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Since 2005 Plastic Crimewave (aka Steve Krakow) has used the Secret History of Chicago Music to shine a light on worthy artists with Chicago ties who’ve been forgotten, underrated, or never noticed in the first place.

I’ve been writing the Secret History of Chicago Music for more than two decades, and some artists have taken me years to track down. But for all that time, my white whale has been Ron Steele, whose name I’ve been seeing on loads of local recordings since I started paying attention in the 1990s. This overlooked genius has shaped the music biz behind the scenes since the 50s, but he doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page.

When I learned that Chicago singer Liska, aka Annelise Steele, is Steele’s granddaughter, I thought I might finally have a lead. Thanks to her for sharing contact info for her 90-year-old grandfather—that led to one of the most highly anticipated interviews I’ve ever conducted.

Ron Steele’s career began with the big bands of the 1940s, and after traversing jazz, folk, country, blues, R&B, soul, rock, hip-hop, techno, and more, it’s still going today. He’s been a musician, engineer, studio designer, producer, arranger, and teacher. He’s worked with several generations of recording formats, including wire recorders, magnetic tape, eight-tracks, CDs, and digital surround sound. He’s had a hand in thousands of records and raised six talented children with his late wife and creative partner, Vernyle. 

Steele was born in Chicago on May 15, 1936. His German immigrant father, John Bigalski, had changed his last name to avoid prejudice at Saint Patrick High School, where much of the student body was Irish. His father survived the disastrous capsizing of the Eastland in the Chicago River in 1915, but one of his six sisters was among the 844 dead.

Steele’s mother, Esther Souminen, was born in Duluth, Minnesota, in 1911. She met Steele’s father at a roller rink, and after they married, they moved to an 85-acre farm in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. They heated their home with a single stove, and Steele walked a mile to school. “It was like being in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. I guess there were about 20 kids there,” Steele writes in his unpublished autobiography, Poker With Michael & Guitar With the Boston Symphony: An Autobiography of a Life Making Music. 

The family gave up on farm life before Steele finished elementary school, and they moved back to Chicago. Steele’s father got a job maintaining machinery for Heick Die Casting, and his mother made TVs at Zenith Radio for 25 years. When Steele was 11 or 12, he says, his mom bought him his first guitar, but he didn’t take to it right away. “I couldn’t stand it,” he says.

“My dad took me to lessons at the Volpe School of Music on Irving Park,” Steele writes in his autobiography. “I really hated these lessons, but we went for ice cream afterward, so that made it palatable. I did not do well and after about six months I quit. A little later, a school (Montclair Music) opened near us on Grand Avenue and offered a great price for lessons that included being in an orchestra. . . . It was God awful, but for some reason I enjoyed it.” 

In an interview for this story, Steele says playing in a big group made all the difference. “It’s the interplay between other players, and the challenge—I’m gonna play this thing perfect,” he explains. “You don’t wanna embarrass yourself for the rest of the team.”

Steele went on to study guitar at a music school run by trumpeter Rocky Casiello. At Lane Tech, he and his friends took classes in drafting, foundry, forge, electric, and wood shop. He told a teacher he played guitar and ended up steered toward upright bass in the school’s orchestra, where he scrambled to keep up with the classical repertoire. 

Steele furthered his private studies with George Allen, a man he calls “the top guitar teacher in Chicago” in his autobiography. Allen had a studio in the Lyon & Healy building. “George used to teach me using clarinet books,” Steele writes. “The clarinet has about the same written range as the guitar, so this material was perfect for learning reading and position studies on guitar.”

While at Lane, Steele went professional when drummer Eddie Berg, a neighborhood friend, invited him to join a working band with accordionist Kenny Mjeon and clarinetist-saxophonist Andy Anderson. They called themselves the Star Tones and rehearsed in Berg’s basement. Berg got them a gig at a tavern on Grand. “We worked from 9:00 p.m. to 4:00 a.m. every Friday and Saturday,” Steele writes. “This was a lot of playing for me as a 14-year-old and it was an incredible experience.” Most important, the job required Steele to learn to read music quickly.

