Lee DeWyze: The reluctant 'Idol'

Mount Prospect's Lee DeWyze had the ambition, but it took some prodding to get him on pop's biggest stage
By Steve Johnson | Chicago Tribune reporter

It could have been fate, or it might be just a sweet irony. But a year and a half before he cruised through to this week's final four of "American Idol," Lee DeWyze sat on a metal chair in a tiny park in his northwest suburban hometown and helped judge a karaoke contest called "Ice Cream Idol."

Instead of a V-neck T-shirt like Simon Cowell's, DeWyze was wearing a Run-DMC tee. One of his fellow judges was a not-very-convincing female impersonator dressed as the John Travolta character in "Hairspray." A 5-year-old performed. So did a 55-year-old.

Ken Dix, an owner of Capannari Ice Cream, the Mount Prospect shop that sponsored the contest in adjacent Moehling Park, says that DeWyze, who grew up in a white Cape Cod-style home a three-minute walk away, handled it all in good humor.

"He was no Simon Cowell," says Dix, who's also a local firefighter. "He was probably more like Ellen (DeGeneres), very generous with everybody."

It's a story that people who were there — or who caught DeWyze haunting open-mic nights in the area; who heard him strumming made-up tunes about wall coloring at the local paint store where he worked; who saw his band at FitzGerald's or the House of Blues, maybe bought one of the two albums he cut — will tell more than once.

DeWyze, 24, is already famous: Road signs announcing his provenance now guard Mount Prospect's perimeter, and "Vote 4 Lee" signs and T-shirts are everywhere in the town of 56,000. He's considered a favorite to pass through to the finals of the Fox singing contest, arguably the most profound influence on American popular music in the last decade.

Not bad for a kid who, as he said on the show's Web site, got kicked out of Prospect High School — for fighting in defense of someone close to him, according to two friends — and finished up at the same school district's Forest View Alternative School in neighboring Arlington Heights.

Also not bad for a guy who almost had to be dragged into trying out for "American Idol," a posture of reluctance he still hasn't shed entirely, even as he's joined in the cheesy group-sings and ultra-cheesy Ford commercials.