By Thomas Conner
© Chicago Sun-Times Which band in this year’s Lollapalooza lineup has accomplished all of the following? — Sold out a 55,000-seat arena — 18 times. — Created and popularized its own form of glam. — Sold 30 million albums. — Recorded a classical album with Beatles producer George Martin. It ain’t Lady Gaga. The band is X Japan, the biggest rock band in Japanese history. The quintet came together in 1982 (originally called just X, but John Doe had something to say about it), disbanded in 1997 and re-formed in 2007. They started as a speed metal band with delusions of grandeur and evolved into a power-ballad powerhouse. Their shows are equal parts Anthrax and Celine Dion. In their homeland, their presence still creates Beatlesque hysteria, with screaming fans and impenetrable throngs. When the founding guitarist, Hideto “Hide” Matsumoto, died in 1998, nearly 50,000 weeping mourners crowded the funeral; last May almost twice that number mobbed a memorial service marking the 12th anniversary of his death. But thus far, only Asian fans have had these opportunities to go wild for X Japan — because the 4 p.m. Aug. 8 performance at Lollapalooza in Chicago’s Grant Park will be X Japan’s U.S. debut. “Yes, we’re a huge band in Japan, but that doesn’t mean anything here,” says Yoshiki Hayashi, usually known only by his first name. Yoshiki is the band’s drummer, songwriter and core idea man. He’s also a classically trained pianist. “We feel like a new band again, trying to make it. It’s a very pure feeling. It feels like it did when we started, which is good.” Fitzgerald wrote that there are no second acts in American lives, but America has given plenty of second chances to foreign acts. Yoshiki — who now lives in Los Angeles, where he’s wrapping up X Japan’s first new studio album in 14 years, due this fall — hopes X Japan will live and thrive again on these shores. When he speaks, he struggles with his English, but his ambition is clear. So is his realism. After Lollapalooza, X Japan will launch its first U.S. tour, hitting 10-15 cities. They won’t be selling out or even playing arenas like they do at home. And that’s OK with Yoshiki. “We’d like to play clubs or small venues. We cannot do that in Japan anymore,” he says, noticeably excited by the prospect, and maybe a little relieved. He misses the old days, pre-mobs, pre-stadiums. “When we were an indie band, right after we graduated high school, we were performing for 50 people, maybe 200. That was a great moment. By the time we were signed to Sony [in 1988], we were already performing for 10,000 people or bigger. … We weren’t supposed to make it big, you know? We were — how do I say? — the black sheep of the family. The Japanese scene was very poppy. We were playing speed metal. Nobody thought we could be mainstream. Then it got very, very big.” Back to basics The American shows will be stripped down. X Japan fills arenas like the Tokyo Dome with massive productions — lights, lasers, pyrotechnics, enormous stages with catwalks, lots of running around and dramatic performance. Yoshiki has played several times on a drum riser that not only rises above the stage, it takes off and flies around the arena, trailing smoke and neon lights. And, oh, the costumes. X Japan pioneered a style of presentation now known as “visual kei,” meaning flamboyant outfits and hairstyles, many of which resembled Kool-Aid fountains. In other words: glam rock, hair metal. For the U.S. jaunt, Yoshiki says X Japan will be “back to basics.” “The bigger we got, the bigger our personalities,” he says. “We just want to go back and focus on the rock. Either way, you know, you don’t see good rock shows anymore. Rock doesn’t sound mainstream these days. We’d like to contribute something to help bring rock back. Rock doesn’t have enough drama now. Rap, R&B, dance music has taken that. Our band wants to be a part of bringing that back to rock.” He laughs. “But our band has enough drama.” Forgotten history Yoshiki and X Japan’s singer, Toshimitsu “Toshi” Deyama, have known each other since kindergarten. When Toshi left the band in 1997, it wasn’t amicably. Yoshiki says the two didn’t speak for up to eight years. When Hide committed suicide, Yoshiki thought X Japan was dead, too. But in that time, the Internet flourished. X Japan’s music — and especially its videos — went viral. The band that’s still only performed two concerts outside of Japan (last year in Hong Kong and Taipei) now has fans from China to France. Meanwhile, Yoshiki pursued solo interests. He recorded a best-selling classical album in Japan, the double-CD “Eternal Melody” in 1993, co-produced and arranged by George Martin. The next year, he contributed a symphonic version of “Black Diamond” to a classical Kiss tribute record. He composed and performed a piano concerto for Japan’s emperor. And he cashed in. There’s a Yoshiki line of jewelry, a Yoshiki wine, a Yoshiki racing team, even a Yoshikitty — the only time Hello Kitty has combined another name with its famous toy brand. Still, he missed his childhood friend. “It’s weird, when you have that vocalist next to you all the time for many years, you take for granted how great he was,” Yoshiki says of Toshi, who spent the intervening years performing spiritually minded acoustic concerts of what he called “eco rock.” “When we started talking again, he said the same thing about me. We discovered these fans around the world, and they were demanding a return from us. It made me — I still feel like I’m dreaming. I never thought we would reunite this band. And we can’t completely.” Coming to America At the first X Japan reunion shows in 2008, the band performed its 29-minute opus “Art of Life” — during which Yoshiki collapsed from the exertion — and featured a floating hologram of the late Hide playing his guitar parts. (There you go, William Gibson fans: Rei Toei lives!) “That was too much for me,” Yoshiki says, assuring the band will not continue the stunt. “That was so real. It brought me to tears.” But are there fans in the United States? Lollapalooza may be the band’s first ticketed performance, but on Jan. 9 X Japan filmed four new videos on the roof of Hollywood’s Kodak Theatre. Thousands crammed the streets to get a glimpse, fans who’d driven from Texas and Chicago for the occasion. “Their music is a cross link of my generation,” says Chicago photographer and fan Nobuyoshi Fuzikawa, 38. “That’s why I’m so excited they’re still playing for a major audience after all these years. It’s inspiring, and makes me want to try new challenges. … Lollapalooza is [a] well-known concert around the world, so I will be happy to see a Japanese performer have a presence there.” Takeshi Tsukawaki, 24, will be driving to Chicago from New York just for the Lollapalooza show. He’s a younger fan who discovered the band during its hiatus. “I have two older brothers. They were always listening to X Japan,” he said. “I didn’t know they were such a big band in Asia. I just listen to them again and again. … I have no idea what a show will be like. Maybe they can’t play very well like before, or maybe they’re better and more powerful. I never expected to be able to see them, so I’m coming. There are lots of people coming.” By Thomas Conner
© Chicago Sun-Times Hanson "Shout It Out" (3CG) ★★★★ OK, Hanson wins. They beat all the people (myself included) who ever knocked their sweet hooks, ruddy faces and boy-band hype. The latest from Oklahoma's undaunted trio is a joyous, jubilant cache of near-perfect pop singles. The whole set is one big 1970s AM-radio anachronism, really. Effervescent and ebullient. Download: "Thinkin' 'Bout Somethin'" would make Ray Charles smile wide, and not just because they copied his "Blues Brothers" scene for the video. By Thomas Conner
© Chicago Sun-Times Jon Bon Jovi is standing up. The only reason that's news is because he blew out a calf muscle on stage July 9 during a concert at New Meadowlands Stadium in his home state of New Jersey. "I got another leg," he told the crowd. "I don't need this one." He hobbled back to the microphone and finished the show with "Livin' on a Prayer." "The leg's back now, miraculously, with all the rehab I've had," Bon Jovi told the Sun-Times in an interview Wednesday. "If I was a football player, I'd say I'm 'probable' to play. Really I've just nursed all the sympathy I could get at home, and now I've gotta go back to work." Work is a prominent theme on his latest record, "The Circle." Bon Jovi's job has looked the same for nearly 30 years — playing one massive stadium show after another. This weekend, he returns to Chicago for two nights at Soldier Field. After that, more stadiums and arenas in 30 countries for the next two years. Again. The Circle Tour already is the top-grossing tour in North America. Bon Jovi's last tour also had that distinction, in 2008. Amid all the reports of canceled shows and trimmed-back tours this summer, Bon Jovi's stadium gigs emerge as one of the few winners. Thus far in 2010, he's played 38 shows, selling half a million tickets and banking $52.8 million, according to Pollstar. Since long before the band hit it big with the 1986 album "Slippery When Wet" ("Livin' on a Prayer," "You Give Love a Bad Name," "Wanted Dead or Alive"), Bon Jovi has been playing the big venues. "It's what we've done since the inception of this band," he said during a conversation that reflected on the first stadium shows, the new music business and writing a song about Jennifer Hudson. Q. These tours are clearly huge undertakings. Do you have a limit? What would be too big for you? A. Well, I was the guy quoted saying that I wanted to play and sell out the desert — more than once. I've always been very comfortable in the big venues. It's not an issue of being too big as long as it's manageable, for us and the fans, and the business calls for it. And we're having fun, which we still are. Q. Do you remember the first arena you played? A. Yes: 1983, opening for ZZ Top at Madison Square Garden. Talk about a daunting venue — this was before we'd even released a record. It took courage, but we did it. ... It was really only daunting inasmuch as this was the fabled Madison Square Garden, a place where heroes have walked. Every kid out there thinks that tennis racket is going to turn into a guitar and they're going to have the chance to speak to someone. We got there. We got in trouble, too. We had more people backstage than ZZ Top had times 10. We invited everyone. There was one case of beer between about 150 people. We didn't even get to meet ZZ. It was a fantasy. Q. Do you still get nervous at all? A. Not so much nerves, but anticipation. I ask: "Are you prepared?" I've never had stage fright, if that's what you mean. Q. What do you attribute that to? A. If you really want to dissect it, it goes back to the drinking age in New Jersey being 18 back in the '70s, which meant you could sneak into bars as young as 16. You'd get to see bands, and you thought that was the big time. And every step along the way, that was the big time. From the dance to the club to headlining a club to theaters and stadiums — every step on that path you said, "This is it! I've made it!" ... It all goes back to that naivete or innocence at 16. I didn't have to go to the service, and I was young enough I could live at home, and I didn't have a family to support, so I could chase this dream. When the drinking age changed to 21, it changed the opportunities for the next generation of kids. Now you had to get to about 19 before you could sneak in and see a rock band, and by then things can be different. Q. In the '80s, you had the quintessential success story: make a record, hand it to a DJ, he plays it, it catches on, sign the record contract. Could you pull that off today? A. Yeah, but in a different way. The public spaces are on the Internet now, and the audiences aren't as big. "The Loop" [Chicago's WLUP-FM] had a voice back then. There were places like that where DJs had influence and were style makers. There are a couple of those guys still in the world. Pierre Robert in Philadelphia [at WMMR-FM] is a throwback to that. He guides you through what's going on, including some social activism. But if a kid like me walked into a Clear Channel chain now ... no one's going to come out and say, "Sure, let's spin this on the air in Chicago!" He'd get his ass whooped. Q. When did you realize that had changed? A. One day in Chicago. I remember walking Michigan Avenue — right? where all the stores are? — to that huge Virgin Megastore that was there until three or four years ago. I'd go there whenever I was in Chicago. I'd buy DVDs and CDs and whatever junk, anything and everything. I walked down there one day to see it all gone and thought that's the beginning of, not the end but — it was definitely my nose slamming into the face of the record business and thinking, "Well, the new generation better find us a trick, because the old generation has given away the keys to the kingdom." Q. Puts "7800 Fahrenheit" in a new light, eh? A. You know, I had a conversation with Doug Morris, now the head of Universal [Media Group, Bon Jovi's current record label]. He was president of Atlantic Records when they tried to sign me in 1983. There we were in a meeting with [Atlantic founder] Ahmet Ertegun and Doug and all these guys trying to sign me, and we didn't sign. I did my deal at Polygram. But Doug wound up at Unversal, and I asked him, "What would have happened if I'd signed with Atlantic?" He said, "To tell you the truth, I don't know if we'd have made 'Slippery When Wet.'" I said, "Why?" He said, "You know, your first two albums did OK, but chances are we wouldn't have given you that third shot. That's the way Atlantic used to think. If you're not headlining after two records, move on." And now here he is the president of my label, saying, "Sure glad we didn't drop you." Q. I'm guessing this is why you remain in at least some contact with aspiring bands, putting contest winners on your stadium bills [like Chicago's 7th Heaven, opening Friday's concert]. A. I've been doing the opening band contest for years. I love it. I want them to get the opportunity to go out there and see what it would be like on Christmas morning, the way we lived. If anything, it's a motivation tool. When they've tasted that ZZ Top moment, they go back home and work harder and figure out things, whether it's soliciting fans in the aisles with fliers they've made or giving away CDs 'cause they've made 500 of them or calling the newspaper and telling them what you do, getting an article written about you. My day or this day, you've got to work hard at it. Q. How's "The Circle" doing? A. Well enough, in this day and age. I think it's a fabulous album that says a lot. Q. You do seem to be tackling topical matters more than ever here. How do you approach current events without crossing the line into folk music? A. We think universally and timelessly. Case in point: the song "Bullet." One Sunday morning Richie [Sambora, guitarist] was at my house, and I'm watching "Meet the Press," and it's about Jennifer Hudson's brother-in-law, what's his name? The guy who killed her family members on a rampage? [On Oct. 24, 2008, actress-singer Hudson's mother, brother and nephew were murdered on the South Side. Hudson's estranged brother-in-law, William Balfour, has been charged with the murders.] He's this guy going, like, "Why didn't I get mine?" Awful. But instead of sitting down and writing a song with his name in it or hers, with a specific day and date, you make your case because this same situation is going to happen again in five years somewhere else. You speak to the larger issues. You ask whether the song will stand up 20 years from now and is the message going to be clear. BON JOVI with Kid Rock and 7th Heaven (Friday) with Kid Rock and the Worsties (Saturday) 7 p.m. Friday and Saturday Soldier Field, 1400 S. Museum Campus Dr. Tickets: $36.50-$500; ticketmaster.com (Friday is sold out) This post contains my complete running coverage of this annual festival ...
