Center on Halsted Benefit on Sunday

Right, so the whole "blogging" thing was on hold for a while there. A little down the page, I'll catch you all up, but first an obligatory plug: I'll be playing a benefit show at Center on Halsted on Sunday at 7pm. The show's $25 for general admission, $35 if you want some champagne and dessert afterward.

The Center (Chicago's LGBT community center) has been the literal center of much of my goings-on since my last blog post. The Bailiwick Theater company was in residence at the Center's theater over the summer, and I wound up accompanying a number of shows for them in early August. The Center is also sponsoring a new LGBT Youth Choir that a number of my comrades in the Chicago Gay Men's Chorus are helping to organize and direct -- the aforementioned benefit on Sunday is raising funds to kick-start the choir. EDGE Chicago posted a piece about the youth choir today, which you should read, as it will more eloquently describe how awesome it is that the kids at the Center will have a queer-specific performing group to perform with. And believe it or not, it was relatively unrelated that I started a database/fundraising job at the Center this month, which brings me down there on what feels like a daily basis now.

I think this is proof that I am actually super-gay, as opposed to your garden-variety, I like to dance and sing and not play sports and listen to Tori Amos gay.

What else has been happening?

I noticed that I left off a good two weeks of Rock Camp blogging. (Was I rocking too hard? Yes. Yes I was.) It seems like months ago now because I'm not spending all day with the SoR kids anymore, but there are still some interesting things happening at the School. Our oldest keyboard student just left for college, and there's another one not too far behind him, and the staff is realizing that as a school overall, we need to start training the younger keyboardists now to maintain our current, incredibly high level of musicianship in our performing groups. So I'm in the process of designing a keyboard workshop for the non-keyboardist, to lure them into the world of resonance cut-offs and pitch bend wheels. This will be some of the more unique teaching I get to do at School of Rock because it overlaps a lot with the loop pedal/synth work I've been incorporating into my live set lately.

Lastly, Canasta's final show with our drummer and fellow Obie, Josh Lava, was on Sunday, and we couldn't have had a better month full of shows to send him off to Portland with. We played at the venerable Old Town School of Folk Music, took a field trip to an awesome micro-brewery venue in Michigan, and played the shit out of Simon's in Andersonville. A full news blurb sums it all up for you on Canasta's website.

In the meantime, we're in the midst of auditioning new drummers, several of whom we're very excited about, but we are certainly open to ideas and suggestions. If you know anyone in Chicago who (a) plays drums, (b) likes orchestral-pop, and (c) will put up with me demanding Arby's and Elizabeth playing crossword puzzles in the car, send them to me, please.

You Should Be Listening to Music This Weekend

I'll have a wrap-up of Rock Camp Week 2 early next week, with a report on Session 1's final show tomorrow afternoon. For now, you must suffer through my extremely biased but un-self-righteous suggestions for how to spend your weekend listening to live music, because if you're not, what are you doing??? Get the hell out of our city.

Saturday | Pitchfork.
I'm only going on Saturday -- which I'm regretting now, because I'm realizing the cost of a one-day pass might be worth it for the Flaming Lips alone. Still, Saturday's schedule fulfills many of my summer-festival-going wet dreams, which almost makes up for Lollapalooza's lineup putting me to sleep for months. Here's where you can stalk me:

Early afternoon - I'll be hitting up the silkscreen poster fair. There are a bunch of show poster artists that don't make it out to other indie craft festivals around town, and those artists tend to bring a different aesthetic than the local imitators of the Jay Ryan/Bird Machine School of Show Posters. (Ryan's posters are still my favorite, though.)

4:15 - Final Fantasy - I know there's another full-length coming out of Owen Pallett at some point, and some of those songs have to be in set rotation at this point. He hasn't played in Chicago since Fall 2007 at Schubas, so anything that isn't on last year's EPs will be new to me.

5:15 - Yeasayer - I really didn't know anything about them until I realized the shoutey world-beat song I kept hearing on KEXP was them. Shoutey and world-beat go together like Owen Pallett and Zack Condon.

7:25 - Beirut - Speaking of Zack Condon, I'm crossing my fingers that FF and Beirut do something together at Pitchfork. The tracks they've done together end up sounding like a purposeful collaboration instead of a token guest vocal or schtick. It's not out of the realm of possibility.

8:40 - The National
I really don't get tired of seeing this band. Their last album, Boxer, is a quiet, moody rocker, which I love, but I love even more when the band reworks them into their louder incarnations. ("Squalor Victoria" being one of the most extreme examples.)

10:00 - After-Parties at Schubas and Bottom Lounge
I'm missing Plants and Animals and Cymbals Eat Guitars (respectively) at the festival itself, so I'm tempted to squeeze one more Pitchfork-related act into the day. Schubas is only $6 with a festival wristband, but Bottom Lounge is literally a 60 second walk from Union Park. Hmm.

