TUESDAY, NOV. 27, THE HIDEOUT — RICK RIZZO AND JANET BEAN: The Hideout’s been hosting some shows lately in its front room, including a few recent gigs by Rizzo, the lead singer and guitarist for Eleventh Dream Day. This time, he was joined by his fellow Eleventh Dream Day member Janet Bean, who normally plays drums and sings. For this unamplified performance, she had jingle bells on her ankles; she also shook a tambourine and occasionally played a Melodica, while Rizzo played acoustic guitar. It was unusual to hear EDD’s songs unplugged. The tunes are meant to rock, but it was cool to hear Rizzo and Bean’s vocal harmonies and lyrics so clearly. They played several new songs, which will probably show up on the next Eleventh Dream Day record, whenever that comes out.
WEDNESDAY, NOV. 28, THE BURLINGTON — DAVID VANDERVELDE: This was the last of four Wednesday-night shows Vandervelde performed during his November “residency” at the Burlington; the only one that I managed to catch. He was in excellent form, playing several songs with buzzing guitar riffs and solos in the style of Neil Young and Crazy Horse. But as always, he also reveled in power-pop melodies. On this occasion, his songs reminded me more than a little bit of Badfinger. Can’t wait to hear his next record. I showed up just in time to catch the last song and a half by Mazes, who seemed to be rocking pretty hard; and alas, I missed the first set of the night, by the Singleman Affair.
THURSDAY, NOV. 29, ALLSTATE ARENA — THE WHO: I hadn’t been planning to see The Who until I got a last-minute offer for a ticket. I’m glad I went. The one time I’d seen The Who before was their “farewell” tour in 1989. And I was skeptical about the whole idea of Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend carrying on as “The Who” without either Keith Moon or John Entwistle. But as much as I’d prefer going in a time machine back to a Who concert circa 1967, they played a remarkably good show this time.
Daltrey’s vocals stayed strong. Townshend twirled his arm in that trademark windmill, making jagged shards out of his rhythm chords. And several musicians filled out the rest of the sounds as they performed the entirety of their complex 1973 rock opera Quadrophenia, followed by a short string of some greatest hits: “Who Are You,” “Behind Blue Eyes,” “Pinball Wizard,” “Baba O’Riley” and “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” They should’ve ended the show there, but they went on, with Daltrey and Townshend alone on the stage doing an acoustic duet version of “Tea & Theatre,” from The Who’s 2006 album Endless Wire. It was actually nice to hear the two of them playing by themselves, but the song paled in comparison to everything that had come before it. Still, all in all, a memorable night of music by one of the world’s greatest rock bands — or what remains of it.
FRIDAY, NOV. 30, THE HIDEOUT — MIKE COOLEY: Patterson Hood gets the most attention in the Drive-By Truckers, but the other singer-songwriter-guitarist in the group, Mike Cooley, has been contributing great songs to the band’s albums since the beginning. He rarely plays solo gigs, so it was a privilege to see him sitting down with a couple of acoustic guitars on the Hideout’s stage. Cooley, who generally lets Hood do all the talking between songs at DBT shows, turned out to be a fairly talkative and wickedly funny guy. And what a pleasure to hear his songs in these plucked-acoustic arrangements, which often sounded quite a bit different than the full band versions. A friend who saw Cooley on Thursday night as well told me that he played a lot of different songs the previous night. As Cooley noted, he works without a set list, and he obligingly played some of the songs requested by enthusiastic fans. Highlights included “Zip City,” “Checkout Time in Vegas,” “Marry Me,””Carl Perkins’ Cadillac” and “When the Pin Hits the Shell.”
I had my camera at only one of these concerts, the Mike Cooley show. My photos:
The Nov. 29 issue of The New Yorker has a wonderful essay on Keith Moon’s drumming by literary critic James Wood. Reading this appreciation of Moon’s insanely great drumming made me think of the following article, which I wrote in 2007 for Pioneer Press Newspapers, looking back on two concerts the Who performed in the northwest suburbs in the late ’60s. There are many musicians I’d love to travel back in time to see — to see them when they were their prime or when they played to small crowds before they became huge stars. Near the top of my fantasy list: The Who in the 1960s or early ’70s.
The Who at the First Monterey International Pop Festival, just a few days after their concert at the Cellar in Arlington Heights.
ONCE UPON A TIME, a brash young rock band from England descended on Chicago’s northwest suburbs, smashing guitars and making a loud and rebellious racket. Forty years later, fans vividly remember when the Who came to town. The Who’s earliest U.S. concerts included a June 15, 1967, stop at the Cellar in Arlington Heights on and a July 31, 1968, show at the New Place between Cary and Crystal Lake.
Paul Sampson, now a Crystal Lake resident, owned the Cellar, a teen club at the corner of Salem and Davis streets that hosted concerts by Chicago bands such as the Shadows of Knight as well as touring acts like Cream. The building is now an auto repair shop, not far from the Arlington Heights post office.
“The most distinct thing that I remember about the Who was Peter Townshend coming to my office,” Sampson says. “He says, ‘I can’t go on. I’ve got guitar-string problems.’” Sampson recalls thinking that Townshend was “a little spoiled,” a quality common in that era’s rock stars. “I thought, ‘Give me a break,’” Sampson says. “Needless to say, I let him know that he wouldn’t be paid if he didn’t go on. It just doesn’t work that way. I guess he found it within himself to go out and take care of whatever the issues were.”
