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MIXTAPE: Bloodshot Records’ Chicago Sounds

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Bloodshot Records has been operating in Chicago for the entirety of its 20+ years as a record label. As the story goes, the label was birthed — written on a bar napkin at local watering hole Delilah’s — to compile the sounds and ideas of a burgeoning country/punk scene in and around the city in the mid-’90s. On our site, it says, “We’ve always been drawn to the good stuff nestled in the dark, nebulous cracks where punk, country, soul, pop, bluegrass, blues, and rock ‘n’ roll mix and mingle and mutate.”

And while Mike Smith and I haven’t been there since Bloodshot’s inception, we grew up on the catalog (Heartbreaker, anyone?), along with other sounds of similar ilk and of similar community. If you spend enough time in Chicago going to and playing shows, drinking at the Hideout or Schuba’s or Empty Bottle, or just meeting people who are vaguely into music, there are names that consistently arise — ones that have the respect of other musicians, live music show-goers, and casual standers-by.

Here, we’ve compiled our own mixtape of Chicago’s current roots/alt-country artists. Maybe none of them implicitly fall under those umbrella (and sometimes unwanted) terms, but they all possess some sort of grit, twang, or attitude that slots in with the roots aesthetic. — Josh Zanger

Wilco — “Casino Queen”

The band took shape after the split of alt-country originals Uncle Tupelo and, as Wilco progressively leaned more toward pop/indie rock, Chicago has happily claimed them as a musical staple. Early in the band’s career, you could still hear the alt- influences, especially on their debut album, A.M., songs like “Casino Queen” and “Box Full of Letters” remind me of Jeff Tweedy’s creative work with Jay Farrar (now of Son Volt) and Brian Henneman (of Bottle Rockets).

Robbie Fulks — “Aunt Peg’s New Old Man”

Robbie is a Bloodshot original — his first album is catalog number BS011 — and, in my opinion, what keeps the Chicago alt-/roots scene relevant and vibrant. If you think I’m partial, take a trip to the city and go see his residency at the Hideout on a Monday night while he’s in town. Every show is different, with different themes and different guests, but ALL of them feature Robbie’s excellent musicianship and high-wire wit.

Hoyle Brothers — “How Many More Nights”

Since I moved into the city many years ago (and for many years before that), the Hoyle Brothers have been a local honky tonk treasure. They’ve been doing weekly happy hour residencies at the Hideout and Empty Bottle since early 2000s, and it feels like a rite of passage to have attended and gotten drunk at one of their performances.

Lawrence Peters — “Another Year”

If you’ve been to the Hideout, you’ve seen Lawrence behind the bar slingin’ PBRs and cheap whiskey shots. There’s also the chance that you’ve seen him playing honky tonk and country music as the Lawrence Peters Outfit, in one of many renowned local bands, or DJing country tunes at various bars and clubs.

Waco Brothers/Jon Langford — “Receiver”

Jon Langford is a man about town — making art, playing shows, making music, making his political voice heard, kissing babies — and I have yet to meet a person who doesn’t love him. Also, every time he comes to the Bloodshot offices, he makes it a brighter place and then leaves with, “Thank you, good people of Bloodshot, and keep up your great work!” On his own or in various projects, he’s beyond prolific. With the Wacos, content comes a little more slowly, but always carries an added punch in the band’s potent rock ‘n’ roll/punk/country form. In full disclosure: A Waco Brothers 7” is the label’s third release.

State Champion — “There Is a Highlight Reel”

I haven’t seen the band play in a while, so I’m not sure if they even call Chicago home — their Facebook page lists “Chicago/Louisville.” They have a grungey, garage, twangy sort of sound that brings to mind an alternate genre Uncle Tupelo. Freakwater’s Catherine Irwin lends guest vocals to this song, giving it an extra bit of eerie grit.

— Josh Zanger, publicist at Bloodshot Records

Al Scorch — “Everybody Out”

In Chicago over the last five years or so, Al Scorch has been at the forefront of the roots music scene. His combination of bluegrass, folk, country, and punk-rock is uniquely Chicagoan — it’s a direct cross between tradition and rebellion. In the city, you can see Scorch telling urban stories over his lightning-fast banjo pickin’ everywhere from punk clubs to square dances, DIY spaces to theaters. He is a true everyman. I grew up on punk music, and I moved to Chicago from the beautiful Shenandoah Valley in Virginia, a hotbed for roots music and traditional bluegrass, in particular. When I first saw Al Scorch at the famed punk club the Empty Bottle on a Saturday afternoon, it was the first time Chicago truly felt like home to me.