© Chicago Sun-Times Pitchfork Music Festival opens ... sounding pretty folkie By Thomas Conner on July 16, 2010 4:40 PM Bright sun, water bottles, brooding singer-songwriters — this must be the sixth Pitchfork Music Festival. The annual hootenanny is now under way in Chicago's Union Park ... and it sounds like a hootenanny. The fest opened Friday afternoon with two fine strummers that made the venue sound more like a folk festival than the go-to shopping mall of indie rock. Sharon Van Etten had the daunting job of not just kicking off the afternoon's music but doing so by squinting and singing directly into the July sun. Van Etten warbled her shy solo tunes. The crowd gathered. A warm-up indeed. But it was the Tallest Man on Earth, aka Kristian Matsson, who brought the first real musical heat. Skinny, scruffy, charging boldly around the stage with his small-body acoustic guitar, Matsson played some fine folk songs. Opening with the title track to his new CD "The Wild Hunt" and strumming hard through to "King of Spain," Matsson growled and howled through a set of easy chords and pastoral lyrics in the tradition of America's best traditional music. Which is all the more impressive since he's here from Sweden. Small wonder he was so enthusiastically received at the Sasquatch Music Festival earlier. This weekend each year I'm often instead at the Woody Guthrie Folk Festival. Both Van Etten and Matsson could swing hard on the folk fest circuit. The fact that they are welcomed so warmly in the heart of indie rock — Matsson numerous times thanked the crowd "for being so lovely" — hopefully is a pleasing portent for the "genre." Pitchfork Music Festival: Believing in the Liars By Thomas Conner on July 16, 2010 6:06 PM Ain't no folkie fest no more. Angus Andrews, singer for the Liars, is prowling the Pitchfork main stage, shrieking over the band's fractured, stop-start rhythms. The cacophony he's raising is terrible and terrifying. His vocals — a series of owl cries and electronically distorted yowls — rise and fall over guitar lines played carefully just a half tone off where they should be, and the bass lurks and dodges in the lengthening shadows. This doesn't sound like a 10-year-old band. The Liars are still throwing in everything and the kitchen sink, like an underpracticed, angry Supergrass, though they've definitely ramped up the intensity of their caterwaul since the release of this year's "Sisterworld." "The devil's in Chicago at motherf—-in' Pitchfork!" Andrews shouts. Then, in his lovely British accent, he politely and demurely says, "Thanks so much for having us" and preaches for a second about not throwing water bottles. I knew it was all an act. Pitchfork Music Festival: Stay cool with cheaper water By Thomas Conner on July 16, 2010 9:28 PM Friday's late-afternoon start to the Pitchfork Music Festival was certainly hot in Chicago's Union Park. But it's been hotter, and staff reported no unusual increase in heat-related medical care. Just to be on the safe side, however, the festival decided Friday to cut the cost of water in half. Bottled water is now available for $1, and will remain so throughout the weekend. "Out of concern for the heat, we're trying to be proactive," said Pitchfork staffer Anders Smith Lindall. This came shortly after an announcement from the main stage that water would be handed to concertgoers pressed against the front barricades, where some fans had already been pulled and treated for heat exhaustion. Music starts earlier in the day Saturday and Sunday, meaning more time for fans to be under the sun. A high of 90 is forecast each day. Pitchfork Music Festival: Rockin' Robyn! By Thomas Conner on July 16, 2010 10:46 PM Who knew the best performer of the day would be a blonde bombshell spinning Euro-disco? Robyn — another Swede on Friday's bill and a former child star who's fought hard to regain her own artistic control — came out fighting, throwing punches in the air when she wasn't doing that elbows-high, shoulder-leaning dance all '80s female singers used to do. Feisty, sexy, spunky Robyn opened with the virtues of being a "Fembot," assured us that love hurts "With Every Heartbeat" and sang flawlessly through new single "Dancing on My Own" in front of a band dressed in all white, twiddling knobs and pounding synth-pad drums. The latter really exploded at the end of "Cobrastyle," with Robyn showing some kick-box dancing. Her Pink-ish feistiness reached its zenith in "Don't F—-ing Tell Me What to Do," during which she led some kind of aerobics class (sporting a totally Pat Benatar green beret, too). And she was the crowd favorite. Go figure. I had grown to assume this was a fairly rockist crowd, and I was originally surprised by the booking of this talented but very dance-pop artist on the venerable Pitchfork bill. But she embodies the spirit of whatever "indie" started out to mean. She debuted at 16 as an R&B starlet, and she's faced consistent and constant stumbling blocks in her business dealings which have kept her from the States. Even back in 2003, she was collaborating with experimental synth-pop outfit the Knife while her label was releasing a sugary best-of over here. She bought herself out of her record contract and started making the kind of music she wanted, and suddenly she won Grammys (in Sweden). Now she's doing her thing, releasing three "Body Talk" EPs — the second one's due Sept. 7 and might include a collaboration with Snoop Dogg! — and finally making an impact in the United States. Just last night she was singing at the Arvika Festival in Sweden, and after Pitchfork comes a North American tour, co-headlining with Kelis. Judging by the diversity of the people dancing determinedly to her songs tonight, it should be a great tour. Pitchfork Music Festival: Broken Social Scene, Modest Mouse By Thomas Conner on July 16, 2010 11:18 PM Sundown slowed down with Broken Social Scene, a sprawling Toronto collective with a few Chicago roots. This band makes a lovely sound, even if the songs don't always gel behind the chiming guitars and palpitating drums. Thirty-one musicians appear on the band's latest CD, "Forgiveness Rock Record," recorded in Chicago under the guidance of John McEntire from Tortoise and the Sea & Cake. McEntire himself played a second drum set on stage Friday night, adding needed extra heft to gauzy arrangements that tend to sag if not tended carefully. This loosey-goosey ensemble, which tends to trade instruments among each other, was most engaging when they got the pulse going, rollicking through "Texico Bitches" and the rumbling furnace of "Cause = Time," which featured five guitars. The set ended in a see-sawing riff with strings that evoked the most intense Poi Dog Pondering drones. Alas, the evening wrapped with Modest Mouse, a rodent of a band whose major-label indie rock (work that phrase out for a while) deserves the restraint implied by its name. Now that the trinket of ex-Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr is being worn by another indie-rock sweetheart (the Cribs) — though new guitarist Jim Fairchild did a helluva job filling those shoes, particularly during "Satellite Skin" — Modest Mouse is just a tuneless junkyard of discarded song parts. Frontman and the band's sole constant Isaac Brock is one of the most difficult singers to enjoy in rock and roll, and when he picks up that banjo for "The Devil's Workday" and sings about hanging himself for treason, well, hey, we got some rope. The God-awful funk beats of "Education," the stand-up bass — they're just a dissonant Dave Matthews Band, and the neo-hippies in the crowd were twirling in their calico prints to prove it. Pitchfork Music Festival: In a Delorean, plus Dam-Funk By Thomas Conner on July 17, 2010 6:40 PM Delorean in the summer heat is a weird and wonderful experience. Hitting the stage switched on, they build layer upon layer, loop upon loop — dreamy synth sounds that build and build and then ease off, one tune blending into another. That has the effect of inducing a dreamy state, which coupled with the blaring sun on your neck could induce a crazy euphoria. Or, like the guy behind me, you could just complain, "They've been playing this same song for half an hour." But listen closely, behind bassist Ekhi Lopetegi's thin vocals, and there are intricate patterns in the sampled piano and the vox humana. Despite the scraggly page-boys and beards, this band is not grounded in rock but draws more from the Balearic house music of their native Barcelona, Spain. Lopetegi's bass, though, and Guillermo Astrain's guitar bring enough vibration to a rock crowd to keep it on its feet. Primal Scream, we hardly knew ye. California's Dâm-Funk (DJ Damon Riddick) got a late start on the shady balance stage, but in no time he laid down some fat beats and was advising us, "You gotta keep your hood pass intact, y'all." Dâm-Funk (it's pronounced "dame") mostly just turned on sounds and rhythms, then stalked the stage singing like a lost DeBarge. Then he pulled out the keytar and started into his trademark, slow, mostly instrumental jams. Joined by a live drummer and an extra synth player, Dâm-Funk updated '70s and '80s urban soul, and he stayed classy even when the shouts from Wu-Tang's Raekwon intruded from across the park. Since he was late starting, he even cut his set short. "We gotta respect the other bands, y'all," he said, removing the keytar. "We got four more songs, but f—- it. Peace!" Such consideration! Only at Pitchfork. Pitchfork Music Festival: Titus Andronicus is no tragedy By Thomas Conner on July 17, 2010 6:47 PM Best band of Saturday afternoon: Titus Andronicus, a blazing band from Glen Rock, N.J., a location that has allowed them to absorb the best of bombast from Springsteen, the fire of post-punk from New York and possibly even a little Philly soul. "I'm sweating like a pregnant nun talking to the pope," said frontman Patrick Stickles after lurching out of another of the band's nihilistic songs, "No Future, Part 3." But their outlook isn't completely bleak. The song hammers a refrain, "You'll always be a loser!" over and over before concluding: "But that's OK." The quintet was augmented by a few support players, piano and strings and horns; the extra players weren't necessary, but Titus Andronicus songs are multi-level, architectural creations with a capacity for a lot of extra decor. This is band that can write as well as it rocks, and God does it rock. At one moment Stickles is picking a spidery melody on his guitar, next the kinetic Amy Klein is crunching into the tune, and — as in the sprawling "Fear and Loathing in Mahwah, NJ" — it all builds to a triumphant bashing. Near the end the guitars screeched in harmony and hit a northern highlands rhythm like they were Big Country. Then they turn around with the panache and the chops to introduce the band via a jump-bluesy tune, "And Ever." Brutal and friendly, vicious and tender, Titus Andronicus has it all. Pitchfork Music Festival: The rain doesn't really help By Thomas Conner on July 18, 2010 2:00 PM Day 3 of the sixth annual Pitchfork Music Festival, which began in 2005 as Intonation, is under way in the sultry summer heat. A noontime thunder shower moved through quickly, cooling things off for a matter of moments before the sun returned and added the evaporated rain to the day's humidity totals. Water remains at half price, a dollar a bottle. Still, the line for the free water is longer than that for the bottled variety. Pitchfork staffer (and occasional Sun-Times contributor) Anders Smith Lindall says festival workers are handing out water bottles to distressed concertgoers when the line gets excruciatingly long. Those who don't mind earning their reward — and helping to keep the park clear of debris — can earn one beverage ticket (worth a buck, for one bottle of water) for every 10 discarded plastic cups collected and returned to the recycling booth. Pitchfork Music Festival: Best Coast is the best By Thomas Conner on July 18, 2010 3:30 PM Sunday's music at the Pitchfork Music Festival began with dessert. Between the dull, thudding chords of Cass McCombs and the first laconic and then tortured feedback of the Girls, a fresh, sunny new pop band called Best Coast held down the Balance stage — the "small" stage, under the trees — with a workmanlike attitude and a handful of cheery love ditties. Ultimately unpretentious, Best Coast (Bethany Cosentino and two pals) ran through songs from the debut "Crazy for You" CD, filled with bright major chords and lyrics like "I'll try to make you mine" and "that's just not your deal." The crowd got a big chuckle when she sang, "I lost my job / I miss my mom / I wish my cat could talk." She closed with the trendy single "When I'm With You," the repeated refrain of which is, "When I'm with you, I have fun." So true. Pitchfork Music Festival: Local Natives are fleet and foxy By Thomas Conner on July 18, 2010 5:19 PM Seattle's Fleet Foxes brought beautiful harmonies back to modern music, rescuing three-part tenor singing from the vaults of Crosby, Stills & Nash. But as beautiful as "White Winter Hymnal" can be, the band hasn't yet jumped up and shown any oomph. Orange County's Local Natives have seized that opportunity, and Sunday afternoon at the Pitchfork Music Festival they delivered a set of exciting, rhythmic music laced with the energy of post-punk as well as those sweet, core harmonies. Much of their music is built around what their voices can achieve, and the fact that they achieved it the brutal July Chicago heat is impressive. But these harmonies have teeth. Kelcey Ayer took charge of most of the proceedings, hitting beautiful high notes while bashing the bejesus out of his small stand-up drum kit. The beats he added to the regular drummer's rhythm — sometimes Ayer would play keyboard with his left hand and drum with his right — made songs like "Airplanes" blast like a jet engine. "Camera Talk," the evolving "Shape Shifter," the cover of the Talking Heads' "Warning Signs" — it was all fleet and (dig guitarist-singer Taylor Rice's stache!) very foxy. Earlier, clouds provided sweet relief from the heat just as Beach House began its Sunday afternoon set. Mother Nature knows how to set the mood. Despite the summery name, Beach House makes cool — no, chill — music. With piercing vocals and a hushed, daydreamy tone to the hypnotic sounds, Beach House is made for a little less light. Pitchfork Music Festival: Major Lazer, Big Boi By Thomas Conner on July 18, 2010 10:41 PM Saturday evening began with the digital dub attack of Major Lazer, a computerized dancehall project of Diplo — marking a return to Pitchfork — and Switch. For an hour they assaulted the adoring crowd with very little music, mostly just bleats and blasts that sound like various industrial park alarms. The noises dodged and moved — a frenetic mess for the ADHD set — and Diplo spent most of his stage time shouting the name Major Lazer (at least four dozen times) and begging the crowd for hands in the air. Big Boi doesn't have to beg. Strutting on stage with one of his Atlanta MCs, the other half of hip-hop's acclaimed Outkast starting flinging syllables, eventually firing fastfastfast through "Ghetto Musick" over a machine-gun beat. A relentless hourlong set featured several Outkast hits (a snappy run through "Ms. Jackson") and a few guests, ranging from guest singer Neil Garrard for the tuneful "Follow Us" to a trash-talking youngster. The set dragged on and the beats became monotonous, but when he launched into "ATLiens" and hollered, "Put your hands in the air!" it was superfluous. They'd been up for a while. Pitchfork Music Festival: Pavement resurfaces By Thomas Conner on July 18, 2010 11:45 PM Pavement has worn all three tags hung on this music. Here's a band that was serviced to college radio, came to define a certain smoky corner of alt-rock and now is lionized as indie heroes with a worldwide reunion tour and headlining slot at the Pitchfork fest. The band's much-anticipated set couldn't have begun more appropriately — first with a long, meandering introductory rant by Drag City's Ryan Murphy about the contrasts between this festival and Lollapalooza, among other topics, and then a false start to the opener, "Cut Your Hair." The band that worked hard but looked like slackers is still in perfect non-form. Band leader Stephen Malkmus played facing stage left, and other band members frequently played with their backs to the crowd. Malkmus kept throwing sidelong glances at his old mates as if he wasn't sure what came next. As he maintained a carefree composure — all casual smirks, air drumming and lazy twirls — multi-instrumentalist Bob Nastanovich jumped around most of the time like a devilish imp, hollering through "Debris Slide" and rapping, if you call it that, through "Unfair," which built to such caterwauling mayhem that guitarist Scott Kannberg even tried a scissor kick. One minute it was amazing the whole thing was still on the rails, like they should be following the Smith Westerns on the B stage, the next — such synchronized beauty and cacophony. The end result being, hey, Pavement has a serious legacy, after all. The echoes we've been hearing at this festival, this weekend and years past, they all came together in one joyfully sloppy master class of indie rock. By Thomas Conner
© Chicago Sun-Times Question No. 3: What sonic and stylistic elements distinguish the Chicago blues sound? Question No. 17: What was the first film to use a rock 'n' roll soundtrack? Essay No. 2: Elvis Presley and the Beatles made successive impacts on American rock 'n' roll. Discuss their historic and musical development. Then declare and defend your choice for which of the two was most significant to rock as a whole. These are the kinds of questions students across the country (if they're lucky) strained to answer during recent final exams. Yes, parents, your tuition might be funding a study of psychedelic rock, quizzes about the names of Brill Building songwriters or term papers about Michael Jackson. The history of pop music is fast becoming an enviable elective course on university campuses across the country. UCLA's music history program offers a wide variety of pop music courses, from a Beatles overview to "History of Electronic Dance Music." Northwestern University offers a basic course called "The Cultural History of Rock Music" (though thus far it's been quarantined in the School of Continuing Studies). We even found one at the associate-degree level deep in the wilds of New Jersey: Raritan Valley Community College's "Rock 'n' Roll History and Culture." Roll over, Beethoven, indeed. Rock 'n' roll is, after all, 63 years old (if you go by a debatable birthday in 1947), nearly eligible for retirement. That's an entire lifetime of growth and development, not to mention the genealogy of blues, jazz and folk music that preceded it. It's all ripe for classroom study now — particularly for newly enrolled college students born after Kurt Cobain and wondering why that new MGMT album sounds the way it does. "Students now, they get to be teens and discover music, usually what's current, and then some of them have this epiphany — 'Wow, there's half a century of stuff before this!'" says Glenn Gass, a music professor who teaches rock history at the Univ. of Indiana. "But catching up with that history is so much easier than it used to be. Some of them have virtually the entire history of pop music right there on their iPod. When I started out, students had to listen to reel-to-reel tapes on a reserve list in the library. If you wanted to hear a Fats Domino collection, good luck; it's out of print. We'd go to hotel ballrooms for conventions and sift through stacks of 45s. CDs changed everything, and video — if you had two minutes of Jerry Lee Lewis playing piano, it was 'Oh my God!' Now people with amazing footage have posted it on YouTube. The technology has made all of that history available to students. "But, as with any segment of history, it can be a lot to get your head around, you know? These new courses hopefully are helping put it all into some kind of perspective." Fought the power Gass teaches his two-semester course, "A History of Rock Music" (as well as "The Music of the Beatles"), in IU's Jacobs School of Music and has since 1982. He's written a textbook of the same title. Even after all these years, he says he still can't get used to the reconciling of generations that's occurred within the realm of rock music. "In old days, rock tore the generations apart. If your dad liked it, that was the kiss of death," he says. "Now, time and time again, I play some classic rock, and the kids know it, and I ask how they know it. 