Once again, the opening of this promising venue at its new location at 1375 Lake St. has been pushed back, with Friday's gig by Urge Overkill and Saturday's MU330 show both postponed. (Rescheduled dates to be announced.)
Said the club's newly hired publicist Angie Mead: "This is a huge project, moving a club from one side of the city to the other, and things just weren't ready."
Rumors of a comeback by the legendary soul pioneer Sly Stone may be a bit... premature.
The leader of Sly and the Family Stone has canceled the performance schedule for Saturday at the Vic Theatre -- "due to health reasons," according to promoters Jam Productions. Refunds are available at the point of purchase.
Students of musical history will recall that another aborted performance by Sly led to a riot in Grant Park in 1970, a few years before the band leader dropped out of the music scene for good in 1975, ending one of the most extraordinary careers in soul, R&B, rock or pop... that is, at least until he can finally get it together for good for the long-awaited second act.
R.I.P.: The man who arguably did more than any other to inspire some of the best rock ever
Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist and accidental inventor of the twenty-fifth synthesis of lysergic acid diethylamide -- a.k.a. LSD -- dead of a heart attack at the age of 102.
As tribute, here is how I told the tale in my musical history, Turn on Your Mind: Four Decades of Great Psychedelic Rock.
In the spring of 1943, Albert Hofmann was a close-cropped, bespectacled professional and a thirty-seven-year-old father of three. He had been working as a research chemist at the Sandoz Company in Basel, Switzerland, for fourteen years, the last eight spent researching the medicinal properties of ergot, a fungus that grows on rye. During the Middle Ages, ergot-contaminated rye bread caused outbreaks of St. Anthony’s Fire, a nasty disease that caused the fingers and toes to turn black and fall off, eventually resulting in death through violent convulsions. In the 1500s midwives discovered that small amounts of ergot could help during childbirth by speeding uteral contractions and slowing the flow of blood. Hofmann’s work involved synthesizing variations of lysergic acid, the key ingredient in the ergot alkaloid, in the hope that it could be used as a cure for migraines. The chemist produced his twenty-fifth synthesis, lysergic acid diethylamide or LSD-25, in 1938, but when it was first tested by Sandoz pharmacologists, they didn’t notice anything special, and work moved on to other molecular combinations.
Five years later, Hofmann had an odd premonition that Sandoz staffers had overlooked something unique about LSD-25. In the ’60s, hippies looking for cosmic coincidences would point out that this notion struck the good doctor only weeks after scientists first achieved nuclear fission under a football field at the University of Chicago. New Age thinking holds that nature simultaneously gave humanity the tool to destroy itself (the atom bomb) and the key to open the door to a higher and more peaceful level of consciousness (LSD). Of course Hofmann couldn’t have known about any of that. On April 16, 1943, he synthesized a new batch of LSD-25, and as he finished his work, he began to feel dizzy. Assuming he had a touch of the flu, he closed his lab for the weekend and went home, and there he embarked on the first acid trip. “I perceived an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colors,” he wrote in his autobiography LSD, My Problem Child. “After some two hours, this condition faded away.”
Reflecting on these gentle hallucinations over the weekend, Hoffmann decided that they had been caused by the drug, which he had handled without wearing gloves. Late on the afternoon of April 19 he tested his theory. The chemist dissolved 250 millionths of a gram of LSD in a glass of water and, in the name of science, drank it down. After forty minutes, he began to feel dizzy and anxious. He hopped on his beaten-up bicycle—the only form of transportation available in wartime Switzerland—and started the four-mile trip home. He felt as if he was barely moving, but the assistant who followed him on another bike reported that they pedaled at a furious pace. The road before him rose and fell like the swells of a turbulent sea, and the buildings that lined the streets bulged and contracted like objects thrust into a fun-house mirror. When Hofmann finally reached home, he was in the middle of the first bad acid trip. His world wouldn’t stop spinning, the furniture took on grotesque forms, and the neighbor who offered him a glass of milk turned into a horrible witch. He only calmed down when his physician arrived. “Now, little by little I could begin to enjoy the unprecedented colors and shapes that persisted behind my closed eyes,” he wrote. “Kaleidoscopic, fantastic images surged in on me . . . exploding in colored fountains.”
Hofmann’s bike ride would be commemorated (consciously or not) in several early psychedelic rock songs, including “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times” by the Beach Boys, “Bike” by Pink Floyd, and “My White Bicycle” by Tomorrow.
