Excerpt from an unpublished and unfinished 1996 book on concerts in Chicago
Introduction
It was January and it seemed like an altogether appealing way to pass the time, to see as many shows as I could manage over the course of the year, and write about it. From the outset my plan was to combine concert and record reviews, artist sketches and interviews with observations drawn from my personal experience as a concertgoer. What I endeavored to do was write both objectively and subjectively, personally and impersonally, formally and informally, in a style that could feasibly be applied to any number of topics, but in this case rock music.
One of the things that I liked about the project was that it allowed me to do research at the library, on those evenings that I wasn’t at shows. With the sometimes sparsely documented nature of what I was researching – Slim Dunlap might have been a later member of The Replacements, but you were unlikely to find many entries about him in the Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature – the project allowed me to do something I had very rarely done to this point: get online. It also allowed me to get on the phone, and even occasionally send emails (although I don’t have an exact recollection of doing so), contacting record labels, publicists, musicians themselves, requesting promo copies of new CDs, tickets, backstage access, press and photo passes, and press materials (electronic press kits, to my knowledge, had not been invented in 1996; the PDF, then only three years old, was a term with no meaning in my vocabulary). It brought me back to my college radio days when I called labels in an effort to get many of the same things.
Over the course of 10 months (in November I moved away to Madison, Wisconsin), I managed to make it out to shows at least weekly, if not two, three, four times a week, often alone. I sometimes stood behind black-lipped teenagers in early-morning queues outside (chain) record stores that doubled as Ticketmaster service stations. Getting my name on guest lists always helped; with my day job as a suburban courier, I scarcely had the funds to finance such a venture.
In addition to the shows covered in the article that follows, I saw Lush with Mojave 3, Beck with Cibo Matto (Sean Lennon was on that tour, playing bass; after the show I planted myself, along with a few dozen kids, mostly girls, near the mud-splattered tour buses outside the venue waiting for Beck to come out and sign my notebook, thinking it would be a good memento for the project; he never showed), G Love & Special Sauce (a late show I loved), Meat Beat Manifesto (hated, left early), Dishwalla and Goldfinger, Girls Against Boys, Bob Mould, and Velocity Girl all at Metro (I don’t remember considering going to see Radiohead, who played there April 4). I saw Elvis Costello with Steve Nieve at Park West and later that summer at the Rosemont Theater with opening act Ron Sexsmith (whom I interviewed just to get backstage with Elvis, who, it turned out, had a tight security detail and wouldn’t let the unauthorized even glimpse his soundcheck);Red Red Meat-The Grifters-Rex at Fireside Bowl; Buddy Guy on his home turf at Legends (easily the best show I saw that year); Lotion at Lounge Ax (loudest show of the year); Low at Lounge Ax, where I spoke between sets to utter mope Mimi, the trio’s singer-drummer; Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 at Lounge Ax, a show I saw with two friends who were so turned off by the band that I’m sure they’d still give me a hard time about it if I ever saw either of them today; Poster Children and Silkworm at Empty Bottle; Hovercraft at Empty Bottle, a show where Eddie Vedder, spouse of one of the band’s members, was rumored to possibly be making an appearance … come to think of it, I didn’t get in that show; it was the same night as Presidents of the United States of America at the Riviera (see below) and I spent about 40 minutes in my Volkswagen Golf making out with a girl I met in the balcony and got to the Bottle long after it had sold out (when it was far from empty, wink, wink, ha ha).
That’s a pretty good list already, but I know there were other shows. Like Foo Fighters at the Riviera with The Amps andThat Dog, a show notable for: the large number of parents chaperoning their teenage and prepubescent kids; the between-set playlist that effectively bridged the generation gap with a steady soundtrack of beloved ‘70s hits (I seem to recall even hearing the title track from “Grease,” but I could be imagining that); the absolutely stifling crush of sweaty teens when Foo Fighters, then a credible band, took the stage. Oh, and The Amps’ gear was left in Dayton, or something like that. No, I think, instead, that the gear had just arrived because I remember there being a luggage tag attached to Kim Deal’s minty green Stratocaster (possibly yet another detail I’m making up).
I definitely spent a good deal of time that year at Schuba’s, always happy to find a seat on one of the wood benches that flank that cozy venue. I saw Jeff Tweedy play a solo show, probably at Lounge Ax, in addition to seeing him play with Golden Smog and Wilco that year (both detailed below). And I saw Triple Fast Action, just signed to Capitol Records, play what I recall being a packed show in a tight space, where the wife of one of the band members giddily predicted (to me) that with major label backing the band was going to be huge.
I interviewed Menthol backstage at The Riviera (they complimented my questions afterwards), Tjinder Singh ofCornershop backstage at Metro, and Mekons frontman Jon Langford at Fitzgerald’s in Berwyn. For the latter, I remember that the Democratic National Convention was in Chicago that weekend, returning for the first time since the '68 debacle; I drove up to Fitzgerald’s, eager to chat with Langford and see his great band play that evening. I guess the label had given me his home number; I had called him there a couple days before the show; he was affable and friendly. He was neither affable nor friendly when I plucked him from a backstage room where he and his bandmates were congregating in the minutes before soundcheck was to commence. We sat down at the bar (a good distance from the stage, as I recall, in a different room, possibly on a different floor), and I set up my tape recorder and asked my first question. It was about their classic record, one of my all-time favorites, Rock 'N Roll (1989). If my second and third questions weren’t about that record, then my fourth and fifth questions were, and he didn’t want to talk about that. As I pressed on, I could hear the steady, muffled throb of a kick drum as the band started its soundcheck. Langford got up and abruptly walked out of the room, never to return. I turned off my recorder and did the same, leaving the club and driving home on the expressway, passing under newly painted overpasses adorned with patriotic bunting for the convention, all the time regretting that I wouldn’t be using my guest list access for that night’s show.
That’s about all I remember at the moment. For the shows not written about in the article below, that’s all I can rely on, my memory. That’s because in those days of floppy discs (the 1996 variety that wasn’t actually floppy at all) and MS-DOS and Word Perfect, I never backed up, let alone printed out, a copy of the document that was to be my first published book. And at some point, I lost it. For years I couldn’t speak about this. Then, a few years ago, I somehow, without attempting to, recovered 17 pages of the file; and there it was, an artifact by then, a remnant of what I thought lost forever. I don’t know why or how those particular 17 pages were salvaged, omitting shows in the chronology (for example, Steve Earle played Metro in March, Stereolab in May; write-ups of both of those shows are extant, but in between I saw G Love and Lush at the same venue, and yet there’s no record of either of those shows), but I saw no point in dwelling on such questions; I was happy to have it back, however partial. (And come to think of it, I don’t remember actually writing about a lot of the shows I mentioned above, only inputting my scribbled-in-the-dark, scarcely-legible notes in the bulky computer that sat on the desk near the door in my bedroom, to return to at some future moment, as time permitted.)
With the exception of a few sentences here and there (mostly in one portion of the Lou Reed segment), all of the text below was written in 1996; the audio segments were recorded in November 2011.
Muchacha/Motorhome/Menthol
January 16, 1996
Lounge Ax, Chicago, IL
After a spell, Muchacha, a trio, was introduced. Muchacha had only last weekend appeared in town as Screw Party. They’re local and have a record.
They played a fierce set, grinding on for a half hour as the crowd continued to gather. Sometime after the midway point, though, I’d become weary of the turbulent blare. Motorhome was next.
Motorhome is a Chicago trio with a record deal on a New York label – Dirt. Their three-prong attack was brainy more than brawny; a dizzy loopiness was the sometimes cloying underpinning of all their work. They deftly extracted from only three instruments a profuse, ample bedlam, twitching about the stage. The singer, the group’s only male member, wore long greasy locks and dressed himself up crazily, foolishly – and loosely: As the trio was winding out of its manic set, his scarlet trousers fell, exposing two skinny, pale legs and boxer shorts. I don’t remember any girls squawking with desire; a few people laughed, but no one seemed more amused by this silly exploit than the exploited himself.
The place was packed by the time Menthol walked on stage. They emerged from behind the curtain and thrust into their opening number.
Menthol is a trio from Champaign, Illinois that released its first album on a major label in 1995. Eponymously titled and produced by Brad Wood, the disc features a dozen songs, all written by lead singer and guitarist Balthazar de Ley, the son of a literature professor – with an emphasis on French erotica, I’m informed by the bio sheet Capitol mailed me – at the University of Illinois in Champaign. de Ley receives immense backing from Joel Spencer, a spindly, baby-faced guy whose bass lines work in commanding tandem with Colin Koteles’s trenchant power drumming. Spencer’s more significant contribution, though, is his backing vocals: cutting twin-layers over de Ley’s bellicose leads.
The band descends from the clangorous domain of thrash-pop, occupied most eminently by Hüsker Dü, progenitors of tight, hook-laden discord. “I guess we write pop songs,” comments Spencer, “but they’re huge pop songs."
Menthol played a dense, walloping set of a dozen or so songs, many from their album, with the rest, I supposed, either being new or from the earlier Gold Record LP, released on Mud Records (Motorhome, remember, records for Dirt), when they were calling themselves Mother. I found myself a little disappointed, though. They played with neither the clarity nor the crunch as they do on record and this deficit was not compensated with any sort of loose, in-concert spontaneity. Nor did they command the same authority. de Ley has a slight build and a pensive expression; and adding a pair of large-framed glasses normally reserved for solitary, early-morning hours before one’s contacts are in, young Balthazar ("Baltie” for short), looked more like a weary college senior who’d been up too late than the leader of a major-label recording group. Menthol is a good band, though. And one with a future.
Golden Smog
February 23, 1996
Lounge Ax, Chicago, IL
Fortunately, Golden Smog is a relatively obscure outfit (bassist Raymond Virginia, a.k.a Mark Perlman, was quoted in US magazine saying: “Here’s the difference between the Traveling Wilburys and us: It’s absurd that they would go by aliases because they’re hugely famous people. In our case, no one knew who we were in the first place.”)
Wilco and Son Volt, another band to put out a fine record in 1995, formed from the remains of Uncle Tupelo, a superb group from Belleville, IL, which revolved, much like The Jayhawks, around two principal players: Jeff Tweedy and Jay Farrar. Tweedy, a recently transplanted Chicagoan (he married Sue Miller of Lounge Ax) brought some of Uncle Tupelo with him and formed Wilco. AM was the result and it is certainly one of the significant records of last year (with stiff competition from Son Volt’s Trace). That behind him, Tweedy latched on with Golden Smog.
Golden Smog first issued an EP in 1993; it’s called “On Golden Smog” and is a collection of covers and strictly a side-project; no tour followed. Then in late 1994, the band formed again for the purpose of cutting a full-length album, this time channeling concurring lineage and propensity into a record’s worth of new “countrified” rock songs.
