By Thomas Conner
© Chicago Sun-Times
 
In describing her most recent stage production, "Peaches Does Herself," Peaches (aka Tornoto-born Merrill Beth Nisker), said she wanted it to be a show "that Broadway would never be able to present." A jukebox musical of songs from the pop singer's last 10 years of suggestive dancefloor hits, from "F--- the Pain Away" to "I Feel Cream," the show premiered in Berlin and featured simulated sex acts, dancers in plush vagina costumes and prosthetic penises, and lots of parading by a 6-foot-5 nude transsexual. Peaches herself undergoes a sex change during the show.

Broadway might shy away from that. Peaches, however, doesn't shy from Broadway. The button-pushing, gender-defying, self-described "stage whore" brings her latest show to Chicago this week just in time for Christmas: a solo performance of the Andrew Lloyd Webber-Tim Rice musical "Jesus Christ Superstar."

Given that she bills the show as "Peaches Christ Superstar," the mind reels as to what she's done to the popular rock opera about the Christian messiah. "What's the Buzz," with hair clippers? An instructional and graphically acted-out "I Don't Know How to Love Him"? Something that out-Herods Herod?

Actually, the most shocking element of this show is just how normal it is.

"It's played completely straight," she said in her recent conversation with the Sun-Times. "I've had this in mind since I was 15. I knew a lot of musicals when I was a kid, from my parents, but not that one. It was mostly 'West Side Story' and 'Hair' or whatever. Then someone gave me a tape" — she laughs — "literally, a cassette! I got obsessed with it, with the idea of being in a rock opera. It was '70s rock music I could relate to. It was easy to get obsessed by it. I would sing all the parts by myself, and I thought, 'Wouldn't it be cool to do the whole thing myself one day?' Even then I knew it was a ridiculous thought, but I really wanted it to happen."

Peaches, 44 (the moniker comes from the end of Nina Simone's song "Four Women," when Simone shouts, "My name is Peaches!"), was contacted early this year by the historic Hebbel am Ufer Theatre in Berlin, where she now lives. "They were fishing for a production, and I said, 'I've got one!' I pitched this, and they said great. Then I thought, uh-oh — now I actually have to do this. Because when I'm alone and I sing this show, I skip all the high notes I can't sing, all that white-man Jesus metal voice. So now I had to dig deep into it and make it sound good, make it into something I could sing."

At first, the company that held the rights to the musical balked. The premiere shows planned for March were canceled when Peaches was refused performance licenses for the songs.

She immediately took to Twitter to voice her anguish. "[They] claim that this project is of no interest to them due to its unconventional form," Peaches wrote in a series of tweets. "It's a shame that the authorities feel threatened by this fresh approach. I know a lot of people who really love the music and would appreciate this stripped-down solo performance. I have so much respect for the music and lyrics from the original score and this was my way of honouring that."

"It's because of who I am, and I understand," she told the Sun-Times. "But it was never my intention for this to be a campy performance at all. It's a tribute."

Eventually, composer Webber and lyricist Rice cleared the way for "Peaches Christ Superstar." (Perhaps they felt a kinship with Peaches: "Jesus Christ Superstar" was controversial when it first appeared in 1971 and was banned in some countries.) Rice himself attended one of the first Berlin performances.

"Before the show they told me, 'Tim Rice is on the guest list tonight.' I was like, yeah right. I'll believe that when I see it. Then they're like, 'Tim Rice is here!' Oh God. What if I get a lyric wrong? Which I did — I sang 'king of God' instead of 'son of God' once. I was so nervous. He came backstage after the show and said, 'I can't believe they wouldn't let you put this on.'"

"Peaches Christ Superstar" is, aside from pianist and longtime collaborator Chilly Gonzales, a one-woman show. Peaches sings every part of each song herself — the characters of Jesus, Judas, Pilate, Herod, Mary Magdalene and more.

"The song 'Everything's Alright' — that has Jesus and Judas and Mary in it, and I didn't want this to seem like I'm singing to imaginary people," Peaches said, explaining that she crafted the show so it wouldn't seem that she had a multiple-personality disorder. "I found that if I trusted the music the way it's written, it's naturally clear who's singing through me each time. It's not like I put on an extra piece of hair when Mary's lines come up, or a beard for Jesus. I wanted the emotion of the song to bring that out. I wanted my minimal Peaches approach to strip this down — like Peaches, not like a stripper — and show the raw emotion that exists naturally and plentifully in these songs."

As most reviewers noted about the March 25-27 premieres in Berlin, this performance shows off something we don't always pay attention to when Peaches is slinging double and triple entendres over dance and hip-hop tracks: She has a great voice.

"People are surprised by my singing," she said. "In a Peaches show, I'm jumping around, jumping on you, screaming, yelling. This is straight. ... Sure, a lot of people are expecting a lot of different things, but when we did it in Berlin some people wound up very emotional and crying. People were saying, 'What the hell? I didn't expect Peaches to do that to me!'"

She just hopes the audience at the Portage Theater is more easygoing than the group she encountered years ago at Park West.

"We opened for Elastica there [on Sept. 27, 2000]. This is back when M.I.A. was their videographer. We had this crazy little thing where we decided to play every song we knew through the course of the tour. Chicago was the fifth night, and we'd already gone through 40 or so songs. So we got there and it was — I wouldn't say we were at the bottom of the barrel, but we were making stuff up. The crowd wasn't having it. It was a rough night, but I thought it was the funniest place to do that. All of Chicago's not that uptight, is it?"
 
 
'PEACHES CHRIST SUPERSTAR'
• 8 p.m. Dec. 14
• Portage Theater, 4050 N. Milwaukee
• Tickets: $25, (773) 736-4050, portagetheater.org

By Thomas Conner
© Chicago Sun-Times
 
John Mellencamp wants to go back and start again. He doesn't want to become Johnny Cougar again — God, no. He has nothing but contempt for his own early work as a late-'70s/early-'80s, floppy-haired heartland poster boy. When he speaks of his first eight albums of pandering pop-rock — full of Top 40 hits, mind you, like "I Need a Lover," "Hurts So Good," and signature songs like "Jack & Diane" and "Pink Houses" — it's with a scoff and a sneer.

He's tried to reboot several times. The name change, for one — Johnny Cougar, then John Cougar Mellencamp, cat-free since '91. The turning point came when Mellencamp, a native of Seymour, Ind., released 1985's "Scarecrow," a transitional album that gave us "R.O.C.K. in the U.S.A." but also rootsy, populist tracks like "Small Town," "The Face of the Nation," "Justice and Independence" and "You've Gotta Stand for Somethin'." It was a bid for critical respect, and it worked. (That same year, he helped found Farm Aid with Neil Young and Willie Nelson.) Each album since — an admirable catalog of a dozen more records with a thoroughly Midwestern blend of Friday-night fun and corner-diner speeches — has received various and consistent acclaim.

But people at the shows still expect him to do the splits.

"I talked to my next-door neighbor this morning," Mellencamp, 59, said during our recent interview from his Indiana home. "She was at the show in Bloomington [Ind.]. She said, 'Really, I like the old John better.' And I said, 'Well, Cathy, that guy doesn't exist anymore.' It'd be foolish of me to try and do at my age now what I was doing at 32. It's not dignified. Jumping off an amp at my age would be stupid. Singing 'Hurts So Good'? Please. If people are coming to see 'The Coug,' they should stay home."

If he could erase parts of the past and start over, he said he would. And this is what much of our conversation was about: looking to the past without being nostalgic, back-tracking through decades of "progress" to a point further back — and taking a different route from there. Anything, he said, that might detour around, say, 1983's "The Kid Inside."

Q. You have pretty clear contempt for your early work.
A. I did what I had to do. I did what people told me. There was no way those folk songs were ever going to get anywhere unless I had hit records.

Q. By denouncing those early records, aren't you also insulting your fans?
A. Am I worrying about insulting people? Well, there's no winning that. No matter what you do, someone's going to be insulted. Playing "R.O.C.K." tomorrow night would certainly be insulting. To me.

Q. If you played it like you did in 1985, perhaps.
A. The only thing to do is to try and figure out a way to get to people who want to hear songs like "Easter Eve" [a new, nearly seven-minute song] and do a good job at it. I'll play "R.O.C.K." again, but not in a way you'll imagine. Last night during a show [at Nashville's storied Ryman Auditorium] during a slow, quiet section, someone yelled out, 'Jack and Diane!' I said, 'You're impatient.' I play it, but you don't know what it is till I start singing it. It's the first time I've enjoyed playing it in 20 years. It's a brand new song. It's the folk song it always meant to be. It doesn't sound anything like that version on radio. I always looked at that song like a graphic novel, and now it takes on a whole new seriousness I never realized existed in it.

Mellencamp's new album, "No Better Than This," showcases his desire to rewind and replay. Released in August on revered folk label Rounder Records, its 13 new songs were recorded at three historic locations, and in mono. Much of the album was captured in single takes at Sun Studios, the Memphis storefront where Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash made landmark debuts. Other songs were taped at the First African Baptist Church in Savannah, Ga. (the first stop on the Underground Railroad during the Civil War), and Room 414 of the Gunter Hotel in downtown San Antonio, where a young Robert Johnson sat and recorded 16 now-legendary blues songs (including "Sweet Home Chicago") this week in November 1936.

"The only song written especially for one of the locations was 'Right Behind Me,'" Mellencamp said. "I looked at the songs I'd written and realized I hadn't written a song about the devil. How do you walk into Robert Johnson's house without a song about the devil? So I wrote 'Right Behind Me' real quick." The song's narrator is off to see his baby ("She in Chicago"), and the devil's over his shoulder. "He thinks he's got me / but he ain't got me," he sings — either victorious or overconfident, it's never clear.

Mellencamp sees demons all around him, mostly technological ones. CDs? "A con," he said. MP3s? "A terrible way to listen to music." This lead into a lengthy rant that peaked with his favorite declaration: "The Internet is the most dangerous invention since the atomic bomb." Before this, he had some choice things to say about the recent election, such as: "I love it when the right starts talking about all they've done — referring back to World War II and what their grandparents did. You weren't even born, what the f—- do you have to do with it?"

The world has progressed, he says, but in the wrong direction. So for "No Better Than This," he wanted to go back — sort of, not to relive and re-create, but to start anew from back there. Or at the very least steer back to the path that could have been. As he talked about the new record and his choices of location (interest first, ability to reach them while on tour with Willie Nelson second), Mellencamp insisted he "wasn't trying to go back" by using the old methods and sites. He "looked at this as a forward move."

"Calling something progress doesn't make it better," he said. "That's what the song 'The West End' is about. Things are worse now than they've ever been. There's a line that says, 'Look what progress did / Someone lined their pockets / I don't know who that is.' This is not some old guy hanging on to the idea that things were better when he was a kid. F—- that! I'm not nostalgic at all. I just think we went the wrong way with progress back when we had the chance."

Still, he describes his new tour as "a modern-day vaudeville show." Each concert begins with the showing of a documentary by photographer Kurt Marcus about the making of "No Better Than This." Mellencamp and his band play on "a wild variety" of acoustic instruments, then Mellencamp plays solo for about 40 minutes. The concert closes with a full electric band, all-out rock 'n' roll.

Q. So you still give a little of the old John, rocking out some hits in the end?
A. I'm playing the songs I want to play. At this age, to be doing anything else would be a waste of time.

Q. "Pink Houses," I'll bet.
A. All I've gotta do is start playing that song in the show, and I don't have to sing a note. People know every word to that song. Of course, that song was totally misunderstood when it came out and wound up related to some kind of community, or having pride, pride in ourselves, which is not what it's about but is what people took from it. That can't be bad.

Q. You won the Woody Guthrie Award back in 2003. His songs have been misunderstood more than a few times. Ever thought about writing new music to some of his old lyrics the way others have done?
A. Nora [Guthrie, Woody's daughter and keeper of the Woody Guthrie Archives] has sent me hundreds of lyrics. The fact that so many people have done that is exactly why I won't do it. I wouldn't even pretend I would know what to do with his words. But Wilco and — what's his name? the British guy? — Billy Bragg, they did a hell of a job. ... The world sure needs more music like that now.

Q. Because of hard times?
A. When times are good, you end up with stuff like the Charleston, that kind of music, light stuff, "How Much Is That Doggy in the Window?" When times are tough, you turn to what is stable, what makes the backbone of this country. Music from the land.

Q. The "heartland"? Do you claim that kind of identity?
A. Years ago, I was fussing around, worrying about what to wear on stage. My wife looked at me and said, "John, put on a pair of blue jeans and get out there. You're a blue jeans man. Don't mess with that." That's what people come back to. People don't need smoke and mirrors. I'm an old pair of brown shoes — worn out, but comfortable. Things like that, you just sometimes don't appreciate till later on.
 
 
JOHN MELLENCAMP
6:30 p.m. Nov. 26 and 27
Chicago Theatre, 175 N. State
Tickets: $42.50-$125, (800) 745-3000, ticketmaster.com

By Thomas Conner
© Chicago Sun-Times
 
So I ask you: should I cry or laugh?
Drinking tea in a King's Cross caff ...
— Joe Jackson, “Down to London”
 
LONDON — Any visit to Britain’s sprawling capital requires a proper cup of tea or two, or 10. To leave London without having tea is like going to Seattle and not having coffee or fleeing Paris without having wine. The question is only this: What kind of tea drinker are you?
 
Centuries after British nobility infused the tea habit throughout their culture, tea drinking in today’s London can be enjoyed two ways: dressed up or dressed down. The daily teatime tradition still thrives throughout the city — unadulterated but also with some creative, sometimes wacky, twists. Whether you take your tea with pinkies out in the afternoon or at other times of day (early morning, late night, as part of happy hour) with no jacket required, Britain’s megalopolis still offers teatime tastes for every palate.
 
On a recent well-steeped jaunt, we found everything from classic tea at the Ritz (all silver pots and tuxedoed waiters) to more casual afternoon teas with whiskey, gin and nearly naked burlesque dancers. Old-fashioned or newfangled, here are two different paths through the world’s capital of tea.
 
Traditional
 
Where to stay: If you’re going this way, go all the way. Avoid the bustling locations of most Mayfair hotels and splurge on the five-star glory of the Dorchester Hotel (Park Lane, 44-20-7319-7139, thedorchester.com) on the east edge of Hyde Park. The old girl has been renovated recently, and the spacious rooms and suites received a nice touch of brightness in addition to all the posh. Check the hotel’s site for frequent package deals.
 
