It came from Black Background

This past Friday saw a lost favorite of the Chicago rock scene quite literally Get The Band Back Together. If you spent any time at Metro, Double Door, or the offices of DKA in the late 1990s, you knew the Smoking Popes. I always thought Eric's characterization of the band was dead on: Morrissey meets the Ramones (though I've decided they're at least 10% Matthew Sweet in the Girlfriend era, which is considerably more than 100% Fun.)

The 'Popes apparently put 7 years of unreconciled differences behind them, picked up the strings, and played like old times for a raucous, rapt capacity crowd at Metro this past Friday. As the Tribune's Greg Kot observed,

[This crowd was] rewarded with a performance that offered no new songs, but that essentially picked up where the band left off in 1998. That's a good place to be, because the Popes were still on the ascent, still perfecting their sound when singer-guitarist Josh Caterer quit the band to pursue his newfound Christian faith.

Whatever ill-will that departure engendered within the band appears to have long since faded. The right hands of Caterer and his brothers, guitarist Eli and bassist Matt, were mirror images of one another as they downstroked their instruments on "Before I'm Gone."

My thanks to Joe Kottke here at FeedBurner for scoring the tickets for us; word is the show sold out in 36 minutes. That's white-hot fast for a Metro show that isn't an A-list national act. Then again, most in attendance always expected the Popes would be just such a band. They played like one, cutting straight through their catalog with the crowd singing their way through every chorus. I especially liked their treatment of "Pretty Pathetic," a favorite track from Destination Failure.

If you've never seen a show at Metro, you have to add this venue to your Must Visit list. It's the perfect place to see virtually any modern rock act. No one can play too big to fit there; the space's acoustics and layout are incredibly patron-friendly (versus that "certain deathtrap" appeal of the Aragon Ballroom); and they never oversell the place to a point of total claustrophobic overload.

I trusted my P910 to capture some video from the show; it did that well enough, but you can tell its tinny microphone was no match for the amps at Metro. Hopefully these clips give you some idea of the energy they put out.

(2MB; Pretty Pathetic, plus some panoramic shots of the crowd I can't explain taking)

(976K; i mean, can you even hear the band over the crowd singalong?)

(472K; More of Pretty Pathetic, I'm fairly certain)

Posted by Matt Shobe at 10:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

...with those words from Bono and four cracks of Larry Mullen Jr.'s drumsticks on the downbeat, U2 began to give all it could to bring Americans who watched them back from the edge of an inconsolable despair, barely two weeks beyond September 11th. If you watched them that night, when they took a plain white soundstage for their portion of the America: A Tribute to Heroes benefit concert, you may have realized for the first time why U2 has mattered for so long. If you're about my age -- 34 -- some part of your life was bettered by the band providing its soundtrack. On that night, their music touched millions who simply needed to feel anything other than the familiar rough surface of their communal grief, fretted raw.

Heaven on Earth, We need it now I'm sick of all of this hanging around

It wasn't their best live performance -- not at all. Presumably, the sound engineering was hastily assembled for an impromptu international broadcast. It read the band flat, with even a slight line buzz through the Edge's chiming guitar intro. Bono's voice itself was weary. He carried it through the opening verse like a folded flag.

I'm sick of the sorrow, sick of the pain sick of hearing, again and again that there's never gonna be -- peace on Earth

When the Edge broke the hymnal wide open, leaning into the soaring opening chorus, I mainly remember completely losing my composure for the first time since it all happened. I couldn't take my eyes off the television as a band I had grown up with reached out to say "We don't know how to get through this, either. So we'll play."

And if your glass heart should crack for a second you turn back, oh no be strong, walk on what you got they can't steal it, no they can't even feel it walk on, walk on stay safe tonight

A song about overcoming your lament of something loved and left behind, now seemed to tell you that something was a way of looking at the world. U2 has always been known as a band of tireless faith, and I hope theirs in the rest of us wasn't misplaced. With today's release of How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, I'm virtually certain my next four years are going to be colored in some way by this music that other works simply won't match. I only hope that the moments this time around are much more benign, everyday, but every bit as personal.

Posted by Matt Shobe at 12:00 AM | Permalink