By Courey Gruszauskas

I compiled this mixtape for myself to play during the last week of my stay in Champaign-Urbana. It served as a summation of my three-and-a-half years of mass book-reading and paper-writing, espresso-serving and ass-kicking (at the coffee and community womb that is Caffe Paradiso), bike-riding and chili-cooking, and beer-drinking throughout the fraternal twin towns. It also served as a way to sever the cord from a place that tends to strangle its young in cheap rent, even cheaper beer, and a lifestyle that is too comfortable for one’s own good.
While my graduate school aspirations have me again looking to Champaign-Urbana’s vast landscape of golden grains and pajama-clad youth, I realize the futile attempt to capture those same feelings and experiences of my undergraduate years. The songs may sound the same, but the words have changed their meaning.
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1. Tally Ho!/The Clean
Innocent organs mimic the bouncing curls of some pre-pubescent girl, latching onto her lollipop as she skips with the beat. While my Freudian Psychology class would suggest eroticism and pedophilia in regards to this image, I will shimmy proudly alongside that little girl, smiling with the simple joy found in those snotty vocals. “Tally Ho!” takes you by the hand, no worries about where it will lead you.
2. I Put a Spell on You/Arthur Brown
With the first hit of those drums, you feel this one in your knees. Gravy-thick organs melt into Arthur Brown’s howl and take you down to the floor. His vibrato brings you back up, anxious and scared with his repetitious “I can’t stand it!” The song stops as hard as it starts, and you wonder why you feel this way. The man’s put a spell on you, for Christ’s sake.

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Posted on October 17, 2007

By Don Jacobson

They’re the world’s biggest and coolest street performers. They set up their primo gear on the sidewalk at the corner of OK Computer Street and Electric Avenue, throw down their PayPal hat on the virtual concrete and just start playing, letting all passers-by on the information superhighway get an earful for free but asking them to reach into their hearts and wallets to contribute to the cause.
Radiohead’s much-discussed Internet business model for its new album In Rainbows is one that has a lot of appeal because, if it works, it would make street buskers out of the most arrogant of rock stars and, oh please let it be so, consign the whole rapacious record industry to the cut-out bin of history.

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Posted on October 15, 2007

By Don Jacobson

Kid Rock: Not just a “lap-dance soundtrack” anymore?
Supposedly not, according to the Los Angeles Times, which says Kid’s new LP, Rock ‘n’ Roll Jesus, is more of a classic rock 8-track ride, along the lines of Bob Seger and, oh my, Skynyrd, than Kid’s usual “lap-dance soundtrack,” the rap metal so beloved of strippers and their fans everywhere. You know, I wish that, rather than at some fancy awards show, Kid Rock and Tommy Lee could have run into to each other at, say, Thee Dollhouse in Tampa. Man, then they could have really settled the whole Pam thing for good right then and there – with a dance-off.

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Posted on October 8, 2007

By Dan Zapruder Phillips

Buried in the lousy/loud graphic design he’d sadly champion for the next few years, we see a message from the man himself, presented in a splotchy typewriter font on crumpled white paper. Amid the surreal-yet-none-too-subtle images of a hypodermic needle bleeding money onto a recording console (!!!) and a heart being flushed down a toilet, it reads: “Originally intended for private use only, this compilation serves as the last original material recorded by (Prince) 4 Warner Brothers Records.”
I like to imagine a more honest rewrite that goes a little something like this: “If U end up not liking Chaos and Disorder, keep in mind that it was never supposed 2 B heard outside of my very large and sparkly living room in the 1st place. But if U love it, that’s because it’s made out of super-secret UNDERGROUND jams I pulled from my highly sexy Vault. Just so we have that str8. Rave Un2 the Ecstatic Whatever. –P.”