'Oh, my dad and I listen to Hendrix together.' I can't imagine that in a hundred years. One student in my class told me, 'I'm glad we're finally onto rockabilly. My dad and I drive around listening to that.' That's soooo strange! There's no embarrassment anymore about growing up listening to the same music your parents did. It proves it's timeless. You didn't have to walk the streets of Vienna to appreciate Beethoven. The same is true of the Beatles. Which means it's ripe for study and a little guidance." On this point, fellow rock academics point to the work of Lawrence Grossberg, a renowned cultural studies scholar who did doctoral research at the University of Illinois. Michael Kramer, who teaches Northwestern's "Cultural History of Rock" class, can speak at length on Grossberg's studies of rock music as communication, on his "high-falutin' language" ("Someone had to take it there," he concedes) used to describe rock 'n' roll and his attempt to determine if its was really the breeding ground of a leftist revolution it often claimed to be. By the end of the 1970s, Kramer says, Grossberg realized that the oppositional force of rock 'n' roll — kids vs. parents, youth vs. establishment — had evaporated. Once rock stopped defining difference, Grossberg moved on. "And there are older folks who cling to music as opposition and don't want it to be absorbed into the academy," Kramer says. "Rock doesn't have its edge anymore. but that's exactly what's allowing it to slip into academia." It happened with jazz. Once considered a cheap music and a dangerous influence, jazz preceded rock into the ivy-covered halls of learning and is now commonly studied alongside classical music, often with the same terminology and serious approach. (I took a History of Jazz course when I was in college, even writing a term paper comparing Steely Dan to Duke Ellington.) Popular music studies have been on the British curriculum since 1980. Carey Fleiner at the Univ. of Delaware points out, in a 2008 paper titled "Teaching Rock and Roll History," that British "students also attend particular schools and conservatories explicitly to focus on rock music and to earn a degree on the subject." In the Midwest, Cleveland's Case Western Reserve University gets close to being a pop music studies conservatory; rock history courses have been taught there since 2001, and the school has enjoyed a decade-long collaborative research relationship with the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame across town. Rock is dead, long live rock Until about 10 or 15 years ago, rock music studies began in history departments, communication departments, sometimes even English departments. Rock was used in its context to discuss social and political changes. After all, what serious study of the Civil Rights era or the Vietnam War would be complete without looking into how the people expressed themselves in music or rallied around certain folk songs and rock artists? Today, rock history courses are migrating to music departments. The discussion is less about context and history and more about style, performance and lyrics. Gass, for instance, teaches rock history as a low-level music appreciation course. "All that history and post-Marx theory applied to rock bores me out of my mind," he says. "I teach music appreciation, not cultural studies." John Covach teaches rock history at the Univ. of Rochester (N.Y.), in the Eastman School of Music. He received all three of his university degrees from the Univ. of Michigan, studying classical music (while playing nights — secretly — in a progressive rock band). Echoing the experience of all rock history professors I spoke with, Covach said he encountered slight resistance to the suggestion of such a course — until the school saw first-hand how popular it would be. "I started this course at [the Univ. of North Carolina at] Chapel Hill. They have a very conservative group of musicologists, but they said, OK, give it a try. They cautiously embraced it," Covach says. "Initially they wondered whether students would sign up for it. I told them the big problem would be keeping the numbers manageable. I cap the class at 125, and I always fill up. At North Carolina I had 320 students, and the fire code on the room was 318. If they'd ever all shown up there wouldn't have been enough seats. ... Once a department sees that, they see the course as a cash cow. More students in one of your courses means more resources for the department." Gass faced challenges in launching a rock history course, too. He was undaunted; one of his first jobs was in a 1977 government program teaching jazz and rock history in Wisconsin prisons. "I had a fellow in the musicology department one day in the Xerox room, and the guy said, 'How can you spend one hour on that garbage?' He wasn't even trying to be insulting; he just couldn't understand why anyone would pursue it, the music was so obviously moronic garbage. That's cool. If it was too easy it would have felt strange. I liked that there were still adults who hated rock at that point. Now you have oboe teachers who also love Led Zeppelin." But how you approach the subject — and from which discipline — matters, according to NU's Kramer. The most important question, he says, is are you teaching rock history or pop music history? "I begin my class by asking: Is rock dead?" Kramer says, citing the theme of Kevin Dettmar's book, Is Rock Dead?. He then brings up "The Death of Rock and Roll," a 1956 record by Maddox Brothers and Rose, a country-rockabilly group, that was imitating Ray Charles' "I Got a Woman." "Rock 'n' roll has, from its very beginning, this notion of its own death. Maybe that's because it's the music of young people, and you have to grow up, your youth has to die. ... But there's a tension between rock music and pop music. It's something that's exploded at the EMP Pop Conference lately. Rock has had such an influence on pop music, but there are two totally different classes there, and they could come from any department, really. I would not open a class by asking: Is pop music dead?" The death of rock may not have been greatly exaggerated — and may be the only reason academics now allow students to conduct the autopsy. For his part, Gass prefers to get down to basics and just help students make sense of the smorgasbord available to them on iTunes and Amazon. "There are professors out there who treat a popular music conference like going to a physics conference. There is some real high-level inquiry out there. I teach non-majors — sophomores from the frat house. I'm just looking for a way to connect them to [Bob Dylan's] 'Blonde on Blonde.' ... If I can make that light bulb come on, then rock can live a little bit longer." (Answers to those first questions — No. 3: Rooted in Mississippi Delta blues, with frequent use of slides, bent notes and double-stopped strings, as well as intricate rhythm patterns. No. 17: "The Blackboard Jungle." Essay No. 2: Answers vary. Widely.) By Thomas Conner
© Chicago Sun-Times Elvis Costello and the Attractions made the "Imperial Bedroom" album, their seventh, at the dawn of the 1980s. The band's heroic status in post-punk had begun to cement, they'd toyed with soul and country, and it was already time for a return to form. The tempos are mostly up (save the blues lounge ballad "Almost Blue"), the arrangements are big, the sound is fairly lush and dense. It's more complex than it sounds, and the songs click through a first listen before you really tune into the bitterness and fear lurking in the lyrics. The same could be said of Bret Easton Ellis' Imperial Bedrooms (Knopf, $25, 192 pages) — that it glides along with deceptive urgency and false cheer, with serpents coiled in the shadows — at least at first. It's a return to characters, if not completely to form. This is, for whatever reason, a sequel to Less Than Zero (another Costello title), the debut novel that put Ellis on the literary map back in 1985. In that smart, zeitgeisty tour de force, chief narrator Clay revisits his Los Angeles home during Christmas break, floats through the remnants of a decadent, druggy, emotionally vacant existence and finally bails, heading to back to an East Coast prep school. The final impression: He at least recognizes a way out of the sense of doom gripping his friends and former girlfriend, and he might actually take it. Imperial Bedrooms spoils that into-the-sunset idea. Clay is back in L.A., after splitting time in New York. He's a screenwriter, mildly successful. He's still drinking, taking drugs, floating through ritzy la-la-land without any moral center or, it seems, reason to live. As he moves through the city, sites remind him of the past couple of decades — the movie deal in that restaurant, the drug-fueled night at that club, the young girl he had sex with in that hotel. He's still a ghost observing it all behind a veil, a soulless Christopher Isherwood training the objective camera on his own life. He still seems to recognize, deep down, just how soulless it all is, or at least that he should be somewhere else. Early on, describing another vapid party, Clay says it's "a mosaic of youth, a place you don't really belong to anymore." Readers may have the same sinking feeling trudging through this unnecessary continuation of Clay's hopeless drama. Those who felt a kinship with the "Catcher in the Rye for the MTV generation" may look upon this new novel the same way they probably look at MTV today: with a bit of slithering terror. All that new music, all that new pop culture — it's a beast, always moving and growing, it'll devour you, you'll never catch up, better just to steer clear of it and switch back to VH1 Classic. Which really gets to the heart of Ellis as a writer. Enough talk about his literary genius, let's call him what he rally is: a terrific horror writer. Imperial Bedrooms is an absolute creepfest, at best, as unsettling as any single current of a Stephen King novel (like Cell). His previous novel, Lunar Park, was more widely labeled this way, but the vast majority of his novels are fueled by graphic gore (the serial killer in American Psycho, 1991) and sheer, white-knuckle, hyperventilating tension (the fashion model terrorists in Glamorama, 1998). Bedrooms is a festival of panting paranoia. Something ain't right about this new girlfriend of Clay's. There's a blue jeep following him around. He's receiving mystery texts from someone who's clearly spying on him. Plus, L.A. is buzzing with gossip about the vicious murder of some Hollywood moguls. Clay even suspects his ol' compadres Rip and Julian are somehow connected to it. He tries to avoid them. He fails. In the end, a question repeated throughout the novel — "What's the worst thing you've ever done?" or, alternatingly, "What's the worst thing that's ever happened to you?" — is answered, gruesomely. Clay has spent two novels now (three if you count his cameo in The Rules of Attraction) trying to figure out where he is and how that defines him. The "Disappear Here" sign from Less Than Zero is still up, and Clay sees it again here. When he tries to kiss his new girlfriend in public, she turns away. "'Not here,' she says, but as if 'not here' is a promise of somewhere better." Clay clearly stopped believing in a better place long ago, and it's definitely not in any Imperial Bedrooms. By Thomas Conner
© Chicago Sun-Times The members of Hanson are good Christian lads, but this week they officially began a mission from God. On Thursday, the fraternal trio debuted a video for its new single, "Thinking 'Bout Somethin'," that pays loving tribute to the Ray Charles scene in one of Chicago's landmark movies, "The Blues Brothers." The video — which re-creates the interior of Ray's Music Exchange and features more than 300 people dancing in the street — was shot not on location in Chicago but in Hanson's hometown of Tulsa, Okla. And, eldest brother Isaac Hanson is eager to impart, this is not tongue-in-cheek. "We want people to know that we're not making fun of this movie," he said. "This is not a parody. This is not us using some iconic film as a way to make us look hip. You've gotta understand, we love this movie. This comes from the fact that this movie made us want to dance." The idea for the video came almost on a whim early this year as guitarist Isaac, singer-pianist Taylor and drummer Zac tried to wrap production on its new album, "Shout It Out," due for release on June 8. "Taylor came in and dialed up the 'Blues Brothers' scene on YouTube," Isaac said. In the film, Charles performs the jumpy tune "Shake Your Tail Feather" while Jake and Elwood (John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd) dance. "He presses play on our song, then plays the video clip on mute. Everyone's jaws dropped. It synced up almost perfectly. It totally worked. We looked at each other and said, 'We have to do this.' " Kelly Kerr, the director of photography for the video, was one of those left with his jaw hanging. "The beats-per-minute were almost identical. And I thought, 'We're gonna replicate this.' ... We got real close to the movie but also took some liberties with it, as well." The crew called in set designers to re-create the interior of Ray's Music Exchange inside the Hanson rehearsal space in Tulsa. Then they determined that Tulsa's Greenwood Avenue looked roughly like the similarly historic Chicago streets used in the film. They choreographed and filmed a dance sequence there on March 6. The video for "Thinking 'Bout Somethin' " is now making the rounds online. The single itself becomes available April 27 via iTunes. By Thomas Conner
© Chicago Sun-Times FOR ALL THE TEA IN CHINA: HOW ENGLAND STOLE THE WORLD'S FAVORITE DRINK AND CHANGED HISTORY By Sarah Rose Viking, 252 pages, $25.95 CHA DAO: THE WAY OF TEA, TEA AS A WAY OF LIFE By Solala Towler Singing Dragon, 176 pages, $16.95 By all means, do what comes naturally: Pour yourself a cup of tea as you curl up with a favorite book (and your favorite Books section, ahem). Watch the steam rise from your cup and smell the invigorating, earthy fragrance. Then pause to reflect that the tea you are enjoying is totally hot — as in, stolen! Nabbed! Ripped off! Nothing more than the subject of international corporate espionage! This is the tale told throughout For All the Tea in China, the story of Robert Fortune, an ambitious Scottish botanist who was sent in 1848 to the interior of China to, no bones about it, steal tea. At the time, China had all the world's tea — and was tightly sealed off from foreigners. The British East India Company had just lost its monopoly on trading the carefully controlled output of Chinese tea and stood to lose a fortune, unless they could grab some tea plants and grow their own. This was the basis for Fortune's daunting assignment. Not only was he charged with the mission of sneaking into a large, poverty-stricken country, in disguise, to steal several hundred young tea plants, he had to deliver them safely back to India in conditions and vessels not exactly hospitable to delicate shrubbery. He also had to convince some Chinese tea specialists to defect and come back with him, because he also had to steal the knowledge of tea. As author Sarah Rose explains, "Although the concept of tea is simple — dry leaf infused in hot water — the manufacture of it is not intuitive at all. Tea is a highly processed product." Given this setup, we might expect For All the Tea in China to be a much more swashbuckling or at least daring narrative than it is. The Indiana Jones potential of this story never quite plays out, which likely owes more to the lack of detail in the historical record than anything else. What Rose provides, however, is a mostly engaging tale connecting the dots from the world's first cultivation of tea in China to its mass production and distribution by the British, once they "acquired" it via Fortune's clandestine journeys. Rose ably sets up the empire's great thirst for the tea bush, both economically ("Tea taxes funded railways roads and civil service salaries") and psychologically ("tea rapidly became a favorite way among the upper classes to signify civility and taste in the chilly, wet climate of Britain"), which fueled the quest for China's prized possession. The whole story winds up framed in a way that makes it easy to understand in modern times; Rose explains that "the global imperial project of plant transfer ... was essentially the transfer of technology." Stealing tea and the blueprints for its production was akin to, in today's world, another government infiltrating the Apple campus and then producing their own iPads. A considerably more peaceful story of tea is found in Solala Towler's Cha Dao: The Way of Tea, Tea as a Way of Life. Long before modern Britons developed their criminal thirst for tea, ancient Chinese not only enjoyed the beverage, they infused the experience of drinking it into their Taoist philosophy. (Oddly, in this book, Tao and Taoism are written phonetically as Dao and Daoism.) It's a valuable but slippery concept, this "tea mind," which Towler describes as "a way of being in the world, a way of living a life of grace and gratitude, of being able to see the sacred in the seemingly mundane." This is the heart of Taoism, and also — if everyone is in the right frame of mind — the experience produced by a cup of tea. Towler see-saws between basic histories and anecdotes of tea and the Tao, comparing and contrasting, fortunately stopping short of turning the simple cup of tea into some kind of religious experience even while acknowledging that the Chinese tea ceremony developed into a ritual that "took the simple art of drinking tea to a sacred level." Cha Dao is essentially a cozy primer for Taoism, using tea as a familiar experience through which the reader can begin extrapolating the philosophy. The connections are clearly drawn and easily understood, even the challenging idea of wu wei — the concept of "doing nothing" (which is not the same as apathy, nor is it the opposite of ambition). Towler writes, in describing a tea ceremony: "'Daoists follow nature,' said the [tea] master, 'and so Daoists like tea because it comes from nature. Tea is the flavor of the Dao.'" By Thomas Conner
© Chicago Sun-Times ON MONSTERS: AN UNNATURAL HISTORY OF OUR WORST FEARS By Stephen T. Asma Oxford University Press, 368 pages, $27.95 Quiz time! A monster is: (a) A psycho killer. (b) A seven-headed hydra. (c) Under the bed. (d) All of the above. Stephen Asma is a Distinguished Scholar at Chicago's Columbia College, teaching philosophy and history of science, so it's not out of the realm of possibility that he'd ask such a question on one of his exams. Particularly now that his new book about monsters is available. Asma — who has previously explored the topics of Buddhism (The Gods Drink Whiskey) and natural history museums (Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads) — would give you an A if your answer was (d). In his new spelunking adventure through the caverns of world history, culture and thought, On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears, Asma explores not only what frightens us and why, but also how our individual and group minds have learned to deal with scary new concepts by labeling them monstrous, from Alexander's "enormous beast" and the Bible's Behemoth and Leviathan ("God's lackeys," Asma describes them) all the way to terrorists, zombies and Cylons. But it's more than beasts and behemoths. "Monster is a flexible, multi-use concept," Asma writes. "The concept of the monster has evolved to become a moral term." Q. Why now? Is there something about this moment in history that makes an examination of the monster concept worth pursuing? A. Well, we're seeing every day now the kind of demonization happening in the political sphere. We're led to believe there's this clash of wild-eyed jihad monsters vs. the civilized West. That's how the "war on terror" has been cashed out. The more paranoid part of our culture has been dredging up this monster archetype. But it's not just a one-way depiction. Some corners of Muslim culture demonize us, as well. One of the goals of this book was to provide examples of how we've done this many times in the past and how it relates to what's still going on. Q. And the uptick in horror movies lately must be an indication of something. A. You always see more monster movies when the culture is feeling stressed. Film scholars show a huge explosion of horror [movies] in the wake of the Vietnam war, from "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" to David Cronenberg's stuff, etc. There's a similar correlation between post-9/11 and the new hunger for paranoid, frightening films. This stuff really taps into universal human fears. The guy who made the "Hostel" films, Eli Roth — I talk about this in the book, about these "torture porn" films and how they can actually take something away from your humanity. But Roth defends them this way: He says he gets e-mail from soldiers, and they love this stuff in Iraq. You might not think that an incredibly scary, violent movie would be great relaxing, popcorn stuff for soldiers, but after they've spent all day repressing fears and anxieties in order to do their jobs, it's a big relief for them to let it all out in the safe moment of a movie like this. That doesn't really defend them for me, but it makes some sense of why we love these movies. They're little holidays from our worst fears. Q. Is it as simple as that — a catharsis, a release valve? A. Yes and no. It's slightly more psychologically complex. We enjoy monster stories because they allow us to imagine what it's like to meet our enemies. It's a rehearsal. "How would I react if ...?" That's why people sometimes can't help but yell at the screen: "Don't open the door!" So a monster movie, or even to a degree the depiction of another person or another culture as "monstrous," allows us a fictitious buffer zone to practice and maybe even work through our fear response. Q. Have you read Pride and Prejudice With Zombies? A. [Laughs] No, but isn't that funny? I have read Max Brooks' The Zombie Survival Guide. That's something really interesting, culturally speaking. It tells you in plain terms how to handle a zombie attack. It's serious, but it's funny. It's that same rehearsal idea. Q. How does "monsterization" differ when we apply it to just one person, like the perpetrator of a heinous crime? A. We now understand that serial killers and the like are not actually that different from us. We all have aggression, but they have more. We have empathy, they lack it. Twenty or 30 years ago, we never would have thought that if you pick on someone as a child, you could trigger monstrous events. If you take a kid, submit him to all this abuse and disconnect him from family and other support, the violence is not predictable but there is a pattern. In the medieval era, they'd say you were possessed. The devil did it. Now we understand that your immediate social circle can make you a monster. That's a new way of thinking about monsters, as products of social processes. By Thomas Conner
