SHANE BROWN: An exceptional time at two concerts in Chicago
People do a lot of things to relieve stress.
Heck, there's an entire industry devoted to relaxation and wellness. The Quad-Cities is loaded with everything from day spas to acupressure clinics to hydro-therapy centers. There are parks you can walk around. There are apps for your phone that can help with mindfulness and guided meditation. Drug stores are loaded with herbal and pharmaceutical assists to your mental well-being. The world's a pretty stressful place, and we're constantly searching for ways to alleviate it.
For me, it turns out all I needed was a perfect concert weekend.
I just got back from a long weekend in Chicago. I'm brain-dead and exhausted. I feel like a zombie. Every muscle in my body aches. My feet may never speak to me again. And I haven't been this happy in a loooong time.
When one of my favorite artists plays a gig in Chicago, it's tempting. When TWO of my favorite artists play Chicago on back-to-back nights, at venues a block apart from one another, it's pretty much mandatory attendance. It's been a mighty long time since I've snuck up to the Windy City for more than just a few hours, and it turned out be a MUCH-needed recharge and a throwback to the most music-nerdy days of my life.
In "A Room With A View," E.M. Forster wrote: "The kingdom of music is not the kingdom of this world; it will accept those whom breeding and intellect and culture have alike rejected. The commonplace person begins to play, and shoots into the empyrean without effort, whilst we look up, marveling how he has escaped us, and thinking how we could worship him and love him, would be but translate his visions into human words, and his experiences into human actions. Perhaps he cannot; certainly, he does not or does so very seldom."
Of course, Forster wrote that before much popular music HAD words, but you get the point. There's something about rock stars that's otherworldly. At the heart of it, they're just people like you or me. But give them a stage, a guitar and a microphone, and they're gods among men, capable of changing lives with little more than a simple tune. The artists I saw this weekend both made HUGE impacts on my life, and this weekend felt like I was paying tribute to the influence they had on me decades ago. And you've likely never heard of either of them, and that's cool. Maybe your favorite rock star barely registers on MY radar. That's the best thing about music — there's something for everyone.
I think I was in junior high when I first discovered the band New Order. Once upon a time, they were called Joy Division. Fronted by the arresting vocals of Ian Curtis and the melodic bass playing of Peter Hook, Joy Division were leaders of the post-punk movement. In their brief three years together, they released two seminal albums that helped forge the genre we know nowadays as "goth."
Joy Division didn't make happy music. They were minimalist, angular records that fit no pigeonholes at the time, with Curtis' morose and gloomy lyrics delivered with his trademark icy glare and off-kilter baritone. Curtis had epilepsy, which inspired his seizure-like onstage dancing. When you saw Joy Division, you knew it was something different.
Of course, I never saw Joy Division, because I was 9 years old when Curtis took his own life in 1980. But rather than pack it in, Hook and the remaining members of Joy Division regrouped as New Order, taking the skeletal framework of their previous band's sound and advancing it into a new era of dance beats and drum machines. Fully embracing the synthesizer revolution, New Order showed the world it was possible to make intelligent, challenging records that were as much at home on dancefloors as the bedrooms of sad kids. Their iconic track "Blue Monday" remains the biggest-selling 12" dance single of all time. Their greatest hits album was the very first CD I bought with my own money, and New Order was the first band I ever went to Chicago with friends to see.
New Order are still around today, albeit without the enigmatic bass playing of Peter Hook, who left the band in 2007 amid acrimonious in-fighting. When Hook announced a quick U.S. tour with his new band where he promised to play all of New Order's greatest hits followed by all of Joy Division's greatest hits, I knew I had to be there.
And whew, did I get my money's worth. I knew it would be epic, but I wasn't expecting a 68-year-old to play for three solid hours. I can't think of another show I've been to where EVERY song in the setlist had a place in my Favorite Songs of All Time list, and Hooky delivered in spades. I was among my people — everyone in the crowd looked like aging nerdy record store clerks, and I couldn't have been happier.
Until maybe the next day. That's when Pulp came to town. Pulp was a Britpop band of the 1990s who made it cool to be a nerd. Their frontman, Jarvis Cocker, was a debonair geek god who specialized in anthems for the outcasts and weirdos out there. In those days, I used to run a website and email discussion list devoted to U.S. fans of U.K. indie music, and no rock star was more beloved in our community than Jarvis Cocker. His lyrics weren't just captivating, they were a clarion call for nerds of the world.
"Misshapes, mistakes, misfits / We don't look the same as you / And we don't do the things you do / But we live round here, too / We're making a move, we're making it now / We're coming out of the sidelines / We won't use guns, we won't use bombs / We'll use the one thing we've got more of / That's our minds."
If you ever got picked on, if you ever got bullied or felt alienated, you might not have a support system in place, but you always had Jarvis.
Pulp broke up in 2002 but occasionally reunite for special live performances. This quick jaunt was billed as a one-off tour called, "This Is What We Do for an Encore." Five thousand aging Britpoppers packed into the Aragon Ballroom on Sunday to a message projected on video screens that simply said: "This is a night you will remember for the rest of your life. You are about to see the 552nd concert by Pulp." Many of the members of my old email discussion list were in the crowd, internet friends I made simply by liking the same nerdy music, and we spent the show texting one another with glee.
Not only did they play the hits but came out for an unexpected second encore, with Jarvis taking the stage and asking the simplest of questions: "Would you mind very much if we played a brand-new song?" The crowd went NUTS. Pulp might just be back, and I was one of the first 5,000 people to hear it. Like I said, it was a good weekend.
Is this column little more than a lame travelogue of my weekend trip? Eh, probably, but can you blame me? It was an exceptional time. We stayed at a fantastic Airbnb walking distance from the gigs. I wandered around Chicago for two days. I bought more records than I should have. I was a cheesy tourist and went to Gordon Ramsey's restaurant for a ridiculously good meal. I caught up with friends I hadn't seen in some time. I felt the monkeys of my life fly off my back.
I also don't want to do it again for a good long while. The graph on my step-tracker app on my phone looks like I climbed Mt. Everest last weekend. I'm pretty sure if I lived in Chicago, I'd be as thin as a stick — but I'd also have giant callouses for feet. Big cities are a young man's game. But for just a couple days, I felt like one of those young men. If acupressure or a day spa cures your stress, more power to you. I just need a noisy concert and a rock star telling me everything's going to be just fine.
Shane Brown writes for the Dispatch-Argus and Quad-City Times. Contact him at .
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