Sunday | Boys vs. Girls
The House Theater regularly writes and mounts new rock musicals during its regular season; Boys vs. Girls is part of next year's season but is getting its first run at Northwestern this month. Andrew Bird's old buddy, Kevin O'Donnell, is the House's main composer. There's definitely some overlap in their writing styles. My expectation is that I will be rocked harder than Spring Awakening but not as hard as Hedwig, but I could be underestimating them.

Brace Yourselves for Pride Weekend

Sidetrack has ordered nightly air-drop shipments of Booze Slushie mix directly to their roofdeck should supplies start running low. A reverse curfew will be in effect starting on Friday night mandating that anyone living in Boystown remain outside of their homes after 10pm. Charlie's and Hydrate have ordered sleeping cots for stranded, horny suburbanites who were not able to land a trick by closing time.

If, at some point this weekend, you are not already engulfed in flames (of gay), might I suggest:

• Bombs Away! at Mary's Attic, presented by the Bailiwick. I'm accompanying them on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights this week and again next week on July 2nd. The show's at 7pm and is done by 8:30.
  
• Chicago Gay Men's Chorus has their Pride show running Friday and Saturday this week and next Thursday in the 'burbs.



• This isn't Pride-related at all, it's just really awesome. Canasta is opening for White Rabbits next week not once but twice. We're at High Noon Saloon in Madison on Tues. the 30th and back home at the Empty Bottle on Wed. the 1st. Both shows have a chance of selling out so if you want advance tix, we've got yer links right here. Get a sneak preview by watching the White Rabbits' latest performance on Letterman.
  

Spring Awakening Dialogues, Part 4 (Conclusion)

(There's so much to read in Parts 1, 2, and 3!)

===
Spring Awakening Dialogues, Part 4 (Conclusion)
by Ian

Nate,

It's been a few weeks since our initial dialogue, and now having finally seen the show in New York, I'm glad we stopped where we did. There's a critical difference between dissecting Spring Awakening as a rock album -- since we were lacking the theatrical element -- and Spring Awakening as a Tony-winning Broadway musical.

As sad as it is for lovers of both rock and musicals like us to admit it, Broadway will never, ever produce a work of rock that will, in fact, rock, as in, the roll-the-windows-down-turn-up-the-volume-smoke-'em-if-you've-got 'em feeling one expects from a new rock/pop album. Hedwig is a perfect example: it had critical acclaim, a long off-Broadway run (long after John Cameron Mitchell left the role, by the way), some national performance rights deals, but it never had an official Broadway run. It was never even a candidate for that canon of musical theater. But Spring Awakening sacrificed its edge, perhaps, to succeed in bringing elements of rock to Broadway that, if Mel Brooks would please retire, would influence future productions.

In this context, Spring Awakening works more as a piece of theater than a piece of rock music. It's more enjoyable as a whole package, too. Watching the show, I found myself swept up by musical numbers that I normally skip through on the CD. "I Believe" is a great example. It's repetitive, it's formulaic, but it also gets out of the way for the two lead actors to play an incredibly difficult and crucial scene (which also ends Act I). The music simply sets a tone for the scene, not drives it. The dialogue between Ilse and Moritz in the middle of "Don't Do Sadness/Blue Wind" is actually a much longer (and better written) scene between the two. "Totally Fucked" -- yeah, they're still singing "Fucked" like a glee club at all-state, but at that point the whole cast is Bill T. Jonesing all over the stage, and it temporarily lifts the show out of its emotionally plummeting trajectory in Act II.

In short: I bought into it, I loved it, I kept the playbill. That's as much of an artistic/emotional transaction as I can expect from any Broadway musical that has to put tourist asses in seats and still please the jaded indie gay boys like me.

===

Though I really do get to have the last word on my blog, I'm assuming Nate will have some counterpoints to this, so any miscellany from here on will go on in the comments section. Jump in, folks!

Spring Awakening Dialogues (Part 2)

Click here to read the introduction and Part 1.

===
Spring Awakening Dialogues, Part 2
by Ian

Nate --

Most of your points are well-founded. I don't like to speak to the acting on cast albums (unless it's a sung-through musical like Rent or Les Mis); people shouldn't be forced to act for what is essentially the radio medium when they are only trained for the stage. The lyrics are, for the most part, utterly worthless, but I have extremely high standards for lyrics, so I decided to look past them when I started listening. I still think they're atrocious and place them somewhere between those of fun, adolescent pop-rock and gratingly transparent folk. But I recognize that at least they're trying to do something outside of the typical Broadway rhyme schemes and imagery. (Footnote: in the liner notes, the lyricist admits this was his first time trying to write lyrics. I think he may have been better off keeping that to himself.)

