Hideout Block Party 1957 okay part 2

You didn't think I could write about my friends in all the bands that are playing and not mention our honorary emcees? Not a chance. Sue Miller, Julia Adams, and Joe Shanahan are also joining us for the block party. Just so happens that these three were also Sputnik babes. Speaking for eleventh dream day--our musical journey wouldn't have been the same without the people who ran the best clubs Chicago has ever seen.

Let me start with Sue and Julia. Julia and Sue. Yes, you think Lounge Ax, and you wouldn't be wrong. So many great shows. We've seen them listed. Drag City Invitational. The first Tortoise shows. I used to grab a spot next to Gary Schepers as he mixed the show. Or sat all the way back near the photo booths with Sue. Sue and Julia made playing there fun. Everybody who ever worked there was great. I was a young dad, and  for the most part didn't hang out a lot if friends weren't playing or if edd didn't have a gig. I think Doug might have been there more than he was at home. But, the eleventh dream day shows were always special. The stage was comfy--the right height, the right width. Great sound. Go out the back door and fresh air before encores. Try not to talk too loud because of the asshole neighbors. My favorite nights--when Ira Kaplan was our 4th member, the Beet release party night, the rest are frankly kind of a blur.

But we go back further than that with Sue. Sue booked the Cubby Bear for their best years. Gary at the sound booth there too. Eleventh Dream Day rehearsed upstairs so we just had to drag our stuff down. Sue let us open for Lyres, Feelies, Slickee Boys, Wipers, and gave us a bunch of our own headline shows as we began to feel our oats. We met our good friends from Precious Wax Drippings downstairs in the dressing room when they played with us. John Herndon, Jim Garbe, and the Little boys. Sue made this place the best place to play while she was there. I don't think it was squat when she wasn't.

And then even further back with Sue. To the beginning! The West End. My favorite all-time Chicago club to see bands or to play. She booked it. Gave us our first slot opening for Green when we relaunched as a four piece with Doug and Baird. I loved that place. Sunday all-ages matinee with Husker Du, a matinee show with the Minutemen (second show canceled-I've written about it elsewhere), Descendants all-ages. Feelies show which is one of the best shows ever. Sue--we used to sneak over the fence in the back. Janet was underage and got hauled away (Kevin too!) in the back of a paddy wagon. My first Yo La Tengo show. Alex Chilton first show in Chicago on return to his career. We opened for Green on Red. Mushrooms. My friend Raoul. The night we thought Ray Davies was going to jump on stage as a guest, but didn't. Sam Kinison was there. We heard him scream his patented scream at his girlfriend as they got in the cab. Lee Popa on sound board. Hot nut machine at the from door. The balcony that almost seemed like it was over the stage. Sue would give us $50 which frankly we could have been paying her. In other words, Sue has been there literally every step of the way with us, and was always nice, every step of the way, and I love her to pieces.

And then there is Joe. Before I was even in a band I was hanging out on Clark Street. Snuck in to Stages for the Slits soundcheck which was basically a New Age Steppers show. So many great shows at Metro over the years. You all know them all. For a band like us, it was the big time. Joe gave us our biggest shot to date when he booked us to open for The Long Ryders. That definitely kicked our career up a notch. Then he gave us a Meat Puppets show. Our profile was really helped by these two gigs. Joe started Rock Against Depression nights which let smaller bands like us play--admission $5. Metro was happening. And then once edd  started packing the place on our own, Joe asked if a couple of up and comers could open for us. first Nirvana, the Smashing Pumpkins. You're welcome.
Joe ran the club as well as any club we've ever played at. After the gig he always made us feel like a million bucks no matter what the door did.

So, happy Block Party guys. Joe, Julia, and Sue. Thanks. Smooches.

Hideout Block Party-- It's 1957 Okay

Saturday, September 23rd 2017, I will be sharing a stage with some of my oldest friends. By oldest, I mean those that I go furthest back with, in the long-lasting sense. A year ago, I realized in a phone conversation with my long-time guitar hero and frequent musical partner, Tara Key, that many of us were born in the same year, 1957, and would soon be hitting a milestone. I blurted out, “Hey, let's all do a show together to celebrate.” Tara joined me in the sentiment, also ignoring the logistical improbabilities, but agreeing that getting us all together would be, to put it simply, fun. 

