maybe in response to the new audiences and artists that were finding their way into the Hideout [including more people of color and LGBTQ folks], during my tenure the building was vandalized with white supremacist symbols, and its power lines cut. Leadership was slow to respond.
An employee who was tasked to finally release a prepared statement from management about this vandalism included the phrase ‘Black Lives Matter’ in support and protection of myself and the other Black employees there. Katie (the owner of the Hideout) called the employee on Thanksgiving day and reprimanded them for this alteration as if the statement was harmful to their intentions and bottom-line. This stuck with me and made me feel wholly unprotected.”
According to the Hideout’s Instagram post on the vandalism, published on October 27, 2021, the power cables were cut, an electric meter was stolen, and an “unsigned note with anti-vaccination rhetoric” was left on October 4. A police report I obtained states that the message was “Forced vac will never be tolerated,” and the person who reported the crime, presumably Tim Tuten, “related that he believes the damage is being done to his business because he is a COVID-19 vaccine supporter.”
Then on the 17th, “white-supremacist symbols and graffiti were spray painted on our glass block windows, front door, and our neighbor’s building behind our patio.”
Detail from the police report on the October 17 vandalism incident.
Multiple insiders I spoke to confirmed that Katie Tuten was upset about the addition of “Black Lives Matter” to the post, but one said the call happened within a week of the Instagram post rather than on Thanksgiving. Calling on the holiday obviously would have been inconsiderate, but it also would have been bizarre timing, because that was about a month after the statement was released.
I was told multiple Hideout staffers agreed in advance on the exact wording of the post-vandalism Instagram statement, so Tuten was angry when that person didn’t follow through with the plan.
In addition, the police report confirmed my suspicion that the “white supremacist symbols” in question were “Nazi symbols,” and an insider specified that they were Wolfsangels. That means the vandal(s) may have scrawled them to make an anti-POC, anti-LGBTQ, and/or anti-Semitic statement, rather than to explicitly express anti-Black racism.
That’s a key detail, because it raises the possibility that Tuten might have been uncomfortable with giving a shout-out to one particular minority group but not others. I was told, for example, that there were at least three employees of Jewish ancestry working at the club at the time, and some of them were traumatized by the imagery.
“On one occasion, I was spit on by a customer for asking them to follow mask guidelines. Leadership did nothing to support me.”
Multiple people told me, sadly, during that era there were several assaults of that type by customers against Hideout workers who tried to enforce COVID rules. In response the club hired a security guard to work Thursday through Sunday. Those sources argued that it’s not obvious Deville was singled out for his skin color. Moreover, they said, there’s no possibility that the owners could have heard about his spitting incident and not have at least offered words of support.
“On another occasion, a long-time, white resident artist cursed and berated me in front of staff. He was allowed to keep his residency.”
Multiple people confirmed my suspicion that the artist was Rick “Cookin’” Sherry, leader of the roots-music trio Devil in a Woodpile, which has had a regular gig at the bar since the early 2000s. The band’s name is arguably in poor taste, since it’s derived from the racist figure of speech, “n — — — in a woodpile” (warning: link leads to an article with the racial slur spelled out), referring to something suspicious or wrong.
A couple of people told me Sherry, who is known for his oddball onstage persona, is unfortunately an erratic person in real life as well. They said he has lashed out at many Hideout employees over the years without little or no provocation, although one said Deville’s ordeal was a particularly nasty example of Sherry’s verbal abuse.
Some of the insiders conceded that the club’s leadership shouldn’t have tolerated this behavior from Sherry in the past. But they said this time Sherry was warned that if he verbally attacked staff in the future, he would be banned from performing. His residency was reportedly terminated the day after Deville’s Instagram post came out.
Sherry did not respond to a request for comment.
“In [March 2022], as Covid numbers began to decline I was fired immediately upon arriving at work. Katie wasn’t even in town at the time, and joined my firing via Zoom. They cited a ‘disparaging remark’ I’d allegedly made about the Hideout… Alice, the manager at the time, was shouting when she told me that I was holding staff ‘emotionally hostage’ by complaining about the work culture there.”
I was told that by that March, owners and staff had come to the end of their rope in terms of Deville’s unreliable work habits and trash-talking about the Hideout, with some folks demanding that he be fired immediately.
Katie Tuten was reportedly in Austin, Texas, at the time to attend the South By Southwest music festival, in part so that she could network with bands from other cities who might be interested in performing at The Hideout on tours. She caught COVID-19 there and couldn’t travel, which is why she chose to participate by Zoom.
Multiple insiders told me that Blander’s “emotionally hostage” comment referred to the booker’s habit of going downstairs from the office after conflicts with leadership and venting to front-of-the-house staff, keeping them from doing their jobs.
“I was offered a minimal severance package — on the condition that I sign [a non-disclosure agreement], prohibiting me from speaking about my experience at Hideout, that wouldn’t cover my basic finances and embedded it with language that amounted to an NDA. The language also suggested that I had to sign the NDA if I wanted to avoid the Hideout interfering with any unemployment claim I might make.”
