Silkworm: Night Two

From the outside, you’d have zero idea what Sleeping Village is. It used to be a dentist’s office sitting along high-traffic Belmont Avenue. How anyone had the vision to put a rock club there is beyond me.

The music room has a posted max capacity of 300, and it’s worth a pause here. I’m writing about seeing this run of the first four Silkworm reunion shows in terms that this is the return of a behemoth, the veritable kings of rock and roll, when the reality is that the room is occupied by a quite small number of very specific type of psychos, broadly friendly, but irrevocably drawn by the clarion call of a guitar chord that sounds just so.

This night my party expanded to include Carlo’s cousin Tarlo, and compatriots Crush and Krusch. Krusch was with me when Silkworm had last graced a Chicago stage in March 2005, when we were but cosmic infants in this mysterious plane.

The night two opener were The Gotobeds, keeping alive the tradition of top-shelf Pittsburgh rock music. By my standards they’re practically mainstream: a more direct four-piece hard rock band with a post-punk vibe and a handsome dynamic front man. Extra points are deserved for their logo using the Buzzcocks’ typeface, and for the front man Eli using a clamp light like it was an instrument, which gives me a lot of ideas should any of my bands ever reform. The universe has oddly been pulling me back a little more toward hard rock the last couple of years, and The Gotobeds seem like a band which should be in my rotation.

Tim explained he’d met The Gotobeds at the tribute concert for the late great Karl Hendricks. So many of the connections people have made seem to be borne out of tragedies. I’ll get over the top with a metaphor here and say that fires are an integral part in the long-term health of the forest. The losses are no less painful but how you cope, adapt, and continue to grow in their wake… that’s the sadness and beauty of the human condition.

The conceit of the reunion, as Tim has put it, is to imagine an alternate history of the band, where Joel had never left and they had met Jeff instead of Michael. He had suggested that songs from the entire catalog would be played but some would have alternate arrangements, which makes sense, because a lot of the last few albums made use of space between the musicians as a kind of fourth instrument. So far I don’t think we’ve seen what I would call complete deconstructions, but rather more of a tinkering in the way that they’ve found space for Joel in later catalog songs.

Andy is a guitar hero, capable of outright shredding, sweeping storytelling without singing a word, or morphing into an elite rhythm player when Tim essentially goes lead on bass. It’s also astonishing to see him go off on a guitar line, eyes closed, like he can turn off most of the mind and let the hands operate. I’ve seen plenty of amazing guitarists and none of them do all of the things he does. Reinserting a second guitar to the arrangement, then, is a really interesting thing to do.

Tim comes off as a very cerebral musician, the bass frequently seeming to be mid-scheme. I can best explain the difference like this. When Andy’s deep into something, you sit back and think:

Wow, look where he’s going!

When Tim’s deep into something, you sit back and think:

Wow, where is he going?

The interplay between the imperative and the interrogative is fundamental to the band, and what Michael was always able to provide was the declarative, he just happened to do it with incredible force, knees flying about. Jeff can pound the skins himself, but these guys are professionals and understand the need to play off of each other’s skills, and Jeff is more of a flow drummer, and demonstrates that there’s more than one way to strike musical balance.

The imperative, interrogative, and declarative spoken for, it’s the exclamatory which remains, and, well, friends, this is Joel R. L. Phelps we’re talking about, one of the greatest emotive songwriters this planet has ever produced. It doesn’t really make sense that these three very different songwriters could have found each other as teenagers in Montana.

I think the band was a lot more comfortable overall the second night. The setlist was mostly the same, but this time around we got “Our Secret”, “Grotto of Miracles”, “Yen + Janet Forever”, and maybe the night’s biggest surprise, “Severance Pay” with Joel on lead vocals. We were audience left, about eight feet back, Joel and Tim in front of us. My phone is a little older so it gets okay photos, but if you hunt around you’ll find better.

Somebody close to me got video though, here’s “Our Secret”, the only cover from the night, but a song that’s been with the band since 1987 and which Tim refers to as the band’s theme. Joel covers a different Comsat Angels song, “Lost Continent”, on Blackbird, and if you’re going to look to any single band as antecedent to what Silkworm is about, Comsat Angels are a logical place to start.

The version of “Little Sister” in the encore was particularly great, and for the first time I picked up on how in this early song Tim was clearly a devotee of one Peter Hook. In 1997 in the liner notes from the early years compilation Even a Blind Chicken Finds a Kernel of Corn Now and Then Tim wrote this:

Regard “Little Sister” and “Scruffy” as a prism through which to view the rest. While fully weird-sounding, they capture the rolling of early SKWM in a way that the multitracked stuff didn’t. Hearing the former always makes me penetratingly sad that I’ll probably never play it again.

Through everything it took to get here, I can say this most assuredly: these guys are extremely happy to be together playing music together again.

Night two setlist:

SKWM 9/24/25
Couldn’t You Wait?
Treat the New Guy Right
Insomnia
Raised By Tigers
The City Glows
Grotto of Miracles
Raging Bull
Dremate
Don’t Look Back
Our Secret
Ritz Dance
Give Me Some Skin
Severence Pay
Nerves
Dirty Air

Plain
That’s Entertainment
Yen + Janet Forever
(I Hope U) Don’t Survive

Slow Hands
Little Sister
Bones

Night three coming up!