I’ve known Tara Key and Tim Harris the longest. The first time I saw the amazing Babylon Dance Band open for D.O.A. in Lexington, Kentucky I was mightily impressed. I didn’t meet them back then in 1979, but when I did in Louisville, Kentucky at the punk rock house/ rehearsal space/ hangout 1069 a few years later, it was the start of a long-time friendship. I was visiting a friend, Kate Dunn, and happened to be there as The Zoo Directors took a break from one of their marathon rehearsals. The Zoo Directors was a post-Babs trio featuring drumming neophyte Janet Beveridge Bean and hadn’t done much yet. Within months I somehow persuaded Janet to move to Chicago and start a band. Holding no grudges for stealing their drummer, Tim and Tara up and moved to NYC where they started Antietam.  In addition to forming our current bands in the same year, we have played many a concert together, in Louisville at many a Derby party, at CBGBs, The Cubby Bear, The Hideout, etc. Tara has toured with eleventh dream day, we’ve played on each other’s records, and she and I have two duet/instrumental records together. 

I first met Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley, and saw Yo La Tengo at the West End in Chicago in April of 1986. I recorded the show on my trusty Walkman (I still have the tape!). Hanging out downstairs, still giddy from their performance of Marlboro Country with Charlie Pickett, I realized Ira and I had a similar record collection and mutual love of baseball. When our bands both played at the Barking Tuna Fest in Kalamazoo (the next year?) Janet and I drove back to Chicago with Georgia and Ira in the trusty YLT station wagon where I heard Mingus’ The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady for the first time and shared a laugh over a giant glob of something alien that hit the windshield that wouldn’t come off. When we first got signed to Atlantic, we did a mini tour together (w/Redd Kross) and when we toured Europe on our Lived to Tell record (and fell in love with James McNew!), we co-headlined for what still might be eleventh dream day’s high water mark as a touring band. They of course have carried on to become the best band on the planet. Since 1992 we have done many more shows together, and I rarely miss them when they come through town. This time James, Georgia and Ira appear as Condo Fucks, the best garage band on the planet.

Rick Brown and Sue Garner first appeared on my radar when we played with their band Fish and Roses. I think it was CBGBs the first time, and Czar Bar the second time, but I’m hazy. We had common friends from NYC (Antietam and YLT), and their sound was both novel and striking. I bought the t-shirt! Our friendship really had a chance to grow when edd recorded over the course of a NYC October in 1992, and many a subsequent visit and meal in NYC/Chicago through the years. 75 Dollar Bill is Rick’s new amazing band, a groundbreaker again (he was part of the NYC experimental rock scene of the early eighties) and this will be the first time I’ll hear them with Sue in the mix!

The fore-mentioned bands all slept on each other’s couches over the years and experienced the American indie scene, but there is one participant in the upcoming block party whose couch I have never slept on, but have known a heck of a long time, and who was actually born on the very day of the Sputnik launch!—Mr. Jon Langford. When Tara and I were talking about who we knew who was turning the notch on another decade this year, I recalled that one of my musical heroes was actually my age. Which freaked me out! The Mekons first single Never Been in a Riot came out in 1977 when I was twenty years old (although I wouldn’t hear it for several more years—on the Fast Records Mutant Pop compilation I bought in 1980). In 1977, when Jon Langford was communing with the other Mekons as a drummer, I still hadn’t picked up an instrument. The next year though, inspired by punk rock, I bought a Gibson EB3 bass knockoff from JC Penney mail order, and learned enough on it so that by 1979 I was playing punk rock (and Tom Petty) covers with some friends in The Pods. Lexington, Kentucky did not have much of a punk scene, and the handful of us didn’t do much original material like the Louisville bands were doing. Back to Jon though. I first saw the Mekons in June of 1986. My friends and I went to the Bob Dylan/Tom Petty show at the big barn, Poplar Creek, then drove in to see the Mekons at Exit in Chicago. After being a mile from the action with Bob and Tom, standing at the front of the stage with the kinetic brilliance of the Mekons five feet away was unforgettable. It was a while to get to meet Jon though despite a parallel love of the Sundowners playing old time country in desolate downtown Chicago. We finally met while both in major label purgatory on tour in Lawrence, Kansas on a Mekons/ Eleventh Dream Day bill at Bottleneck in 1991. Sally was at that one. And now we’ve known each other for years. I think Janet and Sally are slowly becoming the same person. And Jon is just a force of nature and has somehow come to embody the spirit of  Chicago. He is playing the block party with Skull Orchard, one of his many brilliant outfits. 