Long hailed as the best live band in hip-hop, the Roots are different things to different listeners. They’re the Bonnaroo-friendly jam band known for playing three-hour sets. They’re the showcase for versatile producer and drummer Ahmir “?uestlove” Thompson, who’s worked with artists as diverse as D’Angelo, Erykah Badu, John Mayer and Hank Williams III and who even mastered the shopping-mall anthem with “Birthday Girl,” the new bonus track featuring Fall Out Boy’s Patrick Stump. But most importantly, they’re the unapologetic community activists who’ve now crafted eight powerful if inconsistent albums of musically inventive, lyrically challenging hip-hop.
In the studio, the band has always suffered from the tension between commercial concerns and political convictions, and it hasn’t really hit the right balance since the masterful “Things Fall Apart” in 1999. This time, having disposed of commercial worries with “Birthday Girl,” the politics are more hardcore than ever, from the title (a nod to a seven-volume treatise on violence) to the album art (a Southern propaganda poster called “Negro Rule” from the 1890s) to lyrics by co-founder Tariq “Black Thought” Trotter and guests including Talib Kweli, Mos Def and Common that take on, among other things, black teenage nihilism, ghetto youth serving as cannon fodder, global warming and the limits of technology (“Does a computer chip have an astrology?/And when it f--- up, does it give you an apology?”).
An edgy, unsettling vibe permeates most of the grooves, building to resolution with the disc-closing, emotionally uplifting "Rising Up." But as on the collective’s last few albums, the mood is sometimes shattered by pointless detours—snippets of a taped conversation railing at the group’s old label or lyrical complaints about the vapidity of BET—as well as scattered rhymes that just aren’t up to the overall quality of the rest (“Between the greenhouse gasses/Mother Nature’s spinning off its axis”).
The collaboration of an unlikely trio of gloomy Brits—sonic wizard Geoff Barrow, jazz guitarist Adrian Utley and hypnotic chanteuse Beth Gibbons—Portishead scored the biggest commercial success of any of the bands to emerge from Northern England in the mid-’90s with the mixture of hip-hop rhythms and psychedelic ambience dubbed “trip-hop,” one of those pointlessly limiting genre constructions so beloved of English rock critics. “Trip hop died on April 29, 2008, in Portishead, North Somerset, England, after a long illness,” an addlepated reviewer recently bemoaned in Salon. “The funeral service has been released in the form of a CD by the band, titled ‘Third.’”
Nonsense. Of course artists as inventive as these or fellow travelers Tricky and Massive Attack have moved on and expanded, just as the Beastie Boys progressed from fighting for your right to party to hanging at “Paul’s Boutique,” and the genre and us are the better for it. Last heard taking a distinct wrong turn on a live album recorded with the New York Philharmonic in 1997, Portishead returns after its decade-long silence with the proper follow-up to “Dummy” (1994) and its self-titled 1997 release, and fans will be happy to hear that it’s still making party music for melancholics. But the band’s sonic palette and its mood have changed considerably.
Gone are the old spaghetti western soundtrack nods; in their place, the warm analog baths of vintage synthesizers at one extreme and beyond-minimalist folk/jazz respites at the other. Together with much more diverse industrial rhythms, it all combines to provide the soundtrack for a much edgier and more urgent kind of dark night of the soul musing: Less languid, Gibbons now also seems less worried about the state of her soul than the plight of our war-torn, environmentally trashed globe.
This does not make for easy listening, but that won’t stop baristas from playing it in their chain outlets—and the music will be all the more powerful for that irony.
To be clear, as a professional rock critic and amateur hedonist, I am no prude. But I found the quickly becoming notorious, provocatively posed, semi-nude Annie Liebovitz photo of Miley Cyrus for the new Vanity Fair pretty darn disturbing for the way it sexualizes a 15-year-old whose entire career as Hannah Montana was corporately crafted by the Disney Empire to appeal to other girls that age and much, much younger.
Still, I wanted a reality check to see how this might play to the pop singer and actress' target demographic. Here is the critique of a certain 11-year-old critic and Hannah fan of my acquaintance:
"Oh my god! She looks stupid! I like Hannah Montana and all, but why is she all glammed-up like that when she looks good just being herself? It's like she's trying to look a lot older -- or cause some controversy. I think she must have just had a break-up, and she's looking for attention! She looked a lot better in concert."
Despite what the band name might lead you to believe, there actually are five members of Trio in Stereo -- vocalist PJ McMahon, bassist Marc King, keyboardist Logan Cradick, guitarist Mike Nelson and drummer Chris Kolodziej, augmented at various times by assorted friends on horns and backing vocals -- and they formed when they were all in college at the University of Indiana in Bloomington, then moved en masse to Chicago to build on what they started with their 2005 debut, the “Everyone Here Looks Familiar” EP.