John Sennett, who now lives in Schaumburg, was a 13-year-old Arlington Heights kid when he went to see the Who that night. “I had all their albums, including their monumental first, My Generation,” Sennett says. “My brother Michael was in a band called the Reejuns. They played some of the Who songs, so I was quite in touch with the Who. They were very ‘tough’ at the time. A street band, singing songs of the street, of the youth.”
A critic for the Chicago Tribune noted that the Thursday night concert got started late, after 20 minutes of “electronic troubles.” The Who ended up playing for only 15 minutes, the newspaper reported, “but it was sweet and loud.”
Sampson doubts the concert was that short. “No, no, I do not recall that,” he says. “I’m pretty sure if they had gone on for 15 minutes, there would have been reservations at the end. … Generally, when a group came in, they were contracted for 45 minutes. The total onstage routine … had to be close to that.”
Kirby Bivans, an Evanston musician in a band called the Other Half, was in the audience. Answering questions by e-mail from his current home in Switzerland, he recalled: “Pete Townshend was having problems with his amplifier and they had a little roadie who was scurrying back and forth behind the amplifiers to try to fix the problem. Pete’s solution was to ram his guitar neck into the amplifiers and sometimes he would knock them over, causing the roadie to cover his head and tried to get away; it was both shocking and comical. We would see the roadie run back to the front of the building and get another amplifier top and bring it back and connect it, only to have it malfunction again causing Pete to ram his guitar neck one more time into it. And sometimes Pete would just throw his guitar neck as high as he could and it would get caught in the chicken wire, which was only about three feet above his head. That would cause him to get really angry and he started pulling it down.”
Sennett says the Cellar’s acoustics basically consisted of noise echoing off concrete walls. “That’s the way we liked it,” he says. “Hard guitar chords and tough vocals along the tracks, in a warehouse.” He saw Sampson looking through the glass window of the Cellar’s control booth, which was above the crowd. Sennett remembers Sampson looking “elated.”
“They were really loud,” Sampson says. “It was ‘bang, crash, bang, crash.’ It was a bit of smasheroo-type thing. I don’t know how much musical value one got out of that, but it became one heck of an act. That’s what they were famous for.” Sennett remembers “bass and drums pounding till the walls shook.”
As the Who finished their set, Townshend smashed his guitar. “Their last song was ‘My Generation’ of course, and during the song the little roadie lit some smoke bombs and we all started choking,” Bivans said. “Someone opened the fire doors and we all tried to get out as fast as we could, along with the Who. The band jumped into a waiting black Cadillac limousine and drove away as fast as they could.
“After the show, the guitar player in my band came up to me, and I said to him, ‘I just ran into Keith Moon.’ He said, ‘Far out! Did he say anything to you?’ I said, ‘No I really ran into him; he almost knocked me over trying to get out!’”
After the concert, a fan asked Townshend what he would use for his guitar the following night. “Glue it back together,” he responded, according to the Tribune.
The next day, the Who played the first of two nights at the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco, followed by the First Monterey International Pop Festival that Sunday, which D.A. Pennebaker filmed for the documentary Monterey Pop.
Sennett says the experience of seeing the Who at the Cellar had a lasting impact on him. “Their pounding chords and disruptive nature drove my personality throughout my youth,” he says. “Playing in a small venue like the Cellar made the Who one of us — no different, except they knew how to play excellent, earth-shattering music.”
Paul Wertico, an acclaimed jazz drummer who lives in Skokie, was a student at Cary-Grove High School when the Who came back to the area for another concert in July 1968. Wertico was already a fan, especially of Moon’s drumming. The Who played in the courtyard of a small club called the New Place, which was in an unincorporated area between Cary and Crystal Lake, on Route 31 less than a mile south of Northwest Highway. After the opening bands finished playing, the audience waited, anxiously wondering where the Who were. Their equipment was onstage, but there was no sign of the band.
“I was standing maybe three feet from the stage, and all of a sudden, a helicopter lands in back of the fence, and they hop over the fence,” Wertico says. “There was a mad crush to the front of the stage.”
Recalling the Who’s famous personas, Wertico says, “I remember (John) Entwistle being really staid and just looking out. He was watching Keith and he was really playing. The other three guys were going completely ape. Roger Daltrey’s twirling the microphone. He’s got tape on the microphone so it doesn’t fall off. And Townshend’s doing all those windmills. Keith broke so many drumsticks. We were wondering if they were broke to begin with, because it was so ridiculous the number of sticks he broke during that performance. Is he using sticks that were cracked already?”
The Who were so loud that they knocked out the power seven times that night, and each time, Keith Moon continued drumming as the electricity went out. Then came the smashing finale.
“All of a sudden, Townshend put his guitar through one of the high-watt amplifiers,” Wertico says. “And Daltrey’s doing the same thing, taking his mike stand and destroying stuff. And Keith’s knocking over everything. Part of Pete Townshend’s guitar landed right in front of me, and this big guy who worked for the Who just jumped and grabbed it. It was so exciting, it was just unbelievable.”
The show left a big impression on Wertico. “The thing that blew my mind was they went through that whole thing of trashing their equipment in a place like that,” he says. “That’s amazing to me. You’d think they’d just save that for the big shows. They did not go on autopilot. They could have been playing for a million people that night. It was stunning, the amount of energy and the amount of joy. That’s what made me want to be a musician, that spirit.”
