I left The Wizard on Friday to spin at a club gig on Rush Street. It was my first time spinning at a place I would consider a club and a complete 180 degree turn from what I'd been doing at the Wizard. Their rules stated hiphop but no rap, but the guy who set me up that day was able to level:
"You're going to need to play some rap to get the crowd going but no Fifty Cent, no Chamillionaire, none of that cars and guns bullshit."
It seemed like a kind of not-so subtle racism, designed to keep the club from going black, but truth be told, dirty hiphop is all the business men and women want to listen to anyway.
My favorite part of the night came after 3, when the boss told me to play shit to get everybody to go home. If I had known that I would have twenty minutes of this, I would have brought some antisocial music from home. Here's my Rock Out the Yuppies set:
Blue Oyster Cult - Don't Fear the Reaper
Radiohead - Karma Police
Charlie Daniels Band - The Devil went Down to Georgia
and as a subtle homage to Pump up the Volume, I played
Leonard Cohen - Everybody Knows
SATURDAY was Sarah's birthday and she wanted to party. Unfortunately, nothing was calling out to us too strong. We missed a hardcore show at La Casa Maldita with a band from Finland and a band from California, in order to go have dinner (fuck yeah, Udupi Palace!) so we ended up hitting up Quennect Four a new spot in Humboldt Park. Quennect for is run by a few people, including John Ibarra, formerly of the bands One Last Walk and the Black Polar Bear Returns, and the short lived spot The Zoo in Wicker Park. Quennect Four is decked out a lot classier than the Zoo: nice big stage, lots of original art on the wall, a shining ebony grand piano by the door. Even the old pool table seems a lot less scuzzy given the new digs, even if it is the same old cast of characters crowded around it.
Brenmar Someday was playing when we got there. Brenmar Someday is a constantly evolving musical project featuring Brenmar, using a mix of electronics and nontraditional instruments, with a revolving cast of characters accompanying. The results of these collaborations have varied from pop to noise to ambient to glitch hop, but like his latest album, A Husk of Hares on Terry Plumming, Brenmar's set (with a live drummer and circuit bender) sounded a lot like jazz.
Brenmar Someday at Quennect Four
The basement of Quennect was a lot different from the upstairs. It reminded me of the basement at the Needlehouse: a lot of stone, some couches and grafitti. After Brenmar, Stiletto Attack played downstairs.
There's really no good reason for you to know the band Sexpod. They were an all-girl Wiccan metal band who realeased an album and an EP in the mid-nineties, whom I loved back when I tyhought I was a lesbian. The singer for Stiletto Attack reminded me a lot of the singer for Sexpod. The band was able to pack a lot of power, and a lot of pop in for a two piece (their bass player was out of town). An apt comparison would be the Go-Gos, only a lot less catchy. For some reason, the place was filled with dudes with nice cameras. I just got a new camera, which is as nice as anything I've ever had), but I was suffering a serious inferiority complex around them). The aesthetic of Stiletto Attack, two hot chicks rocking out in heels, played well to the photagraphers who were still fawning and snapping away after Sarah and I got bored.
Stilletto Attack at Quennect Four
I had an alright time, but Sarah left disappointed. Less because of the bands than for our failure to locate a place that all of our friends were at. It was a busy Saturday night with lofts going off on Kinzie and Artesian, and shows at Spot 6, Subterranean, Reversible Eye and Chicago Hot Glass, but nothing particularly compelling above the rest.
Quennect Four's basement
SUNDAY found me depressed, so Autumn thought that it would be best that I listened to the blues. We hit up The 5105 Club at 5105 W North Ave. From the outside it looked like a dank, subterranea old people bar but the inside was poppin. It was bright and mirrored with fake stone wallpaper, like some sort of outdated hotel rec room and an old dude by the name of Tail Dragger was sauntering around the bar on a wireless mic, growling the blues in people's faces.
I don't know how old Tail Dragger is but he says he's been playing the blues in Chicago for sixty five years (this website says that Tail Dragger was born in 1940, which would make that claim impossible, but something tells me that the gentleman is given to exaggeration). On number of occasions Tail Dragger has offered to take Autumn and her friends down to Alabame and feed em neckbones til they're healthy. Tail Dragger looks like every crazy preacher in every dustbowl horror flick you've ever seen: rail thin with wild eyes in a cowboy suit. One moment he looks like he's about to nod off, the next moment he looks like he's ready to bite somebody.
Tail Dragger offers up a lot of information about himself, much of it unintelligible, when you're the last table standing at the end of a gig. He got his name from Howlin Wolf, whom he used to play with, because apparently he wasn't one for punctuality. He did a four year wrap in 1993 after he shot fellow musician Boston Blackie in a money dispute and has put out a few albums and a DVD.
You can preview a few of his albums here, and you can see him on youtube below, but you should really check him out at the 5105 Club. Especially, given the fact, that by the time I left Sunday night, I didn't have the blues no more.