© Chicago Sun-Times BICYCLE DIARIES By David Byrne Viking, 303 pages, $25.95 On the Talking Heads' 1979 album, "Fear of Music," the disembodied, hesitant voice of singer David Byrne runs down the virtues and disadvantages of the world's metropolises in the song "Cities." "I'm checking them out," he says of various spots, from London to El Paso. "I got it figured out / There's good points and bad points / But it all works out." Such might be the epigram for this innovative musician's latest foray into publishing. Bicycle Diaries is a spruced-up bundle of Byrne's personal journals, focusing exclusively on his observations on a variety of subjects inspired by his travels. The chapter titles — "London," "Berlin," "Istanbul," "Baltimore, Detroit, Sweetwater, Columbus, New Orleans, Pittsburgh," etc. — are evidence of a man who gets around. Their content shows a keen, nonjudgmental intellect with occasionally intriguing insight into modern life and the things we construct to live it in. For about 30 years, Byrne has been riding bicycles as his primary means of transportation. He two-wheels it around New York City (a brave man) and packs folding bicycles when he travels around the world to perform concerts or curate art exhibits or speak at various cultural events. He keeps a renaissance man's schedule, and by cycling from the hotel to the museum or the venue, he experiences cities up-close and sees their architecture in great detail and gains a feeling for the character of the pedestrians that's more savory and, sometimes literally, in-your-face than that experienced behind the windows of a car, bus or train. "In a car," he writes from Detroit, "one would have sought out a freeway, one of the notorious concrete arteries, and would never have seen any of this stuff." However, other than infrequent mentions of odd bicycle lanes or public policy related to cyclists, Bicycle Diaries is not about cycling at all. It's about the stuff. It's not a series of diaries about bicycling; it's about the places where Byrne happened to be pedaling and the things along the way that turned his head. But it's not even really a travelogue, either, though he does provide a general sense of place for each city he discusses. His observations of the urban environment are usually little more than occasional mentions of how difficult or easy it is to bike there, or superfluous-but-colorful notations like this: "Sydney. Hooley freaking dooley, what a weird and gorgeous city!" He only brings up "the cycling meme" as a means of explaining, usually offhand, why he's seeing the things he's seeing. Instead, this is a cheerfully rambling stream of sentience about such wide-ranging topics as censorship, self-censorship, the uses of music, art (a lot of art, complete with many intriguing photos), "the morbidity of beauty," post-9/11 angst, gentrification, the fauna of Australia, suburban sprawl, PowerPoint and other miscellany. Like his music, the prose is easygoing, fluid, a quick read. There's no central thesis, but it's a nice ride with interesting scenery. Byrne, famous as a pop singer, drifts naturally in and out of his subjects and only occasionally discusses music. Again, the concerts he's in town for are his raison d'etre for taking a bike ride and ending up in a seven-page discussion of, for instance, Imelda Marcos. Often his musical observations are not his at all, but he claims them by repeating them, such as this astute point of view from an acquaintance in Buenos Aries: "Nito said that rock and roll is now viewed as the music of the big companies, as it emanates from the large, usually northern, wealthy countries, and therefore is no loner considered to be the voice of the people — not even the people where it comes from." (In a later chapter, he opines a bit on hip-hop, calling it "corporate rebellion," and noting that Chicago hip-hopper R. Kelly's " 'Trapped in the Closet' is one of the wackiest and most creative video pieces I've seen in years.") In many of these chapters, Byrne seems intrigued and slightly fascinated by the foreigner's clearer — and always wiser — perspective on our own American culture. But in his account of Buenos Aries, that tide turns when he discovers that the natives hardly listen to their native music and are surprised when Byrne's own band begins playing salsa-flavored melodies and samba rhythms in concert. These are simply the diaries of an insightful fellow with his eyes open, moving a bit more slowly through your town. A more fitting epigram, in this case, might be a line from a song by Chicago band Poi Dog Pondering. In "The Ancient Egyptians," Poi Dog singer Frank Orrall describes the many human civilizations that expanded and thrived despite the lack of automobiles. When friends insist on jumping into a cab or car, he sings, "But I say no, no, no / and didn't you know / you get to know things better when they go by slow." By Thomas Conner
© Chicago Sun-Times We're sitting in the Palm Court of the Drake Hotel, about as opulent as a room is going to get, and we're sipping tea. It's just us — the dozen people attending Tea Extravaganza 2009, an independent tea tasting led by Chas Kroll of the American Tea Masters Association — and the clinks of teacups reverberate around the well-appointed room, even above the trickle of the centerpiece fountains. Kroll is discussing the selection process for the fine, downy leaves that make up the Chinese green tea he's pouring into tiny "aroma cups." It's called Melon Slice (Top Liu An Gua Pian), from PeLi Teas, and it's a knockout — aromas of sandalwood, flavors of salt and smoke, a surprisingly bold expedition across the tongue. "See?" says Kroll, smiling demurely. "You wonder why people still drink sodas at all." At this particular tea party, that seems to be the rub. Around the table are 12 people who are passionate about tea — tea shop owners, tea sellers, tea lovers and three newly graduated tea masters from Kroll's ATMA course. These are people who want to affect that change, weaning people from sodas and flavored waters — even from coffee — and initiating them into the wide world of tea. There's a lot of talk about "taking tea to the next level" and "bringing it to the masses." They mean the American masses, of course. Almost everywhere else in the world, tea is ubiquitous, bested in popularity only by water itself. Here in the States, though, tea still largely means Lipton bags brewed in a large steel urn and dumped over ice with a lot of sugar. "It's a challenge, educating people about it," says Daphne Jones, a Chicago marketing specialist who helped Kroll organize the Drake event earlier this month. She's also a newly certified tea master. "People understand some of the health benefits of tea, but that's about it. They don't see that there is this world of flavor and localization and customization, the same way they've discovered in their food over the last several years. "It can be daunting, sure, but once people understand that you can have a beer-level tea or a Dom Perignon-level tea, they can start appreciating it like they do with wine." That's where this crew hopes to help. Whether it's Kroll and his expanding tea master minions, or the many tea sommeliers cropping up at shops and restaurants around the country and throughout Chicago — all they are saying is give teas a chance. CULTIVATING 'MASTERS' Kroll, 62, hasn't just capitalized on the rising American interest in tea, he capitalizes it. He trademarked the phrase Certified Tea Master. Because, he says, if he didn't, who would? "I created the American Tea Masters Association out of frustration, basically," he says. Kroll ran his own tech company through the '80s and a tea company, Royal Dynasty Tea, in the '90s. "Vendors would tell me all the time, 'You'd make a great tea master.' I didn't know precisely what that meant, but I liked the sound of it. So I went looking for the organization that bestowed such a title, and it didn't exist. ... So I created it." A Chicago native "and still a die-hard Cubs fan," Kroll established the ATMA from his current San Diego home. He created the rules for becoming a Certified Tea Master and wrote the manuals for the 13-week course he teaches — over the Internet via Skype — to aspiring tea lovers around the country. "A lot of people say you have to be in the industry for 10, 20, even 30 years to be considered a tea master," he says. "My students use accelerated learning techniques so they can at least come out of the starting gate running." Kroll's program, he says, is aimed at the everyman. Still, the recognized professional route for aspiring tea business owners is through another program, the Specialty Tea Institute run by the New York-based Tea Association of the United States. The STI program features two foundation levels plus a professional certification. Kroll's youngest graduate is Christopher Bourgea, 21. A student at Anderson University outside of Indianapolis, Bourgea sews his own tea bags and plans to use his certification as the backbone of his own tea company aimed at potential tea lovers his age. "I am all about loose-leaf tea, but most people are nervous to have loose-leaf tea. I know that if I want to make tea popular with high school and college-aged kids, I'm going to have to put the tea in bags. It is pretty much the only way they will try the teas. I hope to get people hooked with the bags and then move them over to the loose-leaf." LEARNING BY TASTE Rodrick Markus, on the other hand, is just a dealer. He gets the good stuff, the pricey stuff — it comes by the kilo — and likes to offer prospective customers a little sample to get them hooked. "I have friends and clients who tell me, 'Rod, just treat me like a drug addict. When I get low, you've got to get me more,' " Markus says while simmering his latest batch of quality pu-erh tea on a recent afternoon at the Park Hyatt's NoMI Cafe. "I guess you can call me a 'tea sommelier.' That term is big now, depending on which circle you're in. "I don't see how anyone who's less than 80 years old and doesn't have a gray beard reaching the floor can be called a 'tea master.' But whatever you call me, I'm glad to be helping people learn more about tea." Markus owns and operates the Rare Tea Cellar based in Chicago. After practicing psychology and hypnotherapy, he became an importer of wine and cigars, but 12 years ago he switched to tea. "Tea has all the positive aspects of wine and cigars — the unique flavors, the pleasurable sensory experience, the terroir — without anything remotely negative," he says. "My old friends say, 'Aw, Rod, you've gone soft on us. We used to sit around and smoke cigars and drink wine, now you just sip tea.' Then they taste what I've got, and they get it." The Rare Tea Cellar is aptly named. At NoMI, he doled out a delightful Emperor's Ceylon Platinum Tip tea, tasting of honey and pine, and a 1990 Vintage Reserve Silver Needle Pu-erh (yes, tea lovers, a white pu-erh!). Markus loves the pu-erhs, teas that are pressed into bricks and aged for many years in cellars or caves. "I'm always into the rarest of the rare, with anything. If I saw a $30 doughnut, I'd try it." Then again, he realizes he can't impose his grandiose designs on everyone. "You can't be too out-there or too much of a stickler, or you'll alienate everyone. We want to bring people into this experience, not push them away. So we try to make it as easy as possible." RTC teas sometimes come sealed in five-gram packages, for instance, because who actually has a gram scale at home to measure just the right amount? He also sells many hand-tied display teas, which are tea leaves tied into a sphere about the size of a plump grape — simply drop them in the pot and pour the water over, then watch them unfurl beautifully. Markus didn't pursue any tea certification. His education has come through his experience as a buyer. "I learned more from tasting tea over and over and over," he says. "You learn more from bad tea than good tea. I've tasted the same teas 1,000 times. When I hit about my 100,000th cup, I started to finally get what was happening." Does the average person have to try hundreds of thousands of cups of tea to get it, too? Of course not. But Markus uses his saturated experience to train servers and chefs at restaurants such as Chicago's NoMI and L2O (where he's planned 15-course meals featuring 15 tea pairings), so that the average person can sit down, ask and answer a few questions and be matched with the Goldilocks tea — the one that's juuuust right. BEYOND BLACK AND GREEN But what about those of us who rarely enjoy the rarified air of fancy restaurants? Who can we turn to for advice on which tea goes best with a chocolate bar or our favorite take-out sushi? Sam Ritchey at TeaGschwendner is happy to oblige. His business cards say "tea sommelier," but he calls himself an ambassador. He, too, has an informal education in tea. "I'm not a buyer, I don't taste teas to grade them for sale. I taste teas because I enjoy them," Ritchey says one afternoon in the clean, well-lit State Street shop. "I make it more tangible and appreciable for [customers]." Ritchey organizes small tastings and other events at the German company's shop. He recently led an evening sampling of nine Himalayan Darjeelings. "Granted, we're not to the point where the public is interested in something like the Himalayan tasting. That will always be a niche," Ritchey admits. "But people are now getting that there's a broad world here to explore, just like wine. There are options now for people who want to step beyond the box of black or green teas, and there are more people to lead them. "We've already come a long way. Look at the sophistication of coffee in this country now. I'm not saying that Starbucks is a specialty company, but it's brought us a long way from Sanka." Ready to bag the bag? By Thomas Conner © Chicago Sun-Times To start sampling good loose-leaf teas, don't go it alone. Not only are there more tea sommeliers in town to guide your first steps, there also are numerous opportunities to join other tea explorers at events like these: On foot The Chicago Food Planet's strolling, lunchtime Near North Food Tour visits seven spots, including a stop at TeaGschwendner for a brief run-down on the basics of good tea. See it, smell it and taste it with your friends, or make friends along the way. $42 a person, includes all food tastings; www.chicagofoodplanet.com All together Local tea blogger Lainie Petersen (www.lainiesips.com) organizes frequent outings (five in the next month) to local tea shops and restaurants, bringing like-minded tea lovers together to sip and socialize. Register at www.meetup.com/tealovers In the cup Tea sommelier Sam Ritchey organizes educational and sumptuous tea tastings at the TeaGschwendner shop. This fall he's got: "The Extraordinary History of the Ordinary Teabag," Sept. 17, 7:30 p.m. "A Cultural Journey Through the World of Tea," Oct. 29, 7:30 p.m. "An Evening With Edmon: Premium Green Teas," Nov. 12, 7:30 p.m. $10 per person, reservations required; 1160 N. State, (312) 932-0639 At the table Rod Markus of the Rare Tea Cellar guides diners through special tea dinners, pairing multi-course meals with great teas, at restaurants around Chicago. His next events include a Japanese Kaiseki Tea Ceremony on Oct. 11 at L2O, 2300 N. Lincoln Park West, and a Slow Food Tea Dinner on Nov. 19 at the fusion restaurant Naha, 500 N. Clark. See rareteacellar.com for details. In print Local tea lover Susan Blumberg assembled a handy guide, All the Tea in Chicago (Desvoeux, $9.99), which outlines the basics on just about every tea shop and afternoon tea service in Chicago and some suburbs. Use it to plan some outings with your friends. For details, go to desvoeuxpress.com/all theteainchicago.html. By Thomas Conner
© Chicago Sun-Times Lindsey Buckingham is attempting to explain why his on-again, off-again megastar band, Fleetwood Mac, is on the road again without an album to support. Nothing to sell. Just the classic band (himself, Stevie Nicks, John McVie, Mick Fleetwood — still no Christine McVie), together again, playing the hits. He provides lots of deeply considered reasons, yadda yadda — but then he says something extraordinary. "Maybe someone came to the conclusion that it might not be a bad time to go out and do some dates to use as hang time, as a proving ground," he says. "It's an inverted model, for sure, but there's something to it." Proving ground? What could Fleetwood Mac — author of one of the biggest-selling albums of all time, 1977's "Rumours" — possibly have to prove at this point? Buckingham chuckles. He's used to people straining to square his massive insecurities with his equally massive successes. "In a general sense, every time you get together to do something new, you have to start thinking after all these years there are still things for us to work out emotionally, historically. We are a band of couples who broke up and got through it living in various states of denial and never getting closure — at least from my perspective — and it leaves a lot of stuff hanging out there. "I took off in '87 to regain my sanity, and the band died a slow death without me. That didn't make me feel too bad," he snickers. "Without sounding too vindictive, it was nice to know they needed me. ... But we're still a work in progress in terms of those interactions. There are still things that need to be worked through." Kind of amazing, isn't it? More than 30 years after Buckingham and Nicks split up at the dawn of the band's success, the "issues" remain that palpable between them. He still considers the band a "band of couples who broke up." And that was always part of the appeal — the telenovela-like drama and tension between two of the fiercest artistic personalities in Southern California. Buckingham, at least, still hopes to harness that tension for more musical magic. He and the other members seem to be viewing this tour as a casual way for the quartet to settle a bit, to get back into some kind of rhythm that would produce a new record. It's the elephant in the room that each member treads carefully around. "There have been discussions, for sure, that we would love to make some more music," said founding drummer Mick Fleetwood, during an earlier teleconference with the band. "I think it's really down to the whole sort of biorhythms of how everyone is feeling and what's appropriate." They're still so careful when speaking of each other, except Nicks, who remarked — with discernable astonishment — how well they were all getting on so far and added, "Lindsey has been in incredibly good humor since we started rehearsal. When Lindsey is in a good humor, everybody is in a good humor." They still look to him, take their cues from him, and he remains the band's creative linchpin. The last few Mac albums he was on — you know, the successful ones — each began as Buckingham solo projects that the record label and the band begged to turn into band efforts. "Tango in the Night" sounds like his crystalline solo work with a few warmer Nicks and McVie songs added. Buckingham had asked Fleetwood and bassist John McVie to back him on another solo album that, with the addition of four Nicks songs, became Fleetwood Mac's 2003 comeback CD, "Say You Will." But he'd like that pattern to change. After "Say You Will," Buckingham told the band to leave him alone for three years, during which he exorcised two back-to-back solo discs: the quieter, almost indie-rock outing "Under the Skin" in 2006, and last year's slightly harder rocking "Gift of Screws." As a result, Buckingham says he feels refreshed and at the height of his creative powers. "Having accomplished what I wanted to do with both solo albums, I'm really in the best place I've been artistically," he says. "I tapped into things I wanted to get to for a long time. And I have a lot of new material — I could drop another solo album at any time — but no one's talking yet about a new Mac album, at least for a while. Still, I'm pointedly not fleshing out my new stuff, so that I might be able to show it to the band and let it take on a life in the context of that. "The way we used to do it, we'd each have rough ideas and would get together and the songs would get formulized and brought into some sort of life for the first time through a set of Fleetwood Mac eyes. More often than not, over the last few experiences it's been my solo material that had to be slightly altered to make it feel more Fleetwood Mac-like. So I'd really welcome the chance to come to these people with things a little less fleshed out, something that might be born as Fleetwood Mac rather than being just ... painted like it." So he speaks of this tour as a "way to create a level of ferment" among the band again, and adds uncharacteristic optimism of "bringing things to light in a more organic way by being together without a real reason." The question is: Do you want to pay $50 to $150 for a ticket to watch four grizzled but talented music makers "hang" and "ferment"? Buckingham says the band is not using the tour as an expensive woodshed. "We've very pointedly stuck to catalog for this tour," he says, adding, "There is still validity in looking at this body of work, the irony being that this is what most people want to hear from us, anyway. I figure, let's make our mantra just hanging and working on the rough edges in terms of personal interactions with band members. That in itself will be part of the preparation for making an album, whenever that does happen." FLEETWOOD MAC When: 8 p.m. Thursday and Friday Where: Allstate Arena, 6920 N. Mannheim, Rosemont Tickets: $49.50-$149.50 Phone: (312) 559-1212 By Thomas Conner
