Mojo's Vinyl Bar, Highwood — A Listening Bar Built Around the Queue
Five thousand records, one queue, and the old idea that music is something we share
By Rafi Mercer
New Listing
Venue Name: Mojo's Vinyl Bar
Address: 448 Sheridan Rd, Highwood, IL 60040, United States
Website: https://mojos.rocks/
Instagram: @mojosvinylbar
There was a time when a song in a bar cost a coin. You fed the jukebox, made your choice, and went back to your drink to wait. The waiting mattered as much as the song. Somebody else's choice played first, then another, and the room filled with the taste of strangers before yours finally arrived. You hoped they'd like it too. That small hope is most of what a shared room is made of.
Andrew Morrison remembers it. When he came out of the pandemic, he wanted somewhere to go that would lift the spirit and put him back among people. He couldn't find it. So he started picturing one, and he admits he didn't know what it would look like, only how it should feel. On Mojo's own site he describes the condition he was answering as "The Age of Our Isolation": people sitting side by side with earbuds in, each somewhere else. What he went back to was the floor of a friend's bedroom, an album spinning, everyone listening to the same thing.
Mojo's sits on Sheridan Road in Highwood, a small city on Chicago's North Shore, where the road follows the lake north through the suburbs. It's a long way from the city's listening-bar rooms in spirit as well as miles, and that seems to suit it.
The collection runs past 5,000 albums, and they aren't kept behind the bar for staff to choose from. You browse them. Rock, jazz, blues, funk, soul, R&B, country, classical, folk, soundtracks, music from everywhere. When something stops you, you put it in the queue and wait your turn. You can also bring your own record and hear it played somewhere better than your living room. That is the jukebox, rebuilt for the long-player, with the coin taken out and the waiting left in.
The waiting is worth it because of what the record is played through. The speakers are Klipsch La Scalas paired with Cornwall IVs. These are big horn-loaded designs from a company whose speakers have been filling rooms for decades, and they don't whisper. A Rega P6 turns the records, with an Ortofon 2M Blue in the groove and an NAD integrated amplifier running the whole chain. Horns throw sound across a room rather than pooling it in one corner. A queued album doesn't belong to the person who chose it. It belongs to everyone in the room.
The bar leans towards brown spirits. The list runs to rare whiskeys and tequilas alongside the standards, and there's a signature pour each month. Recently that was Booker's Beam House Batch, which the house suggests opening up with a few drops of water. Board games wait on the side for anyone who wants their hands busy while the record plays. The calendar fills in around the records: live sets, whiskey tastings, karaoke, open mic, game nights, bring-your-own-vinyl nights. There are two rooms, so the space can be hired whole or in part.
It's worth being clear about what kind of listening this is. It isn't the hushed, full-side discipline of a kissa, where the room keeps silent for the record. Mojo's is closer to the other strand of the culture, where the record brings people together rather than asking them to keep still. Morrison's own picture is of pulling tables together and making friends, then pushing them back to the walls when a dance breaks out. Both are honest ways of taking music seriously. One asks for silence. This one asks you to take your turn.
The doors open midweek and late at the weekend, and the queue starts again each night with whoever walks in first. Somebody chooses something. Somebody else waits. The coin has gone. The hope that others will be glad of your choice is still there.
I write about spaces like this one in the Tracks & Tales Daily. Subscribe to hear about new rooms first, or read more venues from the listening bar map.
— Rafi Mercer