Steele also started the trio the Deadbeats, with fellow Lane Tech guitarists Chuck Marquardt and Art Ormaniec. They made a few appearances on the Morris B. Sachs Amateur Hour, winning once. Around this time, Steele bought a Heathkit hi-fi. “They sold all the parts and then you assembled the amplifier,” he writes. “I had to learn to read circuits and to solder all the parts. I even built my own speaker from a kit by Karlson. This wasn’t any run-of-the-mill hi-fi system. The speaker was the size of a refrigerator and when I cranked it up, it rattled the house. The skills I obtained doing this would prove valuable later in my career.” 

Steele enrolled at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) in January 1954 and began studying electrical engineering. At the same time, he began his own teaching career. 

Steele had eight students at Casiello’s school, and soon after he also taught 20 at a music school in Elmhurst. Fate intervened when Casiello referred Steele to Bobby Christian, an older percussionist who led a jazz big band that needed a guitarist. Steele auditioned by sitting in with the group at the Green Mill Ballroom. He also took notice of the singer, Christian’s daughter Vernyle—Steele’s future wife.

Soon Steele would be playing all over the midwest. “I ended up driving Bobby’s Cadillac, while his sons, Norman and Brian, drove a station wagon with all of the band equipment,” he writes. “It was a grueling life, but fun. We would drive all day to some college, set up, play for four hours, tear down and then drive straight through the night to get home.”

The band endured bus breakdowns and 20-hour treks through blizzards, and at least once they ended up hitchhiking the last leg of the trip to a gig. But Steele loved the life. “I made a map and put pins in all of the places we played,” he writes. “It soon became full of colored pins. It was an exciting time playing live to audiences and still is probably the most satisfying part of being a musician.”

The gig with Christian also kicked off Steele’s long career as a studio musician. Christian started using Steele on recording sessions, and the gigs earned him enough money that he dropped out of IIT. After Steele proposed to Vernyle in 1958, he knew he’d have to get a steady job, so when he heard that RCA needed a new studio engineer, he applied. He was hired three weeks before his wedding at Saint Giles in Oak Park. The young couple would soon move to the western suburb, and Vernyle went to work at Loretto Hospital.

“I started working in the third-floor tape file room, which was a filthy, rat-infested area in the North Pier Terminal next to Navy Pier,” Steele writes of his early days at RCA. “I then started to do shipping duties and assisting on recording sessions.” 

Steele was soon promoted to mastering engineer, and he started landing important assignments at RCA. He was part of a team led by Lew Layton that recorded the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (CSO) with pianist Van Cliburn at Orchestra Hall for RCA Red Seal, the label’s prestige classical imprint. This large-ensemble experience—and his access to the Red Seal recording equipment—enabled Steele to produce Christian’s next album, 1959’s Percussion in Velvet, in the recently completed One Prudential Plaza. 

Percussionist Dick Schory had released a popular record in 1957 called Re-Percussion, and Steele worked with him on several similar space-age easy-listening albums. Steele was nominated for Grammys for two Schory LPs released in 1963, Supercussion and Politely Percussive. He’d recorded both in Orchestra Hall. 

Steele helped RCA rebuild and modernize their main studio, and his familiarity with the new equipment made him a go-to engineer. Motown outsourced mastering to RCA, and in 1962, RCA tapped Steele to record a big Motown revue at Chicago’s famed Regal Theater. The bill included Marvin Gaye, Martha & the Vandellas, Smokey Robinson’s group the Miracles, and a 12-year-old Stevie Wonder. Wonder’s set included “Fingertips,” which would become his first hit single when Steele’s recording was released in 1963. (Steele would also record B.B. King’s 1965 LP Live at the Regal, which had a huge impact on the blues-obsessed British Invasion.)

In 1964 Steele was flown to RCA’s Nashville studio for an afternoon session, because the lead engineer there had quit. It was a nerve-racking gig, because Steele was working with Elvis Presley. The band showed up late, and Elvis even later. 