© Chicago Sun-Times Loudon Wainwright III doesn't often get political in his folk songs, but that doesn't mean he's purely objective on the subject. "Yes, my wife and I were watching the election results here in L.A., and enjoying the results. Congratulations there in Chicago," he tells us. "Whew. Four years ago I was in Vancouver mixing a record and watching returns at a Canadian house and, God, I was ready to pick up the paper and start looking for apartments." Indeed, he returned home to America — but now he's in recovery. That is, his new album is called "Recovery," and it's a set of 13 old songs — songs mostly from the earliest outings of Wainwright's career (he was the first "new Bob Dylan," the singing surgeon on "MASH," a Grammy winning singer-songwriter, even star of and soundtrack creator for several Judd Apatow projects — and, yes, he's the father of Rufus and Martha). At the behest of artist-producer Joe Henry, Wainwright dredged up this baker's dozen of old tunes — "School Days," "The Drinking Song," "The Man Who Couldn't Cry," "Be Careful There's a Baby in the House" and more — and re-recorded them with his band. He talked to the Sun-Times about why he decided to look backward and what it's like singing a young man's songs at an older age. Q. Each time we talk, I have to stop myself from calling you "Loudo" or assuming a friendship with you, which I think is the result of listening to so many of your deeply personal songs for so many decades. Is that common, people assuming a familiarity with you because there's so much biography in your music? A. That's OK. It's not a bad thing. It hasn't gotten too creepy yet. People know a version of me, certain biographical facts because I've written about them. But they don't really know me, and I certainly don't know them. They show up in the CD line when I'm signing copies, and they say, you know, "This song meant a lot to me," and I like that. Q. And here you are 40 years later, still touring. A. Yeah, my swingin' life, still beating the bushes, still seeing if I can kindle some interest. I've been kindling now for 40 years — exactly, actually. I got paid to play music for the first time probably in 1968. Q. How convenient for a milestone anniversary to offer this disc of retooled old songs? A. Well, it wasn't that kind of thing, really. It all started in discussions with Joe Henry, when we were working on "Strange Weirdos" [an album of songs used in and inspired by the film "Knocked Up"]. I really love this group of musicians I'm recording with now in L.A., and we thought, "Why not go back and look at some of the old songs?" Q. How did you decide which ones to "re-cover"? A. It was very democratic. Joe mentioned some songs, I had some suggestions. I know that in these days of the Internet and downloading a song and reshuffling a playlist, the listener has a lot of choice in terms of the way they experience music. The last few albums I've made, I've tried to put the songs together in a way that creates a tone or a mood — dare I say, takes you on a journey. But once you make it, God knows, people can do whatever they want with it. Still, I gathered these 13 songs to try and make a journey. Q. Having traveled quite a journey in 40 years, what kind of journey is this record? A. Well, it's all about this band, really. That's what makes this different. That and the fact that it's all now from the perspective of a singer who's aged almost 40 years. The things I write about haven't changed much, actually. I was obsessed with getting old even when I was young. Q. What was it like to rediscover songs you'd forgotten? A. Well, I was sometimes amazed. Like "Old Friend" — I hate to praise myself, but I was amazed at what a good song it is. I was good, man! [Laughs.] Q. Was there a desire to do anything different with the songs? A. I came out of a tradition of singer-songwriters, and I liked guys who made voice-and-guitar records. So I resisted it. Now the calendar pages are flipping, the autumn leaves are blowing and here I am back doing these songs with a band. But it's a band I'm extremely comfortable with and really respect. Q. I hear the next album might also be a looking back. A. The next record might be different. I'm working with Dick Connette on a collection — there was a guy in the '20s, Charlie Poole, with a band called the North Carolina Ramblers. Dick and I are both fans of his, and we're working on something like that, singing some of those songs, writing new ones, adapting some. LOUDON WAINWRIGHT III Opening for Leo Kottke When: 8 p.m. Saturday Where: McAninch Arts Center at College of DuPage, Fawell and Park, Glen Ellyn Tickets: $32-$42 Phone: (630) 942-4000 Tea it up, in Hawaii - It was a long time brewing, but state's tea pioneers now pouring it on10/19/2008
By Thomas Conner
© Chicago Sun-Times Birds caw and twitter in the jungle. Koi circle lazily in a small pond. We're sitting in an old barn transformed into an open-air studio, where Eva Lee is pouring some tea. Lee wipes the rim of a large tea bowl, circling the teapot over its perimeter. She pours the light, bronze liquid into tiny porcelain "aroma cups." This is a gung fu cha tea ceremony, informal and chatty. The new oolong we're about to drink had about only 50 yards to travel from bush to teapot. It grows under the shady canopy behind the studio. The proximity wouldn't be surprising in prolific tea-producing regions. But we're not in China or Japan. We're at Lee's home and garden in the jungle, just outside Volcano Village on the Big Island of Hawaii. The 50th state is often celebrated for its Kona coffee, the premium beans grown on the Big Island's west side. But these days there's a new stimulating beverage on the island: tea. Actually, it's the oldest and second-most popular drink in the world, next to water. Lee is one of the island's new breed of tea pioneers. She planted her first camellia sinensis bushes ("the mother block," she now calls them) nearly eight years ago in a semi-sunny spot outside the Volcano Village studio she shares with her husband, Chiu Leong, a potter and photographer. Tea was introduced to Hawaii in 1887 but, over the years, farmers' fits and starts with the plant failed to produce a commodity-level product. Still, the Big Island's rich, volcanic soil and moody microclimates mirror many of the places where tea thrives — the slopes of China, the forests of India. Around the turn of this century, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and several state agencies gave interested tea growers in Hawaii a leg up in starting small-scale tea operations. "The people behind the programs weren't as interested in turning tea into a big cash commodity for Hawaii. They wanted people who would experiment and play, developed something new and interesting," Lee says, between pours. "My husband and I knew virtually nothing about growing tea before we started," she adds. "We were interested in starting something new that would have meaning to us, and we contacted Dr. Francis Zee [of the Pacific Basin Agricultural Research Center in Hilo], who was really trying to get it going here. He was skeptical, but when I mentioned that Chiu was a potter, the door went wide open. He didn't want to turn to farmers for this, because they wouldn't take the risks artists would." Seven years later and Lee — a founding member of the Hawaii Tea Society, around 40 members strong — is hosting tea ceremonies in her Tea Hawaii studio. It's nestled in the rain forest behind Volcano Village, a comfy tourist town on the edge of the still-steaming Kilauea crater. She samples her own teas, as well as those of neighboring grower Mike Riley, pouring them into handmade cups and pots made by Leong. Like wine, tea plants take a few years to establish before real production can begin. Lee's plants are thriving now. Her teas are for sale around the island and are served — in creative recipes, as well as alongside them — at restaurants such as Alan Wong's in Honolulu (808-949-2526, www.alanwongs.com). "We have just the right temperature, just the right humidity," Lee says of the Hawaii climate, as she pours another cup. "We grow ours here under the shade, under the canopy, which is slower but makes the tea sweeter — better for matcha," referring to the Japanese-style powdered green tea. Other Big Island growers specialize in different varieties of tea. Rob Nunally and Mike Longo of Onomea Tea Co., west of Hilo, use the same plant to make darker oolongs, assams and other black teas. "I love tea — good black tea," Nunally says, walking back from several newly planted rows of the dark-green bushes. "I grew up in Fiji, drinking tea as a kid. Once we realized this opportunity was available to us, and we had this land, we thought, 'Perfect!' " Like Lee, Nunally and Longo had no dirt under their nails when they starting planting their 2,400 tea bushes four years ago around their cliff-top home overlooking Onomea Bay. Nunally sells computers and Longo is a chiropractor. Also like Lee, the "tea boys" at Onomea Tea have no ambitions to become big commercial tea farmers. Theirs is a specialty operation, run on a small scale for boutique buyers. "We just plant and pick. We do the wilting over there on our dining room table," Longo says, pointing. "Then we host teas for groups and tourists. It's the perfect-sized operation to be both a beloved hobby and a serious business." The couple behind Mauna Kea Tea has slightly bigger goals. On the slope of another of the Big Island's towering volcanos (this one dormant), Takahiro and Kimberly Ino grow "a little oolong, really on the light side, some yellow tea, but our main thing is green tea." Still a young operation, planted just three years ago, the Inos have previous experience in organic farming and hope to make Mauna Kea Tea more widely available around Hawaii. "We'd like to keep it a speciality, but we'd also like to provide commodity items for people on the island," Takahiro Ino says. "We like to be connected to the land and let people know they can enjoy that deeper connection, too, and it can be affordable." Whether serving a niche market or a wide population, as Lee says, "there is room for all Hawaii tea growers." By 2010, according to the Sage Group's yearly Tea Report — this year headlined "Specialty Tea Is Hot!" — annual tea sales in the U.S. are projected to double to $10 billion. "When we traveled in China," Takahiro Ino says, "we were amazed by how Chinese culture is so connected to tea, and how it's a part of everyday life. It's like coffee is here. Everywhere there you find a teahouse. It's very natural to them. "If we and the other Hawaii tea growers can influence that in this corner of the world or anywhere," he adds, "that would be great." IF YOU GO Most tea farms and gardens on the Big Island welcome visitors: - Tea Hawaii is nestled in the jungle behind Volcano Village, a cozy outpost along Hwy. 11 at 4,000 feet, near the entrance to Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. Eva Lee welcomes visitors for tours and tea service by appointment; (808) 967-7637, www.teahawaii.com. Lee's studio and tea plantings also are part of a joint tour with the nearby Volcano Winery; the Wine & Tea package includes a guided tour of both places at 9:30 a.m. daily, $25; (808) 967-7772, www.volcanowinery.com. - Big Island Tea is another upstart garden between Hilo and Volcano Village, in a town called Glenwood; (808) 968-1800, www.bigislandtea.com. - Onomea Tea Co. also welcomes visitors and groups by appointment to its farm with stunning cliff-top views of the Pacific. It's west of Hilo on Hwy. 19 on the renowned Hamakua Coast, www.onomeatea.com. - Mauna Kea Tea is further west on Hwy. 19 in Ahualoa, on the slopes of its namesake volcano. They host groups by appointment; (808) 775-1171, www.maunakeatea.com. Mauna Kea's tea fields are also part of a tour, organized by the Hawaii Tourism Authority, including two other Hamakua Coast farms (the Long Ears Coffee Co. and the Volcano Island Honey Co.) at 8:45 a.m. daily, $75; (808) 775-1000. Between Hilo and Volcano Village, be sure to stop at the Hilo Coffee Mill. Despite the name, this shop also sells and serves locally grown teas. Owners of the shop also recently planted their own tea bushes out back; (866) 982-5551, www.hilo coffeemill.com. (A tip: For the coffee junkies in your party, drink the Ka'u brew here instead of Kona coffee. It's much smoother and more delicious.) WHERE TO STAY: Hilo offers a few convenient, comfortable options. But Volcano Village is the snuggest spot to lay your head. Kilauea Lodge has 12 roomy rooms and two cottages ($170-$225) just off Hwy. 11. It's homey, has up-to-date amenities (even WiFi) and sports a fine restaurant with rich dinners and fresh breakfasts; (808) 967-7366, www.kilauealodge.com. On the other side of Hwy. 11, the Volcano Rainforest Retreat has four creatively designed, amenity-packed cabins nestled into the rainforest ($110-$260). Tranquil and cozy, these retreats pamper merely by the beauty of their natural and man-made surroundings. The hot tub during a rain forest rain shower ain't too bad, either; (800) 550-8696, www.volcanoretreat.com. IN HONOLULU: No doubt you'll be flying into Honolulu before hitting the Big Island. Take the time for a Japanese tea ceremony demonstration at Urasenke Foundation, 245 Saratoga Rd., in the shadow of Donald Trump's Waikiki hotel that's under construction. In an exquisitely crafted teahouse, visitors are shown an abbreviated version of the formal gongfu ceremony (a full one would last up to four hours), complete with matcha tea and tasty treats. At 10 a.m. Wednesdays and Fridays; (808) 923-3059. A gay love story, with marriage of artistic equals - Celebrating the partnership of 'Chris & Don'8/1/2008
By Thomas Conner
© Chicago Sun-Times 'CHRIS & DON: A LOVE STORY' ★★★ Zeitgeist Films presents a documentary directed by Guido Santi and Tina Mascara. Running time: 90 minutes. No MPAA rating. Opening today at Landmark Century. It's tempting to think, midway through the charming documentary "Chris & Don," that the film should instead be titled "Don & Chris." Don Bachardy, after all, is the one half of this love story who's on screen or narrating probably 80 percent of the time. It's Don's life we get the most details from. Or at least, we see more of his emotions, his reactions, hear his decisions discussed. These are the things we want from biography, things we can learn from. Don, surely, should get the first billing. But to think that would be a tragic (though common) misunderstanding of human relationships, of true love, even of art. Because the story of Don Bachardy is very much the story of the late writer Christopher Isherwood, and vice versa. The two artists were intertwined, affected each other's work, reflected each other in their work. They were utterly in love, and (as the subtitle reminds us) this film is not a document of two noted figures and their artistic legacy, it is a document of a relationship, a marriage. Given the news out of California these days, such an objective look at a gay marriage couldn't have been more serendipitously scheduled. There's an extra level of "controversy" to this relationship. Chris and Don were not only a gay couple, Chris was 30 years Don's senior. They met on a Los Angeles beach when Don was 16. "Chris & Don" is laden with home-movie footage of the two of them, in the '50s, both looking so fresh and exuberant. Don, though, features more prominently in that footage, clearly the fixation of Chris, the writer who once proclaimed "I am a camera." Don is young and beautiful, his gap-toothed smile gleaming through the grainy images. The film's relatively few talking heads discuss the impact Don had on all Chris' friends and colleagues. It's easy to see. But therein lies the slippery slope this documentary seeks to reverse, and almost succeeds in doing so. It's tempting to rush to judgment, as we do with relationships in which one partner is significantly older than the other: He corrupted the boy. Don himself frames it in the beginning of the film, describing Chris this way as "the archvillain, warping him to his mold, teaching him wicked things" — before adding, with a devilish grin, "which is exactly what the boy wanted." "Chris & Don" shows no wickedness at all. It is not whitewashed — the dark times in the relationship are not ignored, such as Don's thoughts of leaving Chris (who died in 1986), arguments, the stress of the age difference, how they were evicted from a house because of it — it's simply objective. There is no Gay Issue and no Age Issue, nor was there in Isherwood's work. To make issues of these things, Isherwood understood, would overpower his narrative and make caricatures of his characters. It would be unrealistic, untrue. The tone of the film is perfectly in line with that of Isherwood's prose and the stylistic declaration of his "I am a camera" quotation from "Berlin Diary" in Goodbye to Berlin (the basis for each incarnation of "Cabaret"), which continues: "... with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking ... someday this will all have to be developed." And here is the film, developing it. We see that not only did Chris deeply impact the life of young Don, encouraging and fostering the artistic talent that made him a renowned portrait artist, but that Don deeply impacted Chris. The good times in their relationship were Isherwood's inspiration toward that more reportorial, objective style of prose for which he was made famous — turning the "fiction" of Goodbye to Berlin into the autobiographical narrative of Christopher and His Kind, his fastest-selling book. The bad times inspired the successful point-of-view experiment of A Single Man, in which the older Chris struggles to come to terms with his impending mortality and the loss of his life — and the love of his life. In the end, we have here a very human love story, one reminding us that our own biographies are not our own stories. My story hasn't been mine for nearly 15 years, since I met my partner. It's impossible to evaluate Fitzgerald without considering Zelda. Chris, we now see, couldn't have been Isherwood without Don. Listen without prejudice: Look past the sex, drugs, the weird TV. George Michael can *sing*7/6/2008
By Thomas Conner