Shopping: Start with some shopping along Piccadilly, an easy walk east of the Dorchester. Everyone will tell you to head north for the famous Harrod’s department store; do not listen to them. Harrod’s is a zoo, so crammed with tourists it’s nearly impossible to shop, or breathe. On Piccadilly is the more stately and elegant Fortnum & Mason (181 Piccadilly, 44-20-7734-8040, fortnumandmason.com). Each floor, from housewares to fashions, is roomy and easy to roam, and the store’s tea department beats Harrod’s hands down. Gaze at the big, gold canisters full of oolongs and darjeelings, then ask the friendly staff for recommendations.
 
History: Check out the first known Western-style teapot, from 1670, at the Victoria & Albert Museum (Cromwell Road, South Kensington, 44-20-7942-2000, vam.ac.uk), a splendid way to spend a few drizzly London hours. The collections here focus more on everyday art and crafts, including quite a bit of teaware, such as a lovely display of pots on two shelves in the Asia gallery. Then catch a cab due east and visit the Twinings tea store (216 The Strand, 44-0207-353-3511, twinings.co.uk/footer/our-shop), on the site of the original shop Thomas Twining opened in 1717. It’s a tiny little place but contains the full array of Twinings tea offerings, including new flavor blends and teas from South America, as well as displays of historic family artifacts, from paintings of the tea dynasty’s leaders to old advertisements and tea boxes.
 
Afternoon tea: Throw a teacup in central London and you’ll hit at least three hotels offering a traditional afternoon tea. Book your afternoon respite at one of these two (well in advance — like, weeks). There’s the Ritz (150 Piccadilly, 44-20-7493-8181, theritzlondon.com), allegedly the standard by which all afternoon teas are judged. “Tea at the Ritz is the last delicious morsel of Edwardian London,” Helen Simpson wrote about the experience of sipping and supping in the hotel’s golden, glowing Palm Court. The tea is fair (served in wonderful heavy silver pots), the service likewise. Because the experience is entrenched as a London must-do, the Ritz packs in five seatings a day. So you can’t exactly linger. (Seatings daily at 11:30 a.m., 1:30, 3:30, 5:30 and 7:30 p.m., from $39 per person)
 
For the best hotel afternoon tea experience for the price, go back to the Dorchester. Tea in the Promenade is magnificent — excellent food (including my new favorite word: the pre-dessert), superb service (they don’t just bring you hot water to revive your pot, they bring you an entirely fresh pot) and a much more comfortable setting (opulent and formal, of course, but considerably less stiff). A tip: The Dorchester’s tea is booked way ahead, like most hotels; however, the maitre d’ told me that when the weather in London is beautiful (a rarity, granted), he gets “20 to 25 percent no-shows.” The lesson, if you’re in town without a reservation: Stop by on a sunny day; they hold reservations for half an hour, and if a party your size doesn’t show, the table’s yours. (Seatings daily at 1:15, 2:30, 3:15, 4:45 and 5:15 p.m., from $35.50)
 
Non-traditional
 
Where to stay: Just west of the West End, near the busy shops along Oxford Street, is the Mandeville Hotel (8-14 Mandeville Place, 44-20-7935-5599, mandeville.co.uk). For a small, boutique hotel, the Mandeville is smartly appointed, classy and comfortable. Its central location (and close to the Tube) makes it an easy home base for exploring London, but it also has a restaurant and full services for when you return. Check the website for holiday specials.
 
Shopping: For a contemporary view of the tea world, do not miss Postcard Teas (9 Dering Street, 44-20-7629-3654, postcardteas.com), a bright, sunny shop on a small, shadowy lane just off Bond Street. The owner, Tim d’Offay, has traveled the world for 15 years, imported tea for 11 years and had Postcard Teas open for five. Postcard Teas, get it? “In one sense, these teas are the postcards I send from around the world,” he said. The labels of each tea he sells are designed to look like postcards — the 50-gram postcard bags allegedly can be written on like cards and sent legally through the mails — with each cancel stamp listing the tea’s origin. The cheerful, chatty d’Offay cups teas for visitors to sample. Try his hearty Mayfair Breakfast blend, or the cocoa-y flavors of Yunnan Red Cloud, a second-pick summer tea (the first pick is used to make pu-erh).
 
Afternoon tea: London tea service isn’t all starched collars and prim protocol. Several places offer twists on the tradition, many of them geared toward attracting men. The Mandeville Hotel, in fact, offers a Men’s Afternoon Tea (3-5:30 p.m. Mon.-Sat., 1-5 p.m. Sun., $23.50). Instead of dainty finger sandwiches, you get stick-to-your-ribs appetizer fare, such as a sirloin sandwich with red onion and thyme jam (awesome), grilled veggies with brie on toast, a sesame beef skewer and chicken satay. Choose a stout tea to stand up to the stronger food flavors, like the smoky Mandeville Special Blend, made especially for the hotel by London’s Jing. It pairs beautifully with the whiskeys and bourbons on offer in place of the usual champagne accompaniment. The Palm Court at the Langham Hotel (1C Portland Place, Regent Street, 44-20-7965-0195, palm-court.co.uk), an easy walk east of the Mandeville, offers a daily G&T (seatings daily at 2, 2:30, 4:30 and 5 p.m., $41) featuring a menu based on the flavors of a gin and tonic, which is what you receive first, expertly mixed and in a nice tall glass. Then comes the tea, based on the botanicals of Beefeater 24; it’s a green tea base with added juniper berries, coriander, lemon peel and other whole ingredients, resulting in a strange but enticing tea, musty and musky, tasty with the munchies.
 
For something completely different, the Volupté Lounge (9 Norwich Street, 44-20-7831-1622, volupte-lounge.com), a self-described “decadent little supper club” hidden away in a basement near Chancery Lane, offers Tea & Tassels (about once monthly, $42), an occasional Saturday afternoon tea with entertainment: 1930s-style burlesque show. Dolores Delight belts show tunes (a stunning achievement given the tight corset), while Millie Dollar emerges in stunning gowns and then emerges from the stunning gowns, down to her pasties and tattoos. Through it all, a traditional afternoon tea menu of sandwiches and scones is served. Sounds odd? Zoe Fletcher, who created the program, says, “Well, that’s me. I like to have a gossipy tea with my friends, and I love burlesque, so it just fit.” Even stranger: I was the only male in the joint one Saturday. The rest of the crowd: all bachelorette parties. Don’t come for the tea (it’s not great) or the food — through, bizarrely, the pair of scones we got at Volupté was the best of anyplace we visited. There’s a joke in there somewhere.
 
 
 

By Thomas Conner
© Chicago Sun-Times
 
In September 2008, a crew of 40 artists, poets, architects, actors and musicians boarded a science vessel and set sail for Greenland. Their destination — apropos for the musicians, which included Laurie Anderson, Robyn Hitchcock, Jarvis Cocker, Martha Wainwright, beatboxer Shlomo and others — was Disko Bay.

The journey was part of the Cape Farewell project, an organization that puts artists and scientists together, hoping the latter will be inspired by the out-of-the-box thinking of the former. Really, though, the goal is to get the artists to "communicate on a human scale the urgency of the global climate challenge."

"What I saw was a gigantic world of ice and water," says Ryuichi Sakamoto, another participant in the Greenland voyage and a pianist who operates in both rock and classical worlds. "The landscape, the wild nature — it just blew my mind. Giant chunks of ice crashing into the sea. We saw much, we learned much.

"I'm still concerned — climate change is going to be even more harsh in the future — but on the other hand, I'm kind of calmed down. This nature, this planet — it will be OK whether we are concerned about it or not. The planet will be here. Maybe some ice will be melted, but it will be back in 200 years. You get to see the big picture of it. It's gigantic. The way we talk about it — the problem of global warming is not nature's problem, it's our problem as human beings. What I'm concerned about is not the planet or nature but the harsh environment for my children and grandchildren. Nature will be OK, just fine. We're hurting ourselves, not nature."

Sakamoto, 58, is the first artist from the trip to express his Greenland experience through his music. (KT Tunstall claims the voyage inspired the "nature techno" approach of her new album, "Tiger Suit," released a month ago.) If the others get around to doing the same, they'll likely make more of a racket than Sakamoto. His two new albums are ambient, delicate affairs.

"Playing the Piano" features solo piano re-readings of some of his own greatest hits: pieces of music from his days in the Yellow Magic Orchestra (once hailed as the Kraftwerk of his native Japan), his solo albums (particularly from the early '80s, when he was collaborating with pop figures from David Byrne to David Sylvian) and film music (the title theme from "Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence," in which he starred alongside David Bowie, and the Oscar-winning music for "The Last Emperor").

But it's the second of the two new discs that features sounds drawn, sometimes directly, from Disko Bay. The dozen compositions on "Out of Noise" blend soft melodies and manipulated noise to create some very discreet music. Sakamoto's career has drawn as much inspiration from Brian Eno and Alva Noto (with whom he's collaborated on three recent CDs) as from Steve Reich, John Cage, even Debussy or Satie. Here, Sakamoto turns a piano phrase into a chopped-up round ("Hibari"), weaves stringed instruments over an electronic piano background that sounds like Eno's Bloom iPhone app ("Still Life"), rings Asian bells alongside electronic transmission noises ("Tama"), even employs recordings he made of the environment itself in Greenland ("Ice," "Glacier"). It all sounds chilly and cold, icy and isolated.

"I was inspired by the sounds I captured there," Sakamoto says. "The sound of the water, of the glacier, of the ice — they are used on this CD. ... There were hours sitting in front of the computer, listening to the recordings of the ambient sound from the Arctic Sea. Hours and hours and hours, carefully listening. I found some good moments. Then I repeated them, looped and looped. Then I started trying to find the nice musical elements on top of it, going along with those ambient sounds. That's how I designed the tracks. Sometimes it was a guitar sound or a piano sound — whatever spoke from the water or the ice."

He had hoped to include native music from the arctic island, he says. To his dismay, he found none.

"I asked the local people, the Inuit, to give us a chance for us to hear their music," he says. "They arranged a party, and they started singing. I was blown away. I was sad. It's almost church music. I expected something maybe a little bit Asian. Those Inuit people came from Siberia; we Japanese and Inuit are brothers and sisters genetically. But the music they sang was almost pure church music. That was sad. Their culture — at least their musical custom — is totally Christianized and Westernized."

Sakamoto's first musical inspirations came from another island. Growing up in 1960s Japan, he was captivated by the wild, hyper-ethnic instrumental sounds of lounge musicians like Arthur Lyman and Martin Denny — the ones based on or frequenting Hawaii.

"Martin Denny was big in Japan," Sakamoto says, remembering that the first piece of music YMO tackled was Denny's broadly drawn "Firecracker." "He kind of imitated Japaneseness, and it was easy to imitate him." He laughs. "In a way, [the Yellow Magic Orchestra] kind of followed his method of imitating the image of Japaneseness. That might have been the wrong image. It's like you see in old Hollywood movies, that in-between Chinese-Japanese-Vietnamese, mixed image of the Asian person. We loved it at the time. Misunderstanding is always interesting. It's good, funny and fun. Creation is always misunderstanding, maybe."

He says he experienced similar feelings of misunderstanding when going back through his own catalog, selecting pieces for "Playing the Piano."

"Every time I listen to an old song, I'm surprised at how wild or powerful it is. I don't always understand it, or at least how to recreate it. Most of it I'll never be able to do again at this age. It's the youth. Youth has its own character, in a way. I'm getting older, so there's something I can do now which young Sakamoto couldn't."

He pauses for a moment, thinking.

"One clear example is, I play piano much more festively, more carefully, more deeply in a way. I was much more technical when I was young. And stronger, more powerful. My piano playing is much more delicate now and in a way more deep."

In concert on this tour of American theaters, Sakamoto is alone — but with two pianos. Often, he plays a segment on one of the pianos, which a computer records and plays back at intervals while Sakamoto continues on the other.

"It's a duet with myself," he says. "I wish I could add a 3-D image on the second piano, a hologram of myself. ... After the ice melts, maybe that will be all that's left of me, a hologram playing the piano."
 

RYUICHI SAKAMOTO
• 8 p.m. Tuesday
• Vic Theatre, 3145 N. Sheffield
• Tickets: $45, jamusa.com, (800) 514-ETIX

By Thomas Conner
© Chicago Sun-Times

Writing about these power-pop gods, it demands two posts each time. You need one for the guys — and they're almost always guys — who actually know who you're writing about. That's usually, let's see, you, you and definitely the guy in the back with the jean jacket and Chuck Taylors. Then you need one for everyone else, the one where I try in vain to inform without proselytizing and wind up practically berating you, dear reader, for not having discovered this genius before, you slacker.

Rock is littered with underappreciated pros, from Shoes and the Spongetones to Jason Falkner and Brendan Benson, and power pop is its landfill. Dwight Twilley is a name you might even have heard of, once upon a time. Try his biggest hit, 1975's "I'm on Fire" ("and you ain't, you ain't, you ain't got no lover!"). Or his next one, 1984's "Girls," with Tom Petty singing backup. Album after album of this stuff continued well into the '90s, beautifully crafted post-Beatles guitar pop with the consistent affectation of a rockabilly slapback on the vocals.

Twilley 2010 sees the arrival of the "Green Blimp," another dozen tracks Abbey Road-meets-Sun Records rock. (Sun's Sam Phillips was the first to give Twilley a break.) By now, he's got his formula down.

"It doesn't take me much time to write songs anymore," Twilley said in a recent interview from his Tulsa, Okla., home and studio. "Once I have the idea, it's a done deal. It can be done usually in a day. I get the body of the song in about 15 minutes. Then it's a matter of walking by it every once in a while, changing a lyric, teetering with the arrangement. ... We just have gotten better and better at what we're doing, more comfortable with the studio."

That's Big Oak Studio, a converted garage behind his midtown Tulsa home. The "we" included Twilley's wife and recording partner, Jan, plus original Dwight Twilley Band guitarist Bill Pitcock IV and, on this album, guests Susan Cowsill and Rocky Burnette.

The "Green Blimp" title track is very "Yellow Submarine," a dreamy, childlike tale about a fantastic dirigible domicile. "It's kind of a hats off to 'Yellow Submarine,' sure," Twilley said. "It's a fictional kind of thing, a kind of shelter" — Twilley's band started out on Leon Russell's Shelter Records — "a warm and fuzzy thing about floating above the clouds where everything's peaceful. The album itself ends up having that theme, a kind of anti-war theme, an anti-violence message. The 'Green Blimp' lyrics go, 'All the fighting beneath us / if we're lucky won't reach us.' It's about drifting through the clouds and not worrying about being robbed or hit by a bomb. A lot of the songs carry that same message. It just happened that way. It's been on my mind. It's not like I'm a protest singer but, for the love of God, we've got two wars going on. Yesterday on the TV they said 350 kids were killed in one day. That's a lot of kids. I don't feel comfortable talking about that. I'm not a political-type person. But I can say, hey, we could all be a little less violent."

