Phthursday Musings: The Return of Fast-Beat, Electrified Rock

I spent Saturday evening in a parking lot in Schaumburg. Bucket list complete!

No, seriously, I did spend Saturday evening in a parking lot in Schaumburg. This was a drive-up concert - you park in rows facing the stage, and then sit in lawn chairs on the side of your car. The whole thing is a creation of the social distancing era and I suspect after this summer it won’t happen again. Nevertheless, I will muse my way through why I found this all so interesting, why I think things like this should repeat, and so on. Don’t worry, this isn’t really a concert review. It’s more of a where-we-are review.

The band was Local H. They’re a Chicago-based hard rock band who broke through in the mid-90s. Let’s say that what they play is Fast-Beat, Electrified Rock.

Unlike most other such bands, they never stopped being a touring and recording concern, so they’re not a nostalgia act. As per the name of last year’s album, they’re Lifers. The core fan base is small but intense. It’s always nice to go to a show and find that the band is someone’s favorite band. It raises the energy.

My buddy Chris has seen them 1,782 times, give or take, and I was along for the ride - literally, since this was a drive-up show!

So as to get a choice location in the parking lot, we arrived a couple hours in advance. The stage was set in the corner of the auxiliary parking lot for the independent league baseball stadium in Schaumburg. Before the show, a screen behind the stage was playing videos, mostly in the ‘90s alt-rock vein, a lot of it not unlike what might have been seen on MTV’s Alternative Nation circa 1993. I’ll come back to the videos further below.

I’ve seen concerts in a lot of environments, but I’ve never driven somewhere, parked, gotten out of the car, and… that’s it. You’re already there. You get out, get your chairs, sit down. No need to stand for three hours. No need to walk around hunting for a place to set up chairs. You’re just there. And the show started around 7:15. No being out after midnight. Outside. Seated. Reasonable hour. An actual band, not some weird ‘80s revue or some such nonsense. It ticked almost every imaginable box.

Here’s what it looked like from where we were (photo by Chris!)

Here’s what it looked like from what I assume was a drone vantage. (Photo from a collection uploaded to archive.org; you can also find a recording of the show there.)

Now. What else are they doing with this ridiculous parking lot? How much overhead can there be? You have a crew to deal with the stage, a crew to deal with the parking… the rest of the setup practically does itself. Do it back to back nights with different kinds of bands and save on the stage setup. They might not be making a whole lot of money, but they’re definitely making some money on this.

And even if “they” aren’t making money… look, this parking lot is probably owned by the municipality. The soccer stadium near us, that’s the case, and they’re putting on a couple drive-up shows there. I think they’re charging too much but oh well, I appreciate that they’re doing something at all, and I hope they wisen up and do more. The soccer stadium is an even better case than the baseball stadium because at this point, there are probably no more than 4 events per month booked for the inside of the stadium. Get creative with your outdoor concessions (let food trucks in!), get creative with your booking, and provide a damn public service, even if the net is zero for the municipality.

Even if I felt otherwise okay about standing in cramped quarters to see a band right now… I don’t want to stand for three hours, I don’t want to be out past midnight, okay? There is a market for more of this stuff, and if these places figure it out and do it right, it will work out for them.

The most obvious antecedent for a drive-in concert is a drive-in movie.

I have super vague recollections of being very young and going to the River Lane in Loves Park. The story goes that we would stop at Brown’s Chicken first. We would get breaded mushrooms. Mom told me they were “little chickens” and that got me to eat them.

I also remember the Robin, way out on West State Street off of Meridian. I think it was the Robin which had the playground equipment up front.

Rockfordians, can you imagine driving out into farmland to see… an Ingrid Bergman movie? (Photo found here if you want to see a few more like it.)

There was also the Sunset, but, uh… that wasn’t for kids. And the last one standing in the area was the Belmont, which maybe had two screens?

Movies today are like $13 a ticket or something wild, right? I feel like way back in the day the drive-in must have been very economical. Bring your own popcorn if you want! Bring your own little chickens! It was at the various drive-ins around Rockford that we saw all of the Disney movies, by which I mean the likes of 101 Dalmatians and Cinderella and The Lady and the Tramp.