© Chicago Sun-Times It's the one good thing that I've got. — George Michael, "Freedom 90" I don't know about the whole show, ABC's new "Eli Stone" — it looked a wee bit hokey, like "Touched by an Angel" for couples who conceived their kids after episodes of "Ally McBeal" — but the George Michael clips give great YouTube. Check out his debut in the series premiere. Eli's having sex and becomes ... distracted by ... music. He stops, investigates — and finds George Michael in his living room singing "Faith." George Michael interrupting someone's sex life for a moment of religious clarity! And still they claim that irony is dead. Throughout this first season of the show, there was George Michael continuing to repurpose his songs as a guardian angel in Eli's dream sequences. The stuffy law firm winds up singing and dancing to "Freedom 90." The firm defends a teenage girl for playing "I Want Your Sex" over the PA during an abstinence-education rally. In the season finale, George Michael brings Eli out of a coma by singing of "a new dawn, a new day" in the standard "Feeling Good." But first Eli asks him, "Are you God?" George Michael smirks and replies, "Well, some men have said so ..." It's wholesome! It's lurid! It's both! George Michael — and for the purposes of this article he shall be referred to by his full name, a la his namesake on another of the pop star's rather inadvertent TV touchstones, "Arrested Development" — isn't God. He ain't even saintly, God knows. But as he comes ashore this summer for his first American tour in 15 years (with a stop Wednesday at Chicago's United Center) thank heavens we can finally re-examine the man for what brings him here — and what really matters in our lives as pop music fans. Because when we're done chuckling about his latest arrest for public sex (Larry Craig was such a copycat) or drugs (as he lit a joint during an interview on Britain's "South Bank Show" in 2006, he explained, "This stuff keeps me sane and happy") or drug-related traffic stops (green means go, red apparently means nap) — entertaining as those are in pop culture's hippodrome of hypocrisy — the scandals have nothing to do with why we still listen to the music. And we do still listen to the music. Turn on a radio, real or online. He's still in the playlists. He's a favorite quick, universal pop cultural reference in movies as well as TV. ("The Rules of Attraction," for instance — dreadful little adaptation, but the hotel-bed dance scene scored by "Faith" redeemed every penny of admission.) Perhaps this is a good reminder as we recover from the R. Kelly child pornography trial — look at all those fans still eating up his output (OK, bad choice of words) — and as we brace for another comeback by the self-proclaimed and similarly acquitted King of Pop, Michael Jackson. Wacko Jacko, certainly, deserves the nickname, but who out there is so self-righteous that they could suddenly deny the basic bliss of "Off the Wall" just because its creator wound up in court? Likely the same gnarled gnomes who pick apart a politican's every gaffe in a frustrated attempt to canonize a saint instead of hire a public servant. Some young trick even claimed recently that Boy George chained him up as a slave in the pop star's basement. Now the bloke is barred from entering the United States (Homeland Security finally pays off!). And you wanna diss George Michael for smoking the occasional spliff and not averting his gaze when a hot cop makes eyes? So we welcome back George Michael — the beleaguered pothead, the lonely john, the misguided angel with the angelic voice — and with his new tour arriving here this week and his new greatest-hits CD ("Twenty-Five," out now), let us remind the masses of the most important part of his rollicking, ever-evolving Wikipedia biography: Dude can sing. Give him five songs Without getting too old-man, everything-was-better-when-Roberta-Flack-was-on-FM on you, the robots are taking over popular song. If it's not a young woman showing off her vocal gymnastics by cramming 18 notes into each syllable (thank you, Mariah), it's a young mallpunk whose mediocre voice has been so "doctored" by ProTools software that he sounds like the second cousin of Matthew Broderick's computer in "War Games." Those who hunger for real singing — who relish the experience of being lifted up by a single powerful voice carefully evoking the words of a well-crafted lyric — are reduced to making pop stars out of young opera tenors. Mamma mia! Pull out your old George Michael records. You didn't sell them all, despite what you claim at parties. Log on, catch up with the last few albums you probably didn't buy. Listen again. The familiarity of his hits can obscure his formidable talent. There's gold in them thar skills. I'm not even that big a fan. I only own two full albums, "Listen Without Prejudice, Vol. 1" and "Songs From the 20th Century," plus a few of the hits. I just never thought he was worth the butt of the joke. (OK, the butt of Dana Carvey's "SNL" butt jokes, funny stuff.) Here we are in another election year; let's take this opportunity to train ourselves to keep perspective amid petty character assassinations. Suck it up and listen to at least these five songs — five songs from the solo George Michael catalog that showcase the man's incomparable pipes and will make all the gags irrelevant: — "A Different Corner" — After proving that Andrew Ridgeley's contribution to the Wham! equation was virtually nil (as everyone with ears suspected) by scoring a massive solo hit with "Careless Whisper," George Michael released this second single in 1986, and was it ever solo — the first record to top the British charts that was written, performed, arranged and produced by a single person. The song sways ever so gently in a somnambulant cradle of bass, piano and patient synthesizers, over which George Michael's voice coos, aches and, when the words demand it, wails. The only special effect you hear on this recording is the perfect echo of the room. — "Faith" -- Wondering what all the fuss was about a few weeks ago when Bo Diddley died? Wasn't he just some academic hero of bluesmen? The simple, chukka-chukka-chug acoustic guitar riff that props up this easy, urgent hit is a prime example of how far Diddley's influence spread. When an artist like George Michael — berated by then as a bubblegum trifle — needs to lean on some credibility, he brings out the shave, the haircut, and both bits. (Heck, this riff was so simple even Ridgeley could've played it.) But its freshness — dig the way he shifts gears between the breathless and the bombast — is evidenced by its near ubiquity in pop culture, even eclipsing the song everyone wouldn't shut up about in 1987, "I Want Your Sex" (which is — huh? — not on his new greatest hits double disc!). — "My Baby Just Cares for Me" -- Did anyone buy this collection, "Songs From the 20th Century"? Released in 1999 — when doing a covers album was past de rigueur and had become de manded — George Michael tossed out his take on a bunch of his favorite tunes, spanning the century in question, from "Brother Can You Spare a Dime?" to the Police's "Roxanne." His reading of this old, jazzy standard brims with effervescent, almost mischievous joy ("even Ricky Martin's smile ..."), and his vocal delivery over all those runs is smooth as buttah. — "Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me" -- Recorded in 1985 at Live Aid but not released until 1991, this exciting concert moment ("Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Elton John!") shows how strongly he delivers outside the studio. His reading of this classic rock ballad is so fluid and lovely, almost soulful, that Elton's entrance is frankly an unwelcome interruption. — "They Won't Go When I Go" -- George Michael's most awesome performance. On the acclaimed but less successful 1990 "Listen Without Prejudice, Vol. 1" album, George Michael set out to prove himself an artist and adult, which he could have accomplished simply by choosing to attempt this Stevie Wonder album track. But his transcendent recording, afloat on a tidal gospel arrangement, bests Wonder's original and sets us all up for the notion that — yeah, Eli — maybe he is an angel. Bad company It's not all golden, of course. He's tossed off his share of stinkers — try to stay awake during "Jesus to a Child," I dare you — and all we can say for the Wham! years is, hey, it was what it was (and sometimes, c'mon, it was fun). But compare him to his contemporaries, and he indeed begins looking pretty saintly. Boy George? A crap solo career and the aforementioned legal troubles. Rick Astley? He's about to release a greatest-hits set with more than one song on it, go figure. Pet Shop Boys? Undoubtedly iconic, but they didn't exactly rise above the dance-club rut. Paul Young? (Crickets chirping.) Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Spandau Ballet, Dead or Alive and all the other 1980s chart toppers now playing the state-fair circuit? Shudder. George Michael stands with the icons of that particular age (and their peccadillos), with Madonna (spiritual slut) and Bono (spiritual hack) and Michael Jackson (arrogant oddball). And these days his voice — granted, it's been well-rested of late — sounds better than any one of them. So, children, come back. Forget the jeers of rock critics, and ignore the sanctimonious temperance leagues. Put down the gossip rags. Give some thought to what the experience of listening to music means and the power a strong voice can transmit through your bones. Come see a happy, fulfilled singer at possibly another peak of his performing career. It may be your last chance, after all. He once again recently mulled over the possibility of retiring, with a maturity to his perspective that made us love him all the more: "Mainly the reason is because I'm 45 and I think pop music should be about youth culture. ... It shouldn't be an endurance test." I won't let you down So please don't give me up Because I would really, really love to stick around ... - - - GEORGE MICHAEL THROUGH THE YEARS You'd be perfectly within your rights to have forgotten that George Michael has a shred of talent. In the last 10 years, he's had plenty of media coverage, hardly any of it about him singing. To his credit, you'd be hard-pressed to find a worldwide celebrity who has taken his public embarrassments in such easy stride. He copped to the whole bathroom arrest by joking with Oprah in 2004: "They don't send Columbo in there, you know. They send someone nice-looking." Here's a look at the high notes and low notes of George Michael's nearly 30 years in the public eye. And consider this: Can you think of a single moment in all these years when he's been clean-shaven? November 1979: Forms his first band, a ska group called The Executive, with pal Andrew Ridgeley. April 1982: Ridgeley and George Michael, now teamed as a duo called Wham! (named, so the record company said at the time, for the sound these two made when they came together ... now stop laughing ...), release their first single, "Wham! Rap," in which George Michael (gulp) raps lines such as, "Hey, jerk! You work! This boy's got better things to do." July 1983: The debut Wham! LP, "Fantastic," enters the British albums chart at No. 1. June 1984: Now on a bigger label, Epic, the single "Wake Me Up Before You Go Go" hits No. 1. August 1984: Even though the song appeared on the second Wham! album, "Make It Big," the single "Careless Whisper" is billed as solo George Michael. It's an instant No. 1 and is Epic's first million-seller. December 1984: A Wham! world tour begins as George Michael is featured on the charity Band Aid hit "Do They Know It's Christmas?" April 1985: Wham!'s tour of China, the first visit to that country by a Western pop act, generates enormous worldwide media coverage, much of it centered on George Michael. July 1985: George Michael duets with Elton John on the latter's "Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me" during Live Aid at Wembley Stadium. The recording won't be released until December 1991, and it hits No. 1 two months later. June 1986: Taking a stand against the band's manager selling out part of his interest to a South African company (or at least seizing on a fantastic excuse), Wham! decides to split up and plays its farewell concert for 72,000 fans at Wembley Stadium. April 1987: "Faith" is released, the George Michael solo debut. It'll sell 6 million copies in a year. Today, it's minted at least 15 million copies. June 1987: The "I Want Your Sex'" single hits the streets, but not many airwaves. Some American radio stations ban it, and British DJs are allowed to discuss it only by referring to it as "I Want." March 1988: Wins a Grammy for Best R&B Vocal Performance by a Duo or Group for "I Knew You Were Waiting (For Me)," his duet with Aretha Franklin. February 1989: Wins another Grammy for Album of the Year, for "Faith." (Yes, it was released in '87. The Grammys, to put it mildly, are slow on the uptake.) September 1990: "Listen Without Prejudice, Vol. 1" is released. It sells "only" 4 million copies. 1991-95: Begins a long legal fight to escape his contract with the Sony corporation. A casualty in this battle is "Listen Without Prejudice, Vol. 2," which dies in preproduction. (Three songs from the project are eventually donated to the AIDS charity disc "Red Hot + Dance," and the song "Crazyman Dance" turned up on the B-side of 1992's "Too Funky," his final recording for Sony.) He's silent for the next three years during the court fight. July 1995: Settles with Sony, signs with Virgin Records. May 1996: "Older" is released, becomes the fastest-selling album in the history of Virgin Records. June 1996: Meets his current partner, art dealer (and former cheerleading coach) Kenny Goss. April 7, 1998: Arrested for "engaging in a lewd act" in a public bathroom at the Will Rogers Memorial Park in Beverly Hills, Calif. Anyone who didn't know he was gay gets the memo. He's charged and released on $500 bail. April 10, 1998: Finally comes out of the closet in an interview on CNN, saying, "This is a good of a time as any. ... I want to say that I have no problem with people knowing that I'm in a relationship with a man right now. I have not been in a relationship with a woman for almost 10 years." Not a single gasp is heard. May 1998: Pleads "no contest" to the charges, is fined $810, ordered to perform 80 hours of community service and seek counseling — and was banned from the park. November 1998: The video for "Outside," from "Ladies & Gentlemen — The Best Of George Michael," parodies the restroom incident. December 1999: Releases "Songs From the Last Century," an album of covers, from "Brother Can You Spare a Dime" to the Police's "Roxanne." April 2000: Joins Melissa Etheridge, Garth Brooks, Queen Latifah, the Pet Shop Boys, and k.d. lang to perform in Washington, D.C., as part of Equality Rocks, a benefit concert in support of the Human Rights Campaign, a gay and lesbian organization. May 26, 2004: Appears on "Oprah" — his first U.S. television appearance in more than 10 years — to promote a new album, "Patience," and discuss his arrest. Early 2005: Goss and George Michael open the Goss Gallery in Dallas. Feb. 26, 2006: Arrested for drug possession after he's found slumped over the steering wheel of his Mercedes near Hyde Park Corner in London. He later describes the incident as his "own stupid fault, as usual." May 2006: While driving his Range Rover in London, hits three parked cars. Later is found by a passer-by again slumped over the steering wheel at a traffic light. September 2006: Scandal again, but one we can support — he's chastised for a tour prop, a giant figure of George Bush in a ... compromising position. Oct. 1, 2006: Found unconscious again at the wheel of his Mercedes in the middle of traffic. He pleaded guilty and was banned from driving for two years, plus more community service. December 2007: Plays himself in a public park looking for action in the series finale of HBO's "Extras." Jan. 16, 2008: Signs a fat book contract with HarperCollins for a memoir which he is to write "entirely himself." April 1, 2008: Releases the double-disc greatest-hits CD "Twenty-Five," featuring 29 songs, including a new version of "Heal the Pain" recorded as a duet with Sir Paul McCartney. June 17, 2008: Opens his first U.S. tour in 15 years in San Diego. Tells the California crowd, "I was watching TV yesterday and saw two women get married!" He then launched into the song "Amazing," which he dedicated to Goss. By Thomas Conner
© Chicago Sun-Times When You Are Engulfed in Flames By David Sedaris Little, Brown, 336 pages, $25.99 Last year, a Vanity Fair article alleged that Augusten Burroughs had fabricated major chunks of his bestselling memoir, Running With Scissors. There was even a lawsuit based on this claim, which Burroughs settled in August, all the while defending his work as "entirely accurate." And when his new real-life musings, A Wolf at the Table, were published earlier this year, many critics scratched their heads and asked whether anyone could truthfully (a) remember this many vivid, minute details about their childhood and (b) have a family that could possibly be this otherworldly, violent and bizarre. (At which point the reader chuckles, "You haven't met my Aunt Agnes ...") Burroughs' peer in this field — the flourishing category of kinda-gay, family-centric, literary stand-up comedy memoir — is David Sedaris, who prefers to call himself a "humorist." Sedaris recently came to the defense of James Frey, whose own exaggerations (yeah, lies) in a memoir brought shame even to Oprah. Sedaris himself has confessed to exaggeration in the name of humor. Though not enough of it this time out. Regardless of where you stand on the issue of playing fast and loose with the truth, you may emerge from Sedaris' latest collection of essays wishing he'd played it a little faster and looser — 'cause it ain't very funny. When You Are Engulfed in Flames, a roundup of 22 essays, all but two of which have been previously published in The New Yorker and other magazines, never quite gets off the couch. Like Hunter S. Thompson attempting to practice gonzo journalism by watching CNN and sending faxes in his 1995 downturn Better Than Sex, Sedaris here seems to pen most of the ruminations from the cozy comfort of his new home in rural France — about the cozy comfort of his new home in rural France. He seems perfectly content, strolling the lanes in Normandy and watching his partner Hugh putter around the house. Who wouldn't be? But contentment has rarely bred art of any universal interest, and Sedaris here is sometimes so passive he ignores opportunities for engaging narrative. In the middle of "The Smoking Section" — the only bulk of new material published here, about the author's attempt to kick the habit — he mentions one way he plans to deal with his struggle: "I hated leaving a hole in the smoking world, and so I recruited someone to take my place." Hopes are raised, here comes a hilarious tale of corrupting a minor! Nope. He blows right by it, preferring to avoid actions with consequences and simply continue whining. One sentence later — "After crossing 'replacement' off my list ..." — he goes back to his very long-winded (is that irony?) gripe session. Most of us never knew someone who was an elf at Macy's, but we've all known someone who quit smoking and, well, you know just how much fun those rants are to listen to, much less read. There are pleasant moments in the dull lull, like dozing on a train and occasionally snapping awake. "Keeping Up" is one of Sedaris' subtle stabs at the softer parts of human nature. A few light touches keep this admission of social helplessness (if not agoraphobia) from sinking completely into a weak whimper for help. Instead, it stays afloat as a sweet confession of the purely practical reasons he can't live without Hugh, a cover for the emotional ones. The only eye-opening achievement here is an absurdist trifle called "What I Learned." It's remarkable mainly because it reads like nothing else here, and uses actual fiction to enliven a skewering of academic existence. "If you passed, you got to live, and if you failed you were burned alive on a pyre that's now the Transgender Studies Building," recalls a refreshing un-Dave narrator of his Princeton years back in ancient times, when he majored in "patricide." Now there's some exaggeration worth reading. But, alas, it's a jewel in the otherwise boring rough. Perhaps Sedaris is the more truthful and honest of the humorous memoirists. Real life, after all, isn't always funny, narratively structured or even interesting. The book version, though — exaggeration or no — should be, right? By Thomas Conner
© Chicago Sun-Times What new can be said about the Lemonheads' classic modern-rock album "It's a Shame About Ray"? How about this: Polly's in town! If you (like us) always assumed that was frontman Evan Dando's then-girlfriend and satellite band member Juliana Hatfield on the "Ray" album cover — buzzer! — thank you for playing. It's actually Chicago area actress Polly Noonan, who's now earning raves in the lead role of Sarah Ruhl's play "Dead Man's Cell Phone" at Steppenwolf Theatre. Noonan enlightened us on how her visage came to grace the 1992 album — which the band will play in its entirety this week. On the degrees of separation: "The Lemonheads were old friends of mine, through Jesse [Peretz], who used to be in the band and was a filmmaker and photographer. ...He made videos for the band and others, like the Foo Fighters. We made a lot of them together and hung out a lot. We enjoyed each other's company." On the cool car in the background: "Jesse was visiting Chicago and took a bunch of photos of me in my car. Everybody loved my car, an old Checker Marathon, brown, with opera windows. It was kinda fantastic." On the video for the title song: "Evan met Johnny Depp at a restaurant, and they became friends. He convinced him to be in the video. I was out on the shoot, somewhere about an hour and a half east of L.A., in the desert. They must have played that song 300 times for the cameras, just blasting it in the desert. But it didn't ever grate on me. I think that's what happened to the album, you know?" On her appearance on an earlier Lemonheads album, "Lovey": "One day I left this message for some friends on their answering machine, and they wound up making it track 11 on 'Lovey.' I didn't know it. A friend of mine was dating Evan at the time, and we were giving him and Jesse a hard time, saying, "You thank everyone in the sun on your albums but you never thank your friends and girlfriends.' They sort of laughed and said, 'Just go home and listen to the album. That was a funny surprise — but also kind of creepy." THE LEMONHEADS WITH BOUND STEMS AND DAVID SINGER When: 9 tonight and 10 p.m. Friday Where: The Abbey Pub, 3420 W. Grace Tickets: $20 Phone: (773) 478-4408 By Thomas Conner