"Green Blimp," Twilley's first studio disc since 2005's "47 Moons," includes real rockers ("Speed of Light," "Stop"), breathy acoustic ballads ("Let It Rain"), some swampy boogie ("Witches in the Sky"), all of it clocking in just under four minutes. The production might sound dated, but Twilley's consistency over the years is as much an advantage in his music. And he's as forward-looking in his business model as he is in his lyrics. "Green Blimp" is available as a free download at dwighttwilley.com and in as-needed batches of CDs. His Facebook page keeps the faithful informed and raises funds for the recordings.

Of which there are plenty more on the way. "I don't want to be one of those guys who retires. I want to make records. I've got a new one and another one almost done," he said. That includes music for an upcoming film about him, a documentary being filmed by Youngblood Productions. "I have no control over the film," Twilley said. "Every now and then, they come by and do an interview. I saw the proposal, and I heard them talking about hiring someone to score the thing with music that sounded like mine. That didn't sit well with me at all. I perked up, said why don't I do the music for you? It's the only thing I have control over. The soundtrack will be done and out before the film ever surfaces.

"And it's different, it's interesting. I'm doing stuff on a biographical slant. I'm thinking about the things I did with [late music writing partner Phil] Seymour, how we got started. It's a damn good excuse to make another record. There's one song called 'Tulsa Town,' another called 'Bus Ticket.' That one tells the story of how Phil and I, these dumb little kids, just drove through Memphis with our little cassette, looking for a record company, and some guy named Sam Phillips listened to it, and we had no idea who he was or what Sun Records was. He was just this guy who sent us a bus ticket to come back and record."
 

By Thomas Conner
© Chicago Sun-Times

Elton John & Leon Russell
"The Union"
(Decca Records)
★★★

Writing in the liner notes of his new CD collaboration with Leon Russell, his musical hero, Elton John details his U.S. debut in 1970 with Russell in the audience, how the two of them struck up a kinship, toured together and enjoyed initial parallels of fame as rock 'n' roll pianomen. "Anyway," John writes, "then I lost touch with Leon and our paths kind of went different ways."

That's an understatement. By the mid-'70s, all the world knew of John's crocodile rock. His body of work, it was announced last week, has earned him an entire Elton John channel on Sirius XM satellite radio.

Russell, meanwhile, served as maestro of Joe Cocker's notorious Mad Dogs & Englishmen tour, had a big hit with "Tightrope," knocked everyone out with a fiery performance at the Concert for Bangladesh — and then almost all of us lost touch with Leon. He took a hard right and recorded a straight-up country album ("Hank Wilson's Back," 1973), then turned left for some avant-garde self-exploration ("Stop All That Jazz," 1974). He never stopped recording or touring, but while John eulogized princesses, became the belle of Broadway and sold out in Vegas, Russell was rolling his broken-down bus into tiny bars in small cities.

After a personal revelation last year about how deeply Russell influenced his music, John sought him out after 40 years. They reconnected, made plans to record. It could have been just another hokey duets album for John, 63, but to his credit "The Union" (out Tuesday) reunites the two piano-pounders under his stated and restated intention of injecting Russell, 68, back into at least a tributary of the mainstream.

"There's no point doing this record if it doesn't bring his work to light," John recently told Billboard. "I want him to be comfortable financially. I want his life to improve a little."

Fortunately, the resulting record amounts to something significantly greater than a charity project. It's a marriage of true love and admiration, much like "Road to Escondido," Eric Clapton's 2006 reunion with J.J. Cale. (Cale and Russell are both icons in their native Oklahoma as pioneers of the easygoing "Tulsa sound," which influenced performers from Tom Petty to Garth Brooks.) While "The Union" sags slightly under the weight of each performer's latter-day penchants, it ultimately succeeds because of the youthful energy they rediscover with each other's aid.

For this union to take place, John had to step back a bit from the obese, overwrought records he's made of late, which he seems to have done with relief and glee. "I don't have to make pop records any more," he told Billboard, indicating that "The Union" marks a new, less commercial chapter in his career. Huzzah!
Meanwhile, Russell — frail and sometimes in ill health, including brain surgery just as recording sessions began in January — had to step up his game, return to something resembling form. Russell's concerts the last decade or more have been static, lifeless affairs. He'd sit nearly motionless before a tinny little electric piano, a snow-white Cousin Itt with sunglasses, and mash out a rushed string of once beautifully arranged gems.

But he turns it around for these recordings. John, in his liner notes, celebrates the moment Russell "suddenly got his confidence again and started to play the grand piano instead of the electric piano, and all this great piano playing came flooding back and we made this incredible record."

The kick-back from real piano keys as opposed to the plastic of an electric keyboard — that simple physical resistance, that subtle artistic challenge has been what Russell's needed for years. He faces it here and comes alive again, opening the album with "If It Wasn't for Bad," as classic a Leon track as we thought we'd never get again. Over a touch of gospel and that moseying Tulsa pace, he seems to address his own criticisms in the song's central pun: "I know that you could be just like you should / If it wasn't for bad you'd be good."

Eight of these songs were penned by John and his writing partner of 43 years, Bernie Taupin. The first, "Eight Hundred Dollar Shoes" voices John's own perspective on his hero: "Your songs have all the hooks / You're seven wonders rolled into one." From then on, the pair play piano and sing side by side, volleying like two tennis players trained by the same coach. Russell's feline yowl adds grit and growl to John's "Monkey Suit" (as "honky" as this cat's been in decades), while John's creamier voice leavens the slow regret of Russell's "I Should Have Sent Roses." For Russell, the proceedings often return to gospel, especially near the end of "The Union" as he shuffles through "Hearts Have Turned to Stone" with four churchy backup singers, then closes the album with the personal, organ-driven hymn "In the Hands of Angels."

"The Union" is filled out by a mutual admiration society of musicians who couldn't help but drop by the studio once they heard Russell was in town. Neil Young sings on the Civil War ballad "Gone to Shiloh." Brian Wilson sings and arranges some of "When Love Is Dying." Jim Keltner (another Tulsan!) plays drums throughout, and producer T Bone Burnett expertly guides and reins in the whole asylum choir.

Look for John and Russell on the road together this fall, starting with Tuesday's show at the Beacon Theatre in New York. Bonus: Cameron Crowe filmed the recording of "The Union"; he plans to screen a documentary in February at the Sundance Film Festival.
 
 

By Thomas Conner
© Chicago Sun-Times
 
A month ago, Roger Waters was in Chicago rebuilding Pink Floyd's "The Wall." One of the many themes in that show and its 1979 concept album is the barrier between artist and audience. Waters erects that barrier, building a 30-foot, white-brick manifestation of theater's "fourth wall," behind which his band continues to play. On the other side, the audience is left to watch synced animation projected onto the wall. It's true musical theater.

The Gorillaz ape a similar theatrical approach. A band of cartoon characters, created a decade ago by Blur singer Damon Albarn and "Tank Girl" creator-illustrator Jamie Hewlett, Gorillaz presents its live music the way the Wizard of Oz presented his edicts: A screen, sometimes a holographic projector, depicts the larger- and loonier-than-life animated players, and we're to pay no attention to that band behind the curtain making the actual music. Like Waters, the whole conceit began as a way to separate sender and receiver to make a statement about the consumption (or not) of music.

"It's a very hard point to get across, still," Hewlett said during a recent interview from his London studio. "We live in a time where, for a lot of people, celebrity is everything. We have thousands of huge celebrities who have no talent to offer, but because you see their face all the time you're conned into thinking that they're celebrities. With Gorillaz, we wanted to show that imaginary characters could be bigger than actual celebrities, who are really imaginary characters, anyway. Tough battle that one. We've persevered with it. I think Murdoc [the Gorillaz bassist] is a legitimate rock star — and believable at that, and a funny one and one of my favorites alongside Keith Richards and Tom Waits."

Gorillaz emerged from the mist when Hewlett and Albarn shared a flat and began spending evenings making fun of MTV. But it's grown beyond mere snark.

"Of course, now I'd like to think that our perspective is much larger than just poking at MTV and the idea of public image," Albarn said in a separate interview. "Now we're to the point where it feels like a comment on popularism itself, our approach to pop music and how it's relative with consumerism. On this record especially, we treat pop culture as a kind of adversary, really. Although it's a loose narrative, and plastic and rubbish is dealt with on a more metaphysical sense, there's something very much worth meditating on with this record.

"We ourselves are a part of the pop culture, but it's OK to dissect it and look at it from not necessarily an entirely positive aspect. Which is not something pop culture is terribly comfortable with. I mean, look at pop music, if you can bear to. Find me some social conscience in it."

The album he refers to is Gorillaz' third full-length effort, this summer's star-studded "Plastic Beach." The album is a set of more pop-oriented electronic and hip-hop songs, many of which make vague statements about the plasticity of culture or the literal plastic humans consume and discard. It features a range of guests, including Lou Reed, Snoop Dogg, Bobby Womack, Mos Def, Mark E. Smith, De La Soul and more, not to mention Mick Jones and Paul Simonon from the Clash. Womack, Jones and Simonon are on the tour, and others are popping onto some dates as special guests.

That's part of the reason the current Gorillaz tour pulls the cartoons back a bit, piercing the veil. With such star power onstage, why hide it? ("I couldn't entertain the idea of putting Lou Reed or Bobby Womack behind a screen," Albarn said. "I'm not that daft.") Hewlett has completed plenty of visuals for the entirety of the concerts, but this time they're on a screen that's up and slightly behind the human band onstage. There's a nautical theme. Jones and Simonon wear sailor suits.

The visuals almost became more central to the live shows, though, instead of less. The original plan was to move past the existing 2-D animation and into a concert of 3-D holograms. They tinkered with the technology and got it to work for their joint performance with Madonna opening the Grammys in 2006. Well, it sort of worked.

"It looked fantastic on TV, but that's it," Hewlett said. "Live, it's impossible to do, it turns out. You can't turn your bass up, you can't turn anything up, because it vibrates the invisible expensive holo-screen stretched between the band and the audience. The holograms go to pieces. At the Grammys, there was not really any sound in the actual theater. The [technicians] we did that with, since then, have fixed the problem, but it's too nerve-wracking to attempt."

"If it were at all possible, we'd be doing it," Albarn said of the holograms. "You just can't do it yet. It belongs to the brave new world, really. ... So the cartoons are back. It's a complete animated narrative above me now. Watching it as we're playing, it feels really strong. I think it's more satisfying, easier for people to watch us and the screen. They're a very strong presence in the ether above us, looking down on us from some kind of digital pantheon."

Albarn said "Plastic Beach" began with 80 pieces of music, so he expects Gorillaz to keep lumbering forward. After this tour, though, he's back to working on even grander stage projects. He and Hewlett collaborated on an opera, "Monkey: Journey to the West," which enjoyed an extended run in London, and Albarn currently is at work on another project "with operatic elements" about a 16th century mystic, due next summer. He also reports that he and the other members of Blur are "still in communication and are intending to do something in the new year."

 
GORILLAZ
with N.E.R.D.
• 7:30 p.m. Saturday
• UIC Pavilion, 1150 W. Harrison
• Tickets, $49.50-$95;
• (800) 745-3000; ticketmaster.com

By Thomas Conner
© Chicago Sun-Times

Much can be made of Janelle Monae's fantastic soul music — its Afrofuturist revival, its wacky narratives, the timing of its critical success during the administration of America's first black president — and something will be made of it right here in this column. But the most important thing to understand about this exciting rising star is this: Don't deconstruct it, just dance.

Any enlightenment to be had will come eventually. Monae works both sides of the truism offered by fellow space cadet George Clinton: "Free your mind and your ass will follow." She's got big ideas behind her words and music, but she doesn't preach. She dances, usually spontaneously.

"I don't choreograph pretty much anything I do," she said last spring in a BET interview. Watch the video for her hit "Tightrope"; she clearly has a relative idea of how she wants to move, but she's also clearly making much of it up as she pivots down that asylum hallway. "So I'm merely creating art right in front of my eyes and the audience's eyes. It's like a spiritual, out-of-body experience. I feel very possessed." She added, in an AP interview: "I want them to allow the music to transform them as much as it's transformed me."

Get them moving, and their minds will follow.

"The ArchAndroid" (pronounced "the ARK android"), Monae's universally acclaimed debut CD, is a highly theatrical statement. When I refer above to her soul music as fantastic, this is not merely a superlative. Drawing from the same wells of other musicians who've used sci-fi and fantasy as African-American allegory, Monae claims a wild backstory to her songs: She is an inmate of the Palace of the Dogs Art Asylum. She has time-traveled here from the year 2719, and her DNA has been used to create an android freedom fighter named Cindi Mayweather, sent to free the citizens of Metropolis from an oppressive group called the Great Divide.

"I believe we're going to be living in a world of androids by 2029," she told the Guardian newspaper, apparently with a straight face. "How will we all get along? Will we treat the android humanely? What type of society will it be when we're integrated? I've felt like the Other at certain points in my life. I felt like it was a universal language that we could all understand."

That capitalized Other — the stranger in a strange land — is a common sci-fi theme and has shown up throughout the legacy of Afrofuturist music, from DJ Spooky's trip-hop back through Dr. Octagon's "Earth People," Digable Planets' "Reachin' (A New Refutation of Time and Space)," Afrika Bambaataa's scratch-cut classic "Planet Rock," even Herbie Hancock's own android assembly in "Rockit." Before that, Clinton's Paliament/Funkadelic launched the "mothership," and the first contact with black aliens occurred right here in Chicago, where Sun Ra landed with his Arkestra in the mid-'50s and eventually claimed "Space Is the Place."

Gerald Majer, in his Beat-like recollection of Chicago's avant-jazz scene, The Velvet Lounge: On Late Chicago Jazz, attempts to describe the tug-of-war between black American history and sci-fi futurism exploding from Sun Ra's early '60s concerts here, enigmatically concluding: "Space is the place: you move in, you move aside, you dance where it divides."

The divide between sanity and madness is central to Monae's cosmology. Her vision of the future is not optimistic, singing in "Locked Inside": "When I look into the future, I see danger in its eyes / Hearts of hatred rule the land while others left outside / Killing, bleeding Citizen, while music slowly dies / and I get frightened, see, I get frightened." The love of her man, however, will keep her from "going crazy."

"So many people deal with so many obstacles every day that they need to relieve some of that stress," Monae said in a recent Vibe interview. "So 'Tightrope' deals with balance and not getting too high or too low. So I just really focused on creating art, songs that I felt would connect to people."

