Dave Chamberlain

Seasons change. So does rock 'n' roll.

To many, it's life-blood--a dangerous, catchy, sweaty, alcohol-drenched, cigarette-smoke-smelling and hard-volume plasma. Of course, Chicago's indie-rock explosion in the nineties went a long way towards neutering and spaying that traditional image--taking experimental play and high-end musical deconstruction to the similar (but opposite) extreme of black metal's self-parody.

But in the last two years or so, a wave of underground rock has hit Chicago like a storm. Many would call it garage rock. While not entirely accurate, the phrase describes a feeling, an aura and an atmosphere of a scene that hails from a city better known for the blues, indie and industrial rock, as well as house music, but definitely not sweaty, smart and catchy rock that sounds like it was recorded in a suburban two-door.

An astonishing number of bands have, in the last two years, flooded the stages of the Beat Kitchen, Empty Bottle, Double Door, Subterranean and Abbey Pub: The Audreys, The Ponys, The Functional Blackouts, The Hot Machines, The Baseball Furies, The Phenoms, The Peelers, Candyland, Miss Alex White, and The Tyrades, to name a few. Hardly any of the above have released full-length records, though some, like The Peelers, are poised to do just that. These aren't three-chords-and-a-cloud-of-dust bands, and they aren't just rehashing the sixties--whether they come from a punk-rock angle or they keep it all lo-fidelity, these bands are good, taking the catch-all definition of garage and spinning it around to their own ends.

In fact, even veterans of the old punk and hardcore wars have taken notice of the recent creative spark. "I pretty much dropped out of music by the late eighties and early nineties," says Dem Hopkins, former manager for hardcore legend The Effigies and punk folk-heroes Naked Raygun and one-time owner of the live-music venue Different Strokes. "Primarily because the music just sucked."

Hopkins returned to the local underground rock scene as the manager of The Audreys (though he recently broke off the affiliation), a relatively new band that takes the crust and seediness from the corners of the Velvet Underground's eyes and spins it into a blood-pumping, modern-rock machine. If that sounds like the Strokes, well there's a distant connection.

"The first thing that got me back was the Strokes," says Hopkins. "I heard them, and I thought, `well something's got to be going on.'" By going to see live music again, mostly national acts, he discovered a bubbling underground of bands that were opening up for the touring acts. "There is no question," he says of the Audreys, "that with what they are doing, the talent is there. And from there, they turned me on to other bands like the Ponys, who are great."

[DROP]But should we even call it garage rock? And for that matter, what exactly is garage rock?

If you're pitting this new breed of Chicago rock bands against the likes of the White Stripes, Hives or Mooney Suzuki, you're only halfway there. "Garage," says Todd Killings, publisher of the locally based, internationally distributed underground rock/pornography magazine Horizontal Action, "whenever I hear the term, it reminds me of sixties music. Like a lot of the major media calls the White Stripes and Hives garage. The word is meant to be a term for crudely recorded music by young kids. But basically, it means simple music, usually catchy and usually based or influenced by the sixties, like the early Rolling Stones."

But this current crop of bands offers a diverse spectrum of sounds. On one extreme, there are The Tyrades and Baseball Furies, two bands composed mostly of Buffalo expatriates who moved to Chicago approximately two years ago, and who adhere to a regimen of loud-fast-hard rules, more in line with punk rock than the White Stripes. On the other end of the spectrum, the Ponys present an almost NYC-slanted art-rock sound with dashes of uncomfortable but addictive melody. The Peelers come more from a straight-rock angle, but well informed by the punk and British invasion sounds from the past.

But whichever historical era that each band chooses to evoke, what they're not doing is the same old, codified garage-rock sound that derives too heavily from the sixties. "Bands like the Ponys, Tyrades and Functional Blackouts, they're all combining a lot of different influences and making it a lot more interesting than the 'Louie Louie' thing," says Killings. "A lot of the more typical garage bands, well, they just don't sound very exciting anymore, because it's been done to death. Take Billy Childish--he's got like sixty albums, but they're all the same. They're all good, but exactly the same. You know what to expect, you know right when the solos are gonna start, what notes they're gonna play. But these local bands are some that are being more creative with the whole genre."

The growth of the scene happened, as with most spiking music scenes, almost overnight. But before they even got started, the scene had a devoted media outlet, as well as its biggest cheerleader.

When Killings and fellow Horizontal Action publisher Uncle Ted first started the magazine in 1997, there were few bands on the local front for them to stick their teeth into. "There just weren't many bands that were into the dirty rock 'n' roll stuff that we liked," explains Killings. With the exception of the Brides and Mashers, the magazine was forced to look to the national front for subjects. "One of the things we wanted to do was give Chicago a kind of presence in that type of music, and of course do a magazine, too."

Early on, the two started booking shows for some of the fledgling underground rock bands, mainly at the now-closed Pops on Chicago and Big Horse. "It was really hard for them to get gigs, even at the Fireside. Back then, everybody had to send a demo tape, and a lot of these bands were side projects of already obscure bands." Despite the fact that some more popular garage-oriented bands of the day--say, The Oblivions--would occasionally play the Empty Bottle (which held the Estrus Records Bottleshock event) or Lounge Ax, Killings notes that "as far as the small bands that weren't world famous, there really weren't many places for them to play. So we kind of tried to open up a little circuit like that for that kind of music too."