The last time I remember going to a drive-in, the Belmont was still around, I must have been in high school, and we saw Hard Target, an absurd Jean Claude Van Damme movie featuring Wilford Brimley as his deep-in-the-bayou Cajun uncle with a crossbow or whatever the hell that was. It was perfect drive-in fare.

I don’t claim to know the economics of this stuff. I know that what few drive-ins have held out have had trouble because of the shift to digital, but that many of them were long gone much earlier. The Robin closed down at least 30 years ago. The thing is, it just sat there as an empty lot for many years, and today I think it’s just a reclaimed field. I realize that there’s actual upkeep expenditures - the speakers, the screen - but I went to high school 10 minutes away from there, and I guarantee you there’s no outside entertainment anywhere to be had anywhere near there today. There’s got to be some way that somebody could have found to at least hire some high school kids and break even in the process.

And if there’s not? Then, damn it, subsidize these places. Subsidize the commons. Money is spent all the time for all kinds of other crazy stuff. Towns have movies in the park. That costs money, doesn’t it? And if you’ve already got the parking lot just sitting there unused most of the time, and it’s not close to anything else, then treat that like a public asset and use it… especially when it is a public asset, like these stadium parking lots.

The soccer stadium in nearby Bridgeview was supposed to be a big asset for the community. But it’s put them in the hole. They never recouped the expense. They try to crawl it back with silly high parking prices, but until recently it seemed like they never really tried to do other creative things to get people in there, and there’s so much they could try. And, yes, that includes movies.

Set aside the finances for a moment. I actually believe that these kinds of events are a public good. If we’re going to accept and embrace the notion of the affluent society or whatever exactly, then these are precisely the kinds of things which should be happening, and they should be happening all over the place.

Much has been written about the loss of the commons. I have a slightly more expansive notion of the commons than the term usually connotes. I think the River Lane was part of the commons. I think the Robin was part of the commons. Yes, these were privately owned businesses, but the nature of the experiences, that’s something shared, something that unites people, potentially across a lot of demographic categories, even if you only do it once or twice. The shared way we can talk about going to a place like that and remembering weird things like the teeter-totters in front of the screen brings cohesion to a community. Don’t we want that? All of the hand-wringing about how polarization and what not… Can’t we just take in a movie together? Get the same ice cream sandwiches from underneath the same old weird signage? Share something as a community, which we’re not sharing today?

I admit I didn’t expect sitting in a parking lot to be a nostalgic experience, but even above and beyond the pandemic paradigm, being able to enjoy something in a setting like that was deeply appreciated. I realize everyone’s memories are constructed differently, but I really wish I could haul my kid off to eat little chickens and watch 68 year old cartoons… and know that one my neighbors was doing the same thing.

As it so happened, we did get to see a movie in the parking lot in Schaumburg. Two, in fact. Over the course of Local H’s set, behind them on the large screen, they showed what was damn near the entirety of and then the vast majority of Alien and then Aliens.

I’d seen shows with video going on before, but nothing quite like this. (Photo also from the same collection at archive.org.)

Alien and Aliens are / were terrifying movies and the juxtaposition of seeing them without sound while a rock band is banging away was pretty wild. But it all got me to thinking about how… I never watch movies anymore. Certainly not older movies. I took the lad to see Detective Pikachu a couple years back, and before that the last movie I saw in the theater was, uh, Lincoln? It’s not just a small screen versus big screen phenomenon either. We just don’t watch very many movies.

One big difference that I observe is that when I was young, movies were on TV and then VCRs became ubiquitous and movie watching was a family sort of thing. Today if there’s some movie to watch, it’s probably not a family type of movie, it’s probably some documentary which wouldn’t dream of holding his attention.

I never turned into a Movie Guy. I even had a short-lived stint as a movie reviewer for The Argus! But music > movies and computers > movies and sports > movies and so on.

Relevant to what I write about above, though, I really would like to go to movies in the park or whatever. I’m much more keen on that than I am on going to a theater. I don’t think I like going to the theater. I’m not sure how exactly to explain it. It’s not just that it’s $13 a ticket and $781 for a tub of popcorn. Maybe it’s that I don’t really like Hollywood? I’m not sure.

