These major movements: Youve got house, youve got industrial, genre inventors who are living in this town, and then you have the noise-rock thing with [Steve] Albini. And then all of a sudden you had Triple Fast Action and Local H and Loud Lucy and Menthol and all of these bands, and Jesus, a fucking hundred others I cant even remember right now. We better be thinking about harmonies. Scott and I talk all the time. The groups latest album, the appropriately titled Works for Tomorrow in 2015, is every bit as strong as its first. Urge Overkill, all the time. That was always the struggle. There were certainly other bands that were part of it and around it, like Triple Fast Action, Material Issue, Urge Overkill. This was immediately after the Nirvana explosion, so everybody in Hollywood was trying to figure out where the next Seattle was going to be, and at that point, also the next Minneapolis, I guess, too. Seattle was of course first and most famous. It's not a venue, really, but it's just a really great place. So we were all versed in Cheap Trick. The Goo Goo Dolls. That was our peer group, but there was also a predatory layer, big labels sending scouts to shows with a buzz around them, labels like Matador and Sub Pop becoming imprints for major labels and just fucking burning their money., While a few artists, like Urge Overkill and Eleventh Dream Day, were plucked out of Chicagos DIY scene, others, like Smashing Pumpkins and Liz Phair, werent well-known regulars in that small, tight-knit world. It was still about getting a single on commercial radio. Nothings been the same since. Id go over and fly on the wall kind of stuff. But we never had a problem booking that room. It burst into the mainstream when "Smells Like Teen Spirit"the first major-label single from Nirvana, a trio based in Seattle, Washington, U.S.became a national hit. 10. Liz Phair was exactly the same way. We opened for Alanis Morrisette one day at Grant Park. The Chicago-based band spent the '90s shedding their country roots, and by the '00s they had become one of the most experimental and exciting bands in rock. I think the story of Chicago music prior to that era was one of accomplishment, but at the same time, bands and artists who just werent of a mindset of come and exploit us. It was more of, Were difficult artists, were tough to work with. That was one of the big things. The apparatus now is a lot more complicated. But even now, only a black-hearted curmudgeon could listen to Sister Havana and fail to smile broadly. They looked fucking kickass, they sounded even better. Its not focused on that sort of commercial, lets get a song on the radio wave of major label signings that occurred in the early 90s. The assistant said, Can I get a copy of the Shrimp Boat album? I said sure, but I dont give the record away. When it comes to discussing '90s rock, we usually turn the conversation towards critically acclaimed bands like Pavement, Superchunk, Archers of Loaf, Built to Spill, Neutral Milk Hotel, and My . Urge Overkill was doing Saturation, that was pretty big. I love listening to their record still to this day. If you stayed around long enough, you had to pay them back. Theyre really good at moving around and changing intervals and stuff. It got real murky there pretty quickly. I know I didnt. They deserved to be hits. It was the birth of what was going on in Wicker Park as well. Your California Privacy Rights. The mainstream music industry really hadnt changed that much. 2. And we all ended up getting super drunk and we got up there and we were the only band that played a side of Neil Diamond and everybody else played their own songs. Who could blame them? It was as exciting as it could be, because of the fact that we had a great nightclub network or community, where every night, there were two or three bands playing in two or three different clubs, and it was all bands that kind of more than just mattered. They werent cool enough. If someone wanted to do a show in a house or in some unconventional space, he would pull his PA system there on a skateboard and just set it up., That sense of freedom, improvisation, and playfulness carried over to the more rock-oriented Lounge Ax, which Albini calls the greatest live music club there ever was, and McCombs calls my favorite venue in the entire world. It's where lounge revivalists the Coctails had accomplished jazz improvisers sit in with them, and where Shrimp Boat played, according to McCombs, this totally skronky, weird, idiosyncratic music with pop songs on top of it. I still talk to Wes. Local H was right there with them. We still have a laugh about it. Formed by frontman Billy Corgan and James Iha, the band included D'arcy