Beer and Loathing at the House of Blues

There are times when even the most obvious of statements needs to be pronounced to the world. I know that I’m breaking no new ground with the declaration that the House of Blues marks a zenith in the corporate co-option of rock ‘n roll, but for some odd reason they’ve gotten a pass in this regards. There are no great boycotts a la Pearl Jam and Ticketmaster. There has been no collective wringing of the hands, like we’ve seen over the spreading grasp of Starbucks, or Walmart, or Microsoft, despite the fact that the creative engine of rock ‘n roll is more important for the cultural health of our nation than coffee, or department stores, or arguably even computers. Like the melting ice caps, this complacency towards the House of Blues, Inc., is an ominous sign for the health of our rock ‘n roll planet, an indication of how much the genre has become merged with the corporate maw.
Let me be blunt. Back in the day, we would not have tolerated New Age platitudes to be declared in a big banner over the stage like facts on a chalkboard, we would have found a way to rip that shit down, bouncers or no. All those red walls and “outsider art”, besides being claustrophobic and slightly unnerving, making me feel like I’ve just gotten over a bad acid trip, have boiled rebellion down to the least common denominator, to something you enjoy on a comfy couch while downing overpriced drinks.
It takes a lot of gall to charge your patrons $6 for a beer and $10 for a small gin and tonic served in a plastic cup, like the experience of being at the House of Blues makes the drinks taste twice as good as at any other bar down the street. Even Rick Bayless doesn’t charge that kind of coin. Or to pay $16 for the “Kobe beef burgers”, which I guess I didn’t have to eat, but it was the second cheapest thing on the menu, and I was hungry.
I admit that I’m also a little pissed about what this says about me, that I’ve reached the age where I can now be marketed to safely and profitably, that I’ve been suckered into this place four times in the past few years, once for Social Distortion, once for X, once for my office’s Holiday Party, and most recently for the Psychedelic Furs. By now, my increasingly skeptical readers are probably thinking that I got what was coming to me, going to see a bunch of retread bands at a corporate music chain.
And on this front I stand guilty as charged. I am the most fleecable of suckers, a middle aged man living out the long faded dreams of his youth, grasping at the last tokens of his old rebellion, hoping these talismen will work their old magic, making me feel relevant and alive.
In my defense I’ll just say that the Psychedelic Furs really rocked the couple of other times I’d seen them. The first time being relatively early in their career, at the Roxy in Hollywood, part of the “Talk Talk Talk” tour, their 2nd album. That show bubbled with the excitement of catching a band that was at the height of their creative powers but who was just beginning to reveal themselves to the world. The Furs that night played almost everything off their first two albums, from “India” and “Imitation of Christ”, which were among the first songs I’d heard that were both thoughtful and tribal in that white-boys-with-guitars sort of way, to the hit-waiting-to-happen, “Pretty in Pink”, which Donna, my girlfriend at the time, leaned against the stage and sang in full voice, assuming the song just had to be written about her. The Furs were pasty nerds, but they were loud, they rocked hard, and they had an odd sex appeal. As a pasty, somewhat culturally blinkered teen in tanned and sunny California, they were a revelation.
A few years later, John Hughes turned the Psychedelic Furs into an 80’s institution. Most of my punk rock friends had long since abandoned them, Donna no longer thought that Richard Butler was singing just about her, and I certainly felt no need to pay $15, which was a small fortune to me at the time, to crowd into Perkins Palace and be subjected to a couple thousand screaming girls dressed in pastels.
But I still had a soft spot for the group. Having played the alto saxophone in the high school band, I thought Mars Williams rocked the sax, sounding hard and driving, with none of the wandering indulgences common to the rock/jazz saxophone. I also thought, and still believe, that Richard Butler tapped into a spiritual vein for our jaded age, angry and yearning and a little too coke addled to find a home.