“Around 7:00 p.m. Elvis drove up on his white motorcycle in a white leather jumpsuit. He came in and said, ‘Let’s eat!’ So we all hung out and ordered takeout,” Steele writes. “Around 8:30 p.m. Elvis played a cassette demo of a song for everyone, and they did a verbal arrangement using the Nashville numbering system for chords. They then settled in and ran it down. After two rundowns Elvis looked at me in the booth and said, ‘Let’s record it.’ . . . I was recording directly to stereo tape so there was no re-mixing or over-dubbing.” 

That session with Elvis yielded three songs, including the B sides “Ask Me” and “It Hurts Me,” both of which cracked the Top 40 on the Billboard singles chart. Steele stayed on in Nashville for about a month, but he turned down a permanent position there—he had too much going on in Chicago, and he didn’t like country music enough.

Steele made the tough call to leave RCA in 1966, because he thought he could make more money as a musician. The new vogue for rock arrangements with two guitars made for extra session work, and Steele could also play electric bass and sitar. 

Steele began gigging at Chess, where he appeared on the Soulful Strings records, a project of arranger Richard Evans. “The idea was to surround a string quartet with an R&B rhythm section and play pop tunes,” Steele writes. “The group had Phil Upchurch on guitar, Lennie Druss on flute, Cleveland Eaton on bass, me on guitar and electric sitar, Bobby Christian on percussion and vibes, Morris Jennings on drums, and a harp and a string quartet led by Dave Chausaw. [Editor’s note: ‘Chausow’ is the correct spelling.] This was eclectic music and really fun to play.”

Upchurch, then in his mid-20s, hadn’t yet learned to read music, and Steele remembers helping his friend locate a written note on his instrument. Upchurch in turn taught Steele a lot about how to groove.

Members of the Soulful Strings became a sort of “wrecking crew” of in-demand studio musicians, playing uncredited on classic soul recordings for the Brunswick label and with genius arranger Charles Stepney. “Stepney was classically trained, but he was funky too,” Steele says. “He knew how to convert funky rock, R&B, and jazz to paper, and he hired good musicians to play it.” 

In our interview, Steele recounts a session with Curtis Mayfield, who was running late, and arranger Johnny Pate, who’d handed out staff paper and pencils to the roughly 25 musicians on the gig, expecting Mayfield to tweak the tunes when he arrived. Mayfield did more than that. He made a circuit of the room, humming or singing every part—strings, horns, and all—to every musician. “He was this big star, and he treated us like we were his relatives,” Steele says. “What a wonderful guy.” 

Steele’s career took another turn after he met pianists Larry Novak and Marty Rubenstein at a gig at Rush Street club Mister Kelly’s. He started doing more music for advertisements, especially once Rubenstein founded Shield Productions with Jim Dolan. Shield landed such big jobs that they decided to build their own recording studio. Steele was enlisted as a consultant and found a space at 161 E. Grand. The biggest step he took was to become a co-owner.

“I was able to squeeze three studios into a very tight area. I did the basic design of the complex and the actual electrical drawings for the whole place. Finally, my engineering degree came into play,” Steele writes. “Meanwhile, we decided to make the facility independent from Shield so that we could get more studio work. Marty’s dad suggested Streeterville as a name, since the area used to be called that.” 

In my interview with Steele, he calls 1969 his “big year.” Streeterville Studios opened to instant success, and his sixth child, David, was born. He and Vernyle moved to River Forest, where Steele still lives today. He also had a hand in the founding of Ovation Records, which released its first LP that year. 

While Streeterville Studios was under construction in ’68, Schory had come to Steele with a proposition: He wanted to start his own label, and he offered Steele a 25 percent ownership stake to help get it off the ground. 

With Streeterville and Ovation at his disposal, Steele recorded albums by Schory’s Percussion Pops Orchestra (of which he was also a member). One LP captured a live concert at Carnegie Hall, and Steele took an ambitious approach to the job. He had a 16-track tape machine shipped to the venue—already an extravagance—and then took the extraordinary step of recording 20 carefully placed microphones directly to tape, with no intervening electronics and no attending engineer.

Ovation became a player in the market for quadraphonic recordings, a four-channel technique that sparked a trend among 1970s hi-fi nerds but didn’t catch on widely. (It’s the ancestor of 5.1 surround sound and other similar systems.) Ovation also manufactured and distributed progressive California-based label Black Jazz, which released highly collectible platters by the likes of keyboardist Doug Carn, bassist Henry Franklin, and Afrocentric Chicago soul-jazz band the Awakening.