The band walked onstage, ushered on by fervent, near-grateful applause, and tore promptly into their opening number. It was not a song I was familiar with; in fact, the only songs I would know all night were the covers they played, and I didn’t know all of them. I hadn’t bought the album yet: I was here on reputation alone. And the two main draws for me were Wilco’s Tweedy and The Jayhawks’ Gary Louris.
The Jayhawks put out several fine, spirited records, brimming with melody and rich harmony, and drawing unremitting vitality from Louris’ fragile vocals and succinct guitar solos (not to overlook partner Mark Olsen’s contribution for a second). Their last album, Tomorrow The Green Grass, nearly as consistent and fertile as their stunning major-label debut, Hollywood Town Hall (1992), was released early in '95 but the group broke up soon after.
Louris shared the vocal on this first Smog song with Run Westy Run’s Kraig Johnson (whom I’ve seen referred to as Kirk and as Craig in recent write-ups), boyish and angular and flanked closely on the snug stage by Tweedy, playing bass, Dan Murphy of Soul Asylum on guitar, and Louris’ bandmate Mark Perlman extracting from a mandolin pleasant, if scarcely audible, accompaniment. These positions would be short-lived: by the start of the second number, everyone but Louris and drummer Noah Levy (from The Honeydogs) had traded places and guitars.
This was the routine for the rest of the night, Louris himself occasionally electing a new ax. Everyone but Perlman and Levy took a vocal – or five or six; four guitars ceaselessly ground out lead, rhythm and more rhythm. This was the spirit and fraternity of the band, every man dropping back, selflessly shouldering a bass part when his rotation came 'round; Tweedy strumming his “WILCO”-branded six-string – the letters were spelled out up the neck of the instrument – only when his turn arrived.
Murphy was the evening’s most gratifying surprise. Lacking the singularity and presence of Louris (and the sunglasses), the marked, musicianly looks of Johnson (and remote and practiced pose), and Tweedy’s contagious, shit-eating zeal (and home-field advantage) – though, hailing from Golden Smog’s most commercial component act, Soul Asylum, not the name recognition – Murphy delivered his handful of vocals with eyelid-shuttered, sweat-provoking intensity. By mid-show his striped shirt and thin hair were saturated.
Johnson was perhaps the show’s biggest letdown, if there was one. He faded in the show’s second hour as Louris and Tweedy installed themselves as the band’s nucleus. Perlman, looking far smaller – puny, in fact – than he has in several photos I’ve seen, plucked away in the shadows mostly, taking more bass parts than the others. The enormous Star of David hanging from the chain around his neck was more discernible than much of his playing. I don’t recall drummer Levy’s staunch contribution getting even a nod of recognition from any of the band. (I’ll note that On Tomorrow the Green Grass, Jayhawks drummer Don Heffington doesn’t even get to take his picture with the band and is credited on a line separate from the others).
The band played on for a couple hours and a couple encores, covering along the way Ringo Starr, Neil Young, the Classics IV 1960s hit “Spooky,” and Elvis Costello (during which two asshole guys and the girl they were mostly neglecting suddenly, and from nowhere, planted themselves in front of me; and there they stood, for the rest of the show, pumping their beers in the air, insufferably clinking bottles on the dubious occasion of each recognized number, and high-fiving on every doubtlessly sophomoric joke hollered in each other’s face). The band’s repertoire of covers also includes Brian Wilson’s 'Love and Mercy,’ The Stones’ 'Backstreet Girl,’ 'Five Years’ by David Bowie, and 'Love is the Drug’ by Roxy Music.
Kleenex Girl Wonder/The Yips/The Cannanes
Date unknown
Lounge Ax, Chicago IL
When I got to Lounge Ax a band was playing, rather well, but I had to piss again. In the can I was roused by the groove of this group. When I was back upstairs and got up to the stage, I was surprised, amused even, to see the band. They were Kleenex Girl Wonder and were raving it up with a little rave-up called – I inferred from their boundless redundancy – “Sexual Harassment." But the thing was, these guys were young, and underscoring their pubescence was that every one of them was completely undersized. They played with abandonment and a callow zeal but with tightness and experience too. And despite the fact that this was a 21-and-over show (I was carded at the door), they didn’t really seem out of place. Each one of them was dressed up in retro rags, and they had those punk-prep haircuts that bands from The Feelies to Weezer have favored. But before I could make any further observation, and before I could get a more certain feel for their sound, they had wrapped up their set. The band, a quintet, didn’t make its exit the customary way, by walking backstage; instead, they bounced off stage into the small crowd and joined their small under-aged entourage. When one of them approached, I stopped him.
"How old are you guys?”
“All of us are 16, except the drummer’s 17."
Kleenex Girl Wonder are veterans of five Chicago club dates – two at Metro. They’ve been together for two years, attend Downers Grove North High School, like Guided By Voices (they saw the show I recently missed at Metro) and Stereolab, and have a four-track demo. I asked how they were added to this bill and my man, Rafeq Hasan, an avid young guy with a dark, sensitive face, explained – his eyes rolling nervously about, fingers wriggling his medium long black hair – how Sue of Lounge Ax heard their tape and gave it to someone at Ajax, the Chicago label The Cannanes record for. I asked if there was any chance that Ajax might pick up his band for a recording contract and he said maybe. They had a couple other leads as well.
I sat back down and waited, a good while, for The Yips. Finally, from the shadows, a woman with an electric guitar diffidently made herself evident. The crowd, whose numbers had been multiplying in recent minutes, spotted her and affectionately prompted her forth. The young woman was in her late 20s (she later told me she was 28), covering her shapeless figure with a fusty, purplish frock and clashing stockings. Her name is Gilmore Tamny.
In the moments leading to her appearance, I had taken notice of the crowd that had assembled around me. It was a gay crowd, the men on one side, the women on the other. Her sister, a Chicagoan, had, it seemed, spread the word quite capably that The Yips would be playing in town tonight because this was an impressively large turnout for an opening act, and a devoted one. They cheered, heartened and inspired their lonely friend on stage. And this was precisely the support she needed.
As Gilmore explained, she had been pressed into solo service, leaving drummer Jon Davidson in Columbus, Ohio, her snow-blanketed hometown. Columbus had been hit, much harder it seemed, with the storm that dropped a few inches of snow on Chicago the day before. And The Yips, ordinarily a duo, had been temporarily cut in half. The details of the story were vague but she described how she and Jon only had enough money for one plane ticket out of Columbus and how their efforts to rent a car had been foiled by a problem with credit cards. She wasn’t even able to bring her guitar and had to borrow Stephen O'Neil’s of The Cannanes.
This said, she uneasily commenced to play her songs. The first number was plagued by insecure singing and halting, fitful guitar. She seemed to be overreaching with such a song, a mercurial knot of unorthodox progressions and irregular form demanding intense concentration and, as a consequence, leaving her quite exposed. I could sense a crossed-finger anxiety mounting in the crowd as we looked on with hope and empathy. Incredibly, Gilmore’s will was not dampened; if anything, she was spurred by these gaffes, pressing on, refusing to look back or dwell for even a moment on a muffed note. She finished the first song, and everyone in the room, Gilmore included, breathed a quiet sigh of relief. As she fashioned her volatile set, steadfast and increasingly assured, I realized that any one of her songs would have made a daunting entry; each song seemed more arduous and acrimoniously discursive than the last. It was an exhausting half hour or so, flinching at the lingering trip-ups and bearing these burdensome, often tuneless, selections.
At the same time, though, it was often quite rewarding fielding such brooding, off-balance accounts as conveyed through Gilmore’s nervy, low-pitched intonation and that absorbing solo electric guitar (an invigorating switch from the tired ruminations that come with acoustic accompaniment). I couldn’t help likening her to Liz Phair. Had the drummer been along, the comparison would have doubtlessly been to The Spinanes, the Portland, Oregon duo.
The Yips did, in fact, become a duo this night, when David Nichols, the percussionist for The Cannanes, added his pithy backing to a song, one that he’d only heard once backstage. Gilmore markedly hit stride on this number, her guitar-playing becoming more cogent and firm. The Yips closed the set with an instrumental, a pleasing, intricate thing with the unlikely title "Muhamad Ali.”
During the break I tried to get a moment with the woman of the hour but I didn’t feel like intruding on any of her conversations with these old, impressed pals.
The Cannanes took the stage sometime around 11 o'clock.
The Cananes, from Sydney, Australia, formed in 1985, recording that same year a cassette called “Cannanes Come Across with the Goods." Over the following decade’s time, they recorded various EPs and LPs for various independent labels, including two self-released Australian records and stints with U.S. labels K and Feel Good All Over. Short Poppy Syndrome, released in 1994, was their first effort for the Chicago label Ajax, for whom they currently record (Ajax has also issued the band’s sterling A Love Affair with Nature, first released in 1989, adding 13 bonus tracks to the 10 originals). The Cannanes’ new album, their fifth, a self-titled CD just released, has won only more critical praise for the band. And that record is the occasion for this month-long American tour, their first in five years, opening tonight in Chicago.
The sound is vital, airy, cerebral; guitarist O'Neil’s brisk strumming, often playing rhythm to newly added bassist Francesca Bussey’s picked lead lines on and David Nichols’ miraculously understated frenetic snare and cymbal work – he somehow gives himself a workout, meticulously pecking away while effecting cool, minimalist detachment – and Frances Gibson’s deadpan vocals, light, moderate and intelligent.
They proceeded with mirth and a gentle charm, romping breezily through each of their selections. Nichols is the band’s leader, peppering the breaks with droll, garrulous commentary and hawking merchandise, quite shamefully, it must be said. He is quite an erudite guy (when The Cannanes recorded the current album, Nichols sat out on the early sessions, recorded in late '94, in order to complete his graduate studies), and a part-time author to boot, writing a biography of the well-honored Australian combo The Go-Betweens.
It was a short set the group played, but not too short; just right, in fact.
The Dishes/Tiny Lights/The Spinanes
March 22, 1996
Lounge Ax, Chicago, IL
The Dishes are a local act, a three girl-and-a-boy-drummer quartet with a penchant for scathing minor chords and contentious vocals. The lead singer, Sarah Staskauskas, a part-time bartender at the Empty Bottle, is a lean, tattooed, strangely attractive young woman, dressed this night in a sleeveless secondhand top, and wearing an Aimee Mann haircut – but stiffer. Kiki, a writer by day, guitarist by night, lurks back in the dim fringe of stage right, trading leads with Staskauskas . I had noticed her before the show because she wears those pointy horn-rimmed glasses that make her look just like Paul, Kevin’s best-friend, on The Wonder Years.