Having been born in the year of Sputnik (the first satellite launched into space), Chuck Berry putting rock and roll on the map, and the heyday of the Beats, my colleagues and I have traversed a unique path as the generation after Pete’s generation. Baptized in rock and roll (1957), too young to be a hippie (1967), young, loud, snotty and ready for punk rock (1977), smack dab in the middle of the best indie rock years (1987), and so forth and so on. We’re all still playing, making new records, not looking back (except when chronology hits you in the chops). See you at Hideout.

Who The Hell Am I

WHO THE HELL AM I

I was lucky enough to share a stage some time ago, in the previous millennium, with Bill Callahan as a member of Smog, on a short tour of Europe. Bill, Jeff Parker, and I all played guitar in this band, and with little rehearsal, I had to feel out my role. Bill, like Will Oldham, doesn’t say a lot about what he wants from you—he trusts you to complement what’ s going on. So, on this tour, I did just that—playing melody lines and coloring the gaps with a volume pedal. There was one show though where Bill turned to me on stage as an instrumental passage approached and said in his patented dead pan, “Be Rick Rizzo.”

I had perhaps less than a measure to process what that meant. Who the hell am I?

I didn’t learn to play guitar until I was what I considered way too old to begin—23 years old. It was 1980 and I was just out of college and living on my own in upstate New York. I had traded my friend my P-bass for his ’68 Telecaster because I wanted to learn to play so I could write songs. When you learn how to do something you tend to go to your reference points. Critics have tended to refer to a very narrow list when they describe my playing. So, let me unpack it for you, the best I can–here are my guitar influences. Although my playing has evolved over the years, I think Rick Rizzo, the guitar player, was formed before I even started a band.

Just to get it out of the way, I think The Beatles served as a primer for everything I know about music and how to perform and write, but the first time I was thrilled by a guitar I was ten years old lying in bed listening to WCFL on my Sears Silvertone radio. I would set a timer on it and fall asleep to the current charts. I Can See For Miles was energy from space. Pete Townshend was my first favorite guitar player. Critics always said he didn’t solo with the best of them (I beg to differ), but it was the rhythm playing and power chords that had me. The one note solo was brilliant too. Pete.

If I go through the timeline of what I listened to as a kid beyond the pop charts, Shindig, and the garage bands on my street, it starts with Chuck Berry. My music fandom as a serious consumer started with Fifties music, just ask my pal, Pat Daly. We recorded a version of Chubby Checker’s, Let’s Twist Again, at Adventureland in an amusement park recording booth for a buck. (I think Jack White has bought up all those old booths). I bought Chuck Berry Gold on cassette and listened every day for weeks. Those rock and roll licks are the dna for all rock that followed.

After Chuck, Albert King was my guy. Lots of the same licks, but slower and with emotion.  Albert was West Coast electric blues. At the time I knew nothing about acoustic blues—I would discover Son House and Lightnin’ Hopkins years later after I started with eleventh dream day. Albert’s notes were filled with a force greater than time and space. If I had the internet back then I would have figured out that Buddy Guy had that too.

When I bought the Allman Brothers, Live at the Fillmore East, I became a man. Okay, I was 15 and wouldn’t grow facial hair for almost ten years, but this record was guitar brilliance. Duane Allman was the guy. I think my sense of jamming was born here.

In the early seventies all I wanted to hear was loud, sonic guitar playing. My friend Gary was a Hendrix freak and I too became a worshipper at the altar of Jimi Hendrix. I went to a local theater for a showing of the Woodstock movie. I was in awe. Jimi was gone, but he was alive in my world. His playing defied all boundaries. The Star Spangled Banner interpretation says it all. There are other great guitar players from this era who I liked alright, but since they didn’t satisfy my sonic guidelines I appreciated but didn’t love them. Keith, Jimmy, Eric were not in my pantheon.