Ryley Walker — “On the Banks of the Old Kishwaukee”

Ryley Walker has been playing multiple styles of guitar (classical, jazz, psychedelic, bluegrass … you name it) in punk bars and jazz clubs around Chicago for years, both solo and with some of the Chicago underground’s most iconic musicians. In local music circles, everyone knows his name for different reasons. In 2014, Walker signed to Dead Oceans, a Bloomington, Indiana, label that specializes in indie rock with splashes of roots music, and released three terrific albums in two years. Just like Walker’s guitar-playing, the albums span a wide genre map, much of which draws from folk, bluegrass, and classic country. Throw in a few jazz and psych numbers, and it’s a unique blend of guitar-led American music.

Devil in a Woodpile/Rick Sherry — “Shake It and Break It”

Devil in a Woodpile is a roots music fixture in Chicago, and Rick Sherry is the carnival barker-like vocalist fronting the unplugged string band. His baritone bellow is earth-shaking while his harmonica playing is to be reckoned with. Devil is also uniquely Chicagoan, as they mix Appalachian-era bluegrass, country (the stuff that floated up the river and landed in the old juke joints and square dances of mid-century Chicago), and folk with the brand of blues that was born in Chicago. Folks will gather in the small Hideout barroom (there’s a reason we keep mentioning the Hideout — it is truly THE roots music haven in Chicago) to watch Devil in a Woodpile play unmic’d in the middle of the room, right on the checker-tiled floor. It’s an event every time. Sherry can also be seen playing in the swingin’ Sanctified Grumblers and the acoustic pickin’ Hatstretchers.

Whitney — “No Matter Where We Go”

Though they aren’t your typical “alt-country” or punk-infused roots that often defines the Americana underbelly of Chicago, Whitney is a band not to be overlooked in the conversation. Born out of the ashes of the short-lived indie rock band Smith Westerns, Whitney combines soul, AM radio pop, late-Wilco-leaning guitar wizardry, and ‘70s-era country music that would make Gram Parsons tap his foot. It’s a unique sound amongst the psychedelia and garage vibes that currently permeate the Chicago indie rock scene. You’ll often see them playing with a brass section and a pedal steel guitar, simultaneously, as evident in their hometown hero set at the 2016 Pitchfork Music Festival.

Henhouse Prowlers — “Leaving You for the Interstate”

As made clear in this piece, a multitude of Chicago bands incorporate bluegrass into their music, mish-mashing it with punk, blues, and country. But the Henhouse Prowlers (previously known as Sexfist — yes, you read that correctly) are one of the few that play traditional bluegrass in the Windy City. Crowded around a mic, pickin’ away on banjo, guitar, dobro, upright bass, and fiddle at Martyrs on almost any given weekend, the Prowlers sound more like the Cumberland Gap in the 1950s than Chicago in the 21st century. Their lyrical allusions are what bring it back around to modern times. They have a song called “Spoiler Alert.”

Jim Elkington — “Slow Train”

If you’ve seen live music in Chicago, you’ve seen Jim Elkington play guitar. The virtuoso has played with everyone from Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy to Eleventh Dream Day (with Freakwater’s Janet Bean) to various Mekons-related projects. (I once saw him play a David Bowie tribute set with Jon Langford and Sally Timms at the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art that felt like a bad acid trip — but you’d never know it through Jim’s deadpan while he shredded away.) I can’t tell you how many shows I’ve been to in which I didn’t even know he was playing until he emerged from the shadows on stage. He’s ubiquitous. Elkington has also released several albums of superb guitar instrumentals steeped in country, bluegrass, and other roots stylings on the Paradise of Bachelors label.

— Mike Smith, new media publicist at Bloodshot Records

Photo on Foter.com

MIXTAPE: Bruce Warren’s Americana Roots

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I was raised in the '70s — the greatest decade of music ever. Here’s a playlist of songs that I put together built on the new and the old, all tied to the music I grew up on — from the singers and the songwriters to the classic rockers, plus some new tunes from musicians carrying on the traditions I fell in love with as a high school kid. — Bruce Warren, Program Director for WXPN

Aaron Lee Tasjan — “Memphis Rain”

With repeated listens, Tasjan’s new album, Silver Tears, unfolds like a great book, with great stories and photographs that linger long after the song ends. This is one of them.

Little Feat — “Skin It Back”

I had no idea who Little Feat were when I bought their 1974 album Feats Don’t Fail Me Now as a high schooler based solely on the cover art by legendary illustrator Neon Park. But, man, did it change my life. This album is like the grandfather of Americana records, in the purest, broadest sense of the genre as roots music. It was R&B, soul, rock, and gritty and swampy, and this band could play like my nobody’s business. Lowell George on slide and funky guitar and that rhythm section pulsing out deep grooves … Mmm-mmm.