"We’re the Dishes. My bra strap is falling down." These were Staskauskas’s opening words and a clue to what would follow. The Dishes are an unsigned band (they’ve recently finished recording some tracks at John McIntyre’s studio in Chicago, a guy from the Empty Bottle informed me), and not one that plays with much polish. It was a coarse set of songs they presented, which, though, fairly challenging, never rose above "angry." This was a band bursting with riffs, but none amounted to much. And every song seemed to utilize those same thirteen chords. One song, "Poverty,” was a standout.
“One more song!” some guy called out. “We don’t have any,” returned Staskauskas.
Tiny Lights is a veteran outfit, based in Hoboken, New Jersey (Frank Sinatra-Yo La Tengo territory.) The first thing one notices about this band is its sultry singer, Donna Croughn. Dressed in a trim, red dress, she commands the stage, smartly crooning in a bracing, cocktail-hour rasp, her svelte form tantalizingly rocking forth. These are not her sole assets, however. The woman also brings her electric violin, which she plays quite handily, and twice pulled out a trumpet, letting go a pair of dazzling, if rudimentary, solos.
It is an intriguing, sometimes perplexing, often luminous fusion of R & B, pure power pop and '80s arena rock that is Tiny Lights (they’ve also employed elements of folk and jazz in their work). The band was formed in the mid-'80s with Croughn; John Hamilton on guitar and vocals; Dave Dreiwitz handling bass, trumpet and backing vocals; Andy Demos, since unseated, on drums and sax, with cellist Jane Scarpantoni joining in 1986. Scarpantoni would leave the band, finding work with R.E.M., Indigo Girls and on 10,000 Maniacs’ Unplugged session. (“It’s funny,” observes Croughn, “10,000 Maniacs opened for us in 1984.) Stuart Hake, not present at tonight’s show, became Scarpantoni’s replacement in 1992.
Last year, Bar None, the independent Hoboken-based label, pulled together an assortment of the group’s "brightest” work done for various labels (Absolute A Go Go and Koko Pop/Shimmy Disc among them), and titled it The Young Person’s Guide to Tiny Lights. Though this retrospective led some to believe the band had split, Tiny Lights, lineup slightly altered, are currently recording a new album, their sixth full-length disc, for Bar None. (When I spoke to Bar None, I was informed that the band had cut “basics” and the album should be completed by summer.)
New members include keyboardist Andy Barton and a lefty drummer, a veteran English hand, formerly with Nectar. Each was in the house tonight.
It was refreshing to watch and listen to this skilled quintet; they had no attitude and they weren’t draped in that stale “flashy trash” that every band seems to wear now. In contrast to The Dishes, this was fine China. I basked for a while in their fine, flawlessly rendered pop program.
When Tiny Lights had completed their set, I offered a complimentary word or two. Ilene, a woman I met, wasn’t as impressed: “I wouldn’t see them again,” she decided. I overheard someone else comment, “I was kind of glad when they said it was their last song."
The group seemed ill-suited for the bill and the venue. One reviewer has noted their sound "best fits a smoky, middle-aged bar." And, sadly, he’s right.
The Spinanes were next.
The Spinanes are a Portland, Oregon duo whose debut album, Manos, released in November 1993, rather unexpectedly topped the college charts. Their follow-up release, Strand, was just released February 28. It was mixed in Chicago by Brad Wood (Menthol). Scott Plouf plays drums; Rebecca Gates, six years Plouf’s senior, sings and fervently strums her electric six-string. And that’s it.
Like The Yips, Gates has only been playing guitar – in any serious way, anyway – for a few years, a self-taught "bedroom strummer." Plouf, one-time bagel shop employee, never owned a drum set: he beats a hand-me-down set formerly owned by Gates’ father.
They formed a band, albeit an incomplete one, at a party. "A year later we started practicing and three months later we played IPU,” Gates remembers. (IPU is K Records’ International Pop Underground convention in Olympia, Wash., where The Spinanes made their debut.) Rebecca explains they never intended to be a duo but finding an available bass player proved useless, “and I wanted to play music. I wanted to do a band, and we didn’t want to search around, and we got asked to do a show." "It worked out just fine,” adds Plouf, “and so we figured, who needs a bass player?”
After recording two singles in Portland and booking their own tours, The Spinanes were picked up by Sub Pop, the Seattle label that spawned Nirvana and Mudhoney. The band recorded its debut and hit the road for nine weeks in a Geo Prism in support of the record. It became the first Sub Pop release to top the college radio charts. Their much-anticipated sophomore effort (following a 10-inch EP in collaboration with The Cannanes, interestingly) features more than guitar and drums, as Gates adds piano, organ and Mellotron.
For this tour, Joanna Bolme from Portland’s Junior High and Calamity Jane, and John Moen of the Maroons and Dharma Bums, for whom Rebecca was once manager (she also ran a Portland nightclub and worked with Young Fresh Fellows), were appended to supply some sonic girth, adding bass, rhythm guitar, keyboards and percussion. They hit the road just recently, playing with Elliott Smith and Versus along the way, always headlining. (This was their only date with Tiny Lights, who often headline themselves. The Lights are real big, I’ve been told, in Winston-Salem and Kalamazoo, MI.)
Arriving in Chicago, The Spinanes shot a video in the city’s Warehouse District earlier in the day, before heading over to Lounge Ax to play this midnight gig.
Rebecca was dressed in black pants and a thrift shop top. She has the look of a former Catholic school student. She’s sexy as hell; dark eye-shadow enveloped her cool, cagey eyes, a single barrette tamed her bangs. Strapping on her guitar, she completes a wholly arresting image.
Scott took his chair behind his drum kit (he drums in his socks) and they began their set, as a duo, with a hush – a low, spacious rhapsody imbued with woozy, swelling captivation. The Spinanes then became their old aggressive selves, lashing out a flurry of fleet, sonorous songs, new and old, impressing the uninitiated with the fullness of their two-piece sound. They played a half dozen songs or more in this format of whirlwind drumming and vehement strumming, before summoning their pals from Portland.
The augmentation allowed them to do more and secure a more complete, conventional sound, but at a cost. As a quartet, The Spinanes are a very ordinary band; adequate to be sure, but nothing more. This was not what I paid to see the group be. “If we do decide to get a keyboard player, or another guitarist or a bass player,” predicted Gates at the time of Manos’ release, “it’s gonna be like, 'Oh, they’re selling out,’ or 'Oh, I always knew they were going to get a bass player.' If we do that, we need to do it because the songs need it, or because we’re tired of looking at each other. It’s not going to be for any other reason than that. And there have been times lately when I’ve been kinda like, 'Is this something that we’re gonna be able to do over a course of a couple records? Y'know, to just play, the two of us?”
After a dozen or more songs using this format of whirlwind drumming and vehement strumming, and more strumming and some backup vocals and tambourine and bass and keyboard … I was ready to see the band pared again. I’d have to wait for the encore.
Boosted back on stage at the crowd’s vigorous behest, The Spinanes, all two of them, returned. Rebecca leaned into the microphone, spoke a few words of gratitude, and introduced the next song. It was the single from the new record. Another song and they were done.
Slim Dunlap/NRBQ
Date unknown
Fitzgeralds, Berwyn, IL
Slim Dunlap appeared on-stage, clutching a ragged old electric guitar. He and his band were making last-minute arrangements for their set, tuning up, checking mikes.
Dunlap is either a cross between Keith Richards and Ron Wood, Seinfeld’s Kramer and Taxi’s Reverend Jim, or, as one guy in the crowd observed, some sort of weird Sid Vicious look-alike.
More than any of his ex-Replacements bandmates, he is the personification of former bandmate Tommy Stinson’s post-Replacements group Bash-and-Pop’s album title Friday Night is Killing Me. This is a man who has played a life of one-night stands and smoked a lot of cigarettes and drank a lot of beer and whiskey – and who knows what else. The cost is visible: he is gaunt and pallid, his swarthy eyes cakey and tired. He is aged beyond his years, and seems to reside in a state of interminable inebriation. But lurking somewhere close beneath this ghostly surface is the vital spirit of a man who lives to play rock 'n’ roll, whose only home is the road and whose only conceivable occupation is being on stage for 45 minutes a night.
His (nameless) backup band is a standard quartet, lead guitar, bass and drums, consisting of two players in their late 20s, maybe early 30s, and an older, balding bassist, still with 15 years on Dunlap. It is a decidedly modest group of guys, chugging along with as much finesse and grace as possessed by their flannel shirts. Dunlap plays ringleader, ever the showman, stammering on between numbers with an affected Southern accent. He commands an audience’s attention, owing nothing to any pithiness in his crude banter, but everything, I believe, to his Stonesy, rolling stone persona and plebeian charm. There is a certain fascination watching such a character, a caricature really, that is half envy, half pity. But with all his and his music’s seeming lack of grandeur, Slim Dunlap brings to even to the coarsest tavern an undeniable dignity.
They played probably a dozen songs, raw, roadhouse rockabilly that failed to make as much an impression as Dunlap himself. Dunlap is plainly influenced by The Stones and the '50s R & B that first molded their sound, and the country & western that later enlarged it. One song united the disparate influences. He called it an Ernest Tubb-Breeders song. It was more Ernest Tubb than Breeders. Another song was titled, simply enough, “Drunk,” introduced with Dunlap’s query, “How many of you are drunk tonight?" "No one is getting drunk any more,” was his soggy lament after a meager show of hands.
One song was very new, having been written after their van burned March 1 driving from Lincoln, Nebraska to Sioux Falls. It was the first time they were performing the song live.
During the set, I became disenchanted in a way, watching Dunlap up there, saddled with these shabby tunes, his sluggish twang growing tiresome. At The Replacements shows – the 1991 Aragon gig I had seen, in particular – I marveled at his succinct, imperturbable solo work; tonight he took a lone, routine eight-bar solo.
Upon concluding their scruffy set, Slim thanked the crowd graciously and, with the wild anticipation of their most ardent fan, announced that NRBQ’d be out soon.
When NRBQ hit the stage, the place had filled up pretty well. Fitzgerald’s had done little to publicize this show; I learned of it due only to my diligent scrutiny of the concert listings printed in the weekly Reader, and even then I was lucky: The dinky Fitzgerald’s ad got squeezed modestly into a bottom corner and afforded NRBQ no more prominence than any of their other coming attractions.
Terry Adams came on first. He is the band’s most flamboyant member, a sprawling presence behind the keyboards, romping on the keys with five-finger aplomb. He sings a few, kicks Jerry Lee Lewis butt on a few more, brandishes a goofy smile, and hazily recites from a notepad the absurd elegy, “I Tried." He is up for this performance, seemingly every performance, reveling in the moment, relishing the camaraderie and attention. He basks in the fresh breath of his electric fan and slips into a dry shirt before the encores. He’s done this live bit a few (thousand) times before.
The Spampinato brothers were next. Joey Spampinato and Terry Adams are the group’s two remaining founding members; Johnny Spampinato is the band’s newest addition. In 1967, Terry and guitarist Steve Ferguson, both Kentucky natives, met Joey Spampinato from the Bronx. Joey is the group’s de facto leader, bassist, and of late its signature singer. He stands at center stage, assiduous and alert. He smiles less easily than Terry but is having no less a lively time. It seems to be his mission to work every crowd into a fever, scrupulously pacing the show until even the most inert in the house can’t stand still any longer.
Johnny occupies the right wing of the stage, exceeding the sundry demands placed on a guitarist for an outfit such as this (especially for one replacing the hearty and beloved Big Al.) And he sings too. He is a taciturn guy who talks with his guitar and who seems happily eclipsed by Terry’s smirky mischief and his brother’s vigilant command. At one point, though, late in the evening, Johnny Spampinato stepped out in a large way, plunging from the stage and taking a sizzling, good-time rockin’ solo to the sweltering dance floor, wallowing for a few moments in the glorious heat his band was generating.
Finally, there’s Tom Ardolino, the group’s husky drummer from Springfield, Mass. Ardolino is about as unobtrusive a drummer as they come, dispensing a sturdy beat and little more – and that’s a good thing. About the only thing one would notice about the man is his curious fixation with the ceiling. He rolls his eyes ceilingward and stares. And stares, immersed not in the layout of ceiling tile or any cracks or spotty paint jobs, I presume, but in his drumming. For "I Tried” he supplied a meandering and enigmatic piano accompaniment, eyes heavenward, while Terry strayed about.
NRBQ, The New Rhythm and Blues Quintet, formed in Miami in 1967. Since reduced to a quartet and only recently losing perennial guitarist-vocalist “Big” Al Anderson (he ended his term after their most recent album Message for the Mess Age), the band has toiled in relative obscurity for nearly 30 years, leaving critics asking ad infinitum, “Why?" (A recent example: "Why a wider audience hasn’t caught on to NRQB’s masterful songwriting is harder to explain than Yanni’s popularity.”) It’s a quirky brew of pure pop, R & B, old-time rock n’ roll, rockabilly and novelty (which tonight included tributes to Mickey Rooney and Captain Lou Albano), bustling with first-take ease. Their records have a winning, beer-soaked immediacy that sound like they might be better enjoyed in a sweaty barroom on Saturday night.
This is NRBQ’s principal attraction, but perhaps its most conspicuous impediment: Rarely does their recorded work sound like anything more significant than the recorded work of a great bar band. And in enduring over such a long period – a span of four decades that has seen striking innovation and change in the industry – NRBQ hasn’t achieved any certain cult status; they’re neither recognized as the seminal figures that their neglected, trans-generational brethren Pere Ubu are or the quixotic helmsmen of a movement, as are The Specials. Nor are they viewed particularly as survivors, such as The Grateful Dead (were) or The Ramones even. What NRBQ is today is what NRBQ has been and will conceivably continue to be: a lamentably safe secret and a hell of a good time.
Nearly everyone is dancing and singing along. One guy has had his chin rested on a monitor since the show began. He’s had his avid gaze fixed on the band and hasn’t stopped smiling for a moment. A woman, probably in her early 30s, has come down from Minnesota with the Slim Dunlap group and has friskily cajoled every static soul in the house into motion, myself included. One guy, in a “Party til she’s cute” t-shirt, didn’t need any urging; he’s worked himself into some kind of solitary frenzy, demanding more space for every song.
The band plays many favorites, mixing it up with their usual flair, exchanging jokes and vocals, tossing off musical idioms at will, submitting a sweet melody and then turning the place over with foot-stomping fervor. They work with a Dead-like doctrine, never playing the same set twice. And like the Dead, they don’t don’t need a new record to go out and play live; Message for the Mess Age, their most recent, was released three years ago.
Luna-Lou Reed
March 24, 1996
Rosemont Theater, Rosemont, IL
“Luna,” writes David Sprague in Rolling Stone, “stake out a strip of terrain bordered by the Velvet Underground’s intense desolation and Television’s studied indifference." And this was not the first, or last, time the New York-based quartet has been equated with Lou Reed and/or VU. But while Dean Wareham is conclusively a student of Reed, shrewd, monotonic misanthrope, he sounds equally seduced by the queer euphony of "Sunday Morning” and “I’ll Be Your Mirror." The Velvet Underground was likewise an explicit catalyst for The Feelies, from whose ranks Luna’s drummer comes. (No coincidence, the Velvets’ Sterling Morrison adding guitar to a pair of songs on Luna’s second album.)
Wareham, vocals/guitar/lyrics, and Harvard graduate, once led Galaxie 500, Harvard graduates all. Sean Eden played lead guitar for The Feelies; Stanley Demeski, his moniker like some 1950s Marlon Brando character, played drums. Justin Harwood, stark bald on bass, once had The Chills for a band. Together they are Luna, a super group of sorts, and one with perhaps unforeseen staying power. Their first album, Lunapark was released in 1992 and contained the breakthrough single "Anesthesia." Bewitched followed in 1994, and last year Luna released the acclaimed Penthouse, as well as an EP for No. 6 Records (the LPs are on Elektra).
Wareham strings together three or four pleasant chords, croons faintly in a tipsy murmur, languidly understating things, then crafts on his guitar a nimble reply, solos that linger and curl like cigarette smoke, winding lucidly through dulcet infrastructures. In live performance, Wareham’s vocals were flat and adenoidal, his distant body resisting movement, his expression (I examined through my binoculars) static. There is little evidence of the muted urgency that belies his dispassionate pose on record. Wareham, a saturnine and seemingly indisposed bandleader, seems satisfied to anesthetize his audience, droning on with uncommon decorum. Luna loped through eight somnolent songs. It was an unusually short set.
Lou Reed’s set got off to one hell of a start, opening with ” Dorita,“ the monstrous prelude to Magic and Loss, effectively into "Sweet Jane,” Reed’s swift, somewhat slothful but durably straight-on solo reading he’s been wielding to every audience’s hysterical delight for more than 20 years. Then followed “NYC Man,” the new single, “Dirty Boulevard” fromNew York, “New Sensations,” a favorite of mine, and a fierce, if slightly stylized, medley of “I’m Waiting for the Man” and “Vicious."
Reed delivered with vigor, and some vim, a generous sampling of the new record, alternating brusqueness with tenderness, and shunning at every turn the despondency that characterized his last album and tour. He also offered a bounty of catalog work, revisiting New York, and modest mid-'80s gems like Mistrial and New Sensations. His aim with this tour, apparently, is to reclaim his unique status as cult idol, epic survivor, godfather of glam and forefather for punk and, most vitally, a tenacious champion of muscular, New York-bred rock 'n’ roll. Reed and his band – guitarist Mike Rathke, bassist Fernando Saunders (like Reed, in black leather pants), and Tony Smith on drums – carried off a hustling 90-minute set with this sole premise.
At one early point, though, following the opening onslaught, the show threatened to falter, as Reed, the stage lights turning to more reflective hues, began to perform another song from his new album. It was a handsome piece indeed, a song ostensibly inspired by the new love in Reed’s life, performance artist Laurie Anderson. On disc and in performance, Reed’s weight is most profoundly felt with mellow meditations of this sort, rather than chest-thumping bravura (unfortunately, some of his songs have thundering breaks with light shows waiting to happen). But I began to slink uncomfortably in my (all too comfortable Rosemont Theater) chair with the fear that he was launching one of his patented song cycles. I would have been happy, and felt quite lucky, in fact, to have watched the great Lou Reed present in their protracted grandeur New York or Magic and Loss, and I wouldn’t have missed John Cale and Reed perform their Songs For Drella suite, had I the chance. But the new album is neither a unified work, nor is it momentous. Set the Twilight Reeling is an erratic offering that works hard to emphasize Reed’s diverse concerns as a songwriter, offering, in its best moments, some wonderful conversational revelations supported by supple accompaniment, but much of it is labored, with Reed showing himself too eager to flaunt his erudition and too ready to revert to his "write what you know” ethic, a tendency that in his hands can become tedious and pretentious.
My song-cycle anxiety was quickly relieved by the unmistakable opening drum beats of “I Love You Suzanne,” the minor mid-'80s classic whose inclusion for me was a happy surprise. The band ran through it and forged on, blending old and new with mastery and might. And thankfully, Reed spared us the eight-minute purgatory of “Riptide,” from the new record.
Before leaving the stage, Reed and his band gathered at center stage and bowed, answering the crowd’s lavish ovation. True to trademark, several minutes restlessly passed before Reed returned for an encore. (My friend and concert companion Shawn remembered what seemed like 15 minutes before his re-apperance at the Arie Crown show she saw in '92.) Some bands barely give a crowd enough time to register its demand and desire for an encore before returning, for fear that everyone will leave – or that they just might not want more. Lou Reed has the luxury of making his fans work for their encores.
When Reed finally returned, to a reverberating chorus of “Lou"s and voracious, hard-fought applause, he gave us three more songs: a rather uneventful reading of his signature hit, "Walk on the Wildside,” a second Transformer favorite, “Satellite of Love,” and the titillating but flat “Sex with Your Parents,” a tart piece of political raillery from Set the Twilight Reeling that sent most of the crowd home happy.
Steve Earle
March 25, 1996
Metro, Chicago, IL
Earle’s arrival on stage was hailed with vigorous, chummy rooting and hooting. These were some of Earle’s oldest friends, the thick-and-thin core who had attended Earle’s earliest Chicago appearances. Some had witnessed personally the man at a frighteningly low moment a few years before at Schuba’s, a nearby North Side venue. One alarmed spectator recalled: “He was skinny as a rail; he must’ve weighed 80 pounds. I wouldn’t have recognized him." These were the faithful who welcomed Earle’s return to Chicago in 1995 with a sold-out Vic Theater. "I kept thinking this is as good as it gets,” said one, “and it kept getting better." "My husband said it was the best show of the year,” one woman maintained.
Like Lou Reed, Earle was dressed all in black, though far less swankily – or deliberately, I reckon. For this tour his backup band The Dukes were resurrected and revamped. Earle’s brother-in-law, Mark Stuart, played rhythm guitar, mostly acoustic; the group’s youngest and most dapper member (he even wore a derby), handled the electric leads.
Earle stood at center stage, guitar strapped across his burly chest, and played and sang and joked with born-again mettle. He weaved endless stories, in his songs and in the cruder vernacular of a running stage dialogue. I can recall few performers having a rapport with an audience the way Steve Earle has. This was, and the smaller setting of Metro partially dictated this, an intimate forum of reciprocal affection in which Earle couldn’t do wrong.
He sings of familiar themes – love, loss, drugs, redemption – but with a particular lyricism that is forthright and sincere, and consistently involving. His instincts are certain, whether they be applied to a robust melody, the phrasing of a line, or the simple satisfaction of a harmonica break.