My friend Pat had a couple of older brothers who shaped the next phase of my guitar lexicon. I would never have found John McLaughlin or Frank Zappa if Pat’s brothers weren’t dropping acid and getting stoned. I was pretty innocent in high school but I sought out Mahavishnu Orchestra and Mothers records with the money I was making as a grocery bagger. At this point I was years away from thinking I could ever play music—these guys didn’t help with those thoughts, but I did register how they explored beyond the typical rock boundaries I knew. My first concert was at the International Amphitheater in Chicago—row 40—Frank Zappa on the Apostrophe tour with Captain Beefheart. Mind blown.

I used to set my alarm to wake up at two in the morning to watch Rock Concert. One night Neil Young was on—a taped performance of Like a Hurricane from London off a record that didn’t yet exist. I owned After the Gold Rush and loved it, but this particular performance struck me deep down in my musical soul. A large fan onstage blew his hair and ruffled his flannel shirt in the simulated hurricane. The solo soared beyond Hendrix—it had all the astral power, but there was a melodicism that made the notes sing. I’m getting blown away indeed.

1975—University of Kentucky—half the dorm hasn’t arrived yet because they have to work the tobacco fields at home. I meet the only other person who had arrived –the friend who would change my musical life—Keith Holland. Keith was gay. I had no idea. Back then, who would have known? Those first weeks of school, I heard records that changed everything. Keith turned me on to the Velvet Underground. Lou Reed and Sterling Morrison probably have as much to do with how I play than anybody else. They weren’t necessarily good players, but there was magic in their interplay. The adage that only a few thousand heard those records, but all who did formed a band was true in my case. James Williamson was also a fave from the Stooges record Keith turned me on to.

Keith also had the record that changed everything—the Patti Smith Hey Joe/ Piss Factory 7”. This was something that only existed on the fringe of the world. It made FM radio irrelevant. It made 99.9 % of everything I knew irrelevant. Patti has said she didn’t ever consider herself to be a punk, she used the “n” word to describe who she was. Outside of society is where I want to be. The term punk was perverted by the fashion-fueled British version of rock that happened in the mid-seventies, but really, what could be more punk than taking on the Crown, so give fashion plate Johhny Rotten his props. To be a punk meant to be on the fringe. That’s why homosexuals, artists, and poets (of which I was none, but a fascinated guest at the party) tended to find each other. In Lexington, there couldn’t have been more than two dozen of us. Keith and I found the townie punks, but it took a couple of years. As for the dorms, I know that we were on the fringe. When it was discovered that Keith was gay,that would be all too apparent. And the music that we listened to was shunned by all but several of our small circle. Lenny Kaye, the champion of the garage music of my childhood, was another subliminal influence on my future guitar style. All over Horses there are guitar runs that are not made to be transcribed. Lenny channeled Patti’s lyrics and expressed all the emotions therein. Unpack Lenny’s playing and you’ll find all that garage band fuzzy Nuggets too.

I bought a bass and amp from the J.C. Penney catalogue in the summer after my junior year of college and taught myself to play. I played in a punk band with my roommate Chris. I traded many of my classic rock records for punk rock. Television Marquee Moon was one of them. Tom Verlaine possessed some of the string bending skills of Quicksilver’s John Cipollina coupled with Neil’s emotional range. Like his adopted name suggests, there is a poeticism to Verlaine’s playing. Richard is pretty great too.

My band The Pods played New Year’s Eve at Halle Lou’s in Lexington to welcome in 1980. We entered the stage to the song Foxhole. The local punks were there at the free show probably because our flyer used the same cut and paste collage style of Never Mind the Bollocks. We made some friends that night, played some shows together in the new year, but then I decided to ship out back to Chicago. I started a new job and moved back in with my parents. I was still playing bass in my bedroom, and loving post-punk bands like Joy Division, Echo and the Bunnymen, P.I.L., and Gang of Four. To fill out the rest of my influence roster I have to include the guitarists I was loving just before I picked up the six string for the first time. Bernard Sumner had a way to interchange power chords with lead lines that I loved, Will Sargent played guitar like J.W.M. Turner painted, Keith Levene was creative and daring, and finally, Andy Gill slashed and chopped and burned his way through the mix. All of these Brits made an imprint on the songs I’d be writing the next year.

Since I began way back then trying to learn guitar I haven’t been immune to other guitarists. I discovered Richard Thompson and Fairport Convention in the early eighties. The sounds he makes are amazing. I’ve also been influenced by my friends. Tara Key and Ira Kaplan are kindred spirits and two players who always take me to other places. The Feelies’ Mercer and Million, Roger Miller, and Karl Precoda seeped into my subconscious as well.