Her musical journey started when Janelle Robinson left her native Kansas City for New York City to study theater. She wanted to be a Broadway star. When that dream faded a bit, she relocated to Atlanta, where she met like-minded artists, like Chuck Lightning, and formed the Wondaland Arts Society (which releases her music, now distributed through Sean "Diddy" Combs' Bad Boy label). Outkast's Big Boi discovered her and began pushing her on his compilations, even slipping her into the Outkast movie "Idlewild." (He guests on "Tightrope"; she appeared on his solo debut this year, too.) The theatrical flair continues — videos are planned for each song on "The ArchAndroid," as well as a graphic novel and, yes, a musical.

So, free your mind — it will come back to you — and trust yourself to just enjoy the groove. Monae's voice is clear and strong. Her music is Motown sharp and James Brown funky. She dances like someone who knows how but doesn't spend a month rehearsing. Last time she was in town, she opened for Erykah Badu and completely upstaged her. (Word so far on this tour is the same is true of her Georgia friends in Of Montreal.) Let the very human beats and belts carry you away, then chat about the big ideas on the way home.

OF MONTREAL
with Janelle Monae
• 7 p.m. Saturday
• Riviera Theatre, 4746 N. Racine
• Tickets, $23, etix.com

 

By Thomas Conner
© Chicago Sun-Times
 
Crowded House called it quits in 1996 after four albums and several modest hits. Granted, most of those hits were on the front end ("Don't Dream It's Over" in 1987, "Better Be Home Soon" the following year), and the band fared better in Europe and its native lands down under. But singer and songwriter Neil Finn's McCartneyesque melodies have survived as a credible, inspiring body of work.

Rumors and requests of a reunion persisted, but in 2005 founding drummer Paul Hester killed himself. The reunion, however — of Finn and bassist Nick Seymour, adding Mark Hart and a new drummer, Matt Sherrod — eventually happened in spite of this tragedy, possibly because of it.

Crowded House Mach II has been a more complex affair, thus far delivering two albums ("Time on Earth" in 2007, this summer's "Intriguer") of densely arranged tunes with wilder undercurrents. We caught up with Neil Finn this week to hear how the new venture is holding together.

Q. How's this tour going?
A. We're in really good shape as a band. It's a very generic answer, but it's true. We've clocked a lot of miles, and our instincts are serving us very well. We're jamming more.

Q. Beg pardon? I certainly don't think of Crowded House as a jam band.
A. Well, as much as our spirit of adventure will allow us. It's not always going to be particularly appealing for the audience to hear us go off together, but we're striking a balance. But I do love the way some songs can be, to some extent, redefined. When I say jamming, I mean throwing a few new angles on the tracks. There are quite a few points in the set where we depart from the script.

Q. Like where?
A. "Private Universe," "Hole in the River" — these have allowed themselves to become quite sprawling, quite intense. Generally speaking, most audiences have seemed quite thrilled with them.

Q. Is there something about the new lineup that lends itself to this happening?
A. We always had that inclination in the old band, though we were regarded as this tight pop band. I think we always had a sense of openness on stage, though. ... We began our career in the first incarnation by busking, the three of us, on streets, in houses, restaurants. So early on there was a freedom, a willingness to get the audience involved and go where you wanted to go. Our drummer at the time [Hester] had a mad sense of abandon and humor, and that became a part of our show. We don't have his presence anymore, but our approach to performing is still looking for those moments that jump off.

Q. You ended the band saying you needed some creative space. Did you find it?
A. Absolutely. I felt hemmed in by Crowded House at the time. I went and made two solo albums, another two with my brother [Tim Finn]. In the course of that I got to play with some amazing people. It was good for the natural restlessness of creativity.

Q. The solo songs called out to be outside the band?
A. It's hard to talk about, but yeah. I suppose I could have done this with the band, or I could've kept the name and done the same thing with other people. But I attached myself to the idea that the band is a fairly involved, encompassing thing and you had to be in it completely; you couldn't come and go.

Q. I remember Rhett Miller speaking about his first solo album away from the Old 97s. People were always asking him, "These sound like Old 97s songs. Why couldn't you just do them with the band?"
A. Right, he toured with me once; I remember that same conversation. He could have; I could have. Sometimes you just have to feel around outside your comforts.

Q. Was re-forming the band inevitable after Paul died?
A. It was part of the sequence of events, no doubt. I was seeing Nick quite a bit in the aftermath of that awful thing. We reconnected and found ourselves playing music, as we do. I was working on what was to be a solo album at the time, but he started to be a part of that process. By the end, we were reconciled to some new spirit of the band. ... It put a good history to our story, so that it wouldn't end in that dark place.

 
CROWDED HOUSE
7:30 p.m. Sunday and Monday
House of Blues, 329 N. Dearborn
$46, livenation.com

By Thomas Conner
© Chicago Sun-Times
 
Chrissie Hynde and JP Jones are slumped in a suite at Chicago's Dana Hotel, utterly discombobulated. Granted, these are rock stars, and it's mid-morning, but Jones — a feline Welshman, neatly groomed but, he admits, hungover — and Hynde wear the vacant, resigned stares of natural disaster refugees.

"I don't know what the f—-'s going on," Hynde says, running a hand through her trademark black mane. "Every day I look around and go, f—-, what is going on? We came over to spend two weeks here, now we're living here. I've never had anything catch fire like this in my career."

She's referring to some intense media and fan interest in her first-ever side project, a rootsy new band called JP, Chrissie & the Fairground Boys. It's a departure from Hynde's three decades leading rock's defiant Pretenders, a moniker that still exists solely because of Hynde's stubbornness and determination in the face of personal tragedy and commercial whim. Last May, without a record even being finished — the CD "Fidelity!" is finally released this Tuesday — she and Jones were trotting across the country, including a stop in Chicago, teasing fans with short sets of the new songs.

But the whirlwind promotional tour was even getting to a seasoned road warrior and expatriate like Hynde.

"I'm totally displaced," she says. "I don't know where I am most of the time, or where I'm supposed to be. I don't know if I'm man or woman. I don't know if I'm American or British. I don't know where I live. ... Men think I'm a man. The guys treat me like one of the guys."

"I treat you like a woman, don't I?" Jones asks.

"I don't know," Hynde replies.

The silence that follows that exchange is beyond awkward, but very telling. Everything there is to know about the mournful music and sighed laments on this record is communicated just as effectively in those several seconds of uncomfortable staring at boots. The union of Hynde and Jones is a dynamic musical partnership, but it's based on a star-crossed, May-December romance.

Star-crossed lovers

Jones, 31, met Hynde, 58, in a bar in late 2008. (Yes, gents, you can still meet people like Chrissie Hynde in a bar. Still wanna call it a night?) There was chemistry, then there were text messages. There was a spur-of-the-moment getaway to Havana, where their personal relationship flamed and fizzled. But it fueled a musical collaboration, and they wrote the 11 songs for "Fidelity!," each of them a naked confessional of an irresistible romance that they say could never really be.

"We made a record that is, yes, very honest. It's some pretty gut-wrenching stuff," Hynde says. "All the songs are written to each other, about each other. ... You know, a lot of people fall in love with people they can't be with. That's what this record is about. It's about falling in love with someone and realizing you can't be with him. He wants kids and a family. I'm too old. It's too late for me."

Right away, over the lilting, sad guitar of the opening song, "Perfect Lover," Hynde and Jones get to explaining what Hynde calls their "unrealistic" love:

Hynde: I smoke and drink and eat too much and other things I shouldn't
(JP: That's why I love you, baby)
I'd like to think I'd never touch what other women wouldn't
(You're not like the others)
I'm a hotbed of addictions, contradictions rule my day
(You're just like me)
I know it's wrong, but the pull's too strong, Lord, help me walk away
I found my perfect lover, but he's only half my age
He was learning how to stand when I was wearing my first wedding band

"Music is a distillation of love and pain," Hynde adds. "Everyone's suffering something. I was crying when I wrote some of this stuff. I mean, it's not that serious. The nature of rock — if you're watching a rock band, you should be laughing at least half the time. We didn't make an album to depress people."

The thoughtful Jones pauses, mulling that over during another strange silence. Finally, he wonders aloud, genuinely worried, "F—-, maybe we have."

A little 'fairground luck'

Hynde, Jones and a supporting guitarist, Patrick Murdoch from one of Jones' former bands, trotted into the Near North studios of JBTV last May, hitting the stage before a small audience of maybe 50 fans. But the instant Hynde appeared under the lights, someone shouted a request for the Pretenders' hit ballad "Night in My Veins."

Hynde's face fell. She hadn't even sat down yet. With a little of the sneer that's endeared her to rock fans for 30 years, she laid down the law for the evening: "Anyone else who says something like that tonight will be ejected from the premises."

Not that the song would have been inappropriate for this pair ("He's got his hands in my hair and his lips everywhere / It feels good, it's all right / even if it's just the night in my veins"), but Hynde is determined to prevent her rock star status from overshadowing her new project with Jones. She was insistent about the billing: JP first, no Hynde.

The relationship began, after all, musically. "I just liked his songs," Hynde says, a little sheepishly, which is saying something for this typically brassy woman. They originally bonded over a discussion of fairgrounds. Hynde has a lifelong love of them, and Jones grew up on the one his parents owned in Wales.

One night, Jones texted Hynde to wish her well before a Pretenders show, on tour supporting the band's last album, the country-rock set "Break Up the Concrete." He said he was sending her some "fairground luck." Hynde liked that phrase and replied, instructing him to write a song called "Fairground Luck." Two days later, it was in her in-box.

"I sent her the song, and she liked it," Jones says. "When she got off the tour, she said, 'Hey, you wanna go to Cuba?' We took guitars to Havana and wrote the basics for the album."

"Fairgrounds just always meant freedom to me," Hynde says, recalling her youth in Akron, Ohio. She's lived primarily in London since the early 1980s. "I loved these fairs that would show up, like, in a strip mall parking lot. I loved that. I loved the gypsy nature of it. The way these people showed up and then moved on to — somewhere else. It was very romantic. And I knew I had to keep moving like that. I left when I was 22 and moved to London. I just left. I feel like I'm still doing that."

Jones had been in a band called Grace, once groomed by EMI as a next-big-thing. It fell apart after two years, and when he met Hynde he'd been fronting a band called Big Linda. Many of those players are now rechristened as the Fairground Boys.

"I was offered a development deal through Universal before all this came about," Jones says. "They were going to put me with, like, 10 big-name songwriters. When a record label wants to put you with 10 different songwriters, how can any truth come out of that? How can you communicate who you are? I felt very pushed, pulled and manipulated. They wanted me to wear certain things, dye my hair. Chrissie and I got together and wrote our album, and it felt so much more natural. I found myself musically through her. She's my muse. I just walked away from it all."

"I didn't encourage that," Hynde interjects. "I didn't want to be that guy."

Jones laughs. "That guy!"

'The kids are safe'

Hynde and Jones returned to Chicago early this month for a 20-minute set at Lollapalooza — on the children's stage, following Dan Zanes. With old fans and tiny tots watching them play their naked songs about cross-generational lust, Hynde was open about the pair's difficult dynamic. She explained the new album was about "when a woman meets a much younger man and they realize they don't have a future together."

"But don't worry," she added, "the kids are safe as long as I'm on this stage."

The frustrated desire plays out across the span of "Fidelity!" In the first single, "If You Let Me," Jones' coarse, scoured voice warns, "If you don't want me to come in, you'd better lock this door." Hynde describes their first encounter in "Australia," her amazement ("I was propping up the bar on my own / Mostly, guys like you say goodbye to me") as clear as her submission ("OK, pal, take me outta here"). The songs are tuneful, built on guitars and a more pleasing variation of the Americana leanings Hynde explored on "Break Up the Concrete."

That album, she says, didn't get the grassroots interest this one has. But while the promotional efforts have been exhausting, she finds the response exciting. She's especially glad they came to America.

"There's nothing happening in music over there right now," Hynde says. "It's all pop crap. ... We came over here five weeks ago looking for interest. People don't do it like this anymore. There's still all this waiting and planning a strategy. I just wanna get on with it. Why not? I mean, we met in a bar.

"When the Pretenders started, we were in the '70s, coming out of that dreadful prog-rock period. And then punk happened, which was so refreshing in so many ways. It was like bands started being taken seriously without all this posing and styling. They were just themselves. I mean, later today we have to go to some photo shoot for Women's Wear Daily, and they told me to bring four different 'looks.' You know, that is just so not me. This is my look." She gestures to her high, black boots, jeans and black T-shirt. "There's just one, really. But even with that, it just feels fresh now. We've been taken seriously based on our music ever since we came ashore six weeks ago. The whole industry has collapsed, and people are finding an audience without all the trappings and the corporate strategies. Today feels more like 1977 than ever."

But after the flush of new romance is gone, both personally and commercially speaking, what will happen next? Hynde says she and Jones have enough material for a second album, but she hedges.

"A second album would be of a different nature," she says. "We were each other's muse on this album. The next one — I dunno." A beat. "Things have changed."

And they both fidget through another lengthy silence.

JP, Chrissie & the Fairground Boys are scheduled to perform Oct. 10 at Chicago's Park West, with Amy Correia. Tickets, $25.
 
 

By Thomas Conner
© Chicago Sun-Times

Listening to Jimmy Webb's stable of once-upon-a-time hit songs — "Wichita Lineman," "Galveston," "By the Time I Get to Phoenix" — you'd think he had a GPS in his writing room.

The Oklahoma-born songwriter left home at age 16. In short order, he was writing songs for artists in the late '60s and early '70s, songs that became big hits, like "Up, Up and Away" for the Fifth Dimension and "MacArthur Park" for Richard Harris, Waylon Jennings and Donna Summer. Those other hits all belong to Glen Campbell.

Webb, 64, is on the road again, out playing some dates this month to support his first CD in a few years, "Just Across the River." The album features many of Webb's hits reborn in loose new arrangements and featuring guest singers such as Billy Joel, Willie Nelson, Vince Gill, Jackson Browne, Lucinda Williams, Campbell and more.

"We're in Chicago in a few days, then playing Largo in L.A. — I've got five sons and a daughter out there, plus my father, who's 87 — then Seattle, Nashville. I thought it was just a bunch of gigs, but I guess that's a tour," Webb says in his easygoing Oklahoma drawl. He's chatting from his home on the north shore of Long Island, N.Y., where he says he's really a homebody. But in order for home to have real value, you have to be glad to see it again.