The Horizontal Action Blackout, an underground rock festival that this year ran for three days and last year was simultaneously pulled off in four cities, dates back to the Empty Bottle, 1997, kind of. After booking The Dirtbombs, The Wittingtons, The Hookers and The Brides, Blackout hit a slight hitch. "I think the Bottle didn't really take us too seriously at the time," recalls Killings. "Because we were just this photocopied fanzine. So we booked it really far in advance, and they ended up bumping it at the last minute, because they probably didn't think it was anything that would gather too much of a crowd." ("To their credit," recalls Pete Toalson, talent buyer at the Empty Bottle, "they did start working on it far ahead of time. But they wanted us to hold three days--over a weekend--and as it approached, the big names that they'd thrown around just weren't coming together. So about a month and a half before it was supposed to occur, we decided we couldn't take a chance."

Killings cites The Guilty Pleasures and The Brides as two of the Chicago bands who played to their tastes before the resurgence of garage rock took hold. Although members of both exist in other bands, the originals no longer exist. To Killings, it was just situational. "A lot of it was just bad timing on the part of the early bands. If they had stuck it out, especially the Brides, which were one of the last really great Chicago bands, who knows?"

[DROP] Most of the new-breed bands will tell you how it's only been recently that concerts are attended by more than just their friends. Concurrently, the same goes for like-minded bands with whom they often share a stage.

Jered (he uses his last name only) of The Ponys, who formed in 2001, notes that "right when we first started as a band, there were only a few" bands for them to share a bill with. "But," he adds, "there have been a lot more bands to play with in the last year or so." One of the bands that best exemplifies the twisting around of the garage sound, The Ponys play a swirling mix of sometimes heady art-wave, late-seventies lo-fi iconoclastic slashing a la The Fall, and sometimes more direct, fuzzbomb rock. Despite the raves the band receives from its peers, they've yet to release anything beyond a few singles here and there for various underground labels. "We recorded a demo and sent it out when we first started," he says, "but we never got any response."

Around the same time that The Ponys formed, two bands were relocating from Buffalo to Chicago. Jim McCann, who plays in both The Baseball Furies and Tyrades, says that "When we first moved here, there were like no other bands. The only band that we knew of was the Guilty Pleasures, and I wasn't even here yet and then they broke up. We were like, oh fuck, who're we gonna play with? But then all these new exciting bands started popping up, and everyone was really cool." Both the Furies and Tyrades come at it from a punk-rock perspective--the Furies taking an almost buzzsaw approach, The Tyrades a sloppier, almost seventies-punk slant with female vocals. Despite the fact that the Furies have been playing together for nearly nine years, they've only one full-length record to show for it. "The Furies," he explains, "well, we're not really very career motivated. It just doesn't really matter. I like my friends, and I like playing shows. So we didn't really work--I guess that would be the word--hard enough. Like some singles came out when they came out, and that first Furies record came out like two years after it was done. And we're sitting on a record that's almost two years old right now. We're fuck ups."

On the other end of the spectrum from both The Ponys and Baseball Furies, The Hot Machines have made almost instant waves, as much for their alluring, sexy take on upbeat rock as their youngest member, 18-year-old Alex White (who also performs as Miss Alex White). Though the Chicago native has experience playing underground rock in Chicago (she started with the Psychotic Sensation when she was 14), she doesn't really notice a specific spike in the number of people attending the concerts. "There's always a group of friends that come to see you," she explains. "And most of the shows that we play are composed of these groups of friends. It kind of goes according to the venue. There's a big difference between playing the Double Door with the Detroit Cobras, who are gonna sell out the show. Or playing with The Ponys at the Empty Bottle."

The Horizontal Action team, however, notices a difference. "When we started," says Killings, "it was small. The Big Horse was considered to be a normal-sized venue. Forty people. But it was mostly just people who were in other bands, plus friends, and us." Six years later, "it's just a lot of people who weren't around back in 1997-98, they just didn't live here. So there's a lot of a newer crowd, for sure--plus, a lot of younger people, like just to this side of 21."

One thing everyone seems to agree on, is that genesis of these various bands coincides with the radio-friendly explosion of what the mainstream media has dubbed garage rock, with the surge of popularity of the White Stripes, The Strokes and The Hives. Despite the coincidence, none of the bands are White Stripes replicas. "These bands are some of those that are being more creative with the whole genre," says Killings. "Which is why they're probably so liked. It's good to have these bands that are doing different stuff with the same formula, and they can always bring it right back, but they offer a little more danger, and/or unpredictable sound to their music."

[DROP]Regardless of how well developed many of the bands have become in a short time, their moderate success is still relatively new. Only in the last eight months have any of them mentioned been consistently added as openers for touring acts, but as crowds grow, the sheer volume of bands threatens to supplant the old post and indie-rock guard of Chicago.

"It's just like the beginning of a cycle--scenes just seem to go in cycles to me," explains McCann. "Right now, it's the exciting, everyone's friends, lets-see-what-we-can-do-for-each-other part. Which is always the best part. It's nice. I consider everyone we play with pretty much my friend."

(2003-06-18)

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