© Chicago Sun-Times Speaking with Mark Eitzel, it's always surprising how cheery he is. His music, and that of his band, American Music Club, is soft and sad, stirring and smoky. "Brooding" is an overused adjective for it. He's often written off as a grump, a depressive. And while he certainly has a record of behavior and lyrics to convict him of those charges, he's more often a smiling, self-deprecating goofball. "It's a real bore," Eitzel says of the assumptions about him. "People think I'm so morose, but I'm not. My music honestly is a reflection of what I see in people's eyes. Which, yeah, is morose. In San Francisco, take the bus — I mean, c'mon, it's morose. Unless someone's yelling 'Cracker!' at you, which happens every time I ride the bus." And soon he's laughing and spitting out two other facts that are still a surprise about him. "Yes, I'm turning 50, but I'm a gay man, so I can say I'm perpetually 29." He laughs some more. Really. "I'm a middle-aged gay man, which is one step away from being a grande dame." It's not usually the same personality that sighs through supple songs such as "All My Love," "Decibels and Little Pills" and "I Know That's Not Really You" on American Music Club's latest album, the second since they reunited a few years ago, "The Golden Age." There are also two songs aimed at his heralded hometown: "All the Lost Souls Welcome You to San Francisco" and "The Grand Duchess of San Francisco." (Not the grande dame, ahem.) Always a booster for the City by the Bay, these two San Fran titles may have been a reaction against the city in which "The Golden Age" was actually recorded: Los Angeles. "I'm not one of those San Franciscans who hates L.A., though. I love L.A.," Eitzel says. "That's a big thing: Everyone in L.A. hates San Francisco and vice versa. It's a bore. I have a lot of friends down there ... but I'm not gonna live there. I need city. I need a downtown that's not full of stupid violent people and one I can walk across. I don't want to always be driving, driving, driving." But surely the change of locale altered his songwriting perspective, as has happened for countless rock bands who relocate to an L.A. studio, from Steely Dan to Folk Implosion. "Well, with Steely Dan, my God, that much coke use would change anyone," Eitzel says. More laughing. "And, sure, it had its effect. I wrote my first song there beside a kidney-shaped swimming pool with a view of the city. You can't help but love it. It's a mirage on sand. It's completely fake. But it's great. And I like having stupid conversations, really. L.A. is comforting that way. You don't have to think too hard." Eitzel spent his last two solo albums twiddling knobs more than strumming guitars, especially the disc "Candy Ass," which is not his most beloved outing. "That was never supposed to come out," he says. "I did it for the money, honestly. I kinda hate it. I was rushed and I didn't use the good stuff." American Music Club will never slip down the electronic slope, he promises. "AMC is very much a guitar band. Nothing else." But Eitzel is still stretching his musical experience. He's writing a musical. "I'm collaborating with [British playwright] Simon Stephens," Eitzel says. "It's going really well. It's a non-narrative kind of musical, a little bit odd. The songs and the action go together in a very elliptical way. We tried some of them out on some opera aficionados, and they hated it, which is good. They can suck on my big f—-in' butt. You can print that." He's really laughing now. AMERICAN MUSIC CLUB Canasta - 10:30 p.m. Saturday - Schubas, 3159 N. Southport - Tickets, $15 - (773) 525-2508 Lucky dog - Chicago's Poi Dog Pondering strikes a chord with its fantastic new acoustic album, '7'3/30/2008
By Thomas Conner
© Chicago Sun-Times Early in Tom Robbins' acclaimed novel, Still Life With Woodpecker, the narrator frets that mere words won't be enough to tell his story. His clacking typewriter's inky letters on parchment won't convey the real essence of his narrative. He pines instead for a "carved typewriter ... its keys living mushrooms, its ribbon the long iridescent tongue of a lizard. An animal typewriter, silent until touched, then filling the page with growls and squeals and squawks, yowls and bleats and snorts, brayings and chatterings and dry rattlings from the underbrush; a typewriter that could type real kisses, ooze semen and sweat." These are Frank Orrall's same fears and desires. In 20 years of making music, Orrall has struggled to translate the sticky, wet, messy experience of life into living pop music. The earthy songs of his Chicago-based band, Poi Dog Pondering, rock and groove but also hum and throb and breathe and laugh. The tunes have celebrated the human body almost as nakedly as Orrall's lyrics. World beat or Chicago house music rhythms demand dancing, while Orrall — c'mon, a singing poet named Orrall! — sings about everything else you can do with your skin and eyes and hands and fluids. "You're a cup that I hold by the cheekbones / I pull you close and I drink you up." "Muscle and sweat and blood and bones / feel good, feel strong!" "Vim and vigor, full of piss and vinegar / wrapping around, surround and bound by ligaments and skin." "Living With the Dreaming Body," "I've Got My Body," "Ta Bouche Est Tabou," "Collarbone." That peaty poetry continues on "7," the seventh and latest Poi Dog Pondering record — out Tuesday, and celebrated last Thursday with a sold-out show at the Vic Theatre — with Orrall confessing to a ravenous sexual appetite in "Candy," demanding that someone "spread your love all over me" in "Super Tarana (little golden deer)," which is definitely in the same spirit of "Sticky," and, in perhaps his most conservative lyric yet, pondering the thought of making a "Baby Together." "There's so much about the life of our bodies, and the life in our bodies, that we ignore or repress. I just sometimes try to sing that unsung stuff," says Orrall during a recent conversation at a South Loop tea house. "But music's about the body and the spirit." That would be the "rock and soul" dichotomy he insists on applying to "7," the first Poi Dog disc since 2003 and the first in many years to eschew samplers and sequencers and get back to making music with instruments made of wood. They even tracked the whole album using analog tape. 'Movement music' "A lot of that [electronic] stuff was hard to convey live," Orrall says. "A major thing that led to this record was me being out on tour with Thievery Corporation. We were sitting around, and one of the guys said, 'Play me one of your new songs.' And I realized I couldn't play him anything on the guitar. I needed all this gear just to convey my ideas. So I thought, I want to be at a dinner party and be able to play all our new songs with just one acoustic guitar." He smiles. "I gotta say, it feels nice. This record is very ... portable." Susan Voelz, the band's longtime violin player, agrees. "Frank said he wanted to make some music he could play on the bus, you know, without having to set up backing tracks," Voelz said during a separate interview by phone. "And now we've really got some songs under our fingers. I love it. Every incarnation of Poi Dog is a trip." Make no mistake, the tunes on "7" are still frequently rhythmic and easily danceable. The only real difference is that the grooves are laid down by congas and body slaps and real drums. Poi Dog shows are usually writhing affairs, with the audience in near-constant motion. Orrall dances, too. He started as a drummer in his native Hawaii, and he confesses to some songs ("Natural Thing," even the languid "Catacombs") being born not out of lyrical or purely musical ideas but from ways he wanted to move his body on stage. He says he likes going out dancing and never misses "Brazilian night" at Chicago's Sonotheque nightclub. Part of what attracted Orrall and his band (then based in Austin, Texas) to settle in Chicago early in the '90s was that love of dance and dance music. Arriving in 1992 on the swell of Chicago's most creative house music years, Orrall says the local DJs he encountered furthered his love of "movement music." 'The ego of words' The core of Poi Dog followed Orrall to Chicago, but Orrall's music had changed. The lyrics almost fell away completely. The "Volo Volo" album originally was completed as an all-instrumental record, which the band's major label at the time politely declined to release; much of that music became the debut of Orrall's first of many side projects, the Palm Fabric Orchestra. Poi Dog released another fairly traditional acoustic-based record, "Pomegranate," in 1995, but Orrall showed his new hand by immediately following it with "Electrique Plummagram," a collection of "Pomegranate" remixes and other electronically derived songs, including some Chicago house music covers. "I liked the vibe of the electronic stuff a lot," Voelz says, adding that her role as a wooden instrument player was not diminished. "I love trip-hop. I've played with a trip-hop DJ for a while. Instrumentally, the rules changed and the music was different. It wasn't all eight-bar phrases. The melodies took over sometimes as opposed to the lyrics. ... I was at South by Southwest [the annual music festival in Austin, Tex.] last week, and I didn't see Lou Reed, but I read about him saying that emotional music with intelligent lyrics is what you're going for. The emotion of the music has to be there. It melds with the lyrics, but the music can communicate by itself if it has to. Or if it wants to." This is the direction Orrall says he took his music during the last several years here in Chicago. He stopped writing lyrics. He and Poi Dog dabbled in arranging for orchestra, presenting two acclaimed concerts with the Chicago Sinfonietta, each of which included an electronically buttressed "remix" of first Dvorak's New World Symphony and then "Carmen." He toyed with ambient video creations in relation to music. He collected a lot of plug-in gear. "I was experimenting with long instrumental passages, feeling that there's so much you can say with music — why clutter it with the ego of words?" he says, hunching up his arms. "Plus, I was getting into this pattern of trying to write songs as opposed to perfunctorily going about writing them. They felt too ego-driven. I basically lost the point for a while. Then, more recently, I just started writing, without expectations, without trying to cram what came to me into four lines, then a chorus, then four more lines. I found I really liked writing long prosaic things rather than in meter. That's when I started getting the material I wanted to get." Next week, the large ensemble — Orrall has to think for a moment about how many players make up the current incarnation of the revolving-door band (it's 10) — hits the road for a rare cross-country tour. When that's done, they return to play at Ravinia, a venue they haven't graced in a decade. "We had a record crowd there last time we played," Orrall says. (The show in August 1997 may have been a record for the band, but it wasn't for Ravinia.) "And there wound up being problems with Ravinia's neighbors. It was really a peak time for us, and huge crowds came, and then there were town meetings about it. So we just kind of stayed away." He thinks another moment, sips his tea. "But it felt like time to go back. I guess a lot of this record is about going back." Poi Dog: Unplugged but charged up Poi Dog Pondering "7" (Platetectonic Music) ★★★1/2 The music of Poi Dog Pondering can grow on you, like a mold or a fungus. And if you're really the type of person to embrace an earthy, organic band like Poi Dog, you don't instinctively see that comparison as negative. Molds and fungi are the most basic, strong and pervasive forms of life, and you think that's worth celebrating. Hell, you think it's worth singing about. The essence of Poi Dog is stated in the refrain of "Outta Yer Head," a song deep into the Chicago ensemble's latest (and seventh) album, "7." Lead singer-songwriter Frank Orrall sings, "C'mon, c'mon, out of your head now / and into your heart." Orall's lyrics and musical sensibility have always come directly from the heart, as both a symbol of romance and nonintellectual motivation as well as an organ of the body pumping its most valuable fluid. Because this record finds the Chicago-based band getting back to basics, performing 14 soulful and neatly arranged pop songs on real instruments as opposed to the samplers and sequencers embraced in previous live and studio outings. And Orrall's got the body and its fluids on his brain more than ever. He wants to spread those fluids around in the not-so-veiled sexual references of "Sticky" ("I'm gonna stick to you, baby / gonna have to pry me loose now"), "Candy" ("I'm gonna eat you from the inside out") and "Super Tarana" ("Spread your love all over me"). The latter two songs are extraordinary — and strangely buried near the end of the disc. "Candy" should be this album's "Complicated," a rousing, escalating rocker that starts out with a simple "mood for something good" and builds to a climax of ferocious physical hunger. "Super Tarana" must have a dozen guitars tracked on the same melody (and in a surprisingly rocking 7/4 time signature), and they sound like a thousand "Wood Guitars." There's some rather dull, by-the-book soul ("Lemon Drop Man," "Baby Together," the almost ambitiously composed "Rusted Weather"), but there are a few moments that conjure the charm of the first record, soft, seeping songs like "Butterflies," which floats on whispers and plucked acoustic guitar and winds up stinging like a bee, and the similarly acoustic-driven (ah, those haunting, beautiful plucks and slides from Susan Voelz's metaphysical violin) "Palm Leaf Effigy," as delicate and beautiful a track as they've recorded in a decade. With 10 members in this incarnation of the ever-evolving lineup, you could call them the Fleetwood Mac of my generation. But the Mac's songs are usually founded on romantic bitterness and betrayal, and Poi Dog is the warm, polar opposite. Twenty years into their musical career, this album actually limbers them up after their frequently stiff and static electronic experiments of recent years. Here's to the electricity of the unplugged. Ex writes about life with Fleetwood Mac, the guitarist's physical abuse and all that cocaine9/30/2007
By Thomas Conner
© Chicago Sun-Times Storms: My Life WIth Lindsey Buckingham and Fleetwood Mac By Carol Ann Harris Chicago Review Press, 400 pages, $24.95 So maybe you've heard that the members of Fleetwood Mac did a little cocaine in their heyday? Well, make no mistake, they did a lot of cocaine. Unbelievable amounts. All the time. Everywhere. Carol Ann Harris — girlfriend of Mac guitarist Lindsey Buckingham from the 1977 release of the band's megahit album "Rumours" through Buckingham's second solo album in the early '80s — recalls how each band member took a powder before, during and after nearly every concert. In her new memoir, Storms: My Life With Lindsey Buckingham and Fleetwood Mac, she recalls the first night of the "Rumours" tour, when the road manager "J.C." ordered Buckingham, singer Stevie Nicks and the rest of the band to line up backstage a few minutes before show time. "They seemed to know what came next," she writes. "Like obedient schoolchildren, the band formed their line, holding out their fists. J.C. poured a small pile of cocaine onto each wrist. 'Two minutes! Let's toot and get those roses in your cheeks, Stevie!' " The artificial stimulants continued throughout the concerts, too, with roadies supplying bottlecaps full of blow to tables in the wings. "During the show, the band would fade back to the speakers at every opportunity and give themselves a bottlecap pick-me-up," Harris writes. "On Christine and John's [McVie] side of the stage, vodka tonics were replenished as needed, and on Lindsey's side ... his roadie always kept a joint going." In this book, that's supposed to be the fun part. Then the domestic violence begins — sudden bursts of fury from Buckingham that would vanish as quickly as they appeared but leave behind physical and mental wounds — and what first seemed to Harris like a fairy-tale romance in swingin' '70s Los Angeles turned into a downward spiral of monstrous abuse and fear. Now, 30 years after it all began, Harris is finally publishing her candid account — and a rare glimpse — of life inside the band. Q. So why write this book now? A. I actually started writing in 1990. Everyone assumes I just sat down and wrote it this year. It originally started as some writing for myself. I decided to start writing about what I went through, going through all my journals and tapes. By 1991, I had about a thousand-page manuscript. A friend helped me organize it, and we started paring it down. The fact that I was a battered woman really kept driving me, but that's such a small part of the book. It's mainly just a story of what it's like to be with the band. I've been asked a million times, "What was it like?" So I tried my best to give an eyewitness account. Q. How aware was the band that you were working on this, and what have the reactions been? A. Sarah Fleetwood [wife of drummer Mick] and I remained best friends for years, so she knew from the very beginning, from the first page. I'm friends with John Courage, too ["J.C."], and made sure the band knew. They've known for years. I don't know how they feel about the finished book, but I hope they like a lot of it. Q. You haven't heard anything from them? A. No reactions. It's been very silent. I fully expected feedback — these are not people who stand by quietly for anything. Q. OK, so the cocaine. Wow. That was a lot of blow. A. People are shocked by this. I thought everyone already knew that. It was funny at the time, though it was a sheer miracle we weren't busted. It was everywhere. The band never tried to hide it. Q. Why do you think the drugs were such an integral part of this particular group — or was it like this with every other band, too, and Mac just gets the press about it? A. I didn't tour with other bands, but you know, members of the Eagles have spoken publicly about drug use. From my experience, it's so exhausting and just such pressure [to be a touring musician]. These people going out on the road singing the same song night after night, doing three cities in three days, and doing it all for a year at a time — it's exhausting. The cocaine kept them going. And four members were in relationships that crumbled, so having to perform night after night with someone you'd like to never see again, and singing songs about that very fact, well, it drives you to crazy things. Q. Do you think the music would have been different without the drugs? A. There's a new article in Classic Rock [magazine], an interview with [Fleetwood Mac producers] Ken Calliat and Richard Dashut talking about that. The band was so high on blow that they made music that was edgier and more powerful. But then, who knows how great it could've been without the cocaine? Q. This is a cliched question of abused women, I fear, but I think the tension in this narrative begs it: Why did you suffer abuse for so long before leaving Lindsey Buckingham? A. It was not like you've probably heard or seen domestic abuse portrayed. I never got the apology the next day, the bouquet of flowers and the "Sorry, I'll never do that again." I got up the next day and he refused to speak about it, like it never happened. It never seemed to happen for a concrete reason. It's not that I was out too late or had done something or was being punished. It would happen out of the blue. It didn't make sense, so I thought it was my fault. I'm not a good enough girlfriend, I'm not relieving his pressure. I blamed it on the pressure of the music, this album or that album, being on the road. Q. What finally led you to leave him? A. That episode at the end of the book, when he'd really hurt me and I went to Century City Hospital so badly injured. And I had to say it out loud: This was done, I was injured. That doctor — what I wrote was verbatim, I never forgot what he said — saying, "You have to leave him." It was a huge wakeup call. Q. Lindsey and Stevie broke up before you two were together, but their romantic tension endures to this day, at least in the view of the public. Why is that? A. Because their relationship is trapped in those great songs that are still played over and over, and which mean something to so many people still. It's interesting to me that when most people break up, people cease to see you as a couple. For Christine and John, and especially for Stevie and Lindsey, they'll always be a couple. The public will always see them as Romeo and Juliet because they still perform together and sing those songs. By Thomas Conner