Q. Why are you still traveling and touring?
A. Mainly because the alternative is to ossify and die. It sounds corny as hell, but music is my life. I've been lucky that I got away with this for so many years, that I've been able to do something I love doing and sometimes even get paid for it. To be honest, making music is not a real job, not like running a metal press on an assembly line somewhere. It's full of great moments of joy and passion, and interaction with the audience — which I enjoy more and more. Shaking hands, signing autographs, collecting anecdotes from people who've spent their lives on the other side of the speaker listening to what I have done and what my friends have done. I take a lot of energy from that. ... But at the same time, there's no place like home.

Q. Once Glen Campbell and the others had hits with those geographical songs, were you pegged as Rand McNally?
A. Success begats a certain kind of success. If you do a certain kind of photograph and it's successful in an ad campaign, you become known for that kind of photograph. It's like typecasting in movies. When I started writing about places, it was because I wanted to. I remember being a little uncomfortable once people started asking me to do it. [He pauses.] I started to say I don't do that anymore, but on Judy Collins' new album, which came out the same day as mine, she's got my new song "Paul Gauguin in the South Seas." So there I go again.

Q. Can you just not help yourself?
A. It's something at a very deep level in my consciousness. I tend to relate to places. I have a backlog of cinematic images and of places I've seen that I fall back to.

Q. Are your geographical references essential to the lyrics? Could the song have been "By the Time I Get to Seattle"?
A. It wouldn't have been a hit. [Laughs.] In that case, the location was important because I was in a real circumstance of having trouble in a romantic relationship, and I had decided to pack it in and drive back to Oklahoma. That whole song is about that trip back to Oklahoma, even though I never got around to making that trip. Phoenix is on Route 66, as is Albuquerque and Oklahoma City. I was born on Route 66 in a little town called Elk City. ... It had to be Phoenix for that song.

Q. Because you say, or because the song demanded it?
A. Sometimes these things, they make their own decisions. They take a certain line and you follow along and keep up because the song knows where it wants to go. Sometimes it's too good to be true and writes itself. Sometimes it's like scaling Mt. Everest, or being born and dying and being born again. ... "Gauguin" was a very difficult song to write. I knew the story was in there, and I knew I knew that story. I knew what it was like to work and have it unappreciated and want to run away from all the trappings of civilization. I Still sometimes pull my hair out with frustration at the whole urban groove and the rut we allow ourselves to get into, how hard it is to break out, how silly it is when you're sitting in, say, a place like Lanai, Hawaii, and thinking about New York. That's silly. But by the time you negotiate security and get yourself back on the plane, you've slowly indoctrinated back to the discipline and rigidity of the confines, the prison-like atmosphere of the urban areas we live in.

Q. So what places do you escape to?
A. Part of me is still an Okie. I like wide-open spaces. I like to get on my boat ... [On my end of the conversation, a siren screams through north Chicago streets. Webb pauses, hearing it, and says, "Speaking of the urban prison."] I like to have a nor'easter rattling my front teeth. I like to see nature acting out.

Q. You've revisited your catalog before, particularly in concerts. Why take the celebrity-guest approach on the new album?
A. It was never intended to have a lot of celebrity artists with it. That's a fact. If we discussed it at all it was to say let's not have celebrities involved. ... The main purpose of this album was to shed all the affectations of urban life, including the southern California pop roots I have. I at least have some capillaries. Some aspirations of my recording career have included the desire to make big production albums along the lines of Elton John or Billy Joel. Now that's silly. It's been done and done well by guys who will always do it better than I can. Freddy Mollin [the album's producer] said, 'We should go to Nashville, get top-line musicians, literally the very best, line 'em up and work it out so we're all in the studio on the same day.' These are busy guys. 'We'll cut 13 tracks in two days, and you'll have an epiphany. You'll have the most joyful time you've ever had in the studio.' He said, 'Just go back to the kitchen table in Oklahoma with your father sitting there strumming his old steel-string Silvertone guitar, singing "Red Sails in the Sunset," ... and let it go. It's the way you sound best.' I've learned Freddy is right most of the time. ... Sure enough, we had a ball. ... It was a nostalgic plunge into the swimming pool of memory and sentiment and the DNA of growing up as a country kid.
 
 
JIMMY WEBB
7 p.m. Saturday
Lincoln Hall, 2424 N. Lincoln
Tickets: $25, lincolnhallchicago.com

By Thomas Conner
© Chicago Sun-Times
 
Nearly everyone in the Wainwright family writes and performs songs, often about each other. So when one of them passes away, one of the stages of grief is to write an album about the loss. Loudon Wainwright III, the patriarch of this postmodern Carter family, reflected on the death of each of his parents in an album each (1992's "History" after Loudon Wainwright Jr. died, 2001's "Last Man on Earth" after his mother died).

Friday night, two of Loudon's kids were on stage at Chicago's Bank of America Theatre. Daughter Martha Wainwright opened the show with her powerful anti-love songs, and she acknowledged the new grief hanging over the family following the death of their mother (Loudon's ex-wife), Canadian folk icon Kate McGarrigle. "My songs are already pretty depressing," Martha said, promising she wouldn't be delivering any songs about the loss of her mother. "I don't want to subject you to what might come out now."

Rufus Wainwright, however, though he might rankle at this suggestion, is more his father's son than he realizes. He has no qualms about laying bare his grief and despair before a paying audience, though he's usually less direct, and the first act of Friday night's concert was a highly artistic, touring funeral service.

Before Wainwright arrived on stage, the theater audience was instructed that this first act would be presented as a song cycle — no applause until the very end, please. (This announcement came before everyone was in their seats, however, so a few enthusiastic latecomers were confused and possibly mortified when they clapped and hooted after the first song, and were shushed.) Wainwright then entered the stage, backlit, walking one step at a time and dragging a 17-foot black train mounted with feathered shoulders, designed by Zaldy Goco, a costumer for Michael Jackson and Lady Gaga, among others. He lowered himself at the piano with somber face and began playing the entirety of his new album, "All Days Are Nights: Songs for Lulu."

An album of complex solo piano songs, "All Days Are Nights" has a smartly sequenced ebb and flow and thus succeeds in a beginning-to-end presentation. The accessible pop of the first few, however, gives way to some fairly complex playing, which during "The Dream" became so technical Wainwright lost focus on his singing. His notorious tenor, almost all sinuses, requires focus even when he's not running up and down the keyboard, but the occasional dissonance between the two heightened a sense of unease — even moreso than the sleepy blinking eyes hovering over him, video visuals courtesy Scottish artist Douglas Gordon.

Except for the three Shakespeare sonnets in the middle (momentum killers, all three), many of these songs are infused with just such unease, with restless thoughts and grief, written as they were in the months that McGarrigle's cancer worsened (and after he completed work on his first, semi-acclaimed opera, "Prima Donna"). The musical answering machine messages about her declining condition in "Martha" are briefly combated with the spirited lashing out and jaunty parlor piano of "Give Me What I Want and Give It to Me Now." It all marches toward the end, with "Zebulon," another song that mentions his mother's illness — but one that she liked so much that Wainwright played it at her funeral. Friday night, he clanged the song's chords slowly, slowly, like mournful church bells, and hesitated in the last lyric, "We'll have some tea and ice cream," just enough to transform it into: "We'll have some tea, and I ... scream." Then the processional, in retreat.

The second act, with Wainwright back and smiling, fresh and plucky in a peach-colored patterned suit, was a life-saver. Now he played as he did in the first fumbling years of his career, as a saloon singer, banging out grand, sweeping tunes on a piano and telling the occasional amusing story. But this set was suffused with loss in its own way, including "Memphis Skyline," a song he wrote about the death of singer Jeff Buckley, and his old stand-by, the hymn-like cover of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah."

And like those creepy blinking eyes, McGarrigle was watching over this set, too, a song cycle of its own that opened with "Beauty Mark," a song celebrating McGarrigle from Wainwright's acclaimed self-titled debut CD, and ended with one of McGarrigle's own tunes, "The Walking Song." Introducing the latter, Wainwright spoke of his mother for the first time, thanking fans for their outpouring of support and referring to his current circumstance as "a very treacherous game of life." The song nears its end with, "We'll talk blood and how we were bred / talk about the folks both living and dead / This song like this walk I find hard to end."

Wainwright has filled his career with tributes to things he says he misses, though often they're things he was barely around to experience, anyway — the Judy Garland concerts at Carnegie, a heyday of opera, even Buckley, with whom he spent just a few hours. He falls in love with the hindsight of them, and his yearning is similarly rose-tinted. The loss of his mother, though, is a stark experience he sees clearly and is working out the only way a Wainwright, not so much a McGarrigle, knows how. As such, his grief feels less shared than inflicted, but this concert seemed to marry his dreams and realities in slightly pretentious but exciting new ways. Bring on a new opera.

Martha's opening set cannot go unmentioned. She appeared onstage five minutes early, grabbing her guitar and launching into an example of her own, serrated approach to baring her heart in song, "Bleeding All Over You." Like her brother, she overstylizes her singing so much that it's often difficult to understand her, but she possesses a voice so powerful that her Dolly Parton crescendos draw yelps and whoops despite the words. Thankfully, she included a few songs from her new, hard-to-find (but oh-so worth the dig) plainly titled CD, "Martha Wainwright's Edith Piaf Record," further proof that hearing her belt in any language is a treat. She received her own standing ovation.
 
 
 
 

By Thomas Conner
© Chicago Sun-Times
 
Rufus Wainwright has been busy. Lordy, has he been busy.

In the three years since his last studio album, "Release the Stars," he's ping-ponged from one ambitious project to the next. He performed sensational tribute concerts to Judy Garland at Carnegie Hall and elsewhere. He wrote music for 24 of Shakespeare's sonnets and performed them for a theatrical production, "Sonette," with director Robert Wilson in Berlin. He sang Berlioz's "Les Nuits d'ete" in New York. He even composed an entire opera, "Prima Donna," which enjoyed a successful premiere in Britain.

So perhaps it's not surprising that for his return to the recording studio, he sought to back off, downshift, quiet things a bit. "All Days Are Nights: Songs For Lulu," released this spring, finds the sweeping, murmuring singer-songwriter sonically naked — just his voice and piano.

"I threatened to do this a while ago," Wainwright says in an interview from a brief oceanside respite before beginning a U.S. tour. "Unfortunately, I needed the proper life circumstance in order to dig into it. Given the sad opportunity with my mother's passing and the exhaustion from working on the opera, the lone piano became my cocoon, shield and confessional."

Rare is the news article about Rufus Wainwright that doesn't allude to the musical dynasty from which he sprang. The mother that passed — that's Kate McGarrigle, beloved Canadian folk singer, who died of cancer in January. His father, still kicking, is rascally American folk singer Loudon Wainwright III. His aunt, Sloan Wainwright, writes and records, as does his sister and omnipresent backup singer, Martha Wainwright.

But Rufus and Martha were raised by Kate in Montreal, and Kate's death is an occasional and prominent lyrical thread on these 12 new compositions. They're not pop songs. They're sometimes complicated odes to grief, love and the tempest of life. In "Zebulon," it all begins piling up on him: "My mother's in the hospital / my sister's at the opera / I'm in love but let's not talk about it / there's so much to tell you."

"It all happened in concert," Wainwright says. "This album was finished right before she passed away and was released after her death.

"As Mom was passing, I had to face myself and the possibility of being alone. We had been so close. The piano was her main instrument, a vision I always acquainted with her presence. The technical difficulty of this enterprise was synonymous with the grief itself."

In "Martha," he puts music to plaintive phone messages for his sister, as if turning his father's song "OGM" inside out:

Martha, it's your brother calling
Time to go up north and see mother
Things are harder for her now
And neither of us is really that much older than each other anymore
Martha, it's your brother calling
Have you any chance to see father
Wondering how he's doing
And there's not much time
For us to really be that angry at each other anymore

"It is like something my father would write," he says, "perhaps as a kind of directness and slight aggression there, too, which he's well-known for." He laughs. "But I just hit 37. I'm well past the youthful bohemia I once inhabited so grandly."

The current tour presents a show in two acts. The first half contains the entire new album as a song cycle, with Wainwright at the piano and no applause. Then Wainwright returns for the second act "and we have fun and sing the old favorites."

Part of the first act, though, includes some of the Shakespeare sonnets, a project he says he tackled as a theatrical warm-up ahead of his opera. Wainwright includes three of them on the new album, including "Sonnet 10" ("For shame deny that thou bear'st love to any / Who for thy self art so unprovident") — the "gay one."

"I think of it as gay, anyway," he says. "For me, it reeks of a drunk old queen who's gone a little too far in one of his histrionic lessons. I can visualize it. You can definitely tell the poet has overstepped his bounds emotionally with this young man and shown a little more than he intended through his affection." A discussion of Shakespeare's sexuality follows.

"Shakespeare got it," Wainwright concludes, meaning he understood two sides of sexuality, but then he chuckles the punch line: "He probably gave it, too."

Wainwright returns to Carnegie Hall on Dec. 29, around which time he promises an "exciting" announcement related to a U.S. production of "Prima Donna."
 
 
RUFUS WAINWRIGHT
• 8 p.m. Friday
• Bank of America Theatre, 18 W. Monroe
• Tickets, $46-$56
• (800) 745-3000; ticketmaster.com

 

This post contains my complete running coverage of this annual festival ...
© Chicago Sun-Times

Lollapalooza 2010 starts, rocks and raps with B.o.B.
By Thomas Conner on August 6, 2010 12:23 PM
 
11:30 a.m. in the sun, and the sixth annual Lollapalooza in Chicago's Grant Park is under way. Already people are lined up at the bars, and the faint breezes are redolent with sun lotion, damp lawns and — there it is — a little marijuana smoke.

The first act of the day is one who doesn't deserve the crappy time slot: B.o.B., a chart-climbing hip-hop newbie with one of the year's best-selling records. He's a double-edged attack — one minute spitting quick, punchy rhymes at the growing crowd, the next playing guitar like an indie rocker, even covering a little of Vampire Weekend's "The Kids Don't Stand a Chance." (There's a cynical joke in there somewhere about the kids about to be assaulted by corporate shilling for three days ...) Atlanta's B.o.B. can deliver something for everyone. "Letter From Vietnam" is a guitar ballad, a '60s — or maybe just Lenny Kravitz-like — protest song. He picked up a guitar for it, then asked permission to keep playing it, as if he were breaking some rules to crossover back and forth. He held up his hip-hop, taunting us with "Past My Shades" and making the women in the crowd smile with "Nothin' on You" ("Beautiful girls / all over the world ..."). He mixed the rock and the rap in "Don't Let Me Fall." Fun, cheery, a good opener to the weekend's smorgasbord.