I’d like the shared experience with the family though, in whatever form that might take. Maybe if movies in the park pop up that’s something we’ll take advantage of this summer.

Okay, finally about the videos now.

It was video after video, mostly stuff from the first half of the ‘90s. There was some classic rock thrown in, and even surprising stuff like Dio’s “Holy Diver”, but like I said above, it was a lot like watching Alternative Nation back in the day.

Nobody ever watches videos like this anymore. I mean, if you do, I’m very curious where you see anything like this. You can shuffle through crap on YouTube, I suppose, but that’s not really what I mean.

Beyond that though, the set of music was unlike anything I ever hear anymore. It’s been at least a decade since I’ve heard Faith No More. Veruca Salt’s “Seether”? I have no idea. Yes, I’m indie-rock guy, this all isn’t stuff I’m especially likely to listen to at home anyway. But very popular music from a formative time… no, I just never encounter it.

There are a lot of digressions I could get into here, say, about how different videos got to be at some point when video trickery became more available. I’d never seen the video for Interpol’s “Slow Hands” before, and the way it was shot just felt so much different from anything that predated it by even five years.

But I’m going to go with this one: It was surprisingly pleasant to just sit back and listen to rock music for a little while. It was a well-curated playlist. I like Interpol. I like Veruca Salt. I like classic rock. And they didn’t play any real crap. But even if they had, just sitting back and hearing a rock set like this… man, that never happens.

I’ve heard some alt-rock mixes, in coffee shops or, more recently, playing from a speaker system on field #1 while I was coaching my son’s game on field #4. But these were very predictable, straight off of 1995 radio kind of stuff. Dio doesn’t normally get dropped into that, and neither does Prince. I mean, I’ve never heard a set which included both of those.

Here’s the deal. I don’t own a lot of this kind of stuff. There was almost no overlap between the video playlist and my still-large CD collection. But I still love me some rock music. It used to be ubiquitous. Today it feels anything but. Oh, I could turn on 101.1 and hear some of it, but glancing this very minute at what’s recently been played on that station, it’s dreck like Imagine Dragons and 3 Doors Down and twenty one pilots, and I’m not interested in that. There’s a new station, 95.5, which I saw a billboard for the other day, but I also noticed it was an iHeart station… even though the playlist looks somewhat better, it’s not quite what I’m talking about either.

Between the Local H set (and keep in mind I’m not actually familiar with their material) and the videos (several of which I’d never seen) I felt… calm.

Rock music which doesn’t suck makes me calm.

And I’ve got to say, I feel like I’ve needlessly moved away from it. I’ve been willing to listen to classic rock in the car but I’ve edged away from that alt-rock pocket from the early ‘90s. I’m not claiming it’s better. But it’s a subgenre which retains a lot of appeal, and I’ve kind of just ignored it for… over a decade?

I’ve let myelf fall in some traps, induced largely by a combination of pandemic and work, where I just don’t turn music on at all, and then I get in the car and I just don’t… turn the volume up. And what I really like is loud rock music. Not necessarily the heaviest stuff, but what I usually most want to hear is… well, you know, Fast-Beat, Electrified Rock.

I feel like I come back around to this often, but it’s legitimately a subject I struggle with, even though it’s one which is nonsensical as a point of struggle: I don’t listen to music like I should. It’s vitally important to me, but I lose track of it. I don’t know how to explain that exactly, but I feel like I’d be much happier if I just had the stereo on more often. And while my tastes are truly broad, my happy center still involves somebody wailing away on a guitar.

And so here you go, kids:

And can I just add, the Rhino logo added to this just somehow makes it even more wonderful?

So.

Fast-Beat, Electrified Rock.

Let’s get down to it.

So far as any of us are aware, this term was coined in a 2014 CNN article about Kurt Cobain, written by one Ben Brumfield, if that is in fact his or her real name.

The actual sentence in which this appears:

[Cobain’s] velvety yet scratchy vocals continue in recordings to carry social disappointment and cynical ire in flats and sharps, all energized by fast-beat, electrified rock.

Ben Brumfield may be a wonderful guy. His article may well have been butchered by one or more editors. This may all be an elaborate trolling. I don’t have answers to everything, people!