So who am I? No doubt a little bit of all of the above. I wish I could be the sum of those parts I’m just a patchwork. I’ve never considered myself to be much of a guitarist. My hands are too small and I’ve never been able to use my pinkie much because it doesn’t stretch to the fourth fret of the major scale. I have to slide my ring finger up to the note that the pinkie would have covered. As a result I’ve never used scales—I sort of feel my way around. I also have a very poor short term memory. I am not the kind of player who can listen to a record and play what I hear. I cannot duplicate anything no matter how hard I work at it.

Back to Smog.

I stepped to the edge of the stage in mock stardom. Bill had emboldened me. Across the field, Iron Maiden was playing, their roar faintly drifting across the fields that separated us at the Roskilde Festival in Denmark. I stepped on my Tube Driver, closed my eyes, felt the breeze in my hair, and fired back.

1. Am. Rick. Rizzo. Whoever that is.

When Life Gives You Lemonheads

We picked up the white Mercedes passenger van at  Heathrow, the kind that's all over Euro highways,  and loaded it with guitars, travel bags, cymbals and the stroller. The plan: drive to the hotel across the street from Finsbury Park to meet our old Dutch tour manager, Jan, who was back in the saddle for our three show mini-tour with The Lemonheads. We had a night to settle in before the first show in Camden, and I, by virtue of my sterling driving record, settled into the driver's seat. It is an odd feeling the first time you drive in England, what with the wrong side-of-the-road discombobulation and all, but really the oddest thing was the clutch for the manual transmission being on the right foot with brake in the middle and the accelerator on the left foot. And I wasn't going to get any practice. A couple of lurches forward and stall-outs, then Doug navigated our way out of the confusing loops and merges of airport infrastructure while I tried to reconcile muscle memory with stress.

Jan came down to meet us to help sort out the general mess of assigning rooms, and writing down where we would all be spread out throughout this somewhat dingy hotel, where not so successful businessmen congregated in the small carpeted room off the lobby to smoke.  Doug and Jimmy (our guitar tech), Wink and Jan, Jerusha, our wonderful nanny from Louisville, and Janet, me, and 15 month old Matt took turns in the claustrophobic elevator to various upper floors to unwind. Matthew, restless from the long journey, grabbed everything in sight in the room, knocking the phone off the hook and putting the cord in his mouth. Time to take a walk.

Finsbury Park was just across the busy road, and there was, to our delight, a carnival in the process of going up. Bumping the stroller over thick electrical cables linking generators to rides, we wheeled Matt through the puddles past rising poles and canvas, pneumatic arms and nicked up oversized teacups. The American carny is a legendary figure--the hardest, most ornery breed of alcoholic pill-freak in wife-beater t-shirt and trucker hat. But the British carny was a different breed altogether. I certainly had never seen one on television or in the movies. Where the American brand had tobacco stained teeth, the Brit carny had few teeth to discolor. The fashion sense featured long stringy unwashed hair under a cap--the kind AC/DC singers used to wear.  A good stroll through the park did the trick and put the kid out, and after a little dinner and a pint at the closest pub it was time to retire. The next day was the first show in Camden.

Pulling up to soundcheck was the first indication of how the Lemonheads were strapped to the rocket to stardom. A gaggle of giggling tweenagers lined the stage entrance, and as we walked in we saw lead singer and guitarist Evan Dando surrounded by television lights and photographers. If you tried to engineer a teen idol, Evan with his good looks and who-me? personality would make any record company see green. He shot us a nod, then stared back into the sun.

We had known Evan and the band for a couple years by then, we had both been signed by Bettina Richards at Atlantic in 1990. We crossed paths occasionally, playing shows together, as we both garnered good college radio success, but languished comercially in our little corner of a mid-level floor of 75 Rockefeller. Then they put out a single preceding their second record.

Mrs. Robinson was a hit.  It's a Shame About Ray was a great power pop record, but the punked up cover of the Simon and Garfunkel song from The Graduate was  "the ticket" as Jon Lovitz was saying at the time. Every A&R rep in the nineties would try to jump start careers with a well-placed cover after that. Our version of Wire's Ex Lion Tamer apparently wasn't what they had in mind.