Since then, the band has spent a lot of time gigging around with kindred sonic spirits such as Mary Timony and Midstates, as well as tweaking the impressive mix of vintage ’90s shoegazer guitars and rhythms and endearingly odd Elephant 6-style orchestral pop flourishes on its first full album, “Bury it to Dig it up,” self-released in mid-February, and available for free streaming or paid download on its Web site, www.myspace.com/trioinstereoband.
If the group is half as accomplished onstage as it is on the wonderfully trippy but undeniably catchy recordings of songs such as “The Show,” “She’s not a Robot” and “Jupiter,” it’s primed to claim a spot in the front ranks of Chicago’s psychedelic-pop elite. Judge for yourself at its next gig at Lilly’s, 2513 N. Lincoln, on May 8.
From Bob Dylan’s “Blood on the Tracks” to Marvin Gaye’s “Here, My Dear,” and from Liz Phair’s “Exile in Guyville” to… well, almost everything in the Rolling Stones’ catalog, rock ’n’ roll has never suffered from a shortage of great breakup records -- those “open your veins and let ’em bleed” chronicles of messy, nasty and profoundly sad romantic splits.
To this list we can now add “12 Angry Months,” the seventh album from those melodic but hard-rocking grunge veterans Local H, and one of the best that guitarist-vocalist Scott Lucas and drummer Brian St. Clair have ever given us.
“The idea was there from the very beginning: to have a breakup record in the tradition of great, angry breakup records,” Lucas says. “So I spent a lot of time listening to ‘Blood on the Tracks’ and ‘Aftermath’ by the Rolling Stones.”
The relationship in question -- about which Lucas remains otherwise circumspect -- actually ended several years ago, after the release of the group’s fine 2002 effort, “Whatever Happened to P.J. Soles?” A number of things conspired to delay finishing the new disc, including a switch in labels (the band is now one of the few original acts signed to catalog specialists Shout! Factory) and producer Andy Gerber having a baby.
“We put out a live record in between, and we tried to keep putting out stuff like that to keep going. But the problem was that we were making a record by ourselves. We were able to sell it to somebody eventually, but it always takes time to make money to go into the studio.”
In the meantime, friends and fans kept asking what Lucas was working on. “I’d be like, ‘Oh, I’m working on this break up record,’ and then it would always be, ‘Oh, you’re still going through that?’ and I’m like, ‘No! I’m not going through it! I’m just trying to make this f---ing record!’ So now I’ve got to talk about it and go on the road and sing all the songs and think about it again. And at this point, it could be about any number of relationships I’ve had.”
That might be the case, but in addition to St. Clair’s always propulsive rhythms and Lucas’ equally abrasive and catchy guitars and vocals, the songs on “12 Angry Months” connect because of the specific details of the protagonist’s grieving process, whether he is railing about the loss of some beloved albums when his partner moves out (“Where’s all my Kyuss records?/You never liked ’em until you met me!” he sings in “(January) The One with ‘Kid'”), derisively mocking her new boyfriend because he’s the kind of guy who loves his car more than his girlfriend (“(March) BMW Man”) or finally accepting that the relationship was doomed from the beginning and resigning himself to moving on with his humble existence (via the magnificently orchestrated “(December) Hand to Mouth”).
“That was the thing: to be as specific as possible with the details and not try to be universal, because the minute you start to try and be universal, people say, ‘Nobody has those feelings. Nobody thinks about ‘the sun, the moon, the stars’ and that kind of bull----. So the whole thing was, ‘Let’s go through specifics and stick to being really honest.’ The entire time when we were doing the vocals and working on the lyrics, I kept going, ‘Andy, I’m not sure I can sing this.’ And that was the rule: Every song should be a song that you’re afraid to have anybody listen to.”
Although Lucas remains one of the best songwriters who’ve ever called Chicago home, Local H has come to be taken for granted in some quarters, simply because of its longevity. The singer formed the band in the late ’80s with drummer Joe Daniels, becoming a duo by default because a solid bassist couldn’t be found. It debuted at the height of the alternative era with “Ham Fisted” (1995) and scored a big modern rock hit with “Bound for the Floor” from “As Good as Dead” the following year. Unfortunately, the release of “Pack Up the Cats” (1998) coincided with the corporate merger of its record company. The disc was largely lost in the shuffle, and Daniels departed soon after its release.