Wretzky and Jimmy Chamberlin in its original incarnation. Studios were busy, the rehearsal spaces were busy. Because they had such a young crowd, I remember Colin saying they were the Richard Scarry of rock n roll. Brad was the same way. Its like when we went to Australia, getting off the plane, I was like, Okay, nobody knows us here. In the past couple of decades, Chicago became known for its alternative rock and pop punk scene, while also producing some of the most . But it didnt work out that way. The way Nirvana took what Big Black was doing and turned it into pop songs that were being sold to millions of suburban teenagers. In 1993, if you loved underground music, Chicago was a special place to be. You also meet a ton of people, so I was able to go into the other side of it knowing a ton of people, A&R people and publishers and radio people and everything else, so that was good. Fueled by a wicked horn lineup, powerful rhythm section, and multiple vocalists, the band covers a great mix of 80s & 90s music in their own upbeat s. Learn More. The next day somebody calls our Oakwood apartment and I pick up the phone and its like, Hi, this is Jody Stephens. That said, there still was such great local labels and regional labels that supported the chemistry of all the Midwest bands, which I thought was so exciting, and really has never been repeated again. You had Wax Trax!, which was really percolating with Ministry and the Revolting Cocks, [Al] Jorgensen. Click here for Part Two in this series, Chess Records and Early Rock n Roll. Brad Wood: We definitely got more phone calls. This simply is a place to get the conversation started. BLIND REALITY IS CHICAGO'S ALTERNATIVE ROCK BAND. Dance Of The Seven Veils has a lot of that. I just want to rock. Jim Ellison. We played a showcase and a cassette demo that we made somehow made it to the desk of an A&R guy at Capitol. 50 Chicago Artists Who Changed Popular Music Alternative Rock, In the early 90s, the vibrant indie- and punk-rock underground of the preceding decade exploded into mainstream consciousness via what would come to be called alternative rock, though most musicians hated that term only slightly less than they despised grunge.. But Im a pretty hard critic of my own work, I guess. Veruca Salt, any one of those bands from that era, were all awesome, and any one of them could have gone on and had success. When there's loose money around, everybody feels like a winner. You could just kind of feel it. All across the city there was asense of musical playfulness and a lack of desire to be pigeonholed. Joe Shanahan: I would have to say that I was on speed dial for a handful of people in New York and L.A., and it was great. If you pick up a guitar and you get on stage, secretly you want people to like you. I remember Billy saying, You dont have to introduce me that way, Im just Billy. And so there was definitely this idea. Veruca Salt broke up shortly there after. It meant that maybe this isnt going to go where you wanted it to go. That band worked harder than people actually ever thought they did. Wed go to each others shows; wed hang out together. I mean, its weird to me that that stuff is as long ago as it is. We literally went from a basement to world-class studios. Brad Wood (Idful Music Corporation): Idful opened officially [in Wicker Park] in 1989. They probably played like two shows a week and it felt like they were doing a completely new set of material each time they played., McCombs describes the first ever Tortoise show, at the Lounge Ax, in 1994: We were supposed to be opening for the Ex but they didn't make it because they had problems at the border of Canada. I was bartending Monday nights, I was going to school and bartending at a place that doesnt exist anymore at Clybourn and Webster, making $20 a night. We were definitely honored by the history of the label. Check them out below. Cornetist Josh Berman observes, If you think about the influence of free jazz on the players of Tortoise, and then you think about the influence of free jazz in the no-wave scene, it's really just a different kind of free music, right? I put all the blame on myself, allowing the obvious things to happen. It was a different role than I had traditionally been doing, which is more or less a glorified engineer, where a band hires me to come into a studio, set up microphones, and record. Lollapalooza was originally conceived as this outsider festival, and look what it became within a few short years. I was in line at a grocery store and he ran up out of nowhere and paid for my groceries. Nothing says Florida sun like weird Anglophile off-kilter new-wave music in weird time signatures on the beach. Patrick Monaghan, who founded Carrot Top Records in 1993, remembers seeing Phair for the first time at a small Polish bar not long before, There was a lot of amazing music in our circles at the time, Albini says. After moving to Chicago from Addison, guitarist, vocalist and songwriter Jim Ellison became an important mover and shaker in the citys indie-rock scene in the mid-80s, booking the club Batteries Not Included. We got a gig at Lounge Ax early on, like a Tuesday night. That might have a platitude feel to it, but I think there's something to really be said for a guy like Jeff [Parker] staying here and really being able to do a ton of things while working as a musician and really creating [something new]. Alas, a very different sound soon emerged from Seattle. I guess thats what production would be for me. Brian and I both figured the best thing to do was to just make records and then hopefully the bands put the albums out and the singles out and just got the name out. But Veruca Salt broke up soon after its second album was released. American rock legends Blink 182 were one of the most commercially successful pop-punk bands of the late 90s and noughties. He was perfectly willing to work with a big label to help him move that along, whereas some of these more indie-oriented bands, I mean, Eleventh Dream Day and bands of that ilk were coming out of the whole punk and post-punk scenes and they were very much skeptical. Full HDThis home outdoor projector supports a 50-250" projection size, allowing you to enjoy the joy of a large screen whether indoors or outdoors. Every band that I thought should be huge was never huge. A lot of that changed in the 90s, obviously, because of the wave of signings. I am so bad at that. Apr 30, 2023 9:01 PM EDT. Brown Betty, Fig Dish, Liz Phair, Local H, Menthol, Pumpkins, Veruca Salt, and there was the Red Red Meat kind of scene. It was like a bomb went off. You start out and you suck and you practice and your songs suck and they get better and they get to a certain level and you go up and more people go to your shows and at a certain point you peak and then you start going down. And at the same time, by that point, were almost 30 years old and you start to feel like, how is this even going to continue? But it wasnt all that different from Kanye West giving me a cassette tape of his music at the House Of Blues. Red Hot Chili Peppers. Pearl Jam managed to hit the scene hard and fast, considering they formed in 1990, and Nirvana changed music in 1991. It was incredible. Yeah, I remember some of those Wednesday nights. That was never an issue. And Jodys all nice, hes like, Hey man, Alex is going to use your amps and everything. I didnt see Alex anywhere. Starting at . Remember that moment? Joe Shanahan: Its interesting, because we did so many Pumpkins shows, we think theyre so synonymous. When you first start a band, or at least when we first started that band, and you have that sort of epiphanal moment or series of moments where you realize that this is no longer just a group of friends that are getting together to have fun. They really evolved very quickly, as bands that could deliver a good entertaining show. I remember meeting Billy Corgan at the height of their fame, and Louise [Post] from Veruca Salt introduced us, and she said, This is Billy from Smashing Pumpkins. As if we didnt know. I saw them headline a show at Metro with Nirvana as the opening band. Greg Kot: I always thought that Local H was a great band. People like Albini and Brad and Casey would just say Fuck it, were open for business if you want to come in and record. But the only reason we got two days in there is because L7 had canceled and it was the record that they did with Butch Vig, so we got in. This was the place to be if you wanted to create your own music in a really individual way. Also, the industry was transitioning, too. Ken [Vandermark] totally exemplifies that, too., Things have changed since then, of course, and Albini reflects on what the current landscape means for independent music in Chicago: The thing we've lost is the influx of cash that the profiteers enabled. The music, however, survives. Patrick Monaghan, who founded Carrot Top Records in 1993, remembers seeing Phair for the first time at a small Polish bar not long before Exile in Guyville, written about Phairs experiences in Wicker Park, came out. The Popes sounded exactly the same every night. She did a really nice job, except she didnt put the important information on it. I think to this day hes still one of the best songwriters that Chicago has produced, and I think hes made a bunch of really great records that people seemed to care less and less about as the years go on, but he