Table of Contents
For my family
THE REGULAR
Around eight each weeknight, I left work and took the El north to a small club called Whirly Gigs. While roadies and band members wrangled cords and tuned guitars on the club’s tiny elevated stage, I sat at the narrow end of the bar, my messenger bag, two-toned cotton sweater, jeans and brown plastic-framed glasses identifying me as a member of the creative proletariat. My stool was the furthest one from the stage. Blasé, aging indie kids ordering drinks often blocked my view, but I didn’t care. I could hear everything I needed to see.
Julian held court each night in the booth closest to the stage. Guys who barely knew him would approach and extend their hands for a hipster’s handshake, a curled-finger lock, tug, and release. Julian obliged each one coolly. The girls sitting with him communicated interest, excitement, or jaded lust with their eyes. Julian absorbed their attention without courting it. If my look identified me as someone with a job, Julian’s sloppy hair, denim jacket, and tub-soaked tight jeans placed him outside the workaday world.
When the first act took the stage, Julian would leave the adoring courtiers and his stage-side seat for the stool next to mine. One night I asked him why no one ever tried to drag him back to his booth, or pull him into the crowd to dance. He shrugged, and sipped his bourbon. “I put the word out,” he said, his eyes on the stage. “During the shows, I listen to the music, and I talk only to you.”
I’d been a regular at Whirly Gigs since moving back home from college in 1996. Julian arrived a few years later. I noticed him right away, but didn’t speak to him at first—I spoke only to the bartender, Casey, and once he knew enough to give me a bourbon when I sat down, we didn’t speak very often.
One night, on his way back from the bathroom, Julian stood next to my stool during the opening act of a three-act bill. The band was aping The Stooges without the punk pioneers’ energy or talent, though energy and talent wouldn’t have made them sound any better. Distaste was surely visible on my face, but Julian never looked at me. “The snare is peaking too high,” he said. His analysis was that of an audiophile, of one who lived for sound and executed unconsciously and crudely what a sophisticated computer program could do electronically and exactly. Julian heard instrument and microphone inputs as visible tracks—jagged peaks above deep, repeating fissures—stacked like a dense, multicolored polygraph display. I could hear the same images in my own head.
From then on, Julian and I analyzed every live set at Whirly Gigs as if it were being recorded. We spoke of sound in terms of two-dimensional images: distorted guitars crying out for compression, backing vocals that needed gating. We weren’t friends. We were something less. I’d never seen Julian outside of Whirly Gigs, never spoken to him on the phone, and it seemed, beyond our nightly meeting place, that seeing sound was all we had in common. But that was enough to make sitting alongside Julian the high point of my day.
When the headliners, whoever they were, had played their final encore, Julian would clap me on the back and head back to his booth. I would pay my tab and head for the El. On my walk to the Belmont station, I would pass a karaoke club called Starmakers. Because of its stock in trade, Starmakers—the name alone—was an insult commonly overheard at Whirly Gigs. If a singer’s performance was overly earnest or overwrought, one regular might shout “Starmakers” into the ear of another before heading for the bar. To associate an act with karaoke was worse than calling its sound dated, or derivative, or even boring. At Whirly Gigs, “Starmakers” was the atom bomb of on-the-spot reviewing.
Despite the hipsters’ disdain, Starmakers was usually packed when I walked past its plate-glass façade. Inside, sleeves were rolled up and collars unbuttoned, and skirts were twisted from repeated shimmies across vinyl benches to visit the bathroom and the bar. In my head, I kept a running tally of the songs I heard on my nightly pass-bys. “I Will Survive” and “Like A Prayer” were favorites, and bachelorette parties often tackled “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” en masse. But the real treats were the choices that confounded me, like the warbling older woman who performed Janis Joplin’s “Me and Bobby McGee” as if it were a Presbyterian hymn, and the guy who gave a pitch-perfect rendering of Michael McDonald’s supporting vocals on “This Is It”—a 1979 duet with Kenny Loggins—but declined to sing Loggins’ parts, reducing the song’s verses to underfed synthesized instrumental breaks. Once I heard—but didn’t see—a man singing Captain and Tennille’s “Love Will Keep Us Together.” What sort of guy, I wondered, would select that song from a binder full of other choices? I promised myself that if ever again I heard a man singing that song, I would get a good look at him and buy him a round. He would deserve it, somehow.
Getting off the El just north of Downtown, near the building where I spent my days working as a senior art director for Fahrenheit Graphic Design, I would walk to the open-air lot where I had parked my car seventeen hours earlier, then drive home to the edge of the city, one of only a handful of Chicago neighborhoods with a zip code that did not begin with 606. Mine was 60707, and when I saw the soccer fields, car dealerships and day-care centers on my stretch of Fullerton Avenue, the 607 seemed about right.
My apartment was in the basement of my parents’ house, a duplex with a door in the gangway that allowed me to come and go as I pleased. I had a bedroom just big enough for a twin bed and a dresser, a bathroom with a shower, and a living room with a kitchenette along one wall. The living room doubled as my home studio, which consisted of a Mac G5, a digital mixing board, four top-shelf microphones, and sound-absorbing cotton panels on the walls and ceiling.
Each night, after arriving home from Whirly Gigs, I would stay up until three or four in the morning scouring file-sharing networks for individual tracks of multi-track pop recordings. I imported each song piece by piece—the drums isolated from the bass, the backing vocals separated from the lead—and investigated every hiss or fumble or bleed that caught my eye. Once, I spent two weeks of late nights with The Clash’s “Clampdown,” searching for the reasons that Joe Strummer’s guitar had been buried in the final mix and trying to decide for myself whether or not Topper Headon deserved his “Human Drum Machine” moniker. (He did.) When I had seen all there was to see in a given song, I would return to the networks, poach another masterpiece, and start the process all over again.
This was my life. It was static and less than I wanted, but with my studio, Whirly Gigs, and Julian, it was just enough to live on.
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