“My Old Friend the Blues” was the sentimental torch that succeeded “I Feel All Right,” the set opener. He followed that with a sampling of the new album, interspersing old favorites like “I Ain’t Ever Satisfied” and a pair of Stones covers: “Dead Flowers,” a staple of both Earle’s and Townes Van Zandt’s live sets, and a song from The Stones’ Flowers, a record he acknowledged as an influence on his early playing.
At one point, Earle began reflecting on the influences for his songs. A guy in the crowd yelled out, “Shrooms!" Earle swiftly countered, "Yeah, right. You haven’t heard the new record." The crowd cheered, punctuating Earle’s rebuttal as the jerk recoiled.
After heating the place up over a dozen songs, The Dukes departed, leaving Earle alone on stage, illuminated by a blue spotlight. He became even more intimate with the crowd, speaking emotionally and confidentially about the things that matter to him, including at one point reeling off death penalty statistics. This was a prelude to a new song, "Ellis Unit One,” written for the film Dead Man Walking. The artists assembled for the soundtrack were personally selected by Tim Robbins, the film’s director, and asked to write songs for or inspired by the film. “Everyone involved consistently wrote some amazing shit,” asserted Earle. Performing the song, he demonstrated plainly that he meant everyone.
“Valentine’s Day” is another new song that made an impression, particularly on the women. On record, the song’s heart is nearly lost in a crowded arrangement that includes vocals by The Fairfield Four. With the intimacy afforded by this solitary setting, Earle’s humble intent was true. “The way you love me every day/Is Valentine’s Day,” Earle sang gently, smoothing the gruff edges of his voice. When the song had ended, his wife dashed out on stage and hurled her arms around her big, imperfect lug of a husband. Introducing her, Earle joked that the kids were home tying up the babysitter.
The Dukes returned and revved it up anew. Earle and The Dukes plowed through the rest of the set, hitting old favorites like “Copperhead Road,” “Sweet Little '66” and “Devil’s Right Hand." When it came time for "Guitar Town,” Earle grinned, flaunting, “I’ve been doin’ this song for I don’t know how long, and it’s still so cool!
His singing voice razor sharp and craggy as ever, Earle persevered for two hours. “I played my first honest-to-God encore in Chicago,” Earle recollected. On this night he played two.
Cornershop-Stereolab
May 10, 1996
Metro, Chicago, IL
Bill Ryan announced the band as the band announced itself with crazy, cosmic surges of digitally processed soundwaves that signalled Tjinder Singh’s grand prelude, “6 A.M. Jullandar Shere." "6 A.M.” and the correlative reprise, “7:20 A.M. Jullandar Shere,” provide the deeply entrancing, profoundly arresting bookends for the new album and Cornershop’s live performances, and have earned the band sweeping notoriety.
The band, a four-piece ensemble transmitting a savory whir of drums, percussion, sitar, guitar and DAT programs, integrates its disparate sources around Tjinder Singh’s raving Punjabi mantra. The single chord upon which the two songs are hinged and with which Singh keeps time on an unflagging stream of eighth notes, has the dizzying effect of heightening tension and lending majesty as the chant propels itself along, winding through its various sections, and always returning to that patently haunting 12-bar “chorus.”
Tjinder Singh is an Asian Indian who grew up in central England in a bitter atmosphere of racial intolerance. "I’ve always lived in an intimidating rather than happy atmosphere,” he recently told Rolling Stone. “It’s really fueled my aggression and given me a sense that I don’t belong."
As an Asian Indian, however, Singh was exposed to sounds that were alien to many of his peers. "My brother [Avtar] and I were brought up with Asian sounds. I couldn’t raid my parents’ Beatles catalog because they didn’t have any. Punjabi folk music, religious music, these were the sounds I had known.”
In 1988 Tjinder and Avtar along with friends Dave Chambers and Ben Ayres formed a band called General Havoc. The change to Cornershop came, apparently, in response to intolerance the band experienced at school and in live performances. "Asians haven’t integrated smoothly or evenly into English society,” Singh explains. “As a rule, they work very hard because that’s what they’ve come to the West to do. They have a reputation for working in retail units and for devoting themselves solely to making money and not adding much to society otherwise. They’re very much scorned for that."
Cornershop released its debut single in 1992 as well as a pair of EPs on the English label Wiija. Something called Elvis Sex Change followed on Wake Up, before the debut album, Hold On It Hurts, was released in 1993 (Wiija/Merge).
But the music made less impact than did Singh’s much-publicized (in England, at least) torching of a Morrissey photo in front of EMI’s offices. Morrissey was at that time inviting reproof and indignation for factious references in his songs "Asian Rut” and “The National Front Disco." "People think it was a publicity stunt, but that’s the bullocks,” Singh maintains. “We felt it was required. Asians bear the brunt of racist hostilities in England, and we were very grieved by that.”
Last year Cornershop began to attract notice for their musical virtue. Wiija issued "Julander Shere” on a 99 pence single, which reportedly brought the band to the attention of David Byrne’s New York-based, Warner Brothers-distributed world label Luaka Bop. Cornershop was signed last year to a five-album deal, the first of which is Woman’s Gotta Have It, a seductive blend of cultures, bustling with ingenuity.
Singh unstraps his acoustic guitar and approaches the dholki, an Indian hand drum which has been fixed on a table. The crowd has responded to the wondrous seduction of “Julandar Shere” with an affirmative roar. In the applause you can hear expectations being exceeded and subverted, and the startling discovery by others of this strangely affecting import.
A mesh of digital samples are revved up and Singh fiercely emits an exotic prologue, which owes as much to the South Bronx as it does to any Eastern influence. The band falls in line behind Singh’s cue, regenerating their crossbred mystique. Paolo Atvei, seated on the floor, stage right, provides a buzzing, prancing Eastern hum on his sitar, which, I learned after the show, he’s been playing for less than two years. He learned the instrument in England and India, assimilating what he knew about guitar, which he already played, and then answering an ad placed by Cornershop only late last year. (Standing on the opposite side of the stage, it wasn’t until the second song that I even spotted him. I heard him, I just couldn’t see him.) Drummer Nick Simms is seated behind his kit, which he plays with insinuating precision, while Pete Bengry, in dark shades and a yellow Cornershop concert shirt, slaps a pair of congas, tickles a set of wind chimes, and supplies the steady rustle of various shakers. With the selection spill the first English lyrics from Singh’s lips. The interplay for this piece exists largely between Singh’s guitar and Atvei’s sitar, creating a lulling vibe as the lyric teeters between English and Punjabi
Atvei exchanged his sitar for an electric Fender on “Hong Kong Book of Kung Fu." The song hangs on a scruffy, Anglo-blues riff, with an offhand clutter and Singh’s frisky yawps – "All right!”– while Bengry pounds out savage accompaniment.
Cornershop mixed sampled hip-hop loops with sitar. A digitally produced female voice lingered sensuously over Singh’s dohlki thump. Simms and Bengry erupted into a tight, consolidated groove, summoning a flash of animation across the dance floor.
And then came “7:20 AM Jullandar Shere." The themes and rhythms are explored boundlessly on "7:20” as the band rides its delirious crescendos for nearly 15 minutes. Singh trolls on with exhilarating purpose, transcending language. He echos one phrase to nearly the point of peril, exerting such vehement reiteration that one wonders how he’ll ever retreat. The anticipation for release has peaked when, finally, Singh breaks away, and that remarkable, nagging 12-bar refrain is again in reach.
Singh is the first to exit the stage, leaving the trembling polyrhythms of Simms and Bengry to persist another five minutes or more. When it was over, Cornershop was rewarded with sustained and resounding applause.
Stereolab formed in 1990 following the break-up of McCarthy, the band Tim Gane played in the previous six years and with whom Seaya (now Laetitia) Sadier had recorded briefly. Stereolab’s debut single, “Super 45” was issued by Duophonic, the label Gane, Sadier and friend Martin Pike founded the same year. A pair of singles followed before their first album, Peng!, was released in 1992. In the ensuing 12 months, Stereolab continued to issue singles, including a North American debut, recorded its second John Peel session at the BBC, changed personnel, concocted a concept album precisely titled The Groop Played Space Age Bachelor Pad Music, and signed a U.S. recording contract with Elektra. Transient Random Noise-Bursts with Announcements and the single “Jenny Ondioline” achieved meaningful domestic penetration, before its successor, Mars Audiac Quintet, gave the band an unqualified American breakthrough. Now, Stereolab has released Emperor Tomato Ketchup, an album partially recorded in Chicago.
“Basically we have very raw music,” explains Gane. “Just a bassline, drums, and bass vocals. We put them down and expand on them. It’s best to go with the first thing that sounds good."
"I think we’re not rock,” offers Sadier. “I don’t think our music is based on rock 'n’ roll dynamics."
And so it isn’t. Stereolab is an ever-evolving experiment in sound, melding a network of electronic signals, advancing a succession of embryonic motifs on which an array of harmonic modulations are conveyed, and developing songs through rhythm and repetition, eschewing linear construction and convention.
"I don’t like rock,” Sadier declares. “Rock bores me. It’s all been done before and it’s time for it to move on.”
The first thing a listener will notice is the dense sound of the keyboards. Stereolab stacks one organ upon another, using a pair of Vox organs from the '50s and a Farfisa from the early '70s. Moog and Korg synthesizer add space-age ambiance, which is indeed a quirk considering how antiquated these instruments have become. While not entirely relinquishing their fuzzy familiarity, the Vox and Farfisa in Stereolabs’ fingers insinuate a futuristic remoteness.
“The Farfisa is a huge part of our sound, and we bought it out of the blue,” explains Sadier. “I’d given a French lesson and I had 50 quid in my pocket. So we went to the market and there it was." Gane began collecting Moogs in the early '80s, which for most of those years was not an extravagant hobby to have, considering the glut that occurs as such devices become obsolete. Maintenance of the Vox organs has been an annoyance, though; he reported having fixed them 20 times.
"It isn’t because of nostalgia or anything like that,” insists Gane. “We use the older effects because they’re more direct, more extreme, and they’re more like plasticine; you can shape them into loads of things. Modern effects sound blander to me and are less human, more characterless. The older effects have a strong sound straightaway."
The band, Gane in particular, has an attachment to its technical gear that is revealed through several titles ("Jenny Ondioline,” “Harmonium,” “Farfisa,” “Lo Boob Oscillator).
The vocals are Stereolab’s second unmistakable trademark. Laetitia Sadier sings in French and English, in either case with precious little intelligibility. Her locutions amount to rhythmic gibberish, which seems to be the intent. Interlocking with Mary Hansen’s precious polyphonies, Sadier is as much a rhythmic implement as she is a lead singer. Hansen serves exclusively in this capacity (as a vocalist), probably having more fun than any backup singer since those of '60s girl group The Vandellas.
