It’s a pretty hard thing to ignore — things just aren’t like they were in the 1990s, or even the 2000s, in terms of grassroots music scenes, all across the nation. Chicago is a great measuring stick for this. I can remember, that is, a time when the outdoor ampitheatre in Tinley Park (which I won’t name on account of its, uh, polymorphousness of nomenclature) would hold concerts about six nights a week, during the warm months, and various invincible venues like the Vic Theatre, Metro, Riviera, Park West and others were reliable havens for catalyzing sounds and shows.
Just this past week, I was in Tinley Park, coincidentally enough, for work, and so of course was thirsting for some good ol’ live music in my beloved Windy City, which sits 90 miles west on I-80/90 of my hometown of South Bend, Indiana, and so tended to be my go-to big city for all things “cool.” My online search was pretty disheartening (then again, it still feels kind of foreign going “online” for things like these) — the only real “concert” I found being this foreign “Mer’s Musical Showcase” thing, which depicted this sort of chic-looking dude of mixed race in a tophat, looking kind of like a cross between Jamiroquai and a session trumpet player. The whole thing seemed a little “cool” by my standards — like, well-dressed, polished and of sound moral stature, commensurate to my native punk/grunge upbringing of the 1990s and the hardcore punk scene in Bloomington when I was down there for college.
While, honestly, not really feeling very stoked about it, I decided to go anyway. It ended up only being $10 to get in, which obviously wasn’t too bad, especially in comparison to the $13 I was paying per pint of 312.
What I’d first like to say, anyway, in reference to this concert experience I had at the Cubby Bear on the night of Wednesday, July 19 [1], has to do with the crowds. I’d like to take great pains to emphasize the greatness of concert crowds in Chicago, rivaled, in my book, only by those in Detroit, a very musical city in its own right. Keeping in the spirit of extreme vitality sustained by 2009’s installment of Lollapalooza, which I attended and which featured, not least significantly, a dude with this wooden owl on the end of a wooden stick he kept lifing up and lowering, the crowd was completely fantastic. What this tells me is that, even though apparently moribund on the surface, the music scene in Chicago is still vital in one important way, which is the appreciation of it on the part of the general public. Granted, the crowd was a rather old one, with average age probably somewhere around 44. At 40, the last thing I’d expected was to be below the age bell curve there. But there was nothing wrong with that, to me.
One aspect of the crowd which was very impressive was their level of applause and appreciation for the musical performers, which manifested as any of various, up to do one song at a time, and then recede the spotlight to another local acoustic rocker. After every song, it was almost impossible to find a single person with their hands sitting still. There was rampant banter between audience members and artists, with one of the performers even pulling a couple of people up on stage to sing a certain song (which went fabulously, amazingly enough), and this one dude came up and introduced himself to me. He had on a shirt that said “Werewolf of Wrigley Field” and started pontificating to me on how these artists had just as much talent as the ones you hear on the radio. I disagreed with him and said that these artists assuredly had MORE talent than radio denizens, seeing as they actually write their own material, short of even getting into the subject of “genre.”
The music itself was passable to good — nobody would confuse it with Ben Folds Five or Sun Kil Moon but pretty much all of the songs were enjoyable. There was this one kind of Sheryl Crow-mimicking girl, in aesthetic, with a throaty voice that could really peel the paint off the walls. I apologize for not having artist names. It’s quite possible that they’re available somewhere online, or through contacting Mer on social media. Another dude who went up was really memorable for his song having a chorus somewhere along the lines of “It’s a miserable / Miserable life”, a mantra that seemed to be repeated ad infinitum. After his performance, Mer, the emcee who apparently curated the concert and who’d been featured pictorially on the devoted webpage, remarked that “Sometimes a song just FEELS famous.” He was right in regards to this one, and in specific, a more descriptive word I might substitute would be “pliable,” in terms of its ability to be ubiquitous, and for people to be able to relate to it, and enjoy it on a musical level, which manifest as a midtempo brand of acoustic rock not galaxies removed from fellow locals Wilco. I, personally, interpreted the lyrics as tongue-in-cheek, but it’s a dangerous and exciting territory to play around with, when you bring in this theme of existential hopelessness, particularly amidst the veritable bevy of ominous cultural messages we seem to have been bandying about since, say, the second war in Iraq. Anyway, Mer may have ushered in the future of the rock concert at the Cubby Bear on Wednesday night, with the various-artist format allowing for a dynamic relationship between crowd enthusiasm and austere, narrative-bent folk rock.
.
[1] By the way, boy was parking a pain in the a** around here, for a Wednesday night with no Cubs game going on. But Wrigleyville is certainly crawling with busy bars these days.
..
<script async src=“https://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js?client=ca-pub-5127494401132808”
crossorigin=“anonymous”></script>
..
<!– Google Tag Manager –>
<script>(function(w,d,s,l,i){w[l]=w[l]||[];w[l].push({‘gtm.start’:
new Date().getTime(),event:’gtm.js’});var f=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],
j=d.createElement(s),dl=l!=‘dataLayer’?’&l=‘+l:’’;j.async=true;j.src=
‘https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtm.js?id=‘+i+dl;f.parentNode.insertBefore(j,f);
})(window,document,’script’,’dataLayer’,’GTM-5KV22KW’);</script>
<!– End Google Tag Manager –>
<!– Google Tag Manager (noscript) –>
<noscript><iframe src=“https://www.googletagmanager.com/ns.html?id=GTM-5KV22KW”
height=“0” width=“0” style=“display:none;visibility:hidden”></iframe></noscript>
<!– End Google Tag Manager (noscript) –>