I remember playing that first Psychedelic Furs album for a Christian girl down the floor from me in Sproul Hall. I was trying to woo her by convincing her that punk rock could be spiritual, but she wasn’t buying it. I had a crush on that girl, but I was almost as passionate about that Furs album as I was about her, and the fact that she couldn’t see how “Imitation of Christ” was paraphrasing Thomas a Kempis while having a go at the hippies at the same time was tragic enough to make me wanna cry. I, after all, was an innocent 18 year old beach kid, and I had this sunny California optimism, not just that there was a spiritual thread to our lives, but that all I had to do was point to it and this sweet recognition would come to everyone, particularly all the wide-eyed girls who were patient enough to listen to my overwrought philosophizing.
The second time I saw the Psychedelic Furs was over 20 years after that first show at the Roxy, at an outdoor fest at the Finkl Steel facilities on the Chicago River with my wife Melissa. The Furs started the set off well, and Richard Butler still had a presence that could grab a crowd. About two songs into the set, the wind picked up, storm clouds approached from the west, the thunder began, and soon we were in the midst of a real Midwestern summer downpour. The band, which was protected by an overhang, didn’t miss a beat. Some of the outer flanks of the crowd made a hasty retreat, but the bulk of us, several hundred strong, wavered a bit, and then regathered ourselves. We began singing louder and dancing harder than ever, sweaty and wet, dripping pagan joy, energized by the pelting drops and the lightning overhead.
“I can see you stuck inside of this cage with me, You’ll cry like a baby, You’ll cry like a bird, You’ll cry like a lady, You’ll cry like a girl, On easy street,” we sang, one of my favorite mid-era Furs tunes, encapsulating the ecstatic melancholy of both the moment and the band.
It was one of those overwhelming, beautiful moments that keep me coming back to the dusty well of rock ‘n roll, hoping for one more drink.
I’m about half way through “Rip It Up and Start Again”, which details the history of the post punk scene, circa 1978-1984. It does a great job recreating an era when, as Roger Miller of Mission of Burma once explained in an interview, every band was the playing out of an idea. They were heady times, when everything seemed possible, not just because we were young, but because we were convinced that music could change the world, or at least our little part in it.
However, the book also unintentionally demonstrates why all of these postpunk flavors of the month, or at least the baggage they carried, brought with them a fatal pretense. “NME bands”, we used to call them, after the trendy English music magazine. Just about every band in “Rip It Up” were high concept, complete with their art school ideologies. There is no doubt that some great music came from this fertile ground, from nonpareils like Joy Division and Wire to vibrant niche makers such as Gang of Four and Young Marble Giants to mainstream crossover artists like the Talking Heads to a slew of interesting wannabes.
But these also rans came to define the scene, bands like Dexy’s Midnight Runners and A Certain Ratio, bands that were much better in concept than execution, who lacked the melody and the groove to make great music, sort of like a porn star with a 5-inch cock, missing the basic tools of the trade, but earnestly trying to keep our attention anyway.
The Psychedelic Furs did not make it into the book about postpunk. I’m not sure why. Echo and the Bunnymen got lots of print, and they were essentially from the same scene, except that the Bunnymen had fewer great riffs but better hair. The Furs absence underscores that the common denominator in the postpunk scene was that you had to be a band that someone could write about. Like the old line that writing about music is like dancing about architecture, except here an entire genre was based around this conceit.
The entire concept of “postpunk” never made any sense. To me, it was all an outgrowth of the original throwing down the gauntlet; from the Cocteau Twins to Black Flag, from Flux of Pink Indians to the the Cure to Throbbing Gristle, it was all one big beautiful scene. “Postpunk” was a way for some people to define themselves away from what they saw as the increasing unpleasantness of punk, and I admit that, as a 19-year old boy, I had a high tolerance for the brawls, slam dancing, and assorted other male idiocy that soon became ubiquitous at hard core punk shows. But the self-conscious sequestering of all these art school grads and NME readers away from the rest of us marked, maybe not the beginning of the end, but at least the end of the beginning.
