My last blog about the music group Front 242 was one of my best, matter of fact, somebody actually called it “outstanding”. But that was just one guy, the rest of it was a shrug into the void. So, in a bad state of funk over it, I threw myself mindlessly into the Front 242 festivities here in Chicago, hoping to lose myself in the excitement.
It turned into a journey of epic proportions. At least, in the confines of the city of Chicago. I found myself in neighborhoods I never imagined even existing, and that’s after 30 plus years of living here.
Take the Dark Matter Coffee warehouse, out in the middle of some industrial zone area that it took 25 stops on the Grand Avenue CTA bus to reach. Dark Matter Coffee had allied itself with Wax Trax and The Front, so that this vast, cavernous warehouse with wooden kegs and bags of coffee beans had turned into celebratory temple for various rites and activities.
The one I attended was a film about Electronic Body Music and featured all those names I remembered fondly from my years kicking around Europe in the mid to late 1980s: The Neon Judgement, A Split Second, Nitzer Ebb. This music was way ahead of the curve at the time and all its preoccupations with power, force and movement particularly ring true in this fateful post-election cycle.
It certainly isn’t music meant to provoke nostalgia, but it was coming on strong the whole night for me: during an interview with Front 242 after the movie, I reacted strongly when Richard 23 mentioned a bar-club called DNA I used to visit regularly in Brussels: a dive with walls splattered with assorted dips and swirls of graffiti.
But as much as I enjoyed the visit, I still found myself slightly disoriented by this warehouse out in the middle of an industrial zone. I still felt bad about my unfortunate introverted tendency to butcher the first names of people who mean something or other to me: the week before, at the StoryStudio Writers Festival, I had called noted Chicago author Rebecca Makkai “Rachel”, which provoked a snarl from her and, at the warehouse movie show, I couldn’t remember if the current owner of Wax Trax was named Julie or Julia Nash, so I went with “Julie” and failed in that guess too, though Julia didn’t snarl at me, probably because that faux pas was lost in the general hubbub around her.
And getting out of the warehouse wasn’t easy. I and a friend were hit with blasts of cold and hard November Chicago rain while we were searching for Western Avenue and, when we finally reached it, we huddled under a bus stop across the street from a food outlet called Piranha’s Fish 'N' Chicken and waited for the #49 Western bus that never came. I eventually had to call on Uber to lift out the both of us.
So I was too beat the next day to go to the scheduled Front 242 DJ set at the warehouse. And though I had hoped in the back of my mind that I would score free tickets to the actual farewell concerts at Metro, that didn’t happen. But what I did do later was hang out at The Museum of Post-Punk and Industrial Music in Bridgeport, to meet fellow Front 242 fans from across the country.
Really, my only knowledge of Bridgeport had been limited to the confines around White Sox Park over the years. Like, my dad had a special parking spot for games there and we used to visit a bar or two just up the street. Nothing like my explorations last week around Halsted, where I made some nice discoveries.
First, two excellent restaurants: something that just had Asian Seafood Restaurant in English on the front, the rest in Japanese. I dug into a massive plate of fried rice, shrimp and chicken and checked out the aquarium of live edibles in the back hallway, with lobsters the size of my fist and some kind of a black eel. And next day, I brunched on a Grabowski Gyro at Greek Grill while watching the fleeting promise in the first quarter of a Bears victory over the Pack, only to later learn about the missed field goal with time expiring: the kiss of death.
And I also found one of the best bookstores in Chicago, Tangible Books, that offered to carry my novel, Zelda Rising. I was happy to find an original paperback copy of Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 by that esteemed doctor of journalism, Hunter Thompson. Also a JR Powers book (a best-selling Chicago author back in day who coined the question, Do Black Patent Leather Shoes Really Reflect Up? in his remembrances of growing up Roman Catholic in Chicago with Catholic girls, who I guess were much like how Britney Spears depicted them in her saucy first video and here I won’t go into Chicago’s very own Jennifer McCarthy, but same difference) and an attractive branch of the Chicago public library system that actually had a metal tower of drawers containing free plant seeds for neighborhood gardening projects.
But of course, I was mainly in Bridgeport to lounge around The Museum of Post-Punk and Industrial Music, drink strange brews, and listen to curator Martin Atkins expound on the various rock and roll legends and semi-legends he knows, worship at his shrine to the appearance of Public Image LTD on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand, and visit his downstairs studio as he cues up massive jolts of raw power out of rare alternate versions of songs from Nine Inch Nails, Skinny Puppy, and My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult. Pure bliss.
Yes, Martin knows how to tell a story or three, but it was the first time I heard about his encounter with rock-and-roll nihilist GG Allin. Seems that, years before, Martin had gone into a drunken rage over Allin’s first punk band, climbed on the stage, and began throwing around guitars, mikes, amps, and a huge monitor. Later, when he was in the bathroom looking at himself, someone pushed him into the mirror and screwed up his nose bad, not to mention serious bleeding. That someone was GG Allin his bad self, a bit early in his career before he started going on talk shows like Geraldo, where he’d proclaim himself the “God of Rock” and beckon young girls and boys to break from their parents and worship him.
And let me say right here, I’m glad Martin never ended up as a corpse in an open casket, attending his own wake, like GG. Or dancing naked on the stage along with all the other abusive pranks GG used to pull. Martin made better music too, so there’s that.
So, yeah, I enjoyed not only the museum itself, but meeting Front 242 fans from Chicago and mostly California, who expressed an interest in reading my novel. I gave them my swag bookmark and my business card, but haven’t heard from them.
I mean, what is it about Zelda Rising anyway? Sure, a couple people have really gone all out praising it – for which I am very grateful – but for the most part, abject silence. Are you speechless over its brilliance or is this a glorified ghosting because you don’t want to tell me it’s garbage or even, gasp, that it’s only “interesting”? Along those lines, what about best-selling Chicago author Rebecca “Rachel” Makkai? I gave her an autographed copy, after all, so what’s her take?
Oh well, I’m sure JR Powers would have liked it. Even from me, a lapsed Catholic author who often reflects on black patent leather shoes and how they trigger the male gaze … or whatever.
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