Deville’s language is self-contradictory — it’s unclear whether he’s talking about an actual NDA, or some other kind of document with similar wording. Multiple insiders said the document wasn’t an NDA, but rather a standard state of Illinois severance agreement with a boiler-plate clause that the employer and employee would agree not to speak badly about each other.
Multiple people told me Deville never got back to The Hideout’s leadership about the severance agreement. However, he was paid a commission for all of the acts he booked that performed after his departure.
“While I was told that my employer-provided health insurance — insurance I’d gone without for my entire adult life — would continue through the end of the following month, I discovered later, while trying to get tested for COVID after being exposed, that it was terminated shortly after I was fired.”
A couple of people told me Deville was informed during his firing of the actions he would need to take if he wanted to keep his Hideout insurance going via the federal COBRA program, arguing that, as with the severance agreement, the ball was in his court. However, after he left the meeting, the bar’s leadership never heard from him again until he reappeared on their radar seven months later, guns blazing, via the accusatory Instagram post, which included an appeal for Venmo contributions.
“Like many predominantly white institutions in the wake of the racial uprisings of 2020 and their ensuing racial introspection, [The] Hideout hired me to this position of relative power to give their company the appearance of being anti-racist, while doing the least to support me in the way I was asking for support in the role, and everything to subvert me, and using my Black labor to get them through the worst parts of an unparalleled global trauma.”
To recap, by all accounts, this small music venue didn’t give Deville the support he was asking for, a subordinate to whom he could delegate some of his workload. But multiple people told me leadership did hire a consultant with the goal of teaching the booker to do his job more efficiently and effectively, and offered assistance with his commuting challenges. Said one insider, “They really wanted him to succeed.”
So did Deville experience racism from the Hideout’s non-Black owners and manager, to the extent that the venue deserves to be, in his words, “eradicated,” a very possible endgame at this point? That would certainly be music to Lincoln Yards developer Sterling Bay’s ears.
Or was this the story of a young, gifted, and Black person who unfortunately was a poor fit for this particular job, despite his bosses’ and coworkers’ imperfect efforts to help him? If that were the case, surely it would make sense for this beloved cultural institution to immediately reopen its doors, saving many jobs in the process, and scrap the plan to get rid of its leadership.
However, again, as a non-Black person, I don’t feel it’s my place to make that judgment.
But here’s what one of Deville’s former Hideout coworkers, who is African-American, had to say at a party two weekends ago. According to a trusted colleague of mine, who said they were in a group conversation with the bar worker that included multiple Black and white people, this quote is nearly verbatim: “I think Mykele may have played the race card a little harder than he needed to here.”
END
Update 11/22/22, 4:51 PM: Yesterday a GoFundMe page was launched to support The Hideout’s front-of-house workers, who have been laid off while the venue is closed for the rest of the year.
Update 11/16/22, 8:30 AM: In a new Axios Chicago piece, The Hideout’s owners confirmed what I had previously heard from other sources: “They are legally restricted from commenting on former employees.”
Update 11/13/22, 1:30 PM: Today I received this statement from a person who used to book a monthly series at The Hideout. Like just about everyone else I’ve communicated with about this issue, this person requested anonymity.
“I ran a monthly series at the Hideout during this time period and personally liked Mykele and his predecessor as program director [Sen Morimoto.] Mykele did make some mistakes: He double-booked our November event, which nearly cost us the involvement of some participants and did impact the audience; He neglected to put some events on the online calendar or get the ticket links up until it was close to the event date, complicating publicity efforts; [And] he regularly included the wrong description of the event online. I wasn’t upset by any of this since he was new and learning the job and since the Hideout does well by its performers. I bring it up merely to suggest that when the Hideout made what was a difficult decision in letting him go, they were thinking about performers and other staff and their needs and concerns. I never heard anyone among Hideout owners or staff say a bad word about him; instead, I heard a lot of good things about the events he was booking.”
Update 11/12/22, 3:30 PM: I edited the wording of the last paragraph to include the races of the participants in the group conversation at the party.
Update 11/10/22, 11:00 PM: I added the audience capacities of a few peer Chicago music venues.
Update 11/10/22, 1:15 PM: I added some details about the vandalism of The Hideout from one of the police reports. I also removed a discussion of the Chicago Reader cancelling a six-part branded content series I was working on for the paper, and telling me freelance pitches would no longer be accepted, on the day after this article was published. I added that multi-paragraph passage to this piece the previous night, but ultimately decided it was a distraction from the more important Hideout narrative. If you’re interested in that story-within-a-story, here’s my thread on the subject.
Update 11/10/22, 8:45 AM: I added a mention of the fact Deville’s first Instagram post about his Hideout experience “included an appeal for Venmo contributions.”
Update 11/8/22, 2:30 PM: I tweaked wording in the last paragraph to say that my trusted colleague was “in a group conversation with the bar worker” rather than simply “within earshot” to make it more obvious why I felt comfortable running the quote.
Update 11/8/22, 12:15 PM: At the (totally reasonable) request of the Streetsblog Network of transportation news websites, I removed a reference to my position as co-editor of Streetsblog Chicago, an independently run site which is affiliated with the network. No other Streetsblog Network or Streetsblog Chicago staff had any involvement in this article.