Just a month or so after entering college at UCLA, I was invited by a dormmate to come down to his room for a few beers before heading out to see the Ramones, who were playing on campus that night. When I got to his room, he asked me if I wanted to hear some B-52’s. I said sure, but that I wasn’t very familiar with their music.
“You call yourself a punk rocker and you don’t know the B-52’s?” he asked incredulously. That first, eponymous B-52’s album had come out a few months before, and to us it was punk, meaning it was part of a fresh, new wave of rock music where everything seemed possible.
But within a couple of years, the boundaries had been established. The fans of A Certain Ratio were on one side, turning their noses up at us punks for being low concept, and I assume also snubbing the burgeoning fan base of the Psychedelic Furs for some other perceived shortcoming of thought, deed, or taste.
Getting back to our night at the House of Blues, I walked into the club with high expectations. We had primed the pump by meeting at Cal’s, a divey bar at the other end of the Loop. Even though I’ve only gone to Cal’s about half a dozen times in the eight years that I’ve worked downtown, I like the place. It is in a crumbling shack of a building, with greasy windows covered with badly drawn Xeroxed flyers for bands that either have or soon will play there. At night, the band squeezes into one corner of a small room, which they optimistically refer to as “400 square feet of rock”. Assuming they don’t have a lot of equipment, there’s room to squeeze another 30 or 40 people into the rest of the bar. During the day, it is frequented by a mix of bike messengers, homeless guys from the mission on the other side of Congress Parkway, and runners from the Board of Trade. The ongoing special is Pabst Blue Ribbon at $1.50 a bottle, which is drunk without any apparent irony by the clientele, although when it comes to cheap beer, I personally prefer Schlitz, which costs another 50 cents. If you decide you want to go high on the hog, a cold bottle of Pilsner Urquell will set you back $3.50. It’s my idea of a bar, namely a place to meet friends and quaff drinks at no more than a few times the price it would cost you to drink them in the privacy of your own backyard.
At the House of Blues, you stand in line to get patted down by the usual phalanx of musclebound bouncers, then get shunted up a stairway to the main concert floor, where the dark red lighting and the omnipresent “outsider art” is supposed to establish a mood. There’s not much to do but nurse your beer and watch promo videos for upcoming bands. On three sides of you are several floors of private boxes, giving the aura of a claustrophobic opera house or the Roman Coliseum, where the patricians look down on the spectacle below.
My buddy Brendan got us upstairs into a VIP area for the Furs show, and I can let you in on a little secret, that it is a sorry aristocracy up there, just a bunch of Midwestern yahoos looking to impress their girlfriends by ordering another plate of overpriced food. There’s really not much to do, and unless you get one of the side booths on the 2nd or 3rd floors, the sound and the sightlines are better on the main room with everybody else. So back down we went to catch the Furs set.
Like I said earlier, I grew up with the optimism of a California beach kid. When that first slew of punk and “post punk” bands came across the country, I assumed that everything had changed, that punk was the new populism, that curiosity and good taste were going to conquer the planet. I remember sitting on the floor of an on-campus apartment with a handful of friends, sucking from a huge trash bag filled with nitrous oxide. We’d pass the bag around and then make our hostess play that first Flipper single, “Sex Bomb” backed by “Ha Ha Ha”, over and over again, just tripping out on how fucked up and perfect those songs were, that big, fat, simple bass riff in “Sex Bomb”, the lyrics nothing more than the short chorus: “She’s a sex bomb, my baby, yeah. Sex bomb, mama, yeah.” And we’d laugh. Flipper were like a nerdy, white version of Bootsy and all those cool black funksters, breaking it down to the bare essentials: a big, fat groove. We were too innocent to know how Flipper were also riffing on Joy Division and the Sonics, we just knew that record rocked. Even the frat boys down the hall who had let us siphon Bogarts off their nitrous canister had come into the room and were rocking out to it. That single was like secret contraband, snuck up from San Diego, where our hostess had heard it the week before, and just by playing it we were changing the world.
