Just finished shooting a video last weekend for a track from the new CD. Hopefully I'll be able to post something soon. But in the meantime, we've got a big big show this friday at the Beat Kitchen. Sorry, no horn section, but lots of sweet sweet powered pop!

I've been meaning to make more posts, but for now ... we're playing a big Local Showcase this Friday night.
If you're in the windy city and love you some of that powered-pop -- or just Coors Light -- then stop on by!

I have a box of old recipe booklets from the 60s & 70s that I inherited from my grandma, and I must say there are some truly awful entertaining ideas in there. I wonder how many happy homemakers back then were actually preparing frankfurter mini-pizzas or fruit macedoine flambe in their electric chafing dishes for the next big shindig. My favorite collection is "Swinging Summer Sandwiches" from the makers of Campbell's Pork & Beans, wherein they manage to combine several ungodly ingredients together. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the SPAM 'N' BEANWICH!



The swiss cheese really is a nice touch. Really takes the sandwich up a notch on the whole "wow-that-looks-like-vomit" scale. Be sure to try it at your next gathering. No, you really don't have to thank me...

We're playing an early show at chicago's urban cowboy paradise The Hideout with Nashville's singing Sweethearts THOSE DARLINS!

For your holiday enjoyment, a few politically incorrect, archaic word choices.




And always remember: Ice Cream & Cake is "Gay 'N' Good"!

In a futile effort to clean my office, I stumbled upon a pile of brochures from past road trips, including one for the mega-classy "Pink Palace" fantasy-themed suites.

I guess I can understand that there's a need out there for some "romantic" atmosphere when you're banging your secretary over lunch. In fact, there's a "Sybaris Pool Suites" franchise here in the burbs—just in case you're ever in need for a little post-coitus swim in your room (although god knows what else is floating in that water). But if the Sybaris is the Hilton Towers of extramarital porking, the Pink Palace is more like a Motel 6. Decorated in what appear to be fantasies culled from carnival workers (Brass!! Rainbows!! Giant Playing cards!!) , you can almost smell the rooms from the photos.

OK, I can understand the heart-shaped waterbed and "space capsule," but who in god's name wants to make love on this?


 
"Mmmmmm this suite is for people who
enjoy lunch without leaving their bed - imagine a bed that
looks exactly like a giant Sandwich."

Happy Anniversary, Honey. Tonight, I splurged for something extra special. That's right, we're gonna fuck on a giant sandwich.
Honey?

I never knew South Dakota was such a big playa in the whole credit card debacle.

Turns out that 30 years ago, the state's economy was pretty much on life support.  I guess there's only so many gullible tourists you can convince to drive to the middle of nowhere to see some dudes heads carved into a rock.

But, as luck would have it, banks in New York were hurting too.

Back then, state laws set the limit on how much interest banks could charge for credit cards—setting the maximum usually somewhere between 12-18%.  That's right, it was ILLEGAL to charge you more.

Then Citibank had a great idea.

They convinced South Dakota to abolish their caps (or "usury" laws), effectively opening the door for banks to charge you as much as they wanted. Then Citibank moved its whole credit card division—translation: thousand of jobs—to Sioux Falls, solving the state's financial woes and making possible 30% interest charges at the same time. Voila! A whole new new screw-you industry was born.

After seeing South Dakota's success, states like Delaware and Maryland folllowed. And the sky was the—credit—limit. Today, iIt's a billion-dollar industry built on the backs of all us over-extended, credit-happy consumers.

Now, with Congress revisiting limits on credit card charges, folks in the black hills are looking nervous. Hey, they still have that nice carved rock somewhere out there, don't they?

I really need to post more often. I have a lot on my mind lately.

But in the meantime, if anyone's looking for a fun time in Chicago this thursday night, we're playing a christmas (I can't bring myself to use the word "holiday") show. We picked some cool tunes to play--"Jesus Christ" by Big Star; "Father Christmas" by the Kinks; "Every Day Will Be  Like a Holiday" by William Bell. Not your typical Jingle Bells/White Christmas stuff. We may even have a horn section, too.

Now all I need to do is get rid of the damn pumpkin that's been sitting on our porch since halloween.

Wow. I still can't believe it, but the new Webstirs CD has finally arrived and it sounds amazing.

It's definitely weird to listen to four years of your life play out in 34 minutes. When we started this project there was no band. We had gone on indefinite "hiatus" after our last record. Our bass player Ed moved back to Urbana, our drummer Russ pursued his talented art career, and Mark and I hadn't played together in years. But our producer Matt (who we've known since college days down in Cham-Bana)  encouraged us to get together and write again, so we ended up making some home demos. Lots and lots of home demos, actually. Most of them never made it to the album. In fact, we've got almost an entire album's worth of songs that we recorded but didn't make the final cut.

It's been a long, long road, and I'll be honest: I thought we were never going to finish it. Half of the basic tracks were recorded in Matt's old, cramped space up in Andersonville. But he found a more luxurious place (with a better-sounding live room), and the ensuing move/studio makeover put the project on hold for at least six months. If not more. To pay for the new studio, Matt had to work a lot of sessions for other bands, so were were kind of bumped to the bottom of the priority list for another year. (I remember Matt telling us we'd be done before my son was born. Now Luca is three. And he has a one-year-old brother!) But I can't fault Matt. He really went above and beyond for us--even tracking piano and vocals in a makeshift studio at his house until the new space was ready.

In fact, everyone has gone out of their way to help us, donating their services for little or no financial reward. Not to get all Oprah about it, but this whole process has really been a chance to reconnect with old friends and make a bunch of new ones. And somehow we've ended up with a whole new band that kicks serious ass. That's the best part.