still does really strong work. I built a studio in my backyard. perfectrx, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons/Photoscape. The Galacticas. But they failed to win mainstream success, the label dropped the group, and the band came to an end as tragic as Nirvanas when Ellison committed suicide in 1996. They asked if we wanted to play South By Southwest, and nobody knew what that was. It was just as robust and quite honestly, Scott still plays here. Records, the storefront version of the iconic punk, new wave, and industrial imprint, formerly within spitting distance of Lounge Ax, moved to a much smaller space in '93 and finally shuttered in '96 following founder Jim Nashs death. We liked how he made records. Green Day. DArcy was amazing. 311 . But yeah, that was a great time. Joe Shanahan is the founder and owner of Metro Chicago and Smart Bar in Chicago, and was part-owner of the recently closed Double Door. With a barre chord structure making room for Liam Gallagher's expressive vocals and empowering lyricism, paralleled by Noel's classical guitar euphoric technique. Of course, I had to consider massive commercial accomplishment, so the Pumpkins are here for the same reason Survivor was. So I would say that Exile In Guyville was for me, a really personal statement. I love that album. My money went with Post, who released another great post-Nina Veruca album in 2000 called Resolver. A lot of great guitar music right now. It was pretty incredible. But that album probably is the least popular of their initial releases, so as with Survivor or Chicago the band, what do I know? He may have been the great young hope at one point, but what he was basically doing was kind of a pseudo-grunge kind of thing that was briefly commercially popular, but hes evolved and gotten so much better since then. And the Smoking Popes, those guys, I still listen to them all the time. She was just so loud and so pitch-perfect. Blake Smith: In high school, we made fake IDs, so wed come down to go to clubs whose names I dont want to say because some of them are still open, and wed see bands like Green, The Slugs, Big Black, Naked Raygun. We were smart in the fact that we just kept touring all the time, and we used that money or that. This was the Chicago legacy. Money changed everything, and one of the things it changed was the expectations bands hadsome bands saw this insane inflation as their birthright. For Artists Developers Advertising Investors Vendors Spotify for Work. So many amazing people. Monaghan remembers the store fondly as a special crossing point for electronic music, particularly house music, and rock playing a similar role for that cross-pollination as the HotHouse and Lower Links did for indie rock and jazz. Click here for Part Six in this series, House Music. Scott Lucas (Local H): I was looking at it from the outside, because I wasnt living in Chicago at that time. There would be no Green Day without Screeching Weasel. Thats it. That was it. But by the summer of 93, the now nearly extinct major-label music industry was searching for the new Seattle, and it descended in force on what the Smashing Pumpkins called the city by the lake.. Thats punk rock and an entire do-it-yourself ethos, but it had a supported ecosystem of like-minded business. Those tours that they were booking us on were strange. It was super hard work. This home outdoor projector supports a 50-250" projection size, allowing you to enjoy the joy of a large screen whether indoors or outdoors. And we were still just trying to figure out how to write songs and play our instruments, really. The other reason is because people pay less money to make records now. I have the things that I want. The Idful stuff is timeless. Top 10 Chicago Blues Artists April 30, 2023; Mind you, this and every installment of Chicago Music History 101 is just one critical fans take on what is most in need of recognition from our long and rich sonic legacy. How dare they get these slots on these Metro shows? But Corgan was writing songs. The citys got Twin Peaks and The Orwells and Ne-Hi. That was a real, very important time. I play it at least once a month, which is a miracle. You could really see, here was a band that probably could have played a venue 10 times that size, but the atmosphere was just so electric in that place. There was nothing free about it. He just seemed, culturally, he made a lot of sense. Were serious about making music. Thats no way to get into this biz; you just do it. We get up on stage and play our set. Sadly, in the effort to hone to the arbitrary number of 50, there is no Tortoise (despite that groups huge influence on the art-rock underground), or Red Red Meat (a personal