I think the first time that it sunk in this was not the case was when some friends took me to a loft party right after I had returned from several months away, hitchhiking across Europe. I missed the L.A. music scene, and I was looking forward to seeing Perry from Psy Com’s new band, who was playing that night, which my friends said had become all the rage in L.A. since I had been gone. Psy Com was a 2nd tier industrial band, but it had an interesting facet, with ominous tunes, heavy on the tribal drums. But it didn’t take long after Perry’s new band, Jane’s Addiction, took the stage at the downtown loft to realize that they were essentially doing a less proficient regurgitation of Led Zeppelin, that their music was not very interesting at all. But the crowd seemed really into it. I walked out of the loft party that night with a sense of foreboding that this was how it would go, the unstoppable flow of mediocrity against the foundations of our bright new world, which would slowly wash away.
In a rational moment, I would know that I shouldn’t expect any kind of magic from the Psychedelic Furs at the House of Blues, but that 2003 show at Finkl Steel had filled me with hope. So the wave crashed kind of hard on me once it was apparent that there was going to be no magic that night at the House of Blues. The crowd was there to be entertained in that “I just paid $25 for this” kind of way, and that Mr. Butler, always a front man with enough presence to outshine the poppy gloom around him, with a bit of Johnny Rotten to flavor his angst, was perfectly willing to play the part with his quirky, almost manic gestures, but it was like a parody of his intense self, a parody even of that magic night in 2003. The songs were still there, the tight riffs and catchy tunes, songs like “Heaven” and “The Ghost and You”, and it was good just to hear them that loud. And it was great to hear Mars Williams’ sax in the mix, as a keyboard had filled in for the sax parts at the Finkl Steel show. But nothing quite clicked at the House of Blues until the encore, when the Furs played two early singles, “Sister Europe” and “India”, back to back, and Butler dropped his mannerisms, reveling in these songs of his angry youth.
Leaving the club magnified my sense of vacancy, my feeling that I was somewhere I didn’t belong. Rock venues are typically insular to begin with, having little contact with the neighborhood, other than to field the occasional complaint about all the racket going on inside, but the House of Blues in Chicago takes this isolation to new heights. It is ensconced in the bowels of an apartment tower, and it turns its back on the street, its entrance opening out on an interior parking circle, like some corporate hotel near the airport.
But in another sense, the House of Blues fits in with the theme restaurants scattered across the surrounding River North area, where patrons pay a premium for the assurance that nothing will go wrong, that the food will be within the pale of acceptable American fare but still quirky enough to tell your friends about the next day. In the same way, the patrons at the House of Blues know that the sound will be mixed by competent professionals and that the bathrooms will be clean, but also that the there will be truffles or some such exotic crap sprinkled on their pasta, funky couches in the VIP rooms, and inoffensively quirky art on the wall that you can talk about with your work mates around the water cooler the next morning. And you can pretty much rest assured that the band you are seeing will deliver the goods in a moderate, professional kind of way, enough to earn their encore but not so much as to inspire anything intense or uncalled for by their fans.
For about a quarter the price that I paid for two tickets to the House of Blues, for the stingy gin and tonics, for my Kobe burgers and Melissa’s tureen of pasta with truffle-sprinkle, we could have spent the rest of the night getting drunk as hell at Cal’s, hanging with some strange and possibly interesting cats, and then checking out whatever under-rehearsed nobody was screaming out their yawp at the bar that night. Who knows, we might have stumbled on to something great, we might have been one of the thirty or so souls to witness something magical, or at least something heartfelt and real.
But we live busy lives. On our rare nights out, Melissa and I won’t take the chance to check out that under-rehearsed nobody. Against our better judgment, we will probably continue to pay up to stand around and coddle our drinks at some overpriced, corporate-run establishment where we know what to expect. And that is what it means to get old.