Another part of Steele’s “big year” was the release of his first LP under his own name, recorded at Streeterville and released by Ovation. Chicago Guitar is so thoroughly Chicago that its cover features a Cubs logo, Buckingham Fountain, and the Hancock building! It’s mostly cover songs, but “Lament” (one of two originals) shows off Steele’s distinct guitar sound, sent into cosmic mode by a Ludwig effects pedal whose name he can’t recall. (Steele briefly consulted on electronics for Ludwig, until the owner decided to focus on drums and pulled the plug.) 

Steele would play guitar on or engineer many other fine LPs for Ovation, including by folkies Hollins and Starr, Heaven & Earth, and Bonnie Koloc. In 1976, he released his second album under his own name, Everybody’s Baby. This time he ventured into psychedelic funk territory, not unlike guitarist Dennis Coffey, a similarly situated session guitarist in Detroit. (Steele knew him, of course.) 

By mid-1977, Ovation was on the ropes financially, and Steele told Schory he thought the label should declare bankruptcy. But then a tax attorney contacted them offering to buy master recordings. “There was a loophole in the tax code that allowed an investor to write off five times the production cost of a phonograph record. The only hook was that it had to be released into the market by December 31,” Steele writes.

By that deadline, Ovation rushed out more than 60 albums, including lots of repackaged tracks and “best of” collections. One of those LPs, by father-daughter country duo the Kendalls, even produced an unexpected hit—the Kendalls had hand-delivered their promo copies to radio stations, and once Schory realized that “Heaven’s Just a Sin Away” was generating sales, he issued it as a single. It topped the Billboard country singles chart and won a Grammy.

This windfall kept Ovation alive, and the label even attracted investors—which allowed Steele to sell his share and focus on Streeterville, now a three-studio operation. Eventually, Steele clashed with Streeterville’s manager (Dolan’s son) and sold his part of that business as well. 

In the decades to follow, Steele moved away from session work and picked up more jobs as a consultant. For one gig, he traveled to the Bay Area to evaluate an early digital audio system that Lucasfilm was using. He’s returned to orchestral playing too, and has been hired for gigs at Ravinia and with the CSO and Lyric Opera. He’s sometimes appeared in Broadway shows, and played 1920s-style jazz banjo in the musical Chicago. 

Steele also taught studio techniques and digital audio for Columbia College, using as his classroom the Midilab studio where he worked with his sons Ron Jr. and John. He later opened a small studio called Eko Media Design, and John and Ron Jr. followed him there; they recorded library music, jingles, educational materials, pop tunes, and even blues artists such as pianist Pinetop Perkins. 

Eko continues to this day, but Steele has retired—though he hasn’t stopped making music or adapting to new technology. He’s made 19 albums by running his recordings through AI tools to create what he calls “healing frequency” music. 

Steele’s career is so vast that I couldn’t possibly cover it all. He added guitar and bass to the 1975 novelty hit “Convoy,” for instance. And he says he played guitar for the Jacksons (formerly the Jackson Five) at the Mill Run Playhouse in Niles in the 1980s—Jermaine held an instrument onstage, but Steele was playing the part offstage. You’ll just have to hope he publishes his autobiography. 

Steele now has a second unpublished book, which he wrote while recuperating from an April back surgery. The Recording Revolution: From My Seat in the Room describes the evolution of studio technology and the journey he took through all those changes. Steele says he felt Vernyle’s spirit guiding him to finish it. She passed away in March. 

Steele’s whole career has been about learning the skills to do what needed doing. “I always maintained a low profile,” he writes in his autobiography. “Play the music and don’t create any problems for the producer.”

“I was trying to be a jazz player, but you can’t make a living playing jazz,” he tells me. “If you want to be a professional and make a living at it, you have to adapt to literally anything.” Steele definitely figured out how to adapt, and no matter where he ended up, he could scratch his artistic itch. He’s a living piece of Chicago music history, with a story bigger than I could’ve imagined.