A non-profit built to support local artists who had historically been shut out of more traditional museums and galleries, the NNWAC set up an office in 1988 in the Flatiron Arts Building at the intersection of Milwaukee, North, and Damen Avenues, and began curating exhibits and performances and organizing studio tours. And then they start talking numbers with your lawyer and with you. And theyre like, Oh, well pay for it! So a guy came by the studio and bought a copy. A list made up of bands like Wilco and Andrew Bird. Wes Kidd: There were so many good bands. I think it has more to do with my lack of business mind than anything else. Drag City wasn't particularly Chicago-centric but their Chicago crew was spectacular, Brise-Glace, anything with David Grubbs in it, Jim O'Rourke, all of Rian Murphy's endeavors., McCombs also cites Azita Youssefis theatrical no-wave group Scissor Girls as one of the most vital acts of the time. Rock Band from Chicago, IL. They eventually got signed to Capitol and David Yow was very transparent with me. . I'd say the core of active individuals is still there, though there are fewer freeloaders and people of naked ambition. We lived together, we practiced every night together. It was just not our audience. If someone wanted to do a show in a house or in some unconventional space, he would pull his PA system there on a skateboard and just set it up., That sense of freedom, improvisation, and playfulness carried over to the more rock-oriented Lounge Ax, which Albini calls the greatest live music club there ever was, and McCombs calls my favorite venue in the entire world. It's where lounge revivalists the Coctails had accomplished jazz improvisers sit in with them, and where Shrimp Boat played, according to McCombs, this totally skronky, weird, idiosyncratic music with pop songs on top of it. People say, Oh, thats not really Chicago. Thats totally Chicago. Greg Kot: How many times have you heard that story? 2 . Its a little bit primitive, its a little bit lo-fi, but you listen to those records now and they still sound great. Starting at. Joel Spencer: There was definitely almost like a punk rock ethos, even though we werent really making hardcore punk or whatever. Were serious about making music. Touch and Go became a distributor and manufacturer for a lot of them, doing millions of dollars of business with some of the weirdest music and people imaginable. In comparison to smaller cities such as Nashville, Memphis, Detroit and Austin, Chicago pays woefully little attention to its musical history, doing little to trumpet the past or celebrate the present for residents or tourists. They were just lovely. Red Hot Chili Peppers. I mean, Naked Rayguns influence on the whole pop-punk thing. He was also making very accomplished albums. Red Hot Chili Peppers. Patrick Monaghan, who founded Carrot Top Records in 1993, remembers seeing Phair for the first time at a small Polish bar not long before Exile in Guyville, written about Phairs experiences in Wicker Park, came out. But mostly, it was the normal stuff: Flying you to New York or L.A. to meet with the label, walking you around the label. Eventually, he got upset and he said, Go ahead, finish laughing. Ah, Urge. And they were thinking, coming to Chicago, some A&R guy would sign them. Click here for Part Seven in this series, Rock in the 80s. It just seemed like a natural choice. All these great bands. We did hire a lawyer, but it was absolutely overwhelming. Watch the latest episode of Pitchfork.tv's new series "Yearbook," which chronicles important years in Chicago music history. I love that album. So that was a big motivation. But thats neither here nor there. Scott Lucas: I think those guys probably have better sense than I do. Dovetail . He was perfectly willing to work with a big label to help him move that along, whereas some of these more indie-oriented bands, I mean, Eleventh Dream Day and bands of that ilk were coming out of the whole punk and post-punk scenes and they were very much skeptical. And thats a lot of respect that they have, bands like Veruca, packed for their audience, for their fans. He really helped us focus, but he also let us work. We create stuff here, but then it gets appropriated by other people, and they turn it into multimillion-dollar properties. Brad Wood: Guyville is the most important record of my career, definitely. But that album probably is the least popular of their initial releases, so as with Survivor or Chicago the band, what do I know? And thats the first time I was able to integrate what I had been doing alone by myself just for fun into a recording of somebody else. But as a songwriter, I thought Scott Lucas really stepped up and just kept getting better and better. Blake Smith: It was pretty insane. Its a Chicago thing that all these U.K. DJs appropriated. Our first two entries here epitomize and to some extent were hurt by the shift from 80s indie-rock to 90s alternative. The Lounge Ax closed in 2000 due to unfortunate pressures from neighbors who thought the scrappy rock club didnt belong in gentrified Lincoln Park, the difficulties of maintaining an alcohol license in a city that keeps changing rules and fees on bar owners, and a landlord who didnt truly support the clubs existence. Wes Kidd (Triple Fast Action): I think our first show was at Cubby Bear, and we told our bass player that if he screwed up, if he had to restart a song, he had to smash his bassand that actually ended up happening. Then you add on top of it the whole house scene in Chicago. It was solely about the music that we made and how we were live. When I look back on it, its like, Oh, wow, we were perilously close to being a one-and-done kind of thing. I think it was just the speed in which we were able to turn around and make another record. The Chicago-based band spent the '90s shedding their country roots, and by the '00s they had become one of the most experimental and exciting bands in rock. Collected Musings on the Alternative Music Explosion of the 90s, The current lineup performed and talked about that long and rich career on Sound Opinions last April, 50 Chicago Artists Who Changed Popular Music Rock In The 60s And 70s, 50 Chicago Artists Who Changed Popular Music Soul And R&B, 50 Chicago Artists Who Changed Popular Music Chess Records, Meet the artist whose bold portraits have dressed up Chicago bus shelters, 150 years later, Dixon bridge tragedy among nations worst, Why were launching The Democracy Solutions Project, Linda Lenz, who kept generations of CPS parents informed through her nonprofit publication Catalyst, is dead at 77. Local booking agencies became international players. But the problem was, all the other bands used to be able to pull it together live, and we were famously a sprawling mess. Photo by Matthew Daniels. We were playing the Rosemont Horizon, playing where I saw my first concert; it was freaky. Right behind them were names like Veruca Salt, Material Issue, and many other bands that were just as good, but for whatever reason are now only remembered by diehard fans. That was a real, very important time. And that wound up paying dividends down the line. Very few people are mature enough at that age to know your way around the industry at all. We cant afford to give it away. He knew how to deliver singles. So I said, But it sounds exactly like Downed by Cheap Trick. I once saw David Yow pour lighter fluid on his jeans and set himself on fire. I think people confuse commercialism and ambition with a lack of talent. Joel Spencer, founding member of Menthol, is the Adult Services Librarian at the Urbana Free Library. 2K likes . Not then, not now. We walk off stage and Alex Chilton walks up to us and looks at us and says, Oh, you played You Cant Have Me, and were thinking hes going to say something nice to us, and he said, We used to butcher that fucking song, too. And then he just walked right by us on stage. Think about Chess Records. It took me a while longer to find a way to integrate more of that personality into other peoples recordings. It was still about getting a single on commercial radio. Like Eleventh Dream Day, Material Issue was ahead of its time, but it was as good as the ironically marginalized genre of power-pop ever has gotten. I remember Brad laughing at us like, You guys will never be that. Those guys are surgeons when it comes to that. And I still love it, the song Braindead just stuns me to this day. I saw them headline a show at Metro with Nirvana as the opening band. And we all ended up getting super drunk and we got up there and we were the only band that played a side of Neil Diamond and everybody else played their own songs. I guess thats what production would be for me. Mine is a class in music, however, and the biggest reason to care, as well as to include her here, is that she wrote a whole heck of a lot of great songs. But, at its best, so unexpectedly brilliant. The boom spread to clubs, recording studios, and indie labels as well as the bands themselves. The next day somebody calls our Oakwood apartment and I pick up the phone and its like, Hi, this is Jody Stephens. People would get drunk onstage, which they dont really do anymore. We were smart in the fact that we just kept touring all the time, and we used that money or that. Blake Smith: It was a drunken, wild time, everybody was out five, six nights a week until 4 in the morning, and we were always the band that took that further than you should. They were making records. I think it was very much a fear of success for a lot of bands in the Midwest. Their sound reads . You cant underestimate band chemistry. Billy Corgan. Theres no Local H (mostly because, as with Cheap Trick and Rockford, the duo initially was so connected to Zion), and there are no second-wave faves such as Figdish or Loud Lucy. So it was booked months in advance. And then, as the decade neared its end, just as quickly as the scene swept in, it was suddenly over. May 8, 2017, 6 a.m. CT. From left, Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins, Liz Phair and Jeff Tweedy of Wilco . We fought with them to get control over it. They were hands down the best live band. It was just her and her guitar. Its always propelled by the music itself and the cultivation of a music community and the businesses and arteries that support it. And it just didnt make sense, in a town like Chicago. Thats punk rock and an entire do-it-yourself ethos, but it had a supported ecosystem of like-minded business. The music, however, survives. The Audition (band) B. Bnny; C. Catherine (alternative rock band) Caviar (band) Certain Distant Suns; Chevelle (band) Company of Thieves (band) Cupcakes (band) D. Detholz! Balty [DeLay, the guitarist] and I would do vocal practices without our instruments, or with our instruments turned way down, because the Veruca Salt ladies, their vocal harmonies were just insane, and it inspired us to try. 10. Every band that I thought should be huge was never huge. We wanted to continue to stay on a major, or at least have that kind of distribution and radio support and everything, but not necessarily stay on a major. We didnt really have much trouble. So we were all versed in Cheap Trick. I remember, one of my first big pieces was about Eleventh Dream Day, in 87, 88. It was everything we wanted out of that meeting. You start out and you suck and you practice and your songs suck and they get better and they get to a certain level and you go up and more people go to your shows and at a certain point you peak and then you start going down. The current lineup performed and talked about that long and rich career on Sound Opinions last April. I am so bad at that. And having a lawyer is even super fucked up. I remember meeting Billy Corgan at the height of their fame, and Louise [Post] from Veruca Salt introduced us, and she said, This is Billy from Smashing Pumpkins. As if we didnt know. Some of the bigger labels wouldnt talk to us ever again after that. Very often, when theres a switch of presidents at a label, one of the things they do is just go through all of the acts and figure out who they want to continue to support. When the final product isnt desired, the price of it goes down, then the budget to record that diminished product also go down, and Ive had to deal with that. Whats Capitol offering you? It was just money that would seem like science fiction to everybody at the time. We had a lot of phone calls, and I have most of those messages. Which is a particularly Midwest thing. These 100 bands and artists' music helped define the "alternative" rock era of the '90s and influenced the next generation of indie rock this century. The mic preamps are the same. I think the music was extremely evolved and well-done, and the singles were quite good. I gave up on that a long time ago. And so our big homage to them was we learned how to play You Cant Have Me by Big Star. He may have been the great young hope at one point, but what he was basically doing was kind of a pseudo-grunge kind of thing that was briefly commercially popular, but hes evolved and gotten so much better since then. I'd say the core of active individuals is still there, though there are fewer freeloaders and people of naked ambition.
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