If I could have three wishes, one of them might be for virgin ears. I want my virgin ears back. Everything just sounded so ecstatically good back then, ’90-’91. When I first started hanging around in Wicker Park, I knew this guy who had this amazing bass rig. I think it was an Acoustic 1x15” combo, the jumper between the amplifier and the speakers disconnected and hooked up to a Gallien-Krueger GK800 head, which also powered a Guild-Hartke 4x10 cabinet, the kind with the aluminum-cone drivers. This monolithic rig stood head-high; the knobs were right in front of your face. I think he had a ‘70s P-bass, I forget. He was an absolutely awful bass player, and kind of a dweeb, actually. But listening to this rig was sheer visceral pleasure. He was the one who turned me on to the Birthday Party, and his amp setup emulated perfectly the evil growl of Tracy Pew’s bass tone, the sound of two continental plates erupting against one another, pure existential reverie. The neighborhood was 100% Mexican and he would crank his bass up at 7 o’clock in the evening, the Summer sounds of child Spanish and cheap television sets close in the gangway between the buildings, and no one ever complained. Everything sounded amazing back then; Beat Happening jamming barely above rehearsal-level in the crestfallen Miami Vice-décor of the Czar Bar, my friend G.’s dishwasher-sized Cerwin-Vega speakers in the living room, the ones he bought from a wayward roommate off to Germany to train for the Gulf War, the speakers we referred to as The Frat Boys. We sat in the barrio darkness smoking pot scored off North Side Jamaicans and listening to Funkadelic’s “One Nation Under a Groove,” “Cherie Cherie” by Suicide, Slint's first album, and our own derailed 4-tracks from the basement, my fucked-up old Tascam wired directly into the receiver. We jammed in the dank basement which we shared with about 5 other non-bands and a nascent version of the Scissor Girls, who were insufferable at the time. When they started rehearsing we would jump ship and retreat to the Zakopane Lounge for dollar Budweisers, their bassy throttle shaking the old rafters.

One night someone broke the cellar door down, but didn’t steal anything. My mutilated Strat copy sat on a chair right by the door, untouched. We had a laugh about that – even a desperate crackhead thought it was a worthless piece of shit. My Les Paul, the one on the cover of that Mekons album, was back at my claustrophobic little studio apartment in Wrigleyville. How quaint, that I would have ever lived in Wrigleyville at one time. The beat-up old drums I loaned to Royal Trux for the Palace Brothers record were down in the basement too. The guys on the first floor had a crazy no-wave band that set up in the back of the cellar behind the old boiler. They built instruments from car doors strung up like harps and had a mentally ill monophonic synthesizer from the mid-‘70s that sounded transcendent running through our crappy Sunn p.a. head. I left a wooden crate of guitar strings in the basement, and when I checked again a few months later, C. had created an entire orchestra of junk instruments out of the rusty old roundwounds I left within the grasp of his restless hands. The first time I played with the Magnetic Fields, 1994 or so, Stephin Merritt and I were chatting before the show about experimental musical instruments (inasmuch as it’s possible to “chat” with the guy), and I told him about C.’s original idea of stringing up a railroad boxcar with aircraft cable and winches and playing it from the inside. Stephin stared at me implacably for awhile and then said, “The cables would eventually snap and kill the performer.”

Saturday mornings we would wake up hungover and go across the street to the Mexican bakery for desayunos, watery eggs, ham off the bone and oily coffee in tiny Styrofoam cups. The sidewalks of Milwaukee Avenue were teeming with Latino families strolling in the bright pollution, buying elotes for the kids from the cart vendors (one of the more visible artifacts of the old neighborhood that has survived the past ten years). The few stray Caucasians wandering the streets were art students but didn’t dress like it. There was no scene and no one to impress. There was the Earwax Café and Club Dreamerz, and that was about it. Saturday night on Damen & North was desolate; rusty storefront grates stretching to the horizon, the odd Chevy Caprice sliding by trailing Banda music in its wake. Dreamerz was the spot; the Jesus Lizard played to about 75 people – the total hipster population of Westtown. I remember a blizzard and a snowball fight with the Poster Children under the sodium blaze of streetlamps; we ran around in the middle of the street pelting each other with melting lumps gathered off the tops of derelict cars. Sometimes you would run into Blackie Onassis eating cheese fries at Duks, suspending his banter only to lick his fingers (back then everybody called him Hollywood John Rowan.) The night sky was that same post-apocalyptic orange, the glow of downtown skyscrapers filtered through clouds and heat. Distant gunfire punctuated anything remotely resembling a holiday (and most other times too, and sometimes not so distant). We stood on the balcony overlooking tar rooftops on New Year’s Eve 1990. It sounded like Beirut. Down in the bathhouse parking lot Chickenman sat on milk crates unfazed. Next door Alfonzo was flipping pizza dough. We toasted the new year with room temperature Tecates. I had a kitten in each hand. We listened to gunfire, backfire, the El train diving underground near Wood Street. It was snowless and we listened to the Ohio Players, and it was a sundry revelation.


posted at 10:05 PM