The band lays down a bed of rhythm, leaving Sadier and Hansen to propel the songs along through any means they conceive. The turns and detours the songs take rely primarily on the vocal lines as the band plows on, audaciously restating the focal riff.
Menthol-Presidents of the United States of America
June 14, 1996
Riviera Theater, Chicago, IL
Menthol came out a little before seven. One kid was ready. His shirt already torn from his gangly chest, he cleared a space on the still sparsely inhabited floor and began lunging around, like a boxer in his corner before the bell. He quickly became the sole surfer, launching himself off a pair of unsuspecting shoulders, hurtling precariously at the mercy of a hundred pairs of brittle 13-year-old arms. Once, he plummeted to the floor, landing on his back; invulnerably, he re-mounted, beginning the rite anew, inspiring not a single imitator. After awhile he tired of that, reclaiming his turf and initiating a mosh pit. It began as a three-way mosh, which looked, particularly from my aerial view in the balcony, more like three kids shoving each other on the playground than any premeditated custom. Tiring of that, the kid tirelessly began to pogo.
Oh yeah. Menthol. They were into their second song, a new one that was pretty good. The third was also new.
The moshing was still confined to a single pocket of playful malevolence. With the density of a large crowd, moshing is usually held to stifled nudges, as the swarm shifts woozily back and forth in a continual struggle for position. Given ample space, though, it can escalate into full-out savagery. The action became sprawling and nasty as these kids tossed each other around, circling, measuring, then pouncing. A group of spectators formed a ring around these runty gladiators, looking on with sober expressions, choosing sides. I lost sight of the one kid as two bigger delinquents began to have blocking practice with each other.
"Stress is Best” came next from the band as roses littered the stage, many in bassist Joel’s direction. The fifth song was also new, and particularly aggressive. It was the most dynamic of the new songs. Baltie rode out the end of “Francis Scott Key” with a long solo and worked vigorously to pull off, with one guitar, “Codes and Ciphers” and “Briefcase Full of Cash,” both founded on twin guitars. “Dry Heaves” capped the set with a harsh climax as Baltie echoed the title phrase with a parched blare. The fury on the floor spread, corroborating Joel’s backstage assertion that this is the most pervasive song on the record.
Baltie set his Gibson Les Paul on the stage floor to feed back while Joel collected some of the flowers and waved a thank you, goodnight.
Presidents of the United States of America were next.
A few years back, Treat Her Right’s Mark Sandman discovered the two-string bass and adapted the instrument to his dusky songs and began playing it in his new band Morphine. He introduced the two-string to Chris Ballew, who played in Sandman’s Supergroup, and it changed Ballew’s outlook entirely.
“I just liked the simplicity and that it was new,” he said. Ballew had some songs and he recorded them on a four-track using the two-string “basitar” as well as a three-string contraption dubbed the “guitbass." Dave Dederer, a former English teacher and a friend of Ballew’s since junior high, heard the tape and liked it, volunteering to play three of the five strings. "I was like 'Great, where else am I gonna find somebody like that?” remembers Ballew.
Ballew and Dederer became a duo, playing locally in Seattle, changing names as whim dictated. One impertinently long sobriquet stuck.
Jason Finn, a local drummer, witnessed the cheerful wonder of the two-man band and wanted in. Finn, three years younger than Ballew and Dederer and formerly a member of Love Battery, reportedly begged to be let in the band.
It seems hard to believe that Chris Ballew could find two people to play in a band using a total of five guitar strings, singing songs named “Kitty,” “Feather Pluckn,” “Lump,” “Boll Weevil,” “Peaches,” and “Dune Buggy." It seems inconceivable that such a band could find nearly 2 million people to buy its record.
Released last November, The Presidents of the United States of America has spawned a pair of Top 10 singles and gone platinum. In the mere span of months The Presidents have had to remodel their live shows to accommodate spacious amphitheaters, auditoriums and outdoor arenas.
"As we’ve gained popularity,” Dave Dederer affirms, “we’ve had to put on a completely different kind of show. We’ve become much more of a rock band in the last nine months." (Here in Chicago, the Presidents played Lounge Ax on their previous visit; on this return visit, they’ve filled the 2,300-seat Riviera Theater).
The Presidents’ formula, singular and successful as it’s been, has left many, particularly those who speculate in ink about such variable matters, scratching their heads, wondering "How?" But all you need to do is hear the album to know the answer: It’s a hit. The songs abound with such artless simplicity and glee that they are inescapable as much as they are ingratiating. Joyfully ephemeral and pleasantly innocuous, the songs seem to have little to say either musically or lyrically, and are happy about it.
"I’m a happy person with a good family,” Ballew told The New York Times, “and I love Seattle, and I love riding my bike. I hope the music translates that joy of simplicity."
The Presidents came on stage dressed as breezily as they dress their songs. All three were in shorts, Dederer in sandals, and Jason Finn draped bravely in a Sonics road jersey. (The Seattle Supersonics were at this moment matched against the Bulls in game five of the NBA Finals.) Chris kicked up his gold-sparkle high-tops with a red sock and a blue sock tucked over the sides, inserting a partisan reference to the basketball game along with the traditional "Hello, Chicago!" They thundered through their 50-minute set, productively working their lean complement of guitar strings and masking the bantam proportions of Finn’s drum kit. Their every jubilant move was orchestrated for the crowd’s involvement and the crowd responded wildly – surfing, moshing, even dancing in the pit, and standing up and singing along boisterously in the balcony. Chris and Dave traded scissor kicks and vaults, and picked and strummed each other’s guitars. Dave even strode out to the rim of the stage and let the sea of grabbing hands shave the three strings of his prized Stratocaster. A gym shoe was hurled on stage colliding with one of Jason’s cymbals and Dave used that as a pick. An orange wig was tossed up and Chris plopped it lopsidedly atop his slick skull, donning it for the rest of the song. At another point, he directed the crowd to bounce along in time, leading the way with a boundless convulsion of energy. There were singalongs and big finales, and once the balcony trembled under the weight of the excitement.
"Feather Pluckn” neatly segued its absurdly appropriated coda, “All the froggies had a good time/All the chickies got their toes wet,” into “Baby You’re A Rich Man." And if some of the kids missed the nod to "I’ve Got A Feeling,” or failed entirely to recognize this as a giddy homage to The Beatles, it didn’t matter. Nor did it matter if “Kick Out the Jams” and “We Are Not Going To Make It,” both from the album, were mistaken for Presidents’ originals, because they sure sound like they could be, even if “We Are Not Going to Make It” now rings a bit hollow (they addressed the incongruity by tacking on to the ending, “We’re gonna make it after all,” paraphrasing the theme song from The Mary Tyler Moore Show). “Kitty,” using something as obnoxious as a chorus of meows to crawl into the brain, and “Back Porch,” with its swift stir of bumpkin rhyme and double-time, drew big crowd responses. Funky “Boll Weevil” and the irrepressible, chart-topping “Lump” were hauled out with good cheer and plenty of spirit. The lighters came out for “Stranger,” a quaint reaction to a lyric about a naked chick in a booth. “Peaches” was preserved for a late, climactic singalong, and “Naked and Famous,” an appropriate theme for Dennis Rodman, became a house-shaking finale, as the Bulls-Sonics broadcast continued to play on a television perched on a chair on stage in a way that band and audience members alike could keep one eye on the game.
The show was big and splashy in the most conventional rock cliche meanings of those terms. The band flaunts its benevolent excess and stomps all over the sacred tenets of their far less prosperous indie and punk rock brethren, whose very existence stemmed from a rejection of brand-name arena rock spectacle. “We’re entertainers, not artists,” says Dederer. We want to be mainstream; we’re not in this to be cool.”
It would be easy to dismiss The Presidents of the United States of America as a childish diversion and rebuff their juvenile adherents. But there’s something more here. The lyrics are meaningless, but they’re not pointless. Rather, they serve as an antidote to vacant moping and drivel, distinguishing The Presidents unequivocally from the glut of bands who know the same chords. And it’s even debatable whether any bands know the same chords. I doubt anyone could glean from a cursory listen to, say, "Kitty” that only five, rather than the usual 10 strings (between a six-string guitar and a standard four-string bass), are being used. Other than an elusive slimness in sound, there doesn’t seem to be anything especially novel about the songs, in strictly a musical sense, of course. But a closer examination reveals an intricate merging of the two guitars.
“Between Dave and I,” claims Ballew, “we have five strings, and you can make the most complicated chord in the world with five strings. We just have to cooperate with each other."
They often play off each other harmonically, reflecting some of the later spare, rocking Beatles items like "Hey Bulldog” and “Lady Madonna." And this use of harmony is half of what I consider The Presidents’ two most tangible assets. The other is rhythm. Groove is the core of everything the band does and the unifying factor between the three of them.
There exists one additional ingredient that is more refreshing than it is determining. Not a hint of cynicism or pretense surfaces in anything The Presidents do and the plainest evidence of this is offered by the big smile Ballew wears when he sings. It’s not a smirk and it’s not a leer; it’s a fat, happy grin and it never goes away.
And while the spontaneity of the songs eventually fails to match that of the their stage act, The Presidents give one heck of a show.
Morphine
June 27, 1996
The Riviera Theater, Chicago, IL
Morphine was formed in 1990 after the swanky blues-rock quartet Treat Her Right dissolved. Mark Sandman, bassist and vocalist for the group, had already begun to play the two-string slide bass that would, in smoldering conjunction with Dana Colley’s saxophone, become Morphine’s signature. Colley, who was employed by Treat Her Right as a guitar tech and had been playing in the Boston group Three Colors, brought his baritone sax to Sandman’s place and they found the pairing of the instruments compelling. They recruited a drummer, Jerome Deupree, learned some songs, and started to play local shows. An album was recorded, partially in Sandman’s home studio, and released in 1992 on an independent label.
Good, the album, created a small commotion and Rykodisc snatched the group up, reissuing the record the following year. Cure For Pain was Morphine’s debut for the label and a resounding breakthrough. In support of the record, the trio played an endless succession of dates, including three stops in Chicago, establishing their celebrated residencies (brief stands at a club or even a number of clubs in a single city), as well as traveling to such remote localities as Kuala Lumpur; Hobart, Tasmania; and Euro-Disney.
Said Sandman: "To go to Aukland, New Zealand and have 800 people show up to see you play is like, 'What’s going on?’"
Yes, the current album, was released in March '95 and a world tour again followed. Morphine twice hit Chicago in support of the album. This third appearance was arranged on a post-tour lark. Chicago is a favorite town of Morphine’s and seemed like a good place to test some new songs. The band strutted out on stage sometime after eight (it was an "After 8” show, sponsored by local radio station WXRT). Sandman soaked up the applause, grinning a crooked grin, hunched over the mic. He deferred his greeting until the applause had sufficiently ebbed. When it had, he spoke with that glib drawl, which anyone who knows his custom speak-sing method would quickly recognize. Sandman took his good time, milking a couple applause lines, establishing the proper mood with a devilish, dilatory mien; if there were a dimmer knob around he’d have turned it down … slowly.