OK - so we share those grievances. I think the major point of departure is that the music is bland because it's too derivative of other forms (and I'm avoiding the "indie rock" part of the debate, because the people who've labeled the show "indie" have no clue what it means). I'm not sure that the soundtrack taken as a whole really is derivative. For one, Sheik's string arrangements are as interesting and complementary to their singers as any Sufjan arrangement. His instrumentations in general are restrained; he uses a small string section, rarely has big gritty guitar or keyboard sounds (they're mostly clean), and mostly uses a cello to establish a backbeat -- drums are more often used as accents (with a few obvious exceptions). Oh, and he doesn't use synthesizers to try to replace instruments that aren't in the pit, which Rent and Avenue Q are both guilty of.

He does skip between different styles -- "My Junk" is obviously girl pop, "Totally Fucked" is (sort of) power pop, "Don't Do Sadness" is straight-up chamber rock -- but his choice of genre reinforces the core concept of the show. They're supposed to serve as the characters' interior monologues in response to the action of the show, and since the characters are teenagers trying to break out of their repressed Victorian selves, it makes sense that many of their songs would evoke some of the stereotypically teenagerish sounds of Q101. (I will admit that the songs that don't try to overtly summon the characters' "inner soundtrack," if you will, are musically stronger -- I'm listening to "Mirror-Blue Night" right now.)

Now with all in that mind, do you still think the "rock" part of the "rock musical" is a gimmick? Would the show/soundtrack be stronger if Sheik hadn't tried to mimic other rock subgenres?

===

Spring Awakening Dialogues (Part 1)

Introduction

I've been a faithful fan of Spring Awakening, last year's Tony winner for Best Musical (among others), since first hearing it on WERS' Standing Room Only. The show is often compared to Rent because it's the latest successful Broadway show to use rock music. (I'm consciously avoiding the meaningless buzz words "rock musical," but other critics have hopped on that train.) My friend Nate and I had very divergent views on the show and, since both of us are voracious indie music listeners and musical fans, I thought it would be interesting to see just where our differences lie.

A few weeks ago we had a detailed debate via email that I've been meaning to post here. Over the weekend I was in New York and finally had a chance to actually see the show. Over the next few posts, I'll be sharing Nate's thoughts and mine, both based solely on the cast album, treating it more as music than theater (I'll address that piece at the end). Feel free to join in via the comments section.

Before we begin, the obligatory plug: my first Chicago show is this Saturday at 8pm.

===
Spring Awakening Dialogues, Part 1
by Nate [emphases are mine - I.]

So I've been listening to Spring Awakening for the last couple of days. I can't say my initial opinion of it has changed much, but at least I can talk about it a bit more now.

The first thing I have to say is that all of the spoken dialogue is so incredibly poorly acted that it just about ruins every song in which it occurs. By far the worst culprit is at 1:42 in between Don't Do Sadness and Blue Wind. I mean, are they serious with this?! How is this show any good when the people in it so clearly cannot act? I don't understand. Are they reading cue cards written illegibly?

Second: I don't know where this musical got off being labeled as "indie rock influenced," but--excuse a bit of political incorrectness--that is totally retarded. It is nothing but Broadway rock (a la Rent) with some Top 40 mixed in. Perfect examples: "The Bitch of Living" still smells so much of Rent that I can hear people mooing in the background. If I heard "I Believe" on the radio, I would change the channel from Q101 to XRT. I think Natalie Imbruglia wrote "My Junk" but then decided she should just sing "Torn" a few more times. Carrie Underwood must have sung "The Song of Purple Summer" on her last album (although with better lyrics), but hey--at least it's a beautiful song.

In fact, the tracks actually worth a listen (other than Purple Summer) are not so much belabored by an aspiration to rock, but are written seemingly for their own sake, are shaped by their own beauty rather than the rock mold into which many of the songs are forced. I could see "The Guilty Ones" in an Adam Guettel musical (I mean this as high praise), which says to me that the label "rock musical" is a mere gimmick here that does nothing beneficial for the music itself. I've never liked Duncan Sheik because I found him bland and largely unoriginal as soon as Barely Breathing got old, and that hasn't changed much.

Oh, and the lyrics? Meh. Especially the "Profanity Song." Boy, they sure are cool spouting all of those cuss words...

So, what do you like about it?
===

Monday Night Festival of Links

By "festival," I mean, I have two today.

The Onion's AV Club has a short and sweet explanation of those songs you hear in cheap comedy films and TV commercials that take a familiar melody and alter one or two key notes to avoid all that nasty copyright/licensing business. Note: the AV Club doesn't identify any specific instances where this marketing, er, strategy, got called out by the imitated artist, but I do, and hot damn, I get to mention Owen Pallett/Final Fantasy again. Pitchfork covers the offense in question here.

The second link is brilliant news for you fans of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer musical episode: Neil Patrick Harris is starring in Whedon's next musical project. Paste has coverage. How cool is that?