Yola Carter — “Fly Away”

One of this year’s outstanding showcases in Nashville at the Americana Festival was British singer/songwriter Yola Carter. She’s sung with Massive Attack, and cites Dolly Parton and Emmylou Harris as major influences. She’s a star. Hold on.

The Dream Syndicate — “Tell Me When it’s Over”

Psychedelic, punk, and pre-Americana all coming together in one place at one time on one glorious record — The Days of Wine and Roses by Steve Wynn and his pals, in 1982.

The Allman Brothers — “Southbound”

You can make 100 mixtapes of music for driving and this is the song you’d want to put on every single wione of them. Shout out to Chuck Leavell on that piano, though.

Michael Kiwanuka — “Love & Hate”

British soul-folk singer Kiwanuka delivered one of the best albums this year on which he mined the spirit of Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On and the soul-folk work of Terry Callier.

Terry Callier — “900 Miles” and “It’s About Time”

Speaking of Callier, there are any number of musical places you can start with the Chicago folk/soul/jazz singer/songwriter whose music shared spiritual commonalities with Tim Buckley and his Chi-town kindred spirit Curtis Mayfield. Start with his 1968 The New Folk Sound of Terry Callier, an American music masterpiece not given its full due.

Norah Jones — “Don’t Be Denied”

Norah drops a very respectable cover of a Neil Young song that originally appeared on my second favorite Neil album, Time Fades Away. (My very favorite Neil record being On the Beach.)

Wilco — “Sunken Treasure”

Side three, track one, Being There. For me, the sonic and songwriting genius of Wilco records like Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and A Ghost Is Born can be traced back to this song. That final verse, however, is super inspiring, even though the song is an emotional sad sack.

“Music is my savior
I was maimed by rock and roll
I was maimed by rock and roll
I was tamed by rock and roll
I got my name from rock and roll”

John Moreland — “High on Tulsa Heat”

Prior to this year’s Americana Music Fest, singer/songwriter John Moreland was barely on my radar. But when Taylor Goldsmith raved about him on the stage of the Ryman during the awards, I went back to my hotel and bought a copy of High on Tulsa Heat. It’s been in heavy rotation on my personal stereo since. Moreland is an amazing storyteller and lyricist. Here’s hoping his music reaches more people.

Bonnie Raitt — “Give It Up or Let Me Go”

Still making music after all these years, Bonnie’s second album, released in 1972, is one of those records you can go back to time and time again, and it continues to sound great. Sure, she covered Jackson Browne, Barbara George, Chris Smither, and Eric Kaz and Libby Titus’s gorgeous “Love Has No Pride,” but it is her self-penned title song that sets the tone of this record.

Mekons — “Hard to Be Human Again”

Insurgent country starts here, with Mekons’ punk and country masterpiece 1985’s Fear And Whiskey.

Hard Holiday: Robbie Fulks and Most of the Mekons on the Island of Jura

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Aside from swimming and light aircraft — one of which is certain doom and the other certainly expensive — there are only two ways to reach the island of Jura, one of several off the western coast of Scotland. You can take a car ferry from Islay, which lies to the south, but it requires a roundabout trip that, while scenic, will take you hours out of your way. More direct passage involves steeling yourself with a shot of the local whiskey and boarding one of the wooden dinghies — called a rigid inflatable — that take the trip across the choppy waters several times a day. Captained by locals long inured to the queasy bounce of the waves, these tiny boats accommodate a modest party and rock vertiginously on the water. Most passengers disembark on the island green-faced and rubber-kneed.

That’s how Robbie Fulks and most of the Mekons made the shaky passage to Jura, where they spent four days recording an album of acoustic ballads and gritty shanties, all full of seafarers weary, wracked, groggy, and often simply lost amid the waves. The Mekons are all British — Scots and Welshmen, specifically, although several now reside in the landlocked American Midwest — and as such are accustomed to some extent to such rough travel. Fulks, however, is an American, which gave him a very different perspective. “The trip was plotted a little sadistically, I thought,” he writes in the liner notes to the album, simply titled Jura. “Many in our number were, or looked, ill.”

Humans have been making that passage for centuries. Trod upon by Vikings long before the arrival of Christianity, Jura was home to Scottish farmers, mostly poor and stubborn against the rocky soil, but they were eventually forced off the land in what is called the Clearances. Landowners evicted their tenants to make room for sheep, whose wool was used to make uniforms for soldiers in Napoleon’s armies. The sheep remain, outnumbering the island’s human population. “A lot of people went from Jura to South Carolina, I think,” says Susie Honeyman, the Mekons’ violinist and expert on Scottish islands. “It’s really difficult to live there anyway, because the soil isn’t very good and people were starving.”

