9:00 p.m. - 2006-08-14
In Which the Tangar Takes Chicago by Storm
Almost literally!
I've said it before: Yid Vicious makes the rain. And we made ever so much of it, lo that sultry August night. The event we were playing at was called "Dance Chicago" or "Chicago Dances" or "Dance, Chicago!" or some such thing. A ten-week series in Grant Park featuring a different genre, band and dance style each night under the stars and majestic Chicago skyline. Yid Vicious played on...can you guess?...klezmer night.
Our first set was to begin at seven-thirty PM with a four-thirty soundcheck. Kia and I got out of Madison at around twelve-thirty thinking, PLENTY of time! Four hours to get to Chicago? Pshaww, piece of cake, nothing to it, mellow yellow, baby. I mean, I've had like ONE Chicago trip take four hours, but normally if there's not a lot of construction, especially around the toll booths, and especially if there's not some FUCKING THIRTY-MILE-LONG, INEXPLICABLE LANE SHIFT BETWEEN ROCKFORD AND ELGIN THAT SLOWS TRAFFIC TO A CRAWL EVEN THOUGH IT'S NOT YET RUSH HOUR BUT BY THE TIME WE ESCAPE FROM THIS MIASMA OF STUPIDITY AND STILL HAVE TO DEAL WITH THE TRAFFIC IN CHICAGO PROPER IT SURE THE FUCK IS, then the trip shouldn't take anywhere NEAR four hours.
So, we arrived in Chicago around four-thirty, none the worse for wear, and met the other band guys and gals, who were hanging out near the stage waiting for the sound guys to wire together their various microphones and speakers and such. We waited around, making chit-chat, drank a beer (Someone in the band thought to bring beers! Probably Mike or Greg or both. Thanks, Mike or Greg!), then I set up the drums and we began the soundcheck, a process whereby the musicians have a lot of brief, awkward exchanges with the soundguys. Or soundgals. We had one of each. (Later, I was telling Kia all about how it was the female soundperson who had commented favorably on the glitter-glue smeared all over my bass-drum head. I pontificated briefly on how it was always women who noticed the drum-glitter, never men. Kia ventured that women and girls are naturally drawn to glitter. I posited that men dast not acknowledge an attraction to glitter out of fear that such an attraction automatically makes one gay. After some discussion, it was conceded that both our suppositions were correct.)
After soundcheck, we had some time to kill, so K and I checked into our hotel room across the street on Michigan Avenue. It was one of the older hotels, not the Drake, but not the Motel Six either. The room had cable and an iron. No mini-bar. It seemed clean and pleasant; air-conditioning and a bible in the drawer, what do you want? We were on the eighth floor. We changed and got our heads together for the show: two hours of klezmer madness in the Shouldery City. Were we ready? Would we bring it? But would we bring IT?
First, we'd have to eat some food and meet the dance instructor. Since it was klezmer night, the dance instructor was someone we'd met many times before. We'd been hired for several of the same events, wherein he would lead the dancers while YV provided the music. I must have introduced myself to this dance instructor five times. Once, I let him stay at our house when he had a gig in Madison. Afterward, I had agonized over not being as good of a host as I should have been. But then, in Chicago, when I came up to greet the dance instructor, and he looked as though he'd never seen me before and asked, "I'm sorry, what's your name?" I suddenly wish I'd been a much, much worse host. It's a weird impulse, regretting treating someone so well when you didn't think you had treated them all that well in the first place, but here we were. Then we got some food, outside in the park. Then the rain came. Lots of rain. Lots of heavy, wet, concert-and-dance-event-cancelling rain.
Our instruments were under a canopy so there was no sense of panic on the part of the band. We just had to hang out and find out whether we'd be cancelled. We'd already gotten a check; at this point it was all academic. Barb and Jim had come down for the show, and we all huddled under a table umbrella, discussing the 1968 Democratic Convention. The only band was the MC5, who had to cut their set short when the cops went berzerk and started beating everything that moved. I wasn't yet born when that whole thing happened. Frankly, the whole idea of violence on that kind of scale happening in Grant Park seems kind of other-worldly to me. I've been to the Chicago jazz Festival a couple of times, or walked through the park in a touristy way with various friends or family members or, best of all, with the lovely Kia. According to personal experience, Grant Park seems like an incredibly serene place. And yet, cowering in the rain that night, all I could think was, "Dump the Hump. DUMP THE HUMP!"
But then the rain stopped, and there was no time for the dumping of any humps. Yid Vicious had to make with the mad bulgars. Which we did. At a deliberate tempo. In general, when we're playing at a specifically dance-oriented event, we pull back our tempos a little, so as not to wear out the dancers right away. When the dancers are on an outdoor, rain-soaked, slippery-ass dance-floor, the tempos become DEE-LI-BER-ATE. For insurance purposes, you understand. This required constant vigilence on the part of Bill, Mike and I during the course of a twenty-minute-or-so medley but we kept it together, deliberate, bulgarific.
Things that seemed to put off the dancers somewhat: The end of "Nice Terk if You Can Get It", which turns from terkisher to swing; and our surf number, which hasn't yet found a totally acceptable title. (Originally I proposed "The Surfin' Nign". Any guesses on why the band vetoed this idea?)
But otherwise the response seemed positive. We played. They danced. When we hit them with the Twentieth Century Tangar, they batted nary an eye and just went for it, moving dervishly the whole time. They ate up the new swing medley we contrived, and I thought they got into Kammen Island Medley as well. Afterward, they were mesmerized by Mi Ze Yemalel, as was I, listening from the back, not playing drums, taking in the whole magic spectacle of Yid Vicious, plus the twinkly Chicago skyline, plus the majesty of Lake Michigan, plus the amazing fact that Kia and I had been married ten years to the day, which is amazing in that she's really great and I'm really hard to be around, plus the mysterious relationship between past and present.
Did the dancers buy lots of cds, as I'd been commanding them with the power of my mind all evening? No. But we helped cause a lot of dancing and merriment, and a few people ambling along Michigan Avenue seemed to enjoy the proceedings spontaneously, and we brought the Tangar to a new city, and that doesn't happen very often, does it?