© Chicago Sun-Times Ten years ago, the album wasn't even out yet but the single already had MMMbopped onto the Billboard charts in the Top 20, and Walker Hanson, father of the three boys who would take his surname into the pop cultural stratosphere, stood offstage in the family's hometown of Tulsa, Okla., plugged his ears against the squealing audience, shook his head and sighed, "I never dreamed it would lead to this." Today, Taylor Hanson — the Hanson trio's still-hunky lead singer — is 24 and has three kids of his own. He can't believe it led to this, either, he says. In fact, a decade after Taylor and his brothers, older Isaac and younger Zac, inflated bubblegum pop to new heights with the megahit single "MMMBop," Taylor was sitting backstage before a show last week in Westbury, N.Y., talking about growth and change and life lessons learned and all the old days gone by. Rewind: He's 24. "A lot of fans have been there with us from the beginning, but they're not the same people," Taylor says. "Everybody's really changed. ... Time is weird that way. Some things seem like yesterday, some seem like a lifetime ago. Fans are saying to us now, 'Hey, 10 years.' And everybody's got a different story. 'I was doing this when I first heard you,' that kinda thing. But it's 10 years — and they're still fans." Why is that, and how has this band of brothers survived? They still sell records — 2004's "Underneath" wasn't their best effort but it still sold more than 350,000 copies, and the new single, "The Great Divide," was the most-requested song at Chicago's Q101 early this month — and this weekend's two-night stand at the House of Blues, supporting July's new release, "The Walk," sold out right quick. They were lumped in with their late-'90s classmates, called a "boy band" just like 'N Sync and the Backstreet Boys. But those confectionary concoctions have melted away (in many cases, imploded), and the hook of "MMMBop" is still alarmingly easy to recall and hum. There have been no tortured Hanson solo albums, and no rehab. Taylor says today's Hanson fans are mostly the same group that fell in love with him and his brothers in '97, young women (and, yes, some guys) now roughly his age. But he adds, "There's also, like, a younger generation, younger siblings. Maybe their twentysomething friend or sister turned them on to us. Or, for that matter, a parent." And he kind of snorts when he says the word "parent." Rewind: He and wife Natalie, 23, have three kids. Thing is, what the fans are paying for is largely what they've always gotten from Hanson: reliable, groove-driven, nearly soulful rock and pop. The band's riffs still can beat down Maroon 5, and Taylor's punched-in-the-gut vocals can still out-soul poseurs like the Fray. "Not to pat ourselves on the back," Taylor says, "but we've never really done anything that reflects very directly what's going on. We've always been our own beast, drawing influences from places that are not the same as our peers. The thing that's in [the national debut disc, 'Middle of Nowhere'] is the core of our influences, that soul music, that freshness that came from young guys who loved that classic soul music and interpreted it with the energy of young teenagers." And do they still have that energy, now that they're absolutely ancient in their 20s? "It's a little different now, but we can still move it," Taylor says. Then he chuckles. "We're sustainable energy. We're moving beyond fossil fuels." Free of its record company — the subject of much rejoicing in the Hanson camp, as well as analysis in the documentary film "Strong Enough to Break" — Hanson returned home to Tulsa to record "The Walk." "The last album ['Underneath'] was very disjointed," Taylor says. "We wanted to do something that was the opposite of that, something rooted and familiar. Instead of battling record-company turmoil or going in the aimless direction of some A&R guy, we wanted to settle into a place where we felt comfortable and make a great record." Then he starts talking like a lame-duck president, musing over his band's legacy. (Rewind: just 10 years in pop music.) "It's really interesting the way history looks at Hanson now," Taylor says. "The evolving perception is that our first record was a garage band with a couple of really talented R&B beat-oriented producers that kind of shared our love of soul music. And we want that to endure." HANSON 8 p.m. Saturday and 7 p.m. Sunday House of Blues, 329 N. Dearborn Sold out A decade of Hanson By Thomas Conner © Chicago Sun-Times It seems like only yesterday we were loving, then hating, that furiously catchy "MMMBop" single. But it was 10 whole years ago. A look back at the boys' boppin' ride: 1997 Before the "Middle of Nowhere" album is released in May, Hanson's inaugural single, "MMMBop," debuts in Billboard's Top 20. By the end of the summer, the song — with a nonsensical chorus that requires no real translation — has hit No. 1 or at least the Top 10 in every country that keeps pop charts. At Christmas, there's even a fresh Hanson holiday album on shelves, "Snowed In." 1998 The trio tours and tours and tours. To have something else to hawk at each stadium the world over, they reissue songs from their previous two regional releases as a collection called "Three Car Garage," then a live album called "Live From Albertane." 1999 The Music Industry Massacre of 1999 finds Hanson's label, Mercury, folded into the Island Def Jam conglomerate. Relations deteriorate. 2000 The sophomore effort shows up: "This Time Around," a remarkably muscled and rockin' collection featuring guest spots from fellow young phenom Jonny Lang and Blues Traveler's John Popper. 2001-2002 Hanson struggles to escape its contract with Island Def Jam. The brothers tour, but new music is not forthcoming. Meanwhile, Taylor gets married and has his first child. 2003 The whirlwind touring continues, but at least this one's an acoustic affair. In fact, the Hansons record and film their Chicago stop to release later as the DVD "Underneath Acoustic Live." 2004 On its own indie label, 3CG Records, the band releases "Underneath," another strong set featuring collaborations with Matthew Sweet. The album enters Billboard's Independent Chart at No. 1. 2005 Hey, let's tour some more! This time, Hanson stopped at colleges along the way to screen its documentary, "Strong Enough to Break," about its break from Island Def Jam and the road to becoming indie rockers. 2006 The trio travels to South Africa and Mozambique, recording a children's choir to be used on future songs. Both Isaac and Zac get married. 2007 In the weeks leading up to the July release of "The Walk," Hanson's fourth full-length album, the band posts half a dozen video podcasts online about the making of the record. Fans, band 'walk' together By Thomas Conner © Chicago Sun-Times Hanson isn't just talking the talk these days, they're walking "The Walk." Literally. As part of the tour, the band is staging a one-mile walk in each city, inviting fans to join the Hanson brothers to just ... walk. "It's amazing to see what happens when you grab a few hundred kids and walk down the middle of the road," Taylor Hanson says. "There's an impact on the people walking — talking, getting together — and the people observing." These events are an outgrowth of Hanson's newly emerged social conscience, itself the result of the band's recent travels in Africa. "The Walk" album opens with a children's choir in Soweto, South Africa, singing a message of hope. The Hansons found these kids when they joined some friends from a Tulsa, Okla.-based medical technology company, Docvia, on a trip last year delivering goods to a hospital in South Africa. There they encountered the continent's HIV/AIDS crisis firsthand. "These kids, orphaned in the epidemic, started chanting, 'I have hope.' We just thought that was so powerful," Taylor says. "What we came back with was a sense that the issue of AIDS really relates to middle America and our generation, because we're the ones who can attack it and do something about it. And we thought, one way or another, we need to capture this in our music." The choir appears in the Hanson song "Great Divide," which was released on iTunes as a charity single, with proceeds going to a Soweto hospital. The exact location of each day's walk will be announced at hanson.net three hours in advance. They'll be encouraging you to buy some shoes there, too — TOMS shoes has offered to donate a pair of shoes to needy kids for every pair purchased. And even if you're not feeling charitable: Fans who participate in the walks will get into the concert each night ahead of the line. By Thomas Conner
© Chicago Sun-Times It's a big family. You've got Loudon Wainwright III, once declared a "new Bob Dylan," who's been singing and recording personal folk songs for coming on four decades now. His ex-wife is Kate McGarrigle, of Canada's beloved McGarrigle Sisters. Their children are singer-songwriter Martha and the grandiose pop star Rufus Wainwright. One of the Roches and her daughter lurk in this family tree, too. Everyone has their own career, and sometimes they even sing together. But, as Yoda once said, there is another. Sloan Wainwright — Loudon's sister, Rufus and Martha's aunt — is the undiscovered treasure of this musical dynasty. Writing and singing since her youth (she's not quite 50), she's been recording only for the last decade. But already her six CDs have set her apart from her brother's witty, documentarian and occasionally caustic songs. "My songwriting is very different from Loudon's," says Sloan during a phone conversation from her home in Katonah, N.Y. "We're such different people, and we come from a very different place as far as expressing ourselves." Loudon's songs frequently dwell on undisguised family issues. His divorces are well-chronicled in his catalog, as are various escapades and bouts with the kids ("Rufus Is a Tit Man," "Father/ Daughter Dialogue," "Five Years Old"). Rufus and Martha have returned the favor on their own albums, and even Sloan has mentioned the relatives in her own music. But in "The Baby and the Bathwater," from her most recent album, "Life Grows Back," she sings the woe of all such biographical songwriters: "Why must we have an audience / To applaud our every confession?" "That song itself is a family song," she says. "It's kind of an auntie giving some auntie-ish advice about being grateful for the good stuff that comes in life, and that line, that's really kind of asking the question about the predicament many of my friends and family are in, this situation where we do work ourselves out in front of an audience. And maybe it's not always such a great idea." Sloan's recording career came late because she was sidetracked for 23 years as co-owner of the Bakers Cafe in Katonah. Throughout that experience, though, she continued singing and performing, developing her stage chops and her unique, contralto voice before learning to apply it in the studio. "The way I see it, there's the art of writing songs, the art of working with your instrument, then there's the art of creating a record, which is entirely separate, and then there's the art of performance," Sloan says. "To me, they're all kind of separate. ... One thing with my songs and my voice that I've learned to do over the years is to kind of use my voice — not my writing voice but the sonic part of my instrument — to rearrange what people are thinking in a performance. ... It's not so much about what I'm saying as how I'm saying it, the way words go together and the way I make them sound." Chicagoans can experience such rearrangement when Sloan Wainwright makes a rare appearance here — on radio, at least. She and her trusted guitarist, Stephen Murphy, will perform live on "Folkstage" at 6 p.m. Saturday on WFMT-FM (98.7). (Only members of the WFMT Fine Arts Circle can attend the broadcast as the studio audience.) She'll be playing songs from "Life Grows Back." She also will appear with Dorothy Scott and Maura O'Connell at a benefit show, "A Women's Night Out: The Art of Music," at 8 p.m. Sept. 15, at the Door County Auditorium in Fish Creek, Wis. Loudon also has a Chicago date ahead: Sept. 22 with Lucy Roche (his daughter by Suzzy Roche) at the Old Town School of Folk Music. By Thomas Conner
© Chicago Sun-Times His music keeps getting more ambitious, more grandiose, more opulently operatic — and his fans keep lapping it up. Rufus Wainwright, the young darling of a profound musical legacy (the Wainwright-McGarrigle clan), re-created Judy Garland's old act at Carnegie Hall earlier this year, to rave reviews (the CD and DVD of the show are out this fall), and he just released his latest disc, "Release the Stars," to still more acclaim. So he's back on tour, and back at Ravinia — but this time without lil' Ben Folds in tow — at 7:30 p.m. Saturday ($45 pavilion, $20 lawn; call (847) 266-5100 or visit ravinia.org). Q. What's new in the show? A. A lot compared to shows I've done recently in Chicago. I haven't done a big show there in a while. The Ravinia shows have been pared down; this one's got a big, heavy band, with the full breadth of my material — my songs, French songs, Judy Garland songs. Q. And did I hear correctly you're doing costume changes? A. Well, you know, I always love taking my clothes off. Without giving too much away, it's very, uh, ethnic and Hollywood. Q. How was Pet Shop Boy Neil Tennant as a producer on "Release the Stars"? A. He was helpful in reminding me that there's an audience out there, that my lofty goals are great but it's important to get on radio and make a couple of bucks, too. Like the song "Tiergarten" started out a bit dirgey. He said I needed some snappy tunes, and I followed his lead. Now it's almost a reggae song. Q. When you get off the road, you're writing an opera? A. Yes, it's called "Prima Donna," and it has nothing to do with Madonna. It's about an opera singer, because I love the genre. I love those characters — Maria Callas or Joan Sutherland — those opera divas. They need their own opera. By Thomas Conner
© Chicago Sun-Times The film is nearly always mentioned with modifiers such as "landmark," "milestone" and "a watershed moment." Fans and academics alike — in surveys such as the book The Celluloid Closet and the film "Fabulous! The Story of Queer Cinema" — continue to cite it as the single turning point for Hollywood's depiction of homosexuals, a swift and sure abolition of swishy cliches. Retailers specializing in gay cinema are weary from continuous customer requests for the film. Yet after nearly 40 years, it remains out of print on VHS and unavailable on DVD. The movie is "The Boys in the Band," a dramatic ensemble play faithfully adapted for the screen in 1970 and starring the complete stage cast, and the first screen success for Chicago-native director William Friedkin ("The Exorcist," "Bug"). It's poignant, it's catty, it's vicious and, as the New York Times described it, it "makes 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' look like a vicarage tea party." But to see it — or to see it again, in a clear, crisp print with better sound than your ancient, worn-out VHS copy from its last, late-'80s release — set your DVRs for 1:15 a.m. Tuesday (Monday night) on Turner Classic Movies. It airs as part of the cable channel's "Screened Out: Gay Images in Film" series this month — and coinciding with this weekend's gay pride celebrations in Chicago. "For me, this will be the film's television premiere," says Mart Crowley, "Band's" playwright and screenwriter, from his Los Angeles home (though he's in the process of moving back to New York). "Once upon a time in New York City years ago, five or six years after the film was released, one of those errant channels showed it. The language and such was so that they couldn't broadcast it, and they didn't bother to bleep it — they just cut the frames out in which there was any obscenity. The picture would just jump around. I couldn't watch it." Thirty-nine years after his play debuted, Crowley is still answering for its impact. "Nobody knew what hit 'em for a while [after it was produced] — not even me," he says. "I was as surprised as anyone else. I was just writing about myself and my friends. I mean, once upon a time it was just referred to as a play. Now it's the 'first gay play' or the 'first out play.' And I still don't even really know what that means." Changing times "The Boys in the Band" was controversial in its day, and remains so still. It's the story of a rather dismal birthday party — or so it becomes — among Michael (Kenneth Nelson), the quick-witted but steel-hearted host, and his fellow gay friends: a flamboyant queen, Emory (Cliff Gorman); a Jewish pothead, Harold (Leonard Frey); a mopey analysis patient, Donald (Frederick Combs); a hustler, "The Cowboy" (Robert LaTourneaux); a dapper black man, Bernard (Reuben Greene); a mysterious old friend, Alan (Peter White), and the couple of Hank (Laurence Luckinbill) and Larry (Keith Prentice). The first act is all wisecracks, the second act is all barbs. Life in the closet was dreary and desperate, and the self-loathing nearly eats some of these characters alive. "It's hard for anyone, straight or gay, who grew up post-Stonewall to relate to these poor quivering queers," the New York Post wrote when the film was restored for the Tribeca Film Festival in 1999. "But most will also have compassion for these sad sacks, living in a deforming straitjacket of shame, misery and contempt. 'Boys' is a useful yardstick of how far gay men have come, and how far they have yet to go." Crowley, to an extent, agrees with these assessments of his work. "I understand why the new movement doesn't want these negative images. They're gay and proud, these boys today, and they don't want to admit that some of us felt miserable at times or that we didn't all arrive at this point in history in a golden chariot. ... We weren't encouraged by anyone's parents or religious leaders or friends. I was a devout Catholic, and I was going to hell. Michael's character reflects that. But now they can see these images and re-evaluate their history. Because it really did start out in a different key." Today we see Oscar nominations for straight actors in gay roles, but Crowley had a hard time finding actors to take on the challenge of "Boys," which is why he held onto them from the stage to the screen. Luckinbill's agent, who also represented Crowley, tried to discourage him from the role of semi-macho, bisexual Hank. "She said it would kill my career," Luckinbill said in 2002. "I said, 'It's a great play, and how is being in a great play going to hurt my career?' ... It did everything in reverse of what my agent said, except for one thing: I lost a True cigarettes commercial. They said, 'No fags smoke our fags!' " A DVD soon? The film certainly made its mark, at least on gay audiences. TLA Entertainment, a video retailer with a popular gay and lesbian catalog, wishes it had a DVD version to hawk. "Would it sell? Absolutely," says TLA's managing editor, Scott Cranin. "We get requests for it all the time. I get several e-mails asking for 'Boys in the Band' virtually every week." So does Crowley. "They bug me in the Virgin Megastore, asking, 'When, when, when?' I have a standard form letter to send to people who write and ask about it. I tell them to write letters to CBS [Consumer Products]." The history of "Band's" ownership is a tortured one. Suffice to say CBS confirmed this week that they do own the film through their partnership with King World. "CBS maybe just discovered that they own it," Crowley says. "I'm told it'll be showing up on DVD next year, in 1908 ... no, it's 2008!" That would be the 40th anniversary of the play's first production in New York. (Calls to CBS to confirm a DVD were not returned.) Dominick Dunne was an executive producer on the film. In a letter posted on the "Band" message boards at IMDB.com, Dunne says, "CBS is finally aware that they own the picture and they are releasing a DVD for the 40th anniversary as a two-disc piece with interviews with Mart, me, Billy Friedkin, etc." In addition, a documentary about Crowley's work is under way, with the working title "The Making of 'The Boys in the Band.' " Filmmaker Crayton Robey, 34, has gathered all kinds of source material and interviews about the play's genesis and the movie's impact. He hopes to release his film independently or include it as an extra feature on the DVD. He pulls no punches in his assessment of "Band": "It's the most significant cultural creative breakthrough the world saw," he said last week in an interview from his New York home. "It was so important, people don't often realize. It was the 'Brokeback Mountain' of its day." |
Thomas Conner
These online "clips" reproduce a self-selection of my journalism (music etc) during the last 20+ years. It's a lotta stuff, but it only scratches the surface. I do not currently possess the time or resources to digitize the whole body of work. These posts are simply a bunch of pretty great days at the office. Archives
May 2014
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