So, on an overcast April day in 1993 our paths crossed again. This time, Atlantic was throwing us a bone, or at least a life preserver. We were somewhere in the middle of our El Moodio tour, we had already hit the road with The Chills on the West Coast, and had done our South by Southeast duty in the motor home. While the shows were going well, and decent reviews poured in, our bar code was not getting zapped enough in the Towers and Best Buys of the world. As I looked around at the buzz surrounding the Lemonheads, I felt a bit invisible.

The show was great. The girls down front tolerated us, saving their vocal chords for Evan, but we went over well in spite of their indifference. A lot of times it stinks to be the opener, but there is something special about a tightly packed thirty minute set where you can expend every ounce of energy. I don't usually play to the crowd anyway. I close my eyes and let the songs carry me off. It varies how long it takes on a given night, but I can usually lose myself in the moment, a zone, a space  without a place. I came off stage sweaty, dazed and ecstatic .

But that feeling doesn't carry over long for me. I get a sense of despair. If someone outside the band enters the dressing room I have to look for an exit. I don't want to talk. This show was no exception. I recognize now looking back that there was something deeper at work--I was entering a period of depression in my life.

I don't know how you can possibly know it when you're in it. I mean, I was happy, I thought. Artistically I felt like I had succeeded beyond my wildest dreams. I was in the middle of touring the world on our third major label record, I had been recognized as a songwriter and guitar player, and it was what I was doing for a living. I got to be with my family while I was doing it. But I was also 35 years old and it was becoming evident that commercial success probably wasn't coming my way. That is a weird feeling--not caring about fame, but craving attention to satisfy an over-sized ego, at the same time realizing that a lot of people around you are banking on you becoming famous.

And I was a father. Matt hadn't been diagnosed with his rare condition by April '93, but he had been having multiple seizures, been delayed walking and talking, and judging by his frequent crying, very agitated by something in his beautiful  little head. It was difficult to prepare for a concert with Matt on the road with us. Before Matt was born, my nervous energy would send me walking in the hours before a concert, exploring whatever city it was we were playing, but with Matt, Janet and I did our best to be parents. After a concert, I was emotionally spent.
So, when this show ended, and Janet said that everybody was going out clubbing, I immediately volunteered to drive back to the hotel with Matt. I had my usual after concert funk and it was a relief to think I could drop out of the social scene. I've never been good in a crowd. In a small group of people I can talk it up and have a great time, but hanging out in a crowded bar drinking and smoking was never my thing.

The plan was for me to drive the van back with Matt in the car seat, and everybody would cab it back on their own. The route was not an easy one. The club was some distance from the hotel, and while I had paid attention on how we got there earlier in the day, the prospect of retracing the drive in an unfamiliar vehicle on the opposite side of the road was daunting to say the least. Jan wrote the directions for me, but it was dark and rainy, and I had to rely on adrenaline and luck to get back. Which I did.

I got up early with Matt and consumed bangers and a boiled egg in the dining room, Janet groggily joining us. Lots of stories about the evening. Party night on the West End. Fashion models hovered around Evan. He and Janet sang Gram Parson songs until the wee hours. Wink, Jimmy, Doug, and Jan liquored it up. Eventually the traveling party managed to pull together to drive to Manchester.

Manchester succeeded in matching my greying mood. Driving in, I realized the influence of geography on art, and saw how my heroes in Joy Division could emerge from such a place. We had a good hang and pre-show backstage, post-soundcheck dinner with the L-Heads, then played to another massive and adoring crowd there to see the headliner. Teenage Fan Club was the middle act and were fantastic. Janet and I skipped The Lemonheads though, and walked across to a nearby university where The Jayhawks were playing in a campus student center.

The next, and final stop was Glasgow, Scotland. It was a beautiful, but long drive on an off-day, and I remember entering the city from high elevation where you could see roof tops extending for miles. The hotel was close to the city center and after settling in we explored on foot with stroller. There was a great bookstore, but browsing with a baby cut that shorter than I would have liked. That night, in the dead of sleep, a deafening and persistent alarm rang out and hotel employees ran up and down the halls urging everyone to get out. Standing outside in pajamas with dozens of other guests, the rumor eventually passed close enough to hear that it had been a bomb threat.