Morphine play what has been identified, by the band itself, as “low rock." Their songs lurk around dim corners, casting long shadows in a bleary underworld. Sooty back alleys and shabby pool halls surface in and inform Sandman’s shady tales. His fingers slither easily across the two strings of his bass; his vocals seem at once dolorous and hard-boiled, framed in a low, weary murmur.
Dana Colley, from rural Hanson, Mass., handles baritone and tenor sax, frequently at the same time. He honks and howls, blasting fierce trills and turbulent, wheezing solos. He plays low, too. A lot of low, in fact. Breathy glissandos and smoky obbligatos. But Colley’s never played proper jazz.
"People naturally identify the sax with jazz, and none of us have ever played in jazz bands,” says Sandman. “It’s not where we’re coming from, although we do appreciate certain jazz records, of course. We feel the music is rock music, so it’s just another way to reinforce that. I mean, at the end of the day, ['low rock’] is still just a dumb category. But it sounded good to us, and people seem to accept it. It’s sort of funny really, 'cause you’ll see captions like 'Low rock trio Morphine is coming,’ as if everybody knows what low rock is."
Like most, "low rock” is too narrow a designation. The songs rumble and roar. Some rumble low, some only roar; still others do both in a sardonic retooling of the Seattle soft-loud ethos. (In fact, Sandman has referred to the music as implied grunge. This guy should be a critic.)
“Honey White,” the prodigiously swinging single from Yes, came quickly. The thing swings and swaggers and rocks, reeling forth with uncontainable momentum. And plows to a stop. "Besides, I like to see a little more fat,“ Sandman cracks. "Besides, I like to see a little more fat,” the crowd hollers along.
Sandman lets that last one linger in the good name of timing. Finally, he gives the cue. Pow! Colley bursts into his first and one of his most raucous solos of the evening.
“Sharks” was prefaced by a mini-Beat poem recited by Mark Sandman, hepcat. Sandman reveals the lot of Mona’s sister, signalling the boozy onslaught of “Sharks.”
"Sharks patrol these waters,” Sandman warned, as the band abruptly halted. The crowd roared its approval. Sandman swaggered to the lean accompaniment of snapping fingers: his and the crowd’s. “Swim just as fast as you’re able/Swim like a mother fucker. Swim." This was Colley’s cue. Bass and drums came thundering in behind Colley’s pealing tenor break.
Johnny Marrs from XRT was the show’s emcee, promising in his introduction of Morphine that the trio would be making plenty of noise (as if we needed assurance). Well, the trio was making plenty of noise. And again, the clamor inevitably swooped to a hush. "Swim for the shores just as fast as your able. Swim." Snap, snap. Frenzy.
"Whisper” was next. Sandman has called this his favorite song on Yes. “It’s got that deep, lush, groovy mood thing going on,” he told an interviewer. “In a big way."
As promised, they previewed some new material. The first was something called "Women Are Dogs Too." "Probably the most sophisticated song on the album,” Sandman quipped. Colley played the double sax on this one. He straps both the tenor and the baritone on, places each reed in his mouth, and blows, doubling the part. On the second new song they played, Colley doubled up again. A walloping “Free Love,” from Yes, followed.
“That was the end of the first part of our show, and if you don’t mind, we’re going to start our encores now,” Sandman told the crowd. “We could do what other bands do and walk off stage now and milk it for a few minutes." The crowd rejected that. "Fuck that,” he agreed.
Wilco-Paul Westerberg-Del Amitri
July 4, 1996
Grant Park, Chicago, IL
At exactly 3 o'clock, Norm Weiner from WXRT introduced Michel Bell, the burly basso who plays Joe in the Chicago production of Show Boat. Mr. Bell performed the “Star Spangled Banner” with all the chesty boom you’d expect from a man who sings “Ol’ Man River” nightly. He provided the crowd-baiting long version, holding the last word of every stanza over numerous measures, using a vibrato one could drive a proverbial truck through.
Wilco came on right after, opening with “Casino Queen” and its raggedly reworked Dylanesque shuffle. Then comes this strange, mordantly self-deprecating greeting from Tweedy: “Happy Birthday, America. I hope you like crap." He reeled backward and then rebutted sheepishly, "I must be high,” which cued the next song, “I Must Be High,” the lead cut from A.M.
Tweedy was flanked Jay Bennett on his right and Jay Stirratt and Max Johnson on his left. Johnson rotated steel, lap steel, mandolin, banjo and fiddle, imbuing as he has on both the last Uncle Tupelo record and A.M., an adeptly rustic credibility. Bennett handled lead guitar and keys, once during the same song, and sang sweet harmony with bassist Stirratt. Ken Coomer plays drums.
Uncle Tupelo had made only a single album for its new label, Sire, before splitting up in 1994. The album was calledAnodyne and it was the Toops’ (as they were called) most roots-oriented record to date. Observing the path that Wilco and Son Volt each followed after Uncle Tupelo’s demise, it would appear that the leaders of those inceptive outfits, Jeff Tweedy and Jay Farrar respectively, were treading common ground all along. At least professionally. “He finally decided he hated my guts,” concluded Tweedy, startled and spurned at the time. “I probably would have never broken up Uncle Tupelo."
Reconvening under a new name, Tweedy and the three remaining Uncle Tupelo members endured Farrar’s abrupt parting and released an estimable debut a year later. Jay Bennett was added as lead guitarist, a function filled on the record by Brian Henneman from The Bottle Rockets.
Tweedy calls the band a "geeky boys club,” reinvigorated by the new chemistry. “It’s exciting and the attitude of everyone going in to it is to have fun and not let everything be as serious or as melodramatic as Uncle Tupelo.”
“What’s with these chairs here?” Tweedy asked rhetorically after one song, gesturing at the 30 or more rows of vacant seats in the reserved area. I was wondering that myself. There were probably 10 rows of friends and family stuffed in front, including wife, Sue, and son, Spencer, who was seeing his first concert. But then there’s this gaping void where no one was sitting, hundreds of white, empty chairs. “It’s a 'fan free zone’,” Tweedy kidded.
It was five years ago today that Paul Westerberg last played this stage. He was still leading The Replacements at the time and was aware, heading into the show, that it was a pivotal gig. “We were six months on the road, and we knew it was the end. Tommy and I knew it was the final performance, maybe ever." The Replacements, two original members and replacements Slim Dunlap and Steve Foley, walked off stage with a wink and shrug and didn’t come back. Such impulses marked and largely propeled the band’s career, from the earliest days when a change of name from The Impediments was required after a local club banned them for rowdy behavior, straight through the Twin/Tone and Sire days when they claimed as much (or more) notoriety for heedlessness and hedonism as they did for their great records. And now on the last afternoon of their career, it made a fitting retreat.
Now Westerberg, a late addition to today’s lineup, has released his second solo album, Eventually, and formed a new band to back him. He seems happy and, from all preceeding evidence, dating back to even All Shook Down, The Replacements’ last album, which evolved essentially into a solo record, Paul Westerberg has been enjoying a professional renaissance. Said Westerberg in 1991: "I’ve matured more in the last two years than in the previous nine, and I’ve finally started writing songs for myself." Said Westerberg in 1996: "I’ve committed the sin of growing older. The worst part of it is, I embrace it. I don’t have to pretend to be 22. I can write music that speaks to who I am now."
At the time of the first quote, Westerberg had quit drinking, ended his marriage, and was by then resigned to the reality that The Replacements were not "destined for the Top of the Pops,” as he put it. Their previous record, Don’t Tell A Soul, had been, according to Westerberg, “a last-ditch attempt to make a commercial record and jump to the next level, biting our nails all the way." The album sold just more than a quarter-million copies and the single, "I’ll Be You,” failed to crack the Top 40. “We were let down, but it opened the door for us to say, 'Hey, let’s just make a little record and if someone likes it, wonderful.”
That record was All Shook Down and it proved to be The Replacements’ undoing. The band played together on only a single track, “Attitude,” and Chris Mars left the band soon after, having been relegated to part-time drummer. Mars had already released a solo album and All Shook Down was to be Westerberg’s. Tommy Stinson was achin’ to be as well, and soon after the band’s timely implosion had a new group and a record himself.
Paul Westerberg was born December 31, 1959 in Minneapolis, Minn. His father sold Cadillacs and his mother worked in a bank. Westerberg finished high school but was denied a diploma when he refused to show for commencement (he didn’t want to wear a cap and gown). He worked for a couple weeks in a steel mill and then as janitor for Senator David Durenberger “That was a great job,” Westerberg laughed. “How dirty can a senator’s office get? I’d bring in my vacuum cleaner, lock the door and write out our early set lists on U.S. Senate stationary. They’d be songs like 'We’re Gonna Get Drunk Tonight’ and at the top it would say, 'From the desk of U.S. Senator…” Westerberg knew since the 9th grade that he wanted to play in a band and had taught himself guitar.
With Bob Stinson, Stinson’s 12-year-old brother Tommy, and drummer Chris Mars, Westerberg formed The Impediments around 1980. “The reason I joined the Stinsons,” recalled Westerberg in 1986, “was to get drunk and party. We never really rehearsed. We’d drink and sort of as an afterthought, we’d pick up our guitars. Then we’d play until the Stinsons’ mother stomped on the floor."
"We started right off with my songs. I wrote like a hundred songs. Most of them were pretty much stolen. I took half of the songs on the Heartbreakers’ Live At Max’s Kansas City album and changed half the words. I wanted the other guys to think I was prolific."
Their first show was at the Paradise Ballroom. The P.A. was shut off after two songs. Another early gig was booked at a halfway house, where the four aspiring alcoholics opened for The Dads, a band made up of recovering alcoholics. They were thrown out of the place, with force, after loading up in the boiler room.
The group eventually played enough, and well enough, to interest Twin/Tone Records; the label released their debut album Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash in 1981. With the release of Hootenanny and Let It Be, The Replacements became a national attraction, and in 1986 Warner Brothers-affiliated Sire records signed the band to a contract. Tim was the initial result, figuring as one of the most notable records of 1985. By now, five years of raucous, chaotic stage shows were beginning to conflict with and undermine the more sophisticated direction the records were taking. "I think the idea of the rowdy, barroom band has run its course pretty well,” Westerberg commented in 1986. A year later, Bob Stinson, the band’s staunchest inebriate, was fired from the band.
Pleased to Meet Me was a logical follow-up to Tim and flaunted on its cover the band’s sardonic concession that, yes, The Replacements were selling out. Or they were at least trying to. “Our goal – which we never really expressed – was that we wanted to sell records,” said Westerberg after the breakup.