The fields are filling up, and be warned: They're not completely dry from the rain earlier in the week. Several spots are still squishy, with the potential for turning into complete pudding once the weight of thousands squeezes the water out. Don't wear your favorite shoes.
 
 
Lessons in old-school from the Walkmen, Raphael Saadiq
By Thomas Conner on August 6, 2010 3:45 PM
 
Mid-afternoon Friday in the south field at Lollapalooza was about being old-school.

The Walkmen have been together 10 years. They manage to sound relatively fresh while drawing upon sounds and song styles much older than themselves, namely the squeezing, wheezing Dylanesque singing of Hamilton Leithauser, the 1950s-echoed guitar of Paul Maroon and the eerie cocktail organ of Walter Martin. Here's a band that began — born from the ashes of short-lived but explosive Jonathan Fire*Eater — all about creating certain instrumental tones. But the acquisition of Leithauser wound up deepening not only the sound but the songwriting. The new songs played from the band's upcoming next album, "Lisbon," due Sept. 14, are rich tales of wary living ("You're one of us or you're one of them," Leithauser shouted over and over) and worn romance ("There's a girl that you should know / she's from my not so long ago"). In a white button-down shirt, with sleeves rolled up, and a black tie, he leaned into the microphone, plungering his tenor through the very top of his sinuses for an incredible elongated moment during "All Hands and the Cook." One wonders how he maintains his voice over the course of a tour, but he sounded great here. Looking forward to the next disc.

After that, as Chicago's Mavis Staples took the stage in the north end of the field, a younger soul icon brought his own lessons in old-school on the main Parkways stage: Raphael Saadiq. Once a pioneer of New Jack Swing (we can now justifiably giggle at that label) in the group Tony! Toni! Tone!, Saadiq now looks like a traveling education in classic soul, complete with almost 12 band members in black Blues Brothers suits. He can lay down smooth, supple grooves, with a band that sounds as if they could back B.B. King later tonight, and talk sexy to the crowd simply singing, "Yeah, yeah, yeah," and then punch it up with a rock 'n' soul hit like "So Lady."
 
 
Are we not men? Well, they are still Devo!
By Thomas Conner on August 6, 2010 6:47 PM
 
Is Devo sympathizing with humanity's plight, or just making fun?

In what was surely the most subversive set at Lollapalooza today — Lady Gaga's still to come, but she seems merely flashy and bawdy rather than really subversive — 1980s icons Devo blasted their modern folk songs about the plight of the working man and the diminishing of humanity in our automated world. Jogging on stage in gray uniforms and "Phantom of the Opera"-like half-masks, these plainly old men seemed to be rolling with the wonderment of being back at Lollapalooza, which they played years ago when it was a traveling festival (and even then were the quaint ol' vets). "It's 2010!" said Bob Casale, midway through a dynamic, multi-media set. "And we're here to f—-ing whip it again!"

Singer Mark Mothersbaugh leapt about the minimalist stage — just a drum set, two synth stands and guitars, spaciously arranged — looking extra robotic, wearing mirrored shades over his mannequin mask. But though their music has the rhythm of machinery, these are songs about the sad and worsening state of man. Even an old hit like "Girl U Want" has Mothersbaugh singing, "Look at you with your mouth watering ... she's just the girl you want." It's a common theme to Devo songs, blippy and innocent as they may appear on the surface. Look at yourself, they say. Be aware of your "Uncontrollable Urge," fight against "Going Under." Pay attention, because Madison Avenue is exploiting your urges and your apathy to make you buy things. And, hey, so are we.

As they sang "What We Do" ("breeding, pumping gas, cheeseburger, cheeseburger, do it again"), silhouetted images of various product icons flashed on the screen behind the stage, icons like the PlayStation controller and other basic "necessities" being hawked several hundred feet behind the crowd amid a forest of logos. It's machine music about reminding ourselves that we are men, not necessarily de-evolving, and it sounds as important today as it did in 1980 when computers and synthesizers were newfangled. After all, as Mothersbaugh sang to close the set — after jumping around with pom-poms, again either cheering this downward slide for our species or trying to empower us to reverse it — "A man is real! Not made of steel!"

Devo was bookended late Friday afternoon in the south end of the field by opposite ends of the energy stream. The Big Pink played beforehand, defining dullness. A limited grayscale instead of a declaration of color, they whined through a short set of electronic drone and drudgery ("fall like dominoes, fall like dominos," zzzzz). After Devo, however, came the perkiest kids in indie-rock: Matt & Kim. Every now and then, one of these coupled drum-and-something duos comes along, but never as relentlessly cheery as Matt Johnson (vocals, keyboards) and Kim Schifino (vocals, drums). Opening with one of several instrumental fanfares they'd play, Johnson asked both Schifino and the crowd, "Are you ready to get wild?" It takes some doing to pump up a festival-size crowd when you're only two strong, but these two have tactics. Schifino smiles so wide and so hard its almost threatening, the kind of unwavering grin you can only learn in realty school or have drilled into you by Sue Sylvester. Johnson doesn't allow the keyboard to hem him in; he jumps, he kicks, he climbs, he strikes Grecian urn poses. He had to catch his breath after only the third song. The songs — "Good Old-Fashioned Nightmare," "5K," "Light Speed" and, yes, "Lessons Learned" (the one with the video of them stripping down in Times Square) — with Johnson's plunky, piano-lesson melodies, don't always live up to the party vibe of the hosts, but they throw a lively one nonetheless.
 
 
Lollapalooza centers on Lady Gaga's Broadway bluster
By Thomas Conner on August 6, 2010 11:53 PM
 
Early this year, Lollapalooza founder Perry Farrell said Lady Gaga's performance would be the "centerpiece" of this summer's sixth annual concert festival in Grant Park. He said $150,000 was spent on the staging for the pop star's Monster Ball Tour theatrics.

In a conversation backstage Friday afternoon, Farrell said, "Did you see how many trucks she has? 18! And one of them is just for her wardrobe."

At this point, after a rise in the pop culture that defines meteoric, Lady Gaga is the centerpiece of any space she inhabits. Her gravity sucked most of the total crowd — estimated by Farrell at 80,000 strong Friday — from Friday's other headliner, the Strokes. The guy standing next to me throughout Gaga's show? Wearing a Strokes T-shirt.

So rock is dead, and somehow Broadway won. Lady Gaga's performance was a highly scripted, bewildering, bedazzled psychological drama, with production values right off the Great White Way.
Her two-hour set played like a jukebox musical — a bunch of Gaga hits strung together with a loose story line about kids in a broken-down car trying to get to the Monster Ball.

Our Lady first appeared in silhouette, singing "Dance in the Dark" in the first of many outlandish costumes fresh off the semi, including enormous shoulder pads, a nun's habit with a see-through plastic suit, a huge fringed lampshade, even the same disco-ball bra she wore when she played a Lollapalooza side stage for a small crowd as an unknown in 2007. She tackled all the hits — "Just Dance," "Love Game," "Poker Face," an encore of "Bad Romance" — from her two albums.

But the songs themselves seemed inconsequential next to Lady Gaga's evangelism. If you've ever been picked on, scorned, denied or in any way counted out, Lady Gaga wants you to know, she understands. Numerous litanies — frequently punctuated with unusually hoarse, throaty, Courtney Love screaming to get her point across — hammered this point, even if the songs only do indirectly. Born Stefani Germanotta, she was picked on in school, which she mentioned four times. Her conquering of pop culture and filling of Grant Park, she seemed to conclude, is vindication and validation. And you can have this, too. Let your freak flag fly with pride and you, too, shall be saved!

Someone's gotta say this to every generation, and it might as well be her this time around. She's just not adding a whole lot to it other than an overload of drama. Girl kinda needs to get over herself.

The attitude behind this is very aggressive, too, and you can see it in the choreography — all punches and thrown elbows and monster claws. Everyone on stage frowns and sneers. The band members flip each other off. The bassist is dressed like a military commando. Gaga's expletive-laced homilies end with screams that say, in essence, "F—- you, world!" She rips her stockings, she smears herself with blood, she's seen in a video dressed in delicate chiffons — and a gas mask. She strives to obliterate every convention of beauty, and she says she's doing it so we can "be FREEEEEEEE!"

"What I really hate," she added, "I hate money." (spit take!) Then the ridiculous scream again: "I don't want your money, I WANT YOUR SOOOOOOUL!" This before she tried to out-sacrilege Madonna (a profane prayer, a bleeding angel statue, comparing herself to Jesus) and added, in possibly her truest statement (despite also explaining that, next to money, she really "hates the truth"): "I don't care who you are or what you believe, all I care about is what you think of me."

What I think of her: She's an incredible talent, but she's buried it in all this showy nonsense that she seems to think has grand, transcendent meaning. When things quieted down and she sat at the piano, alone, she was stunning and truly entertaining, holding the crowd in the palm of her hand with greater power than the dancing and the mugging and the light show. She's got a helluva voice and can control or dish the vibrato with a master's skill. "Speechless" easily leaves a listener just that way, and a new song, "You and I," was a killer ballad with meat on its bones. She sounded like Bonnie Raitt when she sang it, and she certainly left us all something to talk about.

These piano ballads were also the only time we saw a sign of real humanity from Lady Gaga. She smiled. Before and after these two moments, she strutted through her performance with an eerie lack of facial expression, a completely vacant face, even when screaming. Here, she gave a shout-out to her dad. She brought out her former partner, Lady Starlight, for a brief dance routine to Metallica's "Metal Militia." She laughed. As she pounded out "You and I," she looked moved, awestruck, impassioned.

But the humanity disappeared once back on script. Then it was little more than cues and costumes and ... fireworks. It was "family night" with the Chicago Bears tonight at Soldier Field. Just as the curtain went up for Gaga's third act, a barrage of fireworks went off directly behind the stage (and over Soldier). A lot of people in the crowd wondered if this was part of Gaga's show — understandable given the aforementioned $150K spent, her obvious penchant for production excess and, hey, the fireworks lasted exactly as long as it took for Gaga & Co. to dance their way through "Monster."

No, they were really just an omen. See those, Stef? See how brightly they burn, and how quickly they fade?
 
 
Making it work with Wild Beasts, Stars, Soft Pack
By Thomas Conner on August 7, 2010 5:17 PM
 
Saturday lunch hour and the north field of Lollapalooza is lurching and leaning into the straightforward rock of the Soft Pack. This San Diego quartet effects nonchalance — "Here's a new song. Whatever." — but plays like they mean it, filling the park, already packed with reddening bodies, with a grinding, fat-bottomed sound. They're the Fall, no, now they're the Hives. Matt Lamkin is as exciting singing lazy "all right's" and "oh yeah's" as he is roaring with conviction that you should "Answer for Yourself." Basic and emboldening, the way a Saturday morning should be.

In the park's Petrillo Band Shell, next came the Wild Beasts. Such nice blokes, these British boys. Not beastly at all, thanking us kindly for our attention and wishing us a wonderful day. And the music, all chiming guitars and soaring vocals. Just beautiful.

Until you start hearing what they're singing about. There are tales of hoodlums running wild in the streets, "scaring the oldies into their dressing gowns." There are serious threats against "any rival who goes for our girls." The title track of the British band's sophomore CD, "Two Dancers," recounts almost "Clockwork Orange"-like violence: "They dragged me by the ankles through the street / They passed me round them like a piece of meat." The disc's opening track, all humming synthesizers and beautiful bass lines and wood-block rhythms, finds singer Hayden Thorpe, sounding like a demented Jimmy Somerville, howling, "This is a booty call ... my boot, my boot, my boot up your ——hole." Alas, there was no one posted to the sign language station for this show; demonstrating those lyrics would've been added entertainment.

But the Mercury Prize-nominated Wild Beasts are a surprisingly great festival band, their cinematic songs and layered effects luring half-interested fans to the sun-baked pavement in front of the band shell. The sun is warm today but not brutal, and occasional relief from clouds add to the dreamlike feeling, especially with the right music. Thorpe sings mostly in an airy falsetto, a rare treat in modern rock, and it's more than a gimmick. It's difficult to imagine this music wrapping around another kind of voice, not with that light, vibrating timbre to the bass, not with that ringing Johnny Marr-ish guitar. Yes, there's the Smiths reference. Listening to the Wild Beasts, it's not unrealistic to trace the family tree of their leering, melodic style back through Gene (the Smiths of the '90s) to the debut of Morrissey, another daring high-scale singer. Bassist Tom Fleming takes occasional lead singing duties, too, alternating between a low bellow and his variation on the upper register as he did on "All the King's Men," from "Two Dancers." Earlier material had more spunk, a livelier step ("Brave Bulging," "The Devil's Crayon"), but the show came to a big, satisfying finish with the new "Hooting and Hollering."

Some bands, though, struggle to present themselves well in the heat of the afternoon sun. Canada's Stars tried to puff up their delicate sound, making themselves seem larger — good advice if encountering a bear in the woods, but as successful if encountering thousands of expectant fans in an urban park. This is a band that crafts intelligent mini-suites about romantic intrigue, led by two singers (Torquil Campbell and Amy Millan) with thin, soft voices. With the tracks carefully separated on CD, it's moving and magical. Live, it's sometimes a challenge, moreso outside of a dark club or theater. The band started slowly on Saturday, moving in slo-mo for some kind of effect and showering the crowd with white roses and the mylar debris of several hand-held confetti cannons. But that couldn't quite fill the void. Millan was sometimes hard to hear, intoning almost at a whisper (on "One More Night"), and Campbell forced his voice a little too hard in an apparent effort to be heard, though often he wasn't, either. When they joined together for "We Don't Want Your Body" — a new song that one of my companions said sounds alarmingly like a Debbie Gibson comeback effort — they at least began to pick up steam, charging to the end of the hourlong set with ripping takes on "I Died So I Could Haunt You," "Take Me to the Riot" and the closer, "Your Ex-Lover Is Dead."
 
 
Green Day plays on ... and on and on
By Thomas Conner on August 7, 2010 10:29 PM
 
Friday night, Lady Gaga enjoyed the surprise addition of fireworks to her show, courtesy of a fortuitously timed barrage from the Bears' family night at Soldier Field directly behind Lollapalooza's main stage in the south end of Hutchinson Field in Chicago's Grant Park. Saturday night, pop-punk trio Green Day brought their own.

In a two-hour-plus set, singer-guitarist Billie Joe Armstrong, bassist Mike Dirnt and drummer Tre Cool filled the stage with good ol' rock 'n' roll stage antics. Here's a band that has actually gone Broadway, creating a stage musical out of their hit concept album, "American Idiot." But instead of loading down their show with scripted theatrics, they relied on the basics — pyro, fireworks, pulling people on stage and endless exhortations to fans to put their hands in the air.