favorite for the way it forged a unique and psychedelic new sound from this citys great blues legacy). But also, Ive got a good job, Im married and have got great kids. But the ultimately under-appreciated band in that town is Naked Raygun, and that was way before that time. And then at the end of that, we were all like, Are we really going to do this again? I cant even remember of there was an official, Hey, are we all just gonna stop meeting, or if we just stopped calling each other, but it just kind of faded. They looked great. It was more about, Wow, those guys made a really great record, and we got to up our game.. But my point is this, all of those artists at that time were really intricately involved in their personal and their public persona. It was everything we wanted out of that meeting. I remember being at Lounge Ax and Jeff Tweedy showing up with his son, and we were sound-checking, and he came up and asked [drummer] Colin [Koteles] if he could let his little boy get behind the drums for a second. Joe Shanahan: My advice to bands was always the same: Record companies were banks. But Chicago followed a close second. When we stopped getting the support from Capitol, and we were still trying to keep it together in Chicago. In fact, no Chicagoan since Hugh Hefner has so fruitfully pandered to the male hegemony or sent so many mixed messages about female empowerment. You know, we really loved that record too, and they had to keep re-recording it, and it was just kind of heartbreaking. Greg Kot: There was one of two disastrous Liz Phair gigs that I saw early on. Its not going to happen. But I wasnt interested in recording KISS. It all depended on the juxtapositions of which bands played together. You know, these half-dozen major labels and these couple of big radio chains and they completely dictated what got spin and what didnt. They werent playing by the rules, the pay-your-dues model that had existed in Chicago for so long. I think at that point, all of us had put all of our eggs in that basket. We toured with everybody. The gentrification process had begun. McCombs also cites Azita Youssefis theatrical no-wave group Scissor Girls as one of the most vital acts of the time. Blake Smith: It was a drunken, wild time, everybody was out five, six nights a week until 4 in the morning, and we were always the band that took that further than you should. Hed want to record at 9 in the morning. The indie rock scene in Chicago, Id say right now, youve got everybody from Chance The Rapper to Joey Purp to Noname to Mick Jenkins. He said, Hey, I can finally buy a house. Joel Spencer: Yeah, one of the things that happened was Gary Gersh, who was president of Capitol, left. Red Hot Chili Peppers. I remember Brad laughing at us like, You guys will never be that. Those guys are surgeons when it comes to that. Ad Choices. That was just crazy. Photo: user uploaded image Ranked by All voters I still love Supernova, Cinco de Mayo, Polyester Bride, and a dozen others Ill gladly include on a mixtape with the best of Urge, as now seems only appropriate. Joe Shanahan (Metro, Double Door): I was out every single night and seeing band after band, visiting studios, rehearsal spaces, on a daily and certainly weekly basis. That album drew the attention of Atlantic Records, and the band was one of the first among its peers to sign to a major label too early to sync with the alternative moment, as it turned out, but it did yield a partnership with Bettina Richards, whose Chicago-based indie Thrill Jockey Records still is the bands home. He now manages bands like The Damnwells, Old 97s, and Soul Asylum at Red Light Management in New York. There are more than a few songs on that second record that were definitely influenced by touring and touring with other bands and seeing what works and what doesnt. The HotHouse moved out of Wicker Park in 1995 and has since become more of a non-profit organization for supporting musicians than a venue. Some of the bigger labels wouldnt talk to us ever again after that. ADVERTISEMENT. Post-2010, a number of alternative bands are fusing diverse styles of indie, punk, hip-hop, emo, hard rock, and electronic in their music. You were just borrowing the money. Abrasive post-punk and indie rock crossed paths frequently with the city's vital free jazz scene. While alternative rock raged in the 1990s, the softhearted sound of bands like Heavenly, Tiger Trap, and the Pastels welcomed listeners into their own . Wed play Batteries Not Included in front of six people. Watch the latest episode of Pitchfork.tv's new series "Yearbook," which chronicles important years in Chicago music history.

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