What I Learned at the Prefuse 73 Show

As I wrote earlier, I spent the weekend in Chicago for the Prefuse 73 show. I was joined by Mr. Snead. We stayed with our friend Colleen who was gracious enough to let us crash on her floor. I’ve always been pretty jealous of Chicago. I can’t count how many times great bands have been on tour and the furthest north they came was Chicago. Too often. So this time with the great line up of Prefuse and Blank Blue I decided to take a trip down and catch the show while catching up with some friends at the same time.

The show was at The Empty Bottle, which is a pretty typical mid-western rock-roll venue. Lots of exposed brick, dim lighting, cheap beer, and a floor that has had every beer, liquor, and fluid contained with the human body spilled upon it. I had never been to the Bottle before, and I was expecting it to be bigger. I figured Prefuse would draw a crowd large enough to require something larger than a rock club, but I was excited to see him someplace smaller. Which segues nicely into our first learning:

1. Music is best experienced on a human scale. I would define ‘human scale’ as anything immediately conceivable by the human mind. With numbers I’d put the limit around 100-125, and with distance about 100 feet. Anything larger and the mind has trouble judging the amount accurately, and naturally allows for a higher tolerance of inaccuracy. So when I say music is best experienced on a human scale I mean with less than 100 people and from a distance no greater than 100 feet. This I believe is the optimum condition for feeling connected to not only the music but also the musician.

2. Never underestimate the power of the nap. After a wonderful afternoon eating hot dogs, polish, and duck fat fries at Hot Doug’s we headed back to Colleen’s place with no plan of action. All of us were feeling the hearty lunch we’d had earlier and the drowsiness began to descend with the darkness outside. But wait! This is Chicago! We didn’t come here to nap! Let’s go do something! So we scraped ourselves off the floor and headed outside. We did some shopping, drank some coffee, and had a round of bloody marys. That evening, after Colleen went to dinner with some friends, Bud and I were left to our own devices, and things got ugly. Real ugly. With 4 hours to kill before the show we hit a local pub for some dinner, and immediately found ourselves staring blankly into a television unable to form the coherent thoughts and sentences needed for an actual conversation. We both knew that it was going to be a hard slog to stay awake long enough to enjoy the show, and both agreed that we should have napped when we had the chance. We made it to the show, and the music revived us quite a bit, but let this be a lesson to all of you. You must appreciate the nap!

3. Cabbies are less knowledgeable than they used to be. Chicago has a great public transportation system and an abundance of cabs (both of which we lack all but completely here in the North) and we used them every chance we got. We rode the blue-line El into the city from O’Hare and took cabs everywhere else after that. On just about every occasion the cabbie was not as well geographically informed as we would have like them to be. Most times we had to direct them from what we could remember from Google Maps. This has happened a few times in the Twin Cities as well. After getting in the cab and telling the cabbie where you want to go they ask, “How do I get there?” or, “Where is that?” Is it just me or where they more helpful in the past.

4. Winter is the enemy of the show. Saturday afternoon the thick sky had had enough and decided to snow and sleet. This was actually kind of pretty for the first hour or so. The Chicagoans were bundled up tight and commenting on the cold weather. “It’s balmy! Only 30 degrees!” I would say (remember, the temp in the cities when we left was in the single digits). The above freezing temps during the day meant that once the sun went down the sidewalks froze over with snow melt. This made it very difficult, and dangerous, to walk the sidewalks and also made for some scary driving. It was a good thing we didn’t drink too much at the show because we most definitely would have broken something on the way home (on the upside, I’m sure all the cabbies know exactly where the hospital is). The cooler temps also meant that most people were wearing their winter coats, which take up a lot of space. During the show Bud commented to me that the club would be half as full if people weren’t wearing their coats. Winter coats are just a bitch to deal with. What are you supposed to do with it at the show? You can’t wear it because you’ll get too hot. And you can’t hold it because it’s too bulky and awkward and you end up looking like a dork. Usually the solution lies in doing a little bit of both. In the STP we drive to all of our shows, so we have the option of leaving coats in the car. I guess public transportation does has its downside.

5. Smokey clubs suck. I don’t know how anyone went out before the Minnesota smoking ban. It isn’t so much the smoke in the club, but the smoke that you take home with you after leaving the club. It gets into everything. Your clothes, your hair, everything. It’s like rolling around in the sand at the beach and then going to bed. The worst part is waking up the next morning. Somehow you’re always surprised, “What the fuck is this? Sand?”

6. Chicago: hipster quotient high; asshole quotient low. Never before had I seen so many hipsters. I thought we had them bad in STP. We got nothin’ on Chi-town. Which is no surprise really, it being a larger city. The surprise was that everyone at the show was super polite. There was no pushing, no crowding, and everyone who walked past said “Excuse me,” or “Sorry.” Although there was one dude I wanted to tell to quit dancing and enjoy the music.

Good night Chicago!