Made it through the day to a late afternoon soundcheck in a cavernous beer hall in an especially dingy part of the city. The concrete floor had that smell of stale ale and bleach, a smell that still sears my memory. The concert however,  left no impression on my mind, which leads me to believe that it was just another concert. And the end of the "tour".

We had a few weeks of rest when we got home in preparation for a return to Europe for a five week jaunt through Germany, Belgium, Netherlands, Denmark, Switzerland, and London again. There was absolutely no buzz on our record. Radio wasn't playing Making Like a Rug, and Atlantic seemed to be giving a collective shrug. The Lemonheads went on to more success,  the spotlight explored other Chicago bands, and I gravitated toward the darker pole of the el moodio persona. (Note: El Moodio was a nickname first given Wink in honor of his moon child star sign which I also share and is characterized by moodiness and the tides/ pull of the moon. I have self-identified with the nickname and co-opted it. My apologies Wink.)  After a long and exhausting tour that ended with a wonderful birthday in Jan's home town in the Netherlands, I unofficially retired from the grind in July. Teacher would soon displace musician in the employment box on my tax return.

I include a write-up I recently found in a box that sparked this memory. It sums up the miasma of emotions whenever I look in the rear view mirror. Bartender, lemonade for all my friends!

The Witches of Marcee Lane

The witches lived in the storage crawlspace behind the wet bar in our rec room. I felt their presence even while my family watched The Ed Sullivan show on a Sunday evening, but when I sat by myself or alone with my sister on a Sunday morning watching Flash Gordon or Tarzan, the cool dampness that permeated the room like an invisible fog, chilled my bones even on a summer morning.

For years I was afraid in the place of my childhood, and even after I moved out to go to college, I would get a creepy feeling whenever back alone in that house. It was nothing that couldn't be explained. The expansion of the ducts as the furnace came on caused creaking. Cleaning out the crawls revealed no supernatural habitation. No witches. But I was terrified to be alone. Up until middle school I would ask my dad to  walk me upstairs to bed.

Our house was one of two dozen split level ranches in a cul-de-sac twenty miles north of Chicago. The dirt roads leading out of the city had been paved into highways, and the collection of farms in the middle of oak tree savannah turned into villages where dads with briefcases could commute to the crowded city. My grandfather, my mom's dad, a comptroller from Pittsburgh, bought one of the two models available in 1954, planted by the developers who were busy sewing seeds for schools, banks, and churches.

It was a cozy house with three bedrooms, six stairs up the landing that separated upstairs from downstairs. My uncles shared the room facing south with a view of several mighty oaks and a creek that ran through fields of clover and brambles of wild berries. My mom, the middle child and high school teeny-bopper, slept in the middle bedroom while her parents Carl and Alice occupied the room that looked out over the rest of Marcee Lane. The rec room down the stairs off the kitchen was where the new black and white t.v. sat in the cool below-ground space. Two windows at ground level allowed light into the room with its brown/beige checkerboard tiled floor.

They called my grandfather Finny, a nickname given the tall Swede, lumping him in with all the other Scandinavians who found their way to the Midwest. He worked in the city, but enjoyed his new home where pheasant hunting on the weekends with his sons was just outside his door. He would stop at the old Cypress Inn after work, situated on the way home from the train station. Sometimes my uncles got to hang out with him there--David was approaching 6'4" and could arm wrestle his way to a free beer. He was putting himself through John Marshall Law School at night and working days. His younger brother Jay, who was barely out of elementary school, got to play skittle bowling while the men drank.

On a quiet March morning in 1958, Jay was away. He had been sent to live with cousins, a nurturing crew of fun-loving boisterous Swedish/German Pittsburghers in a place where Jay was born and where he could go to school and concentrate, and get away from the gloomy residue of his mother's death from cancer the previous fall. Finny hadn't been able to adjust. After caring for his wife, and on leave from his job, Finny drank himself into a false sense of comfort, and slipped into a depression, exacerbated by losing his job. 

There was another reason for Jay to go to kin. The house on Marcee Lane was getting crowded. My mom had married my dad, and I was a new addition to the family. 

My dad was a street smart city kid with a winning personality and Frank Sinatra style. After a short stint in the army between wars, he was making good money as a milkman for Bowman Dairy, a route that would bring him out to the suburbs. He had plans on becoming a lawyer, and had taken a semester at DePaul, but with rumblings out of Korea and an offer to get service out of the way that could get him out before deployment, my dad left college and did his stint. When he returned, however, he couldn't pass up the urging of a friend to join up at the dairy which was paying a decent salary. 