Don’t Tell A Soul was more overtly an effort in this direction, and perhaps the band’s most fully realized and consummate album. All Shook Down was the rootsy, rocking follow-up and swan song.
“I was filled with a sense of relief,” recalled Westerberg after the Grant Park breakup, “but also with great fear of having no idea of what the future would hold. That feeling was mounting as we were playing. I knew I’d play music, but I didn’t have my solo album planned there in the car on the way to the hotel.”
In fact, it took two years for his solo record to come out. Chris Mars had already released two when Westerberg put out14 Songs in summer 1993. Westerberg emerged from the interim revitalized, content, and enjoying sobriety. Without a band for two years, he spent time writing songs and strengthening his performing skills. “I used to be frustrated because I couldn’t play as well or sing as well as I thought I should be able to. Well, I never practiced."
In '92 Westerberg provided a preview of the new material with a pair of songs for the Singles soundtrack, a film which he also scored. 14 Songs was greeted a year later with mixed, mostly favorable reviews, announcing simply, as Westerberg intended: "Ladies and gentlemen, this guy writes songs." The album, which might have been more effective as 11 or 12 Songs, is nonetheless crisp, crackling with mirth and gusto, and producing a line of Westerberg standards.
More than two years passed before the follow-up, but eventually it came. Named appropriately enough, Eventually has fewer songs and has been received with reviews more precisely described as volatile than "mixed." Initially, in my encounters, the disc met with mild opposition or all-out hostility. Those mildly opposed expressed disappointment but not disavowal; the hostile factions already gave up on Westerberg years ago and aren’t willing to accord the singer any latitude beyond "Fuck School” and “Gary’s Got A Boner.”
So I began to wonder, was 14 Songs a last glimmer? And the new photographs of Westerberg, now in his mid-30s, were discouraging. He looked gaunt and pallid, and the rose-tinted shades he’s invariably been photographed wearing are a trifle square. Then a re-examination of 14 Songs, heard in the shadow of this dissension, exposed the songs as a marginal lot. Most limped along like the booze and cigarettes recordings of a guy who’s off booze and cigarettes (which was true except the part about the cigarettes). A few nearly sparkled, and there are those minor conquests “World Class Fad” and “Mannequin Shop." But otherwise, I was beginning to believe that Paul Westerberg had had it.
Delving deeper, however, I discovered that Stereo Review awarded Eventually "Best of the Month” and kind words were offered by People and Entertainment Weekly. A nice writeup in Newsweek appeared too, placing Westerberg and Mark Eitzel at the front of a pack of refreshing “wimp” rockers.
The album, I found, to my relief, was consistent and consistently inspired, typically endearing Westerberg, with some of the most deliberately sophisticated and plainly ambitious songs he has written. Some of it did seem pretty familiar and the rough stuff sounded more calculated than instinctive, but the album struck me as more of a full effort than 14 Songs. “Good Day,” one of the prime targets of “new” Westerberg critics, threatens to become mawkish but never quite does; it is uncompromisingly a ballad and doesn’t for a moment pretend to be a rock song, which takes some courage for a guy like Paul Westerberg.
Then I went back to 14 Songs and it rocked. Funny how easily one’s perspective can be tainted and turned around.
All day I couldn’t wait to see Westerberg, and shortly after 4 o'clock, my impatience was rewarded. He sprung on stage with a frisky stagger, a blue floppy hat pitched clumsily on his pate and an old Fender electric slung around his shoulder. I’d seen the grin before, all prime and puckish. “I played here before,” he ribbed, peeking out at the swarm, much of it rising upon his emergence.
Reconciling a sprawling accumulation of impulses and influences, Westerberg presented his assorted spins on smart songcraft, meting out woozy bluster, swanky disregard, aching, tenderness, brashness, crassness, wisdom and wit, all with relentless sincerity. He is a performer who puts himself on display, betraying a relatable vulnerability, honing rather than rebuffing an endearing image as the talented degenerate. But talent has become the more perceptible component of that latter equation. Westerberg has always had his way with a hook and has the ability to pack as much into an eight-bar bridge than is necessary for a whole song. But these fits of brilliance have often been blunted by throwaways that passed largely on heart and crude charm. Westerberg himself has admitted it, citing a new-found ability “to know the real stinkers and leave 'em at home."
His current detractors might find that notion laughable, but it was certainly the case today as Westerberg and his snazzy backing band – guitarist Tommy Keene, bassist Ken Chastain and Michael Bland on drums – delivered the most formidable material from the new album, "MamaDaddy,” “Century” “These Are Days," and drew from the past 10 or so years an exuberant collection of old heavies, "Kiss Me on the Bus,” “Alex Chilton,” “Can’t Hardly Wait,” “Merry-Go-Round,” “World Class Fad." During "Valentine,” the first Mats’ song of the afternoon and one of three plucked from Pleased To Meet Me, the crowd’s attention (or at least the small fraction of it that was sitting in the “stands”) was diverted by the swift migration of 30 or more rows of people into the 30 or more rows of previously vacant seats to which Tweedy had earlier made reference. The band (remember them?) forged on, of course, but I could sense Westerberg’s frustration as he himself watched this momentary spectacle.
Initially, the band had more than these circumstantial conditions undermining its assault. There was a discernible stiffness in the playing, a reluctance even, particularly from Bland. Formerly a drummer for Prince, Bland is technically adept, but he keeps his high-hat cymbals closed too damn tight, thereby diminishing the impact of his blows. Further, he seemed a bit diffident about his fills and was, as a result, not so convincing.
Westerberg was not inculpable. Usually, he hurls his vocals around so exuberantly and with such breathless abandon that he’s a step or two ahead of the rest of the band, and his own accompaniment. Today, at least initially, he stayed in stride, calibrating his vocals to the more willful pace of the band. But, as was reported with his show just two nights before at Metro, the opening songs were a warmup. This was, in addition to being a del Amitri crowd and more or less a Wilco crowd, faithfully a Westerberg crowd and things got pretty loose after a while.
Westerberg had quickly tossed aside the hat, and after a few songs, the jacket came off too, revealing some snappy red suspenders. He never did take off those damn sunglasses. Keene, a solo act of some repute but far less renown, looked entirely suave in coat, tie and dark shades. As lead guitarist, he lifted licks and solos straight from the records, which was not only fitting but rather enjoyable, even if it underscored the band’s studied approach. Some of those parts – the break on “Merry-Go-Round,” the mandolin-like fills toward the end of “Alex Chilton,” which Keene strummed on his lustrous black Gibson Les Paul, the only guitar he used – have been happily stamped on my brain. Westerberg, equipped with a dazzling reserve of vintage guitars, took a couple solos himself.
The encore was “Daydream Believer,” which to my surprise and the crowd’s delight was taken faithfully, lovingly even, from top to bottom. “Alex Chilton” wrapped things up on a more emphatic note. Westerberg led the band off stage, departing with the same wobbly enthusiasm as he entered with 50 minutes earlier. Bland, a massive black man with only a clump of hair rubberbanded on top of his head, was the last to leave, draping his huge yellow jacket over his shoulders and disappearing backstage.
There was a large shift of fans after the Westerberg set: those who didn’t care about del Amitri and were leaving and those who didn’t care about Wilco or Westerberg and wanted a good look at the headliners. It was getting to be dinner time and I imagine a lot of people just wanted to get over to the Taste of Chicago and eat already. I think a lot of people just had better things to do after a while. Whatever the case, it happened that Westerberg played to the largest showing, because when del Amitri came on, and especially by the time they finished, there were a hell of a lot of empty seats. I could have moved up but I was pretty happy where I was and I’m not a huge fan of the band anyway. It’s funny, because I’ve liked them since I first played “Kiss This Thing Goodbye” on my college radio station. Waking Hours had a bunch of good tunes that we played at the station, and a few more that we didn’t. Change Everything, the follow-up, packed probably more good songs. And now Twisted, which, admittedly, I’ve had less exposure to than the others, has produced a bona fide crossover hit in “Roll to Me,” and “Here And Now,” the first single, affects me in almost the same way as the Jayhawks’ “Blue,” released at roughly the same time. I can’t say there’s been a del Amitri song that I’ve heard and haven’t liked. Yet I’ve never bought one of their discs, or even thought about it. I’d rather listen to del Amitri than Dave Matthews or Hootie or even Counting Crows, but the fact that I’ve lumped them in with such numb company is perhaps as good a demonstration as I can make as to why I’ve been largely immune to their pleasant salvos.
Well, anyway, del Amitri came on stage at I don’t know what time and they stayed longer than I expected, which made me a little restless. I thought about leaving at one late juncture, but “Kiss This Thing Goodbye” loomed inevitable and I did want to hear it. Having covered everything I knew, which was more than I anticipated – del Amitri apparently is one of those “oh, they do that one, too?” kind of bands – there wasn’t much else to stick around for. Frankly, the roaring axis of guitar was wearing me down. Iain Harvie and Jon McLoughin, acting dually as lead guitarists, buried nearly every song under the drudging burden of excess and, making it worse, they were essentially doubling licks – on identical Les Pauls. Harvie had already irritated me with his long, stringy mane and blundering assurance that del Amitri neither shops at Sears nor drinks Red Wolf beer – the show’s sponsors! – and now here he was, entrenched at the foot of the stage, the archetypal arched-back profile pose, devouring songs with these swollen, straggling manifestos.
Finally, as the last song of the encore, “Kiss This Thing” was dragged out and the show ended.
The set had a far more auspicious beginning. Opening with the “The Ones That You Love Leave You Nowhere,” which was loud and rocking, “Just Like A Man,” “Always the Last To Know” and “Here and Now,” quickly followed, each one as lusty as the last. Justin Currie, the band’s lead singer, bassist and principal writer, has a number of strengths, each of which constitute the crux of del Amitri’s deep-felt prowess. His voice, once improbably descibed by the Chicago Sun-Times as an “alto baritone/tenor,” is a rich instrument with an imposing depth of range and feeling. His songs are often flawless in conception, and thoughtful and absorbing in their construction. Bustling with juicy harmony and quite often crisp, compelling instrumental breaks, many of their songs are paragons of mainstream rock. Blending folk, pop, Southern rock and soul, as well as obligatory smoldering blues-rock hybrids like “Just Like A Man,” del Amitri offer a sturdy roster of songs and, when exercising a little restraint, dependable musicianship.
Later set entries included “Medicine,” the charming “Satisfied,” “Roll to Me” and the more aggressive “Start With Me." "Somebody” made an obvious finale and an agonizing climax to the Harvie-McLoughin slug-fest.
For the encore, the accordion that had been tucked away by Andy Alston’s keyboards, was brought out finally, and quite agreeably, for “Tell Her This." Currie strapped on an acoustic guitar and sang, and the women melted into their husbands’ and boyfriends’ tender clutches.
© 1996, 2011
Stephen Andrew Miles