Since then, the island has claimed a small populace, among the famous of whom is George Orwell. In the 1940s, while writing 1984, he moved to a remote cabin a rough seven-mile hike through the woods from the main settlement. The island may have inspired that notoriously dystopian novel, but it was not kind to Orwell. The weather irritated his tuberculosis, nearly killing him. And, says Honeyman, “He nearly died in the Corryvrecken Whirlpool when he attempted to row across it with his son!”

Fulks and the Mekons arrived there in the middle of a long and arduous tour of the Scottish Highlands, including stops in remotes villages on islands that rarely see popular entertainment. “The Mekons being who they are — which is a bunch of highly disorganized individuals with multiple interests — it turned out that two of them weren’t sure they could go,” explains Mekons co-vocalist/co-songwriter Sally Timms. “Jon suggested asking Robbie Fulks to come along, and he — being either game or deranged at the time — said yes.”

Conditions on the island, Fulks soon discovered, weren’t exactly comfortable. The wind blows sharply, finding seams and holes in even the heaviest coats. The constant drizzle of rain renders everything damp, gray, muddy. The island is roughly the size of Chicago, with fewer than 200 people inhabiting a small settlement that includes one shop, one pub, one distillery. The one inn at full capacity, several of the Mekons took to cabins far from town, like lepers banished from civilization. “We stayed in these remote little cabins, but they weren’t even buildings really, at least not by American standards,” says Jon Langford, one of the band’s numerous vocalists, songwriters, and guitar players. “I think Robbie was shocked by the absence of soft toilet paper, towels, washing machines — things you might think of as bare essentials in the rest of the world. But they don’t need them on Jura.”

“It’s cold and it’s wet and it’s stunningly, dramatically beautiful,” says Honeyman. “It’s not a soft holiday.”

Fulks and the Mekons recorded at Sound of Jura, formerly a schoolhouse owned and operated by Giles Perring who, in the 1980s, played in a band called Echo City with Honeyman. Prior to their arrival, the band had spent weeks planning songs, penning lyrics, testing melodies, and dreaming up arrangements, so that when they got there they could have something resembling songs to rip up. Even at the earliest stages, they knew the album would have a nautical theme. “We’re going to an island, so we’re going to write songs about islands and sailors and fishermen,” recalls Timms. “We always like to have some kind of theme. It helps to hang things on. But we had only a notion of what it might be like on Jura.”

The music reflects the place: These are songs about hard lives on or, at least, near the sea — lives defined by depravation and tribulation. Sung by Langford, “Incident at St. Kitt’s” is a dark, choppy chantey that traces news of a gruesome tragedy from one port to the next, from one ocean to the next, until it’s subsumed into seagoing lore. “Stiff drink! Stiff upper lip!” they shout in unison. That news might have reached the alcoholic and self-justifying narrator of Fulks’ “Refill” or even the pitiful rake in his new version of the Mekons’ classic “Beaten & Broken.”

Says Langford, “We tried to leave ourselves open to where we were, so we knew there were going to be boats involved. As soon as we got there, a lot of the lyrics got kicked out. Place names were brought in, along with snippets of overheard conversations. That’s how we work as songwriters. We’ll just tear the whole thing up at the last minute. Don’t sing those lyrics we’ve been working on. Sing this thing that basically a transcript of a conversation we heard in a pub the night before.”

Jura got into their bones, even as they tried to keep it out. So the resulting album that bears the island’s name sounds evocative of the place itself, with a queasy acoustic drone saturating every song. The drone of the harmonium evokes flat, rocky land — beautiful but hard, boggy, and rocky — inviting you to explore its raised beaches and low mountains, but trapping you in mud once you get there. “We didn’t know we were going to play harmonium on the album,” says Timms, “because we didn’t know there would be a harmonium until we got there. Giles just happened to have one. It’s such an archaic sound. It’s perfect to go with the other acoustic instruments.”

Honeyman’s violin takes to the sea, lending quiet, slow laments like “Sail on Silver Seas” and “I Am Come Home” — both sung by Timms — their gently rocking motion. A susceptible listener might get seasick listening to them, but it’s not an altogether unpleasant sensation. “I’m not quite sure why it’s got that particular character,” says Honeyman. “Certainly, we were aware of our surroundings. The song is quite slow, and everything in Jura is quite slow. When you’re going on boats, you can’t go fast. It’s not like going planes. You just go the speed you can go.”

Jura jolted these musicians into a different gear and made them adjust their speed. That may be the island’s greatest charm, and it means the album shows no signs of hasty assembly. Rather, much like the island that inspired it, these songs make acoustic austerity sound lush and generous and rich. “I think something quite coherent happened quite accidentally,” says Langford. “It’s like this is the only way it could have sounded. We didn’t hit upon something. It was just the sound of us at that time and in that place.”

Mekons photo by Derrick Santini