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Posted on October 5, 2007

By Don Jacobson

In this edition of Chicago In Song, we have no trouble finding songwriters who say they’d rather be somewhere else but are stuck here, more or less against their will. Some cope by getting drunk and eating donuts while in Lakeview, others by complaining about O’Hare. Some even take midnight swims in el lago.
Anything, I guess, that helps you work out the scars you inevitably get from your Chicago experience.

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Posted on October 1, 2007

By Leigh Novak

My dad was 10 sheets to the wind by the time my friend J.R. and I arrived at FitzGerald’s. I rolled my eyes at the old man; the night was barely underway. My dad grabbed us in the direction of the bar to ensure that we too were properly groovied. Knowing how fun it is to be the only saucy among the sober, I sympathized with his immediacy. Soon enough, however, Shawn Phillips would be the only mood enhancement we needed.
We sat down in front of the bartender, who was already well-familiar with my dad and his running tab. But I guess, to my dad’s credit, he was a sort of V.I.P. on this particular night. He did, after all, shelter Shawn on his trip to Chicago (as he has done many times before), fed him well for a couple of days, and personally delivered him to Fitzergald’s the day of the concert, ready to rock. And again, then, knowing this much, I must also give credit to his pre-show drunkenness being the product of arriving at the bar hours ago, while I was still at work, counting the heavy Friday minutes.

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Posted on September 25, 2007

By Don Jacobson

My favorite member of The Band was always Levon Helm. I was never a huge fan of their music, just as I was never much of a Bob Dylan fan compared to a lot of people I know. But for some reason, I liked the Band songs on which Helm took the vocal lead a lot more than the others. He just seemed so damn real – to me, his voice was the main connection that The Band had with the painful, soulful heritage of American roots music. Even though Robbie Robertson wrote the songs, he and the late Rick Danko and the other guys kind of seemed more like rock stars in comparison.
Helm, now 67, a cancer survivor and sometime movie actor, is getting set to release his first solo studio album in 25 years, and from the buzz, as well as from a few audio clips available pre-release, it seems to reinforce his role as the voice that perhaps most personified The Band’s current of proto-Americana, and is also a pretty amazing performance for a guy who, for years after his 1998 throat cancer diagnosis, could not speak, let along sing.

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Posted on September 19, 2007

By Don Jacobson

Our latest playlist comes from The Casbah. Being taken away to this Casbah means a trip not to North Africa but to Garageland and its musical neighbors – Punk Point, Psychedelic Surf City, Shoegazeville and Cool Jazz Junction. It’s a mysterious and surprising journey guided by DJ Brian Parrish of San Antonio’s KSYM 90.1 FM, who uses his exquisite and extensive taste in these kinds of grooves to produce one of the best such radio shows and podcasts in the land every week.

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Posted on September 10, 2007

By Don Jacobson

To anyone who grew up admiring the values and raw energy of punk rock in the late 1970s and early 1980s, yet didn’t get a Mohawk or pierce up, there’s always been a (sometimes strident) tone of condescension toward we more mainstream fans from the true believers who spent long days fighting the man on streets of the big city, then, exhausted from their virtuous struggle, taking their well-deserved rest on the floor of whatever coldwater squat they could scrounge. These guys always wanted to make punk rock less a cultural movement than some kind of meritocracy: “You have to prove you’re good enough to listen to our music, man.”
We were poseurs.

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Posted on September 4, 2007

By Don Jacobson

Old Rat Packers never die . . . they just move on to new generations of admirers who are perhaps better able to separate the obnoxious cultural norms of the era from the music itself. God knows I wasn’t able to do that for most of my life. “Swinging” meant drunken, sexist escapades to me, gotten away with only because they happened at a time when women were not yet in a position to say “no.” But damn, thanks to the bargain bins, it’s clear to me now the Rat Pack crowd made some awe-inspiring sounds, none more so than Buddy Greco, who’s swinging furiously on 1960’s Buddy’s Back In Town, part of which was recorded live at Chicago’s Le Bistro.

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Posted on August 27, 2007