Triple Fast Action veteran St. Clair came onboard, and the band continued to release worthy albums as the alternative era yielded to rap-rock and teen pop and the word “grunge” became a punch line and then the answer to a trivia question. Yet Lucas insists he has never felt boxed in -- not by that admittedly meaningless genre description, or the two-man band format, or the highs and lows of the music industry.
“During ‘Pack up the Cats,’ that’s when I said, ‘I don’t really care. I’m not going to worry about how we do these songs live; live is live, and the record is another thing.’ I don’t use a distortion pedal anymore -- everything is just done through sheer volume now -- so I’m not sure you’re right when you say that I’m the last grunge guitarist. And as far as the label thing…
“Basically, we do things now exactly the way we have always wanted to. The accountant isn’t not doing his job, stealing our money, and the record labels aren’t charging everything against us so we’ll never make a damn dime. That’s all gone. We don’t do that now, and we’re not going to do that again. And I’m actually enjoying everything about making music more now than I ever have.”
To that end, Lucas has not only crafted “12 Angry Months,” but a self-titled 12-inch EP by the Prairie Cartel, an electronic/industrial side project with Blake Smith of Fig Dish and Caviar. He’s been the guest bassist for the Tossers’ European tour, and he’s tinkering with the idea of a stripped-down, partly acoustic solo album. Plus, to celebrate the new disc, Local H is doing a seven-night series of all-ages shows at the intimate Beat Kitchen, performing each of its albums in its entirety on subsequent nights -- even though Lucas admits that some of the songs now seem completely alien.
“It’s like Halloween, except we’re going to the party as ourselves. Sometimes it really feels like we are covering somebody else; it’s like, ‘I don’t even recognize this song!’ So it’s kind of cool, but it also makes you realize that the new record is good and it does hold up.”
FACTS
Local H performs at the Beat Kitchen, 2100 W. Belmont, on May 7 (“Ham Fisted,” with openers Fig Dish at 6:45 p.m.), May 8 (“As Good as Dead,” with Ultra Sonic Educators at 6:45), May 9 (“Pack Up the Cats,” with Fun Club at 7:45), May 10 (“Here Comes the Zoo,” with the Tossers at 7:45), May 11 “Whatever Happened to P.J. Soles,” with Josh Caterer at 6:45), May 12 (B-sides and rarities, with Pegboy at 6:45) and May 13 (“12 Angry Months,” with Mannequin Men at 6:45). All shows are sold-out.
Although there are a few highlights every year, the pop music lineup at Taste of Chicago in Grant Park has long since lost its status as major music news. Nevertheless, it oughta be reported -- and I haven't seen it anywhere since the city quietly posted the announcement on its Web site on April 22.
The best thing about Taste is that it remains free -- in keeping with the original mandate that Grant Park "remain forever open, clear and free of any buildings or their obstructions whatever." The lineup follows the jump, with the notable exception of a headliner for the annual WXRT (93/1-FM)-sponsored July Fourth shindig.
Friday, June 27, 5:30 p.m.
CHAKA KHAN
ANGIE STONE
Saturday, June 28, 5:30 p.m.
STEVIE WONDER
Sunday, June 29, 5:00 p.m.
PLAIN WHITE T'S
JOSH KELLEY
Monday, June 30, 6:00 p.m.
BROADWAY IN CHICAGO
Tuesday, July 1, 5:30 p.m.
JOSS STONE
RYAN SHAW
Wednesday, July 2, 5:30 p.m.
FANTASIA
ESTELLE
Friday, July 4, 3 p.m.
"Special Guest"
GOMEZ
ALEJANDRO ESCOVEDO
Saturday, July 5, 5:30 p.m.
BONNIE RAITT
Sunday, July 6, 2 p.m.
ALY & AJ
A CURSIVE MEMORY
KEKE PALMER
Jay-Z and Mary J. Blige tear it up at the United Center
The idea is obvious: Bring together the top talents in hip-hop and R&B for one triumphant arena tour that raises the bar for the concert experience in both genres. Even better if you can pair one artist who really speaks to the ladies with another who all the fellas emulate.
This isn't a new idea: Hip-hop giant Jay-Z and R&B lothario R. Kelly teamed up for the Best of Both Worlds Tour before it crashed to a halt in the fall of 2004. But that aborted collaboration was stilted, forced and joyless -- in short, a disaster.
In dramatic contrast, the Heart of the City Tour by Hova and Mary J. Blige -- the most successful rapper of all time and the queen of hip-hop/soul -- was a triumphant celebration when it rolled into the United Center Saturday for the first of a two-night stand.
