Date: 5/18/07
Location: The Manor
Show: OffGrid Radio Benefit with The Catchelorettes, DJ Demchuk, VJ Daze, Mr Bobby, and Skyler
Cost: 5 bucks sugested
Drinks: 1 dollar vegan jello shots, 1 dollar Budweiser
Things I missed to be there: Window Show with Squirrely Gee, blutt, Cyro, LB The Viking and more all up and down Belmont; Ladytron dj set at Darkroom; loft jam with Gut Reaction, Red Denizen; Quennect Four jam with Kyle Harter, Kyle Lavalley, Marat vs. Marat, and Charlie Deets; The Electric Set at Reversible Eye; J-Rocc and some other Stones Throw cats at Sonotheque
Reason I went: I kinda put it together
Rogers Park is a great place to throw a party. Up til now this was mostly just a working theory. After 18 years and one odd summer of living there, and then six years away, I never even tried until Friday. Rogers Park now is like Logan Square was five years ago, when I was throwing obscene ragers in a garden apartment on Atrill. Despite the fact that the neighborhood is coming up, and that no small amount of professional families are able to call it home, parts of it are still pretty hairy, and anything that doesn't end in bloodshed doesn't warrant the cops leaving their car to give you a warning. The drawback is that every now and then, events do end in bloodshed, as the owners of the former Cocobean Cafe found out a few years ago when they let a local kid rent the place out for a birthday party.
That was actually just two doors down from The Manor on the strip of Glenwood that has come to be known as The Rogers Park Art District (or something like that). Glenwood has seen a lot of action over the years. For years it has been home to the No Exit Cafe and the Heartland Cafe, centers for underground theatre, open mics, activist events, outdoor vegan dining, and cheap Huber Bock; the Red Line Tap, which is a neighborhood rocknroll bar; a blues bar I forget the name of, and the Lifeline Theatre. When I was growing up, I was mystified by the Eagles Aerie Shamanic Counseling Center and Turtle Island Books. While I was away at college, the space that is now The Manor was Phantom Limb studios and right next door, they were throwing punk shows and zine readings at The Independent Video Alliance. Now they've got the experimental arts venture Mess Hall down the street and soon, Evil Squirrel comics will be opening up next to that soon.
The tall and short of it is, I love Rogers Park and I love throwing parties. I can't live in Rogers Park because my parents still occupy space there, and I haven't been able to throw a party in almost exactly one year, because my new place is too small, so when my friend Alicia started lamenting how she wishes she could use her space more often, the gears started turning in my head. The Manor is a perfect space for a party. As it is, it's a big sparse loft that gets used primarily as a theatre space. Still, as ten o'clock rolled around and the band started up, I started to get that tinge of fear, that I was old, and this was a young man's game, that I had lost it, that no one was gonna show up and I needed to stop trying. This happens every time. Little by little, people started to filter in.
The Catchelorettes are a fairly-new girl group that plays quirky pop punk under a few layers of fuzz and scuzz. They came out in homemade prom dressed, with faces contorted in a kind of aganozized, maniacal apathy, if such a thing is possible, as they ripped into a cover of Gwen Stefani's "Hollaback Girl". If you remember that mp3 that floated around during the good ol' days of Napster, of Mr. Bungle ripping through a sludge cover of Britney Spears' "Hit Me Baby One More Time"... it was like that. There were maybe twenty people there at the time, probably half of whom came for the dance party, and this is what won them over. By the end of the Catchelorette's set, th crowd was still small, but respectable. Thirty, maybe forty people.
The DJs, being DJs, showed up late, and did a mad dash to hook up their equipment before the people got bored. Then the jello shots showed up, and the place turned into a party. Something about that first blast from the PA, that first cup of straight foam from the keg, and the first slurp of a jello shot sent a wave out to the party people all over the city, that it was time to arrive. I hate fashionably late people. Ironically, I'm not the least bit punctual, so I guess I'm a hypocrite, which is alright because I booked some kickass DJs, right?
Danny Daze, DJ Demchuk, and Mr Bobby have all played together a lot, and while they're each good on their own, they really shine doing a tag team set. They play off each other really well. Demchuk will toss out something like "Hip Hop" by Dead Prez or some random ass mashup shit and Daze will follow it up with some whitelabel electro that nobody knows, followed by Nitzer Ebb or some darkwave shit from Mr. Bobby that whips the gothier kids into the same frenzy as the party people.
After that it was by the numbers. Booty juke. Keg runs. The cops circling the block and not doing anything. A broken toilet seat. There wasn't even a fight. The band needed the PA back at 2, so we improvised a rig with a bass amp and the party petered out naturally. It was good times, and a part of my life that I had sorely missed, and now that I've recaptured it, it's got to go off again.