We're celebrating the release with a big show this thursday at Beat Kitchen. We're gonna have a bunch of friends onstage that helped us over the years, including the trumpet talents of John Hagstrom (who plays in a little group called the Chicago Symphony Orchestra). And everyone who comes to the show gets a free copy of the new CD. If you're in the neighborhood, please stop on by.

I mean, who knows how long it will take for the next one...



Oh yeah, we've got the whole record streaming on facebook here
Let me know what you think.

We're psyched to be part of the big Halloweekend party this week (even though it's technically not over a weekend). 14 local bands over two nights performing as famous bands.

It's going to be hard to match the sheer spectacle of a FL show, but we've got confetti cannons, fog machines, giant hands, and of course a cast of drunken characters dressed as santa/easter bunny/aliens/etc. No giant bubble to walk over the crowd, though...

Here's our setlist:
Race For the Prize
Placebo Headwound
Turn It On
The W.A.N.D.
Do You Realize
She Don't Use Jelly

Also on the bill - Neil Young, Velvet Underground, George Michael, The Decemberists, Meatloaf, and Tom Waits. Ooh, scary.

I may not have mentioned this before, but my wife's parents moved into the basement (or as they like to refer to it, the "lower level") of our house. Needless to say, with two toddlers and two in-laws under the same roof with us, there's a bit of tension. They help out a lot, and most of the time I'm easy breezy, but lately they've really gotten on my nerves because of their political views.

Her dad watches/listens to conservative talk shows (and since he is partially deaf, blasts the volume) literally 24/7. And then parrots back their thinly veiled racist rhetoric. This week he has really started to go on rants against "B.O." (how clever) and how there will be riots on the west side whether he wins or loses. Not sure how much longer I can hold my tongue, but it could get ugly...

Her mom was a huge Hillary Clinton supporter during the primaries, which was a good sign. But after Clinton lost the nomination and McCain picked a woman, she quickly jumped onto the Republican bandwagon. So what impressed her about Sarah Palin? The way she dressed, "especially her shoes." Argh! I'm am just amazed how you can switch your support to someone whose beliefs are so completely opposite based on footwear! I'm sure it has NOTHING to do with her gender or skin color.

With less than two weeks to go, I imagine I can suffer this for a little longer. The one saving grace is that neither of them bothered to register to vote. God Bless America.

Just my luck. There's record flooding all around us, and my shower faucet breaks this morning, so we're actually without any water today.

This should be fun to play - I just hope the weather holds out. Pretty soon Chicago will turn into a cold, rainy, miserable place.

$10 Bacon Mondays at Chinaski's. Unlimited baskets of (hog) heaven....

Between the cost of gas, increased parking garage fees (thanks to our Chicago and Cook County tax-happy government), and the sheer mental anguish that is rush hour construction traffic, I've started to take the el to work again. And you know what? It's great. It's good to feel like I'm doing my part to help reduce oil consumption, saving money,  AND enjoying it.  I've even made it through several books already (including the timely petroleum expose "Oil on the Brain").

Here is my lovely downtown stop (Adams & Wabash, Green Line, in case anyone's interested):

If you were a child growing up in Chicago in the late 70s, Bill Jackson (BJ) and his cast of grotesque oversized puppets has a special place in your heart.

Back in the waning days of live-action local childrens television (including Garfield Goose & Friends, the Ray Rayner Show, and the chicago affiliate of Bozo's Circus, which hung on a lot long than other Bozo franchises around the country), BJ lived in Cartoon Town, which was populated with characters like Dirty Dragon,  the Thumptwangers, the Old Professor, Weird, and a  shapeless lump of artists clay with eyes called Blob that Jackson would sculpt from time to time. I'm not really sure what the point of the show was, aside from an excuse to run really lame cartoons. There definitely wasn't a mission to educate like Sesame Street or Electric Company.

Unlike most kids, I actually got a chance to visit Cartoon Town. My parents were friends with Jerry G. Bishop, who played the horror show host Svengoolie (kind of a low-budget hippie ghoul), who shot his segments across the hall from the Dirty Dragon set. During a break in the action, my sister and I snuck into Cartoon Town. The set was dark, quiet, and creepy--and there's nothing that shatters your childlike sense of wonder like seeing all the disembodied puppets hanging up like victims of some kind of children's show serial killer.

A while later, BJ and his puppets had a short-lived nationally syndicated show called Gigglesnort Hotel, where he did a lot of the same stuff. But it just wasn't as shoestring crazy as Cartoon Town.  Here's a clip of BJ doing his stuff with Blob:

Back when I was around 10 or 11, I chipped my four top front teeth on the sidewalk when I fell running out of church (now there's a metaphor for my life if I've ever heard one), and it has always been an issue with my appearance/esteem/etc. Of course, cosmetic dental work generally isn't covered by insurance, and since it would be a few thousand dollars out of pocket, I never got around to fixing them. And hey, it adds character, ri-i-i-i-ght?

This year, thanks to a generous healthcare flexible spending plan at work, I finally set aside some money for some crowns, which I should be getting in about a week. Excited is an understatement.

The only problem is the new teeth are going to be WHITER than the rest of my mouth, so unless I want to look like I'm wearing dentures (the dentists refer to it as "zebra effect"), I need to find some kind of whitening system that really works--and doesn't cost hundreds of dollars.

Strips, trays, gels, pastes, night guards--argh, which to choose? This vanity stuff is gonna cost me...

So this little guy turns three years young today.


We've got a full calendar of birthdays the next few weeks: Luca (today), me (7/30), and Evan (who's turning one on 8/16). That's a lot of cake & ice cream, my friend. Now who's up for a birthday shot? (I mean, other than me...)

Starting tomorrow, I'll be packing up the whole gang for a much needed vacation. We're headed to verdant Rhode Island, famous for. . . uh, clams and the FAMILY GUY?