VeeDee

See that little blur under "VeeDee"? That's me and my friends. We've got a thing going where we do sets of all-Chicago music. Curtis Mayfield. Los Crudos. Will Oldham. My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult. Et cetera. It's yet another great excuse to go to shows I otherwise wouldn't have been able to pay for.

Last Friday was a Midwestern smorgasbord. There was Chicago's own VeeDee, Ohio's Beaten Awake, and Philadelphia's Pearls & Brass. I don't know if Phillie is actually in the Midwest, but for the sake of argument, lets just say it is. The bands couldn't have been more different from one another, at least as far as three bands playing rocknroll.


A not-great picture of one of the dudes from VeeDee]

I had only heard of the first band, VeeDee from a few samplers I'd heard them on. I thought they were a punk band, one of those hoity toity punk bands that only played in bars. I was wrong. They came out like a bunch of fat Ramones but their music came straight from the sixties. They had riffs that were uglier than Iggy Pop's dick, and then tall of the sudden hey would slow it down and give you this dreamy solo that Strawberry Alarm Clock could've gotten off on. Throw in some pre-mascara Alice Cooper and some light King Crimson and you've got a halfway decent analogy.

The other bands were a mess. I never thought a band called Beaten Awake could be so quiet and boring or that a band called Pearls & Brass would be so loud. I could've liked Beaten Awake, but whenever I started to, they'd outwear their welcome by playing for another three or four minutes. Too much ballad, not enough balls (and when you read this statemest, realize that it's coming from someone who was spinning Andrew Bird that night). And then came Pearls & Brass and they were a metal band. That came totally out of left field. On their myspace page, they describe themselves as Blues/Rock which is actually pretty apt, at least from the songs they've got streaming. They must've had a good produced, cuz someone really pulled the Skynyrd out of them for those songs. Onstage in Chicago, though, they sounded a little too close to Disturbed.


Here's Beaten Awake in Chicago a few months back