Friends who first collaborated in the studio early their careers in the mid-'90s, the co-headliners opened the 2 ½-hour show together when they mounted an elaborate stage in front of a big video screen and an even bigger band complete with strings and horns to duet on "Can't Knock the Hustle."
A few tunes later, Hova injected a few lines into "Real Love," but the next 80 minutes were otherwise a solo showcase for Blige. "Thank you, Chicago," the diva said early on. "I brought you some joy. Can I make you happy?"
As that declaration indicates, this was a much more upbeat Mary J. than we witnessed on many of her earlier excursions, when she often seemed to compare battle scars with her devoted fans as everyone sought and found catharsis in her emotional explosions.
Content and in love, on this night it was a powerful cover of "Sweet Thing" by Rufus and Chaka Khan that set the tone. An overwrought "Your Child" fell flat, but otherwise, whether she was detouring into a bit of delicate jazz scatting or burning through ferocious versions of "Feel Like a Woman" and "No Drama," Blige's flame-thrower vocals and indomitable personality were a marvel.
Just as strong was the former Shawn Corey Carter, a.k.a. Jigga, also known as Hova, riding high on the success of "American Gangster," a new Madonna- and U2-like mega-deal with Live Nation and, oh yeah, that recent wedding to Beyonce.
All that aside, the most impressive thing about Jay-Z's half of the night was that he showed the same energy and conveyed much the same intensity to the arena crowd that he did to the much more intimate gathering at the House of Blues last November.
With his signature rapid-fire and seemingly effortless flow, the New York superstar tore through a satisfying chunk of his sizable catalog, including the horn-driven "Roc Boys (And the Winner Is ...)," the crowd-pleasing "I Just Wanna Love U (Give It 2 Me)" and the anthemic "99 Problems." And of course, Blige rejoined the proceedings a few times to keep the circle unbroken, as on a memorable "Song Cry."
But perhaps the most resonant part of Hova's set was his atypical detour into electoral politics, a nightly occurrence on this tour that was all the more effective because of where he was.
First, Jay performed “Dirt Off Your Shoulder," a song that's a favorite of a certain Democratic presidential candidate from Illinois, judging by his mimicking of the rapper’s trademark brush-off-your-shoulder gesture in response to mud slung by Sen. Hilary Clinton. Then, after "Public Service Announcement" segued into a moving montage of images from New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the performer encouraged the crowd to boo a video image of President Bush.
“Chi-town, are you ready for change, y’all?” Jay boomed. Finally, the screen flashed a photo of hometown hero Sen. Barack Obama.
The answer to the rapper’s question was a resounding cheer in the affirmative as raucous as any generated by a concert that lived up to every bit of its megawatt star power.
After stringing us out f-o-r-e-v-e-r before announcing the full roster of acts for the fourth annual Pitchfork Music Festival in Union Park on July 18-20, promoters have made the entire lineup and daily schedule public (though rumblings are they still have one more surprise in store at some other point this season).
The verdict: It's a strong bill, but quite obviously suffering from festival glut, that intense, often corporate-funded battle with the new plethora of big-business logopaloozas trying to remake the summer concert season, for better or worse, as chronicled earlier and often on this blog.
The P'fork goods for 2008 follow the jump.
Pitchfork Music Festival 2008
FRIDAY, JULY 18 (All Tomorrow's Parties classic albums retrospectives)
Public Enemy ("It Takes A Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back")
Sebadoh ("Bubble and Scrape") [* new addition]
Mission of Burma ("Vs.")
SATURDAY, JULY 19
Animal Collective
Jarvis Cocker
The Hold Steady [*]
!!!
Vampire Weekend
No Age
Atlas Sound
Dizzee Rascal
Extra Golden
Fleet Foxes
Elf Power [*]
Caribou [*]
Ruby Suns
Fuck Buttons
Jay Reatard
Icy Demons [*]
A Hawk and a Hacksaw
Boban Markovic Orkestar [*]
Titus Andronicus [*]
SUNDAY, JULY 20
Spoon
Dinosaur Jr
Spiritualized
M. Ward
Ghostface & Raekwon
Les Savy Fav
The Apples In Stereo
Boris
Cut Copy
Dirty Projectors
Bon Iver [*]
Dodos
Times New Viking [*]
Occidental Brothers Dance Band International
El Guincho
King Khan
HEALTH [*]
High Places [*]
Mahjongg [*]
Tickets are available now via pitchforkmusicfestival.com. A limited number of three-day full-festival passes priced at $65 remain but will sell out soon. Two-day passes for Saturday and Sunday are $50. Single-day tickets are $30.