Nevertheless, I will make this assertion:

The above quoted sentence is the worst sentence in the history of journalism. Perhaps even in the history of sentences.

By “worst” I mean much the same thing as I meant some months ago when I explained the usage of the word “greatest”.

I learned this week about a concept called zugzwang. Zugzwang is German for “compulsion to move”. The term is specifically applied to chess, in situations where any move you make leaves you worse off than if you could just pass your turn.

The sentence at hand is sort of the opposite of zugzwang. There is no change that could be made to the sentence which would not somehow improve the sentence.

Misspellings? Excess punctuation? Hitler references? Any of these things would actually create a less awful sentence. I mean, sure, the Hitler references would make it more awful. But not as a sentence.

Let’s imagine that instead of this article having been about Kurt Cobain, it was about, oh, Orville Redenbacher.

Redenbacher’s folksy yet geeky image continues on legacy packaging to connote familial fun and familiar flavors in butters and salts, all energized by fast-beat, microwaved cooking.

Step back and you realize how, if instead of it a writer with zero clue how to intelligently describe rock music, you had a writer with zero clue how to describe, oh, women’s health, you could very easily produce something deeply offensive to half the population.

The OB-GYN’s compassionate yet studious manner continues on in her diagnoses to provide tissue health and progesterone feels in fallopian tubes and Bartholin’s glands, all energized by fast-beat, ultrasonic scans.

I mean, this is why there’s such a push underway to do something about the old boy networks in newsrooms.

Anyway, the sentence was so bad that we created a Facebook page based around it, back when that was somehow a funny thing to do. Oh, we were so innocent once.

This, incidentally, is what an electrified rock actually looks like. He’s an Alolan Golem.

Mostly unrelated to everything - except, you know, for the Fast-Beat, Electrified Rock and all…

We live in Brookfield. Brookfield is where the zoo is. Brookfield Zoo! If somehow you don’t know, it is a big zoo. A ver ver big zoo.

So a couple years ago when a new ice cream shoppe opened downtown, they called themselves Zoo City Treats. They’re nice folks. Drop in some time! They’ve even got a dairy free mint chocolate chip!

Well, one of our coaches told the baseball team last weekend that if one of them caught a pop fly, he’d buy them all ice cream. This understandably led to them talking all about ice cream. Alas, last weekend, no pop flies. But household lobbying took us downtown anyway.

This was the time that I thought it wise to teach D the Zoo City Treats song.

What song, you ask? Why, this one, of course:

Oh man, is this video a stinker. We didn’t see a single video this dumb in the Schaumburg parking lot. It’s like the Scorpions thought This Is Spinal Tap was somehow aspirational.

Nevertheless, you can try it for yourself. Play the song, get to the chorus, and sing along:

ZOO CITY!

ZOO CITY TREATS!

You’ll want ice cream too when it’s done.

Oh, as for the baseball team? First batter tonight, pop up, and the pitcher caught it. So even though it was only 52 degrees out, once the game was over, we went back for…

ZOO CITY!

ZOO CITY TREATS!

As a final note, one of the funnier things about all this is that I’ve now seen Local H twice. I mentioned how they’d broken out in the mid ‘90s. Well, when they broke out, their hit song was “Bound For The Floor”. You might well remember it:

I have to admit, I remember the song becoming a hit, I sort of remember the video, and I thought it was all incredibly boring, like just some other random alt-rock band.

When I saw them the first time a couple of years ago, it was at the Empty Bottle, and they were so … damn … loud … I could barely handle it. I had forgotten to bring earplugs and that proved to be a big mistake.

This time around? Wow, this is very much in one of my sweet spots. It’s just pretense free hard rock. It’s right in line with all the other crazy stuff I’m talking about here.

When they did a drive-in show in the fall, it was a Halloween show, and they came out and did Nirvana. I hear tell they even got the flats and sharps right.

I’m very thankful to be coming out the other side of this extended awfulness and knowing I can still rock out. I mean, rock out a little, in the same clothes I wore to coach my kid’s soccer match. Rock out without it having to be dad rock. (No offense, Wilco.)

So maybe we’ll see you around at some rock show or another. Preferably outside. Definitely fast-beat. Most definitely electrified.