It’s safe to say that Van Halen’s first 6 albums stand as one of the greatest winning streaks in rock history… It’s difficult to consider this band nostalgic, as those 6 albums have never gone long without a spin within my perpetually cycling playlist, but the fact is, they’ve gone decades since they were relevant in the moment… from my perspective, they haven’t been a band since 1984, that’s when the prolificness, the passion, the […]
My love/hate relationship with Axl Rose turned another page last night as I, for whatever reason, bought tickets to see Guns N’ Roses at Chicago’s Allstate Arena. As nostalgia goes, lately it seems that every time I decide to see a show from a band that had significance for me at some other point in my life… I leave unsatisfied, as though some key ingredient from my past love of a band remains elusive 20 […]
My pledge for 2010 to only attend reasonably priced shows in smaller venues continued this past Friday night with Michael Franti & Spearhead at the Riviera Theater in Uptown. One of things I love about Spearhead is that you can count on a new album every eighteen months or so and a show in town on an almost yearly basis… in fact, most of the new album (released September 21st) was written and recorded on […]
I have a strange affliction when it comes to the television that I watch… if you hook me in the beginning, I almost always stay loyal until the end, even if your show jumps the shark… somehow waiting for that early magic to return. Occasionally it happens, most of the time it doesn’t. 24 is one such show. When it debuted back in 2001 it was television like you’ve never seen it before. All events […]
So I happened upon this book like so many before it… by happy accident as it sat on the new arrivals shelf at the local library… its cover art appealed to the graphic designer in me as I pondered the identity behind the vectorized illustration of beelzebub. Would his life forever be affected by the decision to pose for such an image? But I digress. With this book, Pulitzer Prize winning author Robert Olen Butler […]
More and more these days, when I’m scouring for shows to go to, I’m thinking about the smaller venues, the cheaper tickets ($40 and under) and the bands that may have reached a certain level of fame at one point, but have since found their fan-base distilled down to the diehards… for many bands, that can still be a significant audience… but lucky for us, not more than the Vic or the The Riviera can […]
I guess I’ll start off by walking into the brick wall of popular opinion… For me, what was memorable about this concert wasn’t the music, it was more about that magnificent stage (no pun intended). Being a long-time fan of such engineering marvels as the Gateway Arch and the Hoover Dam, this U2 stage was really something to contemplate… I know I’m going against the tide here… other than Jim DeRogatis at the Chicago Sun-Times who […]
I’ve been searching for a worthy post topic to inaugurate this iteration of theScroll… I found it at the Aragon Ballroom (pictured above) this past Friday night in one of the final shows on Nine Inch Nails abbreviated farewell jaunt across North America. Intimate ballroom shows in New York and Chicago, wrapping up at the Echoplex in Los Angeles on September 6th. According to Trent Reznor, these will be the last dates ever under the […]