Note to Green Day fans: Want to get close to Billie Joe? Your chances aren't slim. Study the attention-getting tactics of audience members on game shows such as "The Price Is Right" and "Let's Make a Deal," because that's what a Green Day show has become. Armstrong spends much of the show shopping for fans to bring on stage. Five times, in fact, starting with a student from France, Matthew Sauvetre. He'd been waiting against the barricades all day, and he took the stage during "Know Your Enemy" waving a French flag. After that, Billie Joe pulled a young girl (not older than 10, who he then proceeded to ask, "Keira, do you want to start a f—-in' war?!"), an older woman to help him sing "Are We the Waiting," a small crowd of people and, near the end, a young guy to sing the entirety of "Longview."

Classic gimmicks and a program of three-minute rock songs, however, necessitates brevity. Green Day dragged it on and on. Here's to the simple joys of rawk blown up bigger than life, but by the time we crossed the two-hour mark with the same shtick — pop! roar! OK, my hands would like to lay still for a while — it was beyond wearying.

Thirty years ago, in the heyday of the Ramones (whose recording of "Do You Remember Rock and Roll Radio?" played before the show started), we never could have dreamed that a handful of power chords could propel one band to such heights — 65 million records sold, four Grammys, a Broadway show, headlining Lollapalooza before tens of thousands (Saturday's crowd was again estimated at 80,000 total). An inevitable loss of edge occurs at those altitudes. A decent catalog of socially conscious material was presented Saturday night mostly as mere fun, then devolved into time-filling quotations of hard rock hits (from Ozzy to GNR) and, yegods, "Hey Jude." What WAS fun was when Billie Joe ripped through the power-chorded nuggets with abandon, like "Nice Guys Finish Last," which he finished with a quick, self-satisfied grin.
 
 
Pack your poncho, and other reading
By Thomas Conner on August 8, 2010 11:33 AM
 
Uh oh, rain. A swath of light rain stretches form Chicago due west, with storms in northwestern Illinois. It's all drifting to the southeast and might not trouble the bulk of Lollapalooza's afternoon. But it will heat up today, reaching into the 90s for the first time this weekend. So pack your poncho (no umbrellas, please, people behind you want to see the band) and your water bottle, and look for the booths where you can fill your water bottle for free.

Beyond this blog, other reading for today ...

Soundgarden plays tonight, reunited after 13 years. But their first show was Thursday night at the Vic.
An interview with Yoshiki from X Japan, playing at 4 today.
You dudes and your bandanas.
Lollapalooza takes over Grant Park, so tourists visiting Chicago this weekend are denied seeing one of our most famous landmarks: Buckingham Fountain.
Which, of course, means that when it heats up today, we can jump in it.
Plus: more food options!
 
 
It's the Cribs, not the Smiths
By Thomas Conner on August 8, 2010 3:48 PM
 
How did the Smiths' Johnny Marr become indie-rock's hired gun?

Since the dissolution of the Smiths, Marr has played with a lengthy list of other stars — from the Pretenders and Neil Finn to Modest Mouse and now the Cribs. They don't seem to pick him as much as he picks them up, sidling up to them like a swinger and telling them how much he loves their music. His cred — the ringing, complex guitar he contributed to the Smiths, not his proximity to Morrissey — makes them salivate and, voila!, Marr stays employed.

His work with the Cribs in their early-afternoon set Sunday at Lollapalooza sure seemed like that: work. It's not like he's adding much more than muscle to this band, a trio of brothers before Marr joined a couple of years ago — no distinctive Rickenbacker, no skipping "This Charming Man" kinds of melodies. Just good, hard grinding with the other Jarman boys (singer-guitarist Gary, bassist-singer Ryan and drummer Ross). Which is no complaint; he holds the line solidly — doing his bit on the side of the stage with confidence and a general lack of expression — while Gary and Ryan are free to caterwaul and fling themselves (and their melodies) all over the stage. His chords underneath the desperate squeals of "Cheat on Me" certainly sounded like the Marr we (older fans, that is) could easily recognize, and then finished with use of the whammy bar and a slide. But as the last song disintegrated in feedback, with Gary and Ryan rubbing their instruments on their amps for maximum noise, Marr was putting his jacket back on. Shift's over.

A focus on Marr, however, is just another tragic result of a Gen-X Smiths fan at the helm of this particular report — an unjust diversion from a perfectly good, punkish rock band. The front Jarmans are the real entertainment, Ryan of the bowl haircut and spit-out lyrics, Gary of the pigeon-toed, neck-straining leaps toward the mic. For "Men's Needs," Ryan leapt to a lower platform, pricking a brief solo before the girls in front (wearing Smiths T-shirts). The Cribs lash out at their own songs, yelp-singing and thrashing around, knocking over mic stands without a hint of script. A labored "Be Safe," with jagged video accompaniment of some guy whining about "the complacent ones" (eye rolling here), completely stalled the band's momentum midway through the set, but they rallied.
 
 
Arcade Fire brings the heat at the end
By Thomas Conner on August 8, 2010 11:15 PM
 
Twitter, if you haven't learned this by now, is full of lies. Sunday night, for instance, the Twitterverse was full of cruel rumors aimed at festivalgoers at either end of the park during this final night of Lollapalooza 2010. First, news spread that Eddie Vedder was in town. The mind reeled — maybe we'd get an appearance with south-field headliners Soundgarden, maybe a duet with Chris Cornell on "Hunger Strike"? Nothing happened. Then came word that David Bowie was going to appear with Arcade Fire, headlining the park's north side. He's done it before, albeit a few years ago. Again, alas, nothing doing.

But who needs Bowie? Arcade Fire emerged onto the stage from a bath of amber lights, underneath a video screen showing sunsets, horizons, billowing clouds. Then they launched into "Ready to Start," a song from their acclaimed new CD "The Suburbs." The band's return to Lollapalooza could be likened to Lady Gaga's — once on a smaller stage (in 2005), they now return as triumphant, headlining scenesters. Sunday's performance proved it was no fluke.

Arcade Fire lays down bombastic hootenannies, squeezing every ounce of drama from its dense, epic arrangements and lyrics of challenge and hope. Win Butler, grandson of lounge-era bandleader Alvino Rey, and Regine Chassagne led the large ensemble through an hour of what the Waterboys used to call "the Big Music." An hour and a half set built slowly, full of little pop suites that crept around the stage and eventually exploded with the propulsive force of, um, the band's fiddles, accordions and hand percussion.

From the machine-gun rhythms of "No Cars Go" to the encore of "Wake Up" (what was, in previous years, the Bowie moment), the band cemented its updated art-rock thesis, attributing the previous work of Talking Heads and Mercury Rev but also more mainstream bluster like Springsteen and, especially when Butler sang "Rococo," Neil Young. Somehow, Arcade Fire gets away with everything, no matter how high the moon they're shooting for, and Sunday night's set ended with a distinct ring of validation.

Before Arcade Fire, the National filled the north end of Lollapalooza with its stark but gently applied folk-rock. Sounding like U2 on a bender, or pretty much every American Music Club album, the band was joined early on by Arcade Fire's Richard Parry (introduced as "Richie from Soundgarden") on "Anyone's Ghost." National singer Matt Berninger (right, photo by AP) is a surprising rock star, sheepish, doting, poking his deep voice into mushy staccato singing, while the band hums and plods behind him in its abrasive drone. It all built to a studied squawking and yowling before Berninger plunged himself into the crowd. Despite the racket, though, there's a lot going on in this band; they'd benefit from a more focused showcase here, like (hint, hint) a Millennium Park show.
 
 
X Japan makes U.S. debut, wins converts
By Thomas Conner on August 9, 2010 12:20 AM
 
The other night, referring to the small crowd for the Strokes and the triumph of Lady Gaga, I quipped that rock is dead. I stand corrected.

Making its U.S. debut — after forming in 1982 and re-forming in 2007, with massive popularity in its home country — X Japan took to the Lollapalooza main stage Sunday afternoon and delivered a spectacular, almost operatic performance of big ballads and speed metal.

Given the circumstances of the premiere, a small knot of hardcore fans clustered down front for the show, some of whom traveled from all over the country for this event, dressed to the nines in X Japan's glam-anime style called "visual kei." But by the end of the show, even the mildly curious were won over by the infectious rock drama. Fists were pumping, guys were playing air guitar, people were chuckling at themselves while following suit, making the X Japan sign by crossing forearms in the air. One guy in front of me was so involved in his air guitar, he sloshed beer all over nearby fans.

X Japan only played six songs, but the theater — on the same stage where 36 hours earlier Lady Gaga had brought her bawdy Broadway peep show — was captivating. Bursting to life with plumes of pyro, the quintet launched into "Rusty Nail" with a driving rock melody that dissolved into synthesized strings. Such is the duality of X Japan, moving between hard rock and classical structures sometimes within the same measure. A new song, "Jade," opens with a kind of rumbling guitar attack that would make Metallica take notice, then it's a lumbering power ballad, then it's chugging at a breakneck pace, finally erupting into a guitars vs. drums battle. All the while singer Toshi Deyama — he looks like Roy Orbison and sings with a pinched high tenor like Steve Perry — wails away unlike a man who'd been virtually out of commission for a decade before the group re-formed.

The band's late guitarist, Hide, was able to make the debut, too, several years after his suspicious death. He appeared on the video screens while Toshi sang a slice of "Kurenai." The heart of the band, composer and drummer Yoshiki Hayashi, pounded and rolled his drums (wearing a neck brace to protect himself following drumming-related back surgery) and occasionally moved to a see-through grand piano for transitional music or to kickstart top-heavy ballads like "I.V."

At the end, Toshi asked, "Are you ready to rock?!" But the question wasn't too late, because the crowd, swept up in the frenzy, finally had an answer. "We are!" band members began shouting. The answer was to cross your forearms, marking the sign of X Japan. Over and over, this call and response continued. Once he realized he'd converted the Lollapalooza throng, Toshi changed the chant to "You are!" And we were.
 
 
Company of Thieves and other final notes
By Thomas Conner on August 9, 2010 9:45 AM
 
Some bands from the last loose pages of the notebooks ...

Sunday morning was surprisingly delightful and refreshing for several reasons, which were focused in one area of the park. Rain showers and breezes cooled things down briefly, the Sony Bloggie Stage benefited from this more than most because of its tree-lined, green surroundings, and one of the first acts to grace this stage was Chicago's Company of Thieves. Playing to a remarkably full crowd at this small side stage, the Company played hard. With her band giving its all behind her, singer Genevieve Schatz danced all over the stage, wailing with abandon — throaty in her range, breathy above it, never stopping to think about which was which, just going for it. This isn't a complex band, they play pretty basic pop-rock, but they were certainly spirited Sunday morning, closing with "Oscar Wilde," a popular download from their latest album, "Ordinary Riches." They were joined on the final number by pirouetting youngsters from Framework Dance Chicago; it was a little "Fame," but fun. When the show wrapped, the people around me gave it three "wow's" and a "holy crap." I heartily agreed.

Company of Thieves was on "Live From Daryl's House" once. Some other pals of Hall & Oates, Chromeo, played in the south field Friday evening just before Lady Gaga. Hearing this gig, I wouldn't put them next to Hall & Oates, though. Klymaxx, maybe, or Rick James, Sylvester, certain corners of the Prince catalog. This Montreal duo gets a not-quite-disco groove on, but it never builds a full head of steam. Even the duo's last song, their new single, "Don't Turn the Lights On," sounded like warm-up music on the PA.

Sort of like Switchfoot, ick. The Christian-mainstream band's early Sunday set didn't sound like a live band, just a modern-rock radio station cranked really loud, all pinched and compressed. "Can you hear me? / This is the sound of the desperation bound," they sang in their penultimate song. Yep.

Dawes, midday Saturday on the Bloggie stage, is a curious new artifact. An L.A. quartet of young bucks, they play a dusty genre of country rock harking back to the 1970s Laurel Canyon days (Jackson Browne, CSN, etc.). Their debut disc is called "North Hills." It's bizarre: here's an up-and-coming indie-rock band — young ones, no one's older than 25 — plying a style of music redolent of some of the industry's most bloated corporate-rock indulgences. Just further proof that everything comes back to us. Dawes is good at refreshing this sound, though, a meaty band with a guitarist, singer Taylor Goldsmith, who knows how to punch and pull his lines (just what the world needs, a new Waddy Wachtel). When they harmonize on "Love Is All I Am," they sound not like Crosby, Stills and Nash or Fleetwood Mac but the branch of country music that listened to them. After moseying through "When My Time Comes," I expected an encore of "Magnet and Steel."
 
 
Biggest crowd, plus no sitting on the fence at Lollapalooza
By Thomas Conner on August 9, 2010 2:20 PM
 
Lollapalooza's attendance for 2010 marks its biggest yet in Chicago: 240,000 — that's 80K each day — filled Grant Park this weekend, topping last year's three-day record of 225,000 for the weekend.

The extra bodies had extra room, too. The festival grew 35 acres this year, filling 115 acres. This allowed for significantly easier traffic flow north and south, turning Columbus Drive into a mile-long sidewalk, and avoiding the bottleneck around Buckingham Fountain that caused so many missed sets in previous years. Perry's Stage, for DJs and electronic acts, grew considerably, as did the food area.

Still, the increased space allowed for up to 95,000 participants a day. Festival organizers C3 Productions said they capped attendance at 80,000 this year to "focus on flow and room for the patrons" in the new layout, according to C3 spokeswoman Shelby Meade.

Bigger space also meant more fenceline to patrol — and more opportunity for jumpers who don't want to pay admission.

We watched this happen all weekend long. Anders Smith Lindall reported on one breach involving 30 to 60 jumpers; he got photos of others.

Saturday evening, three young guys rolled over a fence and seemed startled to find themselves behind a bar. They scattered, and security personnel went after them. I saw one apprehended, a teenage boy in a black-and-white checked shirt. He was handcuffed and led out of the fence by security. More than a dozen jumped over the fence Sunday night into the media area. Security later said 15 had been rounded up from that breach. They then sat down and compared wounds — a cut hand for one, bruised leg for another. They chalked it up to "kids being kids."

That said, as of Sunday morning, Chicago Police said they had made just 27 Lolla-related arrests, most of them for fence-jumping.

The extra bodies also mean more money for Chicago's parks.With three-day passes costing $215 this year, the added capacity was expected to bring more revenue to the parks, which get 10.25 percent of receipts.
Last year that meant about $1.9 million for the district's fund-raising partner, Parkways Foundation. The money helped pay for everything from repairs to Buckingham Fountain to scholarships for some of the city's neediest kids to go to park district camps, said Brenda Palm, Parkways' executive director.

 
 

By Thomas Conner
© Chicago Sun-Times
 
'Twas an esteemed watchdog of modern society who once said, "I say, whip it. Whip it good!"

The music of Devo is chirpy and chilly, perky and punky, and the pioneering synthesizer band's early hits are enshrined in the seeming fluff of 1980s pop culture. But when Mark Mothersbaugh and Gerald Casale assembled the band in the late '70s, they had serious social commentary in mind.

The name itself is a shortening of "de-evolution," an idea that humankind actually regresses as it moves forward in time, instead of evolves toward an ever-brighter enlightenment. In the cold but still tuneful medium of electronic new wave, Devo was able to match the message to the medium, producing catchy but often controversial songs about the apeman on the train next to you ("Jocko Homo"), the perils of having "Freedom of Choice" and a rockist-riling cover of the Rolling Stones' "Satisfaction."

The latest revival of the Devo brand came this year with a new studio album, the lively and toothy "Something for Everybody," and a new tour, which includes a stop this weekend at Lollapalooza in Grant Park.

Mothersbaugh spoke with the Sun-Times about the band's revival of misfortunes, how they have tried to use advertising against itself and the pitiful state of the world overall:

Q. What drew you back to the studio after 10 years?
A. We're old-timers, and we forgot what made us stop in the first place. Kidding. Actually, we met with our label [Warner Bros.] and instead of pontificating to us about what a record company is and what an artist does, they said, "We're trying to reinvent ourselves. Maybe you can help us."

Q. The brave new world you've been singing about has arrived. Why join them on their quest?
A. We always want to be a part of something new and changing. The Internet has changed the way musicians and artists create art, and the way audiences experience it. It's even changed what art is. I like it. To me, YouTube is much more interesting than MTV ever was. For what you lose in some sort of quality, just the idea that you can watch this incredible encyclopedia of all sorts of music and art and information, well, I think it would be a really great time to be 20 years old and thinking, "I want to be an artist, but I don't know what to do."

Q. Your first experiences with Warner Bros., I'm guessing, were not open, round-table discussions.
A. [Laughs] There was a marketing meeting when we first landed at Warner [in 1977]. We're sitting around a table with these guys, and one guy goes, "Here's the marketing plan for your music: We're going to put life-size cut-outs of you in every major record store in the country." And then he just leaned back and smiled and the other guys tipped their coffee cups. We looked around. That was it. We said, "How much will that cost?" $5,000. "Can we have that money to make a film instead?" They were like, "A film? What can we do with a film?" We took the $5,000 and made the "Satisfaction" video, and they indeed had no idea what to do with it. We mostly showed it on a screen before we started our shows. But we kept talking about sound and vision, sound and vision. Then along came MTV, and instead of killing rock outright it kind of propped it up for another 10-15 years.

Q. Why is Devo always wrapped up inextricably with marketing and advertising?
A. It goes back to our beginnings. Gerry [Casale, the other Devo co-founder] and I were at Kent State in 1970, protesting the Vietnam War. Gerry was there the day they shot the kids on campus. I was protesting because, OK, they're commies, I don't care. They can have bad government if they want; I don't want us to be napalming them for it. After the shootings, everyone went quiet. So the first thing we learned was: rebellion is obsolete in capitalist culture.

Q. Even though that's the founding image of rock 'n' roll.
A. Exactly, but look how they all change. The Sex Pistols turned into groovy fashion statements. Anything political they were about was turned into a way for capitalists to make money. We wondered: How do affect change in a democracy? Who does it best? Even then, it was Madison Avenue. They don't do it by attacking, they do it by hugging you to death. So while we don't like most of the things they sell us — it's mostly conspicuous consumption and mindless consumerism — the techniques they use work. So we thought: What if we use those techniques for good instead of evil?

Q. You had this conversation with a major record label?
A. This time we did. They wanted us back. We said, "On one condition: Let us use an ad agency for marketing instead of you guys." We talked them into hiring Mother [a new ad agency in Los Angeles], and we talked to them about marketing a brand that had been off the marketplace for 25 years. We did focus groups, color studies, all kinds of things. We wound up using advertising techniques to skewer themselves but also advance our cause, so to speak.
 
Q. Haven't Devo songs have been used in ads for years, hawking all manner of products?
A. We've licensed Devo songs a thousand times, always have, always wanted to. "Whip It" has been "flip it" and "strip it" and Swiffer, I think, made it "Swiff it." To me, if that stupid commercial puts Devo in your head, and some kid who doesn't really know the song hears it and makes a connection to Devo, maybe he'll be proactive to find out what we're all about, hear the real lyrics, make it more important. It's like when "Freedom of Choice" gets used in a beer commercial. I don't drink beer, but if a beer drinker hears the lyric and it makes him think, "What do they mean by that?" that's better than not thinking it.

Q. You play both sides of this game. You write a lot of music for TV commercials. You even used to slip in subliminal messages, right?
A. I did do that early on, yes. I'd sneak in Devo catchphrases, like "Duty now for the future" and "Be like your ancestors or be different." If I didn't like the product, I'd put in "Sugar is bad for you" or "Question authority." It's easy to do. I lost interest after about 40 of them. It's funny, though, when you're unveiling these things in meetings, and you get to the part where you can barely hear "Choose your mutations carefully." I have to be careful not to blush.

Q. Why did you stop?
A. It's not necessary anymore. More people believe in our original concept of de-evolution than ever. Years ago, they thought we just had a bad attitude. We're just about the Captain & Tennille at this point. Honestly, I didn't think de-evolution would happen so soon. But here we are waiting in incredibly long lines at the airport for incredibly old planes with not enough food or water or air, and we have way too many people and no one is talking about the biggest problem on the planet, which is overpopulation. I never thought it would be like this so quickly. But, hey, we do have portable cell phones.
 
 
DEVO
WITH DIRTY PROJECTORS
• 7:30 p.m. Thursday
• Congress Theater, 2135 N. Milwaukee
• $35-$100; congresschicago.com
AT LOLLAPALOOZA
• 4 p.m. Friday
• Grant Park, Michigan and Congress
• $90-$850; lollapalooza.com

By Thomas Conner
© Chicago Sun-Times
 
Lady Gaga isn't known for subtlety or subdued performances, and when she headlines the first night of Lollapalooza 2010 next weekend, she'll no doubt deliver an earful and an eyeful.

Lollapalooza founder Perry Farrell already has admitted to spending up to $150,000 for the production of this single, two-hour performance. Lady Gaga's current Monster Ball tour features 15 over-the-top costume changes, plus a giant gyrosphere, a flaming piano, a neon car, a series of skits and an enormous squid attacking her onstage.

It's a long way from a clunky synthesizer and a disco-ball bra.

Lady Gaga performed three years ago on a side stage at Lollapalooza, long before she conquered the pop-culture world. She wasn't even blond yet.

It was Aug. 4, 2007, day two of the festival in Chicago's Grant Park. A small crowd of about 500 gathered to watch a brunette Lady Gaga, then 20, take the BMI Stage with her partner, DJ Lady Starlight, in the middle of the afternoon. During a 45-minute set, the Ladies played synth-driven dance-pop, including the songs "Boys Boys Boys," "Dirty Ice Cream" and "Disco Heaven."

Lady Gaga strutted across the small stage, singing, dancing, occasionally jabbing at a synthesizer, which she had set up just low enough so she'd have to lean over — flashing her cleavage — to operate it. She wore a black bikini, the top of which was adorned with chains (which she made herself), with high black stockings and heels. Her one costume change consisted of swapping the black bikini top for a mirrored one that turned her breasts into disco balls.

"I wouldn't say she was terrible," says Jake Malooley, now an editor at Time Out Chicago, who wrote a short review of Lady Gaga's appearance for the magazine's blog. (Critics from the Sun-Times and other local papers did not mention the performance.) "It just didn't seem like a Lollapalooza-worthy performance. She was doing this dance-pop sort of thing where she had a DJ, and she would poke a keyboard every now and then. ... It didn't seem very well put together, more about the spectacle than the music itself — dancing and being silly. She didn't seem to know how to play her synthesizer. She had to stop a song and get the engineer to show her how to program a certain sound."

His review that weekend concluded: "But no one's going to accuse Gaga of being a musician, and I think she's aware of that. 'In my day job, I'm a go-go dancer,' she said jokingly. Well, at least I thought it was a joke until midway through the next song she shimmied over to stage left, wrapped her legs around the scaffolding and began twirling while giving the metal pole a few aggressive pelvic thrusts. Very ladylike, indeed."

The revealing clothes even earned Lady Gaga some hassle by The Man. While later strolling the park offstage, wearing very short shorts, Lady Gaga was cited by a Chicago police officer for indecent exposure.

"I was wearing very short hot pants and a police officer told me to put my ass up against the fence because I was not appropriately attired to be seen by children," she told the New York Post last year. "I told him I was an artist, but he didn't care. Where I come from, they were just normal hot pants, but in Chicago they were indecent."

The outfit got Farrell's attention, though.

"I remember ... she's got dark-brown hair, she's in a bikini and she's wearing thigh-highs, and she's sweating because she was on at around 3 o'clock," he told MTV in June. "Her music was cool, her show was kind of cool."

The Lady in waiting

From that Lollapalooza to this one — from a few hundred bucks for a stage show to $150,000 — Lady Gaga's career trajectory has defined "meteoric rise."

Before she began turning heads in 2007, she was Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta, daughter of two technology executives and a student at an Upper West Side private Catholic school, with classmates Paris and Nicky Hilton. (In classic, Bowie-esque coyness, she now refuses to acknowledge her real name. "She's not here anymore," she said of her birth name in an interview a week after Lollapalooza 2007. "She's covered in sequins.") Her stage name was derived, she claims, from the Queen hit in 1984, years before she was born.

She grew up playing piano and began writing songs as a teenager, even sneaking out at night to perform at coffeehouses — more Fiona Apple or Tori Amos than the flashy vixen she is now — but 2007 was the year folks began to take notice.

Performing as Lady Gaga and the Starlight Revue, with DJ Lady Starlight (aka Gaga pal and makeup artist Colleen Martin), the duo attracted the attention of producer Rob Fusari, a music-biz svengali who has worked with Destiny's Child and Whitney Houston. He had some advice. "I had read an article about women in rock," Fusari told the New York Post in January, "and how it was getting very difficult for women to break through in the rock genre, how Nelly Furtado had moved into more of a dance thing." The Starlight Revue, he said, wasn't "going in the right direction. It wasn't something kids could relate to." (Earlier this year, Fusari filed a $30.5 million lawsuit against Lady Gaga, claiming she shut him out of proper compensation for crafting her persona and music.)

So Lady Gaga and Lady Starlight began weaving dance beats and Europop into their songs. The gambit worked, sort of. Lady Gaga landed a recording contract with hip-hop label Def Jam. But nothing happened. A debut album was scheduled for May 2007, but the label dropped her after three months.

Enter up-and-coming R&B darling Akon, who took Lady Gaga under his wing and signed her to his own Kon Live imprint at Interscope Records. "I was like, 'Yo, I want to sign that right there. She needs to be under my umbrella,'" Akon told the Huffington Post earlier this year. "She just blossomed into a super megastar, man." And made Akon very rich, he admits. "She's pretty much retired me."

Initially, Lady Gaga worked for Interscope as an in-house songwriter. She crafted songs for the Pussycat Dolls and New Kids on the Block (with whom she toured). Two months ago, a recording made the gossip rounds on the Internet — allegedly of Britney Spears' singing a demo of Lady Gaga's "Telephone," which Spears declined to record for her "Circus" album. Lady Gaga recorded it herself, teamed with Beyonce, and made it a No. 1 hit this spring.

Fame comes quickly

Meanwhile, Lady Gaga was creating her own music and trying it out on any audience she could find. Her first major single, "Just Dance," was released in April 2008. By June, she returned to Chicago, not yet at the arena level; she performed at the finals of the Windy City Gay Idol talent contest at Circuit on North Halsted.

This was also the time when she began experimenting with outlandish stage antics to get a wavering audience's attention. "I remember one show I played where nobody was paying attention to me," she told the New York Post in April 2009. "It was really late, so I took my clothes off. I started playing in my underwear at the piano and I remember everyone was all of a sudden like 'Whoa!' And I said, 'Yeah, you're looking at me now, huh?'"

The natural brunette also bleached her hair blond, allegedly because she was weary of being mistaken for Amy Winehouse.

One of her best friends wrote a piece about Lady Gaga for the May 2010 edition of Esquire. He recalled: "Back in the summer of 2007, there was a night when she popped out of a cake and sang 'Happy Birthday, Mr. President' for my then boss, the owner of Beauty Bar in Manhattan. It was fitting, somehow — the Marilyn reference. I'll quote something she said to me one day around that time as directly as I can: 'No one in the world knows who I am, but they are going to want to know who I am. My first time ever on TV I want to be on a huge show where I play one song. I'm going to come out onstage in my underwear and show the world that here I am and I don't give a f--- what anyone thinks of me."

That same month, Time magazine listed Lady Gaga in its annual run-down of the world's 100 most influential people.

"The Fame," her debut album, finally appeared in the fall of 2008. Over the course of the next year and a half, Lady Gaga would score six consecutive No. 1 singles and sell 8 million records — 35 million singles worldwide.

"Just Dance" was a big hit in the clubs, and it reached No. 1 in January 2009. The next single, "Poker Face," was even bigger, topping charts around the world. "The Fame" earned six Grammy nominations, and won for best electronic/dance album and best dance recording. A pattern was set. The follow-up album wasn't even supposed to be an album. "The Fame Monster" was supposed to be a bonus disc for the debut, but a few extra tracks made it a full-fledged new album last November, just to feed the hungry masses.

The center of attention

Lady Gaga is such a spectacle now, not only is she one of two headliners this Friday (the Strokes are scheduled on the opposite stage at 8:30 p.m.), Farrell says she's the evening's "centerpiece." He just hopes the elaborate theatrics don't overshadow her songs.

"Her presentation is so overwhelming that some may overlook the music," Farrell told MTV Radio two weeks ago. "But the truth is, her music to me is right where music should be. It's on the cutting edge, but it's [also] in the crosshairs of where every musician is aiming these days. She's this hybrid of Yoko Ono, sort of the Plastic Ono Band meets Madonna meets Elton John. She's this beautiful crossing of those things every musician is looking to find. Everyone's looking for that sound, and I think she really hits it.

"The production of her music, the people she's surrounded herself with, the development of her stage show — it's something that, when I think about Lollapalooza, in that gorgeous setting of Grant Park, with the amazing buildings all around us, lit up, I see her and her show as being a centerpiece to the evening."
 
 
 

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.