The route brought him out to Northbrook, where he often chatted with Alice and charmed her so much that she readily gave him permission to take her daughter Judy out on a date. Judy, a senior in high school, soon to graduate, was attracted to my dad and his charm, his red convertible and gifts of black lilies (an idea lifted from the Brenda Starr comic strip).

Next came baby (me), and moving in with the in-laws, and Alice gone to cancer, David swamped with the service, then school and work, and Jay in sixth grade, and off to Pittsburgh, Finny regularly into his cups. The Cocker Spaniel, Tokie, didn't like a baby taking her a notch down on the cute charts, and after a long Chicago winter it was difficult to imagine that it would roll over into spring. The Soviets were nuking it up and celebrating Sputnik. Ginsburg howled. Miles blew.

On a quiet March morning, just before sunrise, while everyone slept, my grandfather was at the end of a long and lonely night. Another day would not be possible. He took his gun out. Where was it? In a bedroom drawer? A handgun or his hunting rifle? He went to the middle bedroom. Where was I? That was the room where my crib was kept. I was not yet one year old. One shot fired. My mother awoke and screamed. That's what my dad said.

I didn't find out about my grandfather's suicide until I was in my forties. My mother was dying of cancer after a long, hard life of living with multiple sclerosis. My dad wanted me to know the secret. He wanted me to finally know that her pain was much deeper than physical malady. She had lived a life of joy and laughter, and had never said a word about her parents, although I knew she loved them because she always smiled fondly at the old home movies of her childhood. But, I had rarely heard their names spoken, or stories of their past She had raised me and my sister with the focus on us only. I don't know how that was possible.

My father remembers little of that morning. In fact he remembers nothing. Ambulances. Police. Funeral. He doesn't recall. He said he concentrated on taking care of my mom. With his dad's help, he bought the house.

I tried to look up the public records, but they have been destroyed. I thought to find the police chief from that year who was quoted in the small Chicago Tribune story reporting the death. He passed away years ago.

So I'm left with cobwebs, and in the still of the night, I listen for voices. For the witches who surely lived in my basement.

Paul K

First encounter: About thirty-five years ago, 1982 I think, I lived in an apartment on Lunt Ave. near the el tracks in Rogers Park. It was there that I met a young man named Paul Kopasz. Some friends of mine, musicians from Kentucky with a band called The Chinese, were in Chicago to play at the Cubby Bear, and I put the bunch of them up. Paul was a tall, gangly teenage kid with a tousle of dark hair, looking like somebody who read Kerouac as a guide for living. It was his first time in Chicago and he was excited and grateful to be there. He asked a lot of questions about things I don't remember, the band played the gig, and I never saw the kid again. That's how I remember him--the kid.
Second encounter: But I did see him again--early nineties. Eleventh Dream Day was touring, and landed in Lexington. Paul K. and the Weathermen were on the bill. I remember being fairly blown away. They played it pretty straight in terms of the songwriting--a lot more traditional than my band, but Paul had a powerful voice and played an acoustic in an astonishingly electric way that took the top off your head. The kid had a band and it was good. I can't say I followed him much after that. I was too wrapped up writing my own songs and our paths didn't cross on our many tours across America and Europe. But I have a lot of friends who were true believers and knew him for the legend he was and still is and own every song on his many recordings.
Cut to now: I was staying in an apartment above the restaurant Decca in Louisville after spinning records in the bar, when I spied a guest book, and started flipping through it. There was Paul K giving thanks to the owner, Chad, and his address was there. So, I wrote him. Asked him 'sup and howyadoin. And he sent me a bunch of stuff including the amazing documentary "A Wilderness of Mirrors" that is an unflinching look at Paul and his music and his hard living. We talked on the phone and somehow ended up playing some acoustic shows together. And then he dialed me up to record a bunch of songs here in Chicago with Glenn Kotche, Steve Poulton, Deanna Varagona, and  Scott Ligon. No rehearsals--just playing. And it sounded like magic to me.
Paul has a gift of a voice, one of those rich gifts that singers like  Leonard Cohen and Townes Van Zandt have. And he can write lyrics worthy of those two also. You should see him. He ain't no kid anymore.