Silkworm: Night Three

Night three was again at Sleeping Village. This time I had a baseball game to coach immediately before. I might dwell upon the juxtaposition of dad doing dad things and then rock maven staying out all hours, but most of the shows I go to, I’m still in the younger half of the audience, and the Silkworm run has been no exception.

A brief aside about Chicago itself: Sleeping Village is in Avondale, a neighborhood inbetween the two neighborhoods we lived in (Logan Square and Jefferson Park), and once you get off the Kennedy and are fumbling your way along the likes of Hamlin and Cornelia to find parking, it’s all very familiar again, the big weird beautiful city with all it has to offer, which may or may not include easy to find street parking. Luckily it’s easier about Sleeping Village than some other parts of the city!

This evening Karla and I were joined by Ruymal and literally my oldest friend Kishwahk, us going back either 44 or 45 years depending on what strange memory from Beyer might be most correct. It’s been wild seeing people from very disparate parts of my life over the course of the week, especially considering how few people overall have been at these shows.

Apropos to nothing: somehow over the course of the last three nights we have managed to bring up Iowa City about 79 times.

Night three’s opener was Dianogah, who describe themselves extremely accurately as “the band from Chicago that opened for one of your favorite bands circa 1998.” Indeed, I first saw Dianogah in 1998, opening for Silkworm. Except, because of something, which in my mind had always been weather but was probably a van breakdown, Silkworm never actually made it to that show! I handled this state of affairs by pivoting and seeing them in Cleveland a few nights later, which might sound excessive, except I had recently moved to Columbus for grad school, interesting times those.

Dianogah’s gimmick is that they’re a three piece with a drummer and two bassists, because who needs a normal guitarist anyway? The closest they come to assigning a subgenre to themselves is to claim to be “one of the pioneers of the emerging mortgage core scene”, precisely the kind of clever quasi-joke that would send most white people scurrying for the safety of Fleetwood Mac. Luckily I am here to tell you that they are indeed a post-rock band, precisely the kind of disconcerting label that would send most white people scurrying for the safety of Fleetwood Mac. I’m going to wildly oversimplify to say that post-rock involves common rock instrumentation and somewhat unconventional song structures - one song seemed to involve two bars of four followed by two bars of three, and I’m not music theoritician enough to tell you what the hell time signature that is, but I am just barely theoritician enough to tell you that it’s pretty damn weird.

The preceding paragraph probably fails to reassure the reader that I do in fact like this stuff. I like the quieter pensive instrumental stuff and I like when it gets rolicking, though with Dianogah it never gets too rolicking. I suspect that a disproportionate number of already admittedly disproportionate fans of Dianogah and their like are themselves musicians, like some sort of grand inversion of the canard that very few people saw Velvet Underground live but everyone who did started a band. (While I can’t vouch for the overall musicality of the crowd, I can say that I saw Doug McCombs lingering in the back.)

For tonight’s main set we were situated audience right, maybe a bit closer to the stage but also at more of an angle. We were pretty much right under a house speaker. I hadn’t paid that close of attention to the differences in the mix the first two nights, but there were things I was picking up night three that were definitely different. Andy seemed a little muddier, Joel’s guitar seemed higher in the mix. Maybe because we had a clearer sight line of Jeff and could see a little more of what he was doing, I was also able to hear him in better focus.

Our sense was that the band was both tighter and looser on night three, which of course sounds ridiculous, but they refer to different aspects of the band’s countenance. In particular the comfort level with how Joel would add flourishes to songs which didn’t originally have dual guitars seemed to grow just over the course of the three nights, and also Joel settling into his live vocal range.

Silkworm, if I describe them to someone, I describe them as a “rock band”. I do not think of them as a “hard rock band”, and even though they were on two of the most famed indie-rock labels, I’m actually hard-pressed to refer to them as an “indie rock band”, because to me that implies more of an aesthetic of Pavement or Guided By Voices. For lack of a better word, there’s been a maturity to Silkworm’s sound seemingly since day one. I also don’t think of them as “post-punk” even though there are a lot of clear influences there. There’s a fair argument that some of the early material, especially Joel’s, might be considered “emo”, but it’d be emo minus the punk adjacencies.

Maybe the best way to understand the overall aesthetic is through “Garden City Blues”, the first song on In the West, because what we’re ultimately dealing with here is young musicians forged by growing up in an isolated outpost like Missoula, but at that, an isolated outpost which also happened to be a college town through which a lot of sonic ideas could flow, but maybe not on the same timeline as everywhere else.

All of this helps explain how and why the songs and underlying ideas continue to resonate, and why this may have been the ideal band to have died and arisen again. We’re not just the sum of our parts, we’re also forged by a series of crucibles. The friends that find each other in these strange places - R.E.M. in Athens, Silkworm in Missoula, the Elephant 6 core in Reston - there’s something to be said not just about the inputs but about the crucibles themselves. With Silkworm there’s an added element though, a sort of heightened awareness of the time and place they were in. I think this all helps explain a lot of why the material feels timeless and universal to me, and yet may also at the same time might make it less accessible to others. We’ve all been in the crucibles, but for those of us who can’t help but actively think about all that, this is our band. A certain kind of psychos indeed.

The set lists across the three nights have been about 2/3 the same night to night, and have spanned all of the band’s albums. Really though the practical limitation is trying to get up to speed on all of the material while also modifying arrangements for it all. They’ve seemingly worked up about 30 songs and it’s pretty goddamn impressive they’ve pulled this off given that Joel lives in Vancouver and Andy lives in the Boston area.

SKWM 9/25/25
Couldn’t You Wait
Never Met a Man I Didn’t Like
Insomnia
Raised By Tigers
Garden City Blues
Don’t Make Plans This Friday
Raging Bull
Little Sister
Don’t Look Back
Tarnished Angel
Clean’d Me Out
Ritz Dance
The Third
Pilot
Nerves
Dirty Air

Sheep Wait For Wolf
Swings
White Lightning
Bar Ice
Yen + Janet Forever
LR72

Plain
That’s Entertainment
The City Glows
Treat the New Guy Right

Bones

Off to Tolono tonight for night four from Loose Cobra, capacity 100. It should be a very interesting time. My fourth installment might be a bit delayed because this is running into a weekend full of non-Silkworm activities. The rock maven does have dad things to do, you know.