Plus: Yo La Tengo Does The Dead
“Disturbed frontman David Draiman has recalled the band’s struggle to get noticed in their early days – saying they were ‘blacklisted’ for not being cool enough,” Loudwire recalls.
“The Chicago band found it hard to make a name for themselves in a city better known for its alternative scene than for rock and metal.
“Draiman tells Loudwire: ‘People think it was this meteoric rise – it really wasn’t. We beat the hell out of ourselves for two or three years as a local band.
“Any time a rock show would come through town, we would pass out cassettes, stickers, t-shirts – whatever we could.
“There was a lot of struggle in a city that wasn’t conducive to hard rock and heavy metal. It was Smashing Pumpkins. It wasn’t about metal so we were blacklisted. We couldn’t even play inner city clubs – we weren’t cool enough. We had to force our way in.”
Actually, the Smashing Pumpkins weren’t cool enough either back then (or now), and Billy “William” Corgan has never forgotten it.
Still, Draiman has a point, and the local media still doesn’t give Disturbed its due.
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For the uninitiated:
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Yo La Dead
Yo La Tengo’s Ira Kaplan tells Las Vegas Weekly that he attended one of the Grateful Dead’s reunion shows in Chicago in July.
I had a great time. I had given no thought to going, but then Alex Bleeker from Real Estate got in touch; his other band, The Freak, were doing this aftershow in Chicago, and he asked if I wanted to be part of it and play some Dead songs, and part of saying yes meant I had an opportunity to buy a ticket. So it was kinda like, wow, if you’re gonna get offered this opportunity, say yes. I went in that casually. I apologize to anyone reading this who would have given anything to be there, but I had great time. I didn’t really expect anything. It had been so long since I’d seen them, that the whole culture of the village and “Shakedown Street” and all that, I had never seen that before. I think every time I saw them was in the ’70s. But I loved it.
Here’s Yo La Tengo covering the Dead’s “Golden Road (To Unlimited Devotion).”
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And here’s Real Estate covering “He’s Gone.”
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Poor Richard’s Velvet
“Today, rare photographs – along with a treasure trove of one-of-a-kind Velvet Underground posters and fliers, unreleased recordings, handwritten lyrics, news clippings and more – have landed in a Cornell University Library vault three stories below the Arts Quad, where researchers can study the band’s outsized impact, from 1960s and 1970s counterculture to today’s mainstream,” the Cornell Chronicle reports.
“Highlights from the collection include an oversized poster promoting the Velvet Underground’s first album, believed to be the only surviving copy; notes from Lou Reed, who died in 2013; a handwritten set list for a performance at Poor Richard’s in Chicago; foreign and domestic bootleg recordings; and images of performances taken by prominent contemporary photographers.”
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“John Cale provided vocals at Poor Richard’s in Chicago without Lou Reed who was recuperating from hepatitis at Beth Israel Hospital,” according to Connie Lynchitz on YouTube.
“Although NICO was advertised to appear, she was absent as was Warhol. Poor Richard’s was a club inside an poorly ventilated old church in which the temperature rose to 106 degrees during that summer.”
Here’s the audio Lynchitz uploaded from that show:
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Chicago TropRocker
“Howard Livingston was in a business meeting in China when he realized where he should be; where he wanted to spend the rest of his life – the Florida Keys,” KeysNews reports.
“I”ll never forget, I was sitting in a conference room in China, daydreaming of a warm day on a dock in the Florida Keys,” Livingston recalled. “All of a sudden, someone asked me what time it was then in Chicago. I realized I had no idea what anyone had been saying in the meeting, and I replied, “I don’t know about Chicago, but I’m on Key West time right now.”
“That business meeting, the epiphany it prompted – and the ‘trop rock’ song that it spawned – changed everything for Livingston, who was born in Kentucky, then lived and worked as an adult in Chicago, where he learned to sail on Lake Michigan.”
Here it is.
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College Review Circuit
* Badger Herald: Rise Against’s Riotous – If Sometimes Monotonous – Rock Enraptures Orpheum.
“Chicago punk-rock outfit delivers satisfying show, but may have been beat by impressive opener Letlive.”
Here’s both of ’em.
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* The Chicago Maroon: Hippo Campus Nearly Reaches Heights Of Their Hard Pop Inspirations.
“When Hippo Campus finally cut loose from Verse Chorus Verse Chorus Bridge Verse Chorus, they became what I’d hoped they’d be.”
Here’s Hippo Campus from JBTV:
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* Loyola Phoenix: Deafheaven Raises Hell At The Metro.
Here’s video of Deafheaven from the Oakland Metro because video from the Chicago Metro isn’t available.
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* The Michigan Daily: The Future Is Up To Chance.
“Chance the Rapper’s new single is the first song that has ever made me yearn to be from another part of the country.
“Chance debuted the song ‘Angels’ on Stephen Colbert’s show, and his performance is the most Chicago thing I’ve ever seen.
“Chance and Saba (who does the hook) are both wearing Chicago radio station hoodies, dancing to footwork beats with gospel synths and horns courtesy of Donnie Trumpet and the Social Experiment.
“In the lyrics, Chance contemplates touring with Chief Keef, champions his independence from major labels and honors his Windy City loved ones who have passed away (the ‘angels’ that he’s got all around him).
“It’s the quintessential lead single – it’s exciting because it’s undeniably the familiar Chance we all love, but it’s also catching us up on everything that’s new in his life (namely, fatherhood).”
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Comments welcome.
Posted on November 10, 2015