"Turn It Up," but acoustic

We'll play it louder tonight in Minneapolis 👩🏽‍🎤♀︎

Gang, 

Last night in Chicago was, of course, sublime. For a town that exists in an accursed microclimate that seems to shroud it under eternal cloud cover and icy chill, it remains brimming with life and culture and enthusiasm. We assume as much, anyway, based upon the ten block radius surrounding The Empty Bottle, which is really all we ever get to see of this fine town. But, wow, what a radius!

Every time we visit Chicago, Keith C. conjures a maniacal yen for a new, random meat-food, and so he struck out for an Italian Beef sandwich (a meat-pile with giardiniera on French bread) at Fatso’s Last Stand. Coincidentally(?), last time we were in town, he and Chris hit the very same Fatso’s for a Chicago-style hot dog, which Chat GPT tells me is “an all-beef frankfurter (such as Vienna Beef) in a poppy seed bun, topped with yellow mustard, neon-green sweet pickle relish, chopped white onion, tomato slices, a dill pickle spear, pickled sport peppers and celery salt.” This Fatso person has it all, and Keith C. loves whatever meat thing he or she might happen to vend.

Some of the best food is just a pile of things.

Chris and I counterbalanced Carne’s visit to the charnel house by hitting the Handlebar, the only vegetarian place in the vicinity. Per the report of the woman who works the door at the Empty Bottle: “in Chicago, the vegetarian option is a side salad.” Fortunately, the Handlebar breaks every rule in the Chicago handbook, and though I quietly questioned whether a restaurant should qualify as “vegetarian” if it sells a fish sandwich, Chris told me to shut up and ordered the fish sandwich. 

Our binary meals complete, the band reconvened at The California Clipper, an old-school cocktail bar whose classic vibes are strong enough to forgive the only-pretty-okay drinks and the cover charge. The entrance fee went toward the charmingly idiosyncratic country-kitsch musical duo performing in the corner, though, and the combination of high-octane booze and the enthusiasm generated by our newfound love of the Country and Western genre-cloud primed us for a fine show of our own, indeed.

On top of very fine music, this band makes it easy to imagine Bill Hader is playing guitar, especially if you sit twenty feet away and have our vision.

And so we were exultant but exhausted at 3:00am when we pulled up to the SpringHill Suites, a sound-looking structure operated by the venerable Marriott Corporation, which we’d assumed conferred upon the place a certain legitimacy. We were wrong. Despite signage assuring patrons that the entrance would be locked after 11:00pm each night as a point of policy, the front door offered no resistance to our advance. The lobby was empty. All lights on, papers scattered about the desk, the snack bar unguarded. To men who read as much crime fiction as we do, the scene was immediately ominous. The night clerk was definitely dead. 

Meekly knocking on the desk and offering a quiet “hello?,” I poked my head into the office space behind the front desk, confident that I’d find a corpse in a Marriott uniform slumped over the fax machine, brains spattered all over a nearby stack of guest intake paperwork. There was nothing, nobody. We called the hotel’s phone number. The phone at the desk directly in front of us rang and rang and rang its mournful death knell. Chris conjured a bravery beyond the grasp of we cowardly Keiths and ventured further into the bowels of the offices. We assumed that he would meet the same fate as the expired hotel clerk and silently said goodbye to our old friend. When Chris returned, un-murdered, he reported that there was a locked bathroom door back there. Nobody had responded to his knocks — absolute proof that it was stuffed full of bodies. 

After fifteen minutes of deliberating on whether we should call the police or the county coroner, a dude walked out from the back office, said that he’d been taking a dump, and curtly informed us that we weren’t allowed behind the desk. “We thought you might be dead,” Chris told him, to which he chuckled. We quietly took our room keys and hoped our frayed nerves would allow us to get the five hours of sleep that was our due before we had to begin today’s drive to Minneapolis. 

We’ll sleep when we’re dead!

Which reminds me: today’s acoustic Lobes track is, of course, “Turn It Up.”  Why “Turn it Up” for Minneapolis? We have it on good authority that “the energetic and vibrant feel of the song could reflect the town’s lively music scene and its history with pop icons, as well as the sense of making the most out of the intense seasonal changes.” Sounds about right! 

Which, coincidentally, is what the crowd will be saying at our show at 7th St. Entry this evening. “Sounds about right! Yep!” 

Peggy was a Chicago street cat. During the pandemic, The Empty Bottle’s owners let her in to run their pest control program. Now she’s a full resident, though she keeps herself pretty scarce till the end of the evening —  the music has died down, and the clientele are drunk and easy to trick. For more on Peggy’s story, and a closer look at her delicate features, check out this article in the Chicago Reader.

Back tomorrow with another acoustic track, one that corresponds meaningfully with Kansas City, where we’re playing. Can you figure out what it is? You have a 12.5% chance even if you just guess at random. You might as well try: you can’t win anything, but you also can’t lose anything. Just like life.

🤘🏽,

🎸