Tonight at 5:30 pm I was at Garfield Park Conservatory with a few hundred other committed geeks and aficionados quaffing locally-made beers to mark the kickoff of Chicago Craft Beer Week. It's a glorious, eleven day (that's right, a week can be eleven days when there's beer involved) celebration of Chicago brewers and Chicago bars that celebrate great beer. Not just in the city but throughout the suburbs there will tap takeovers, special brews, beach parties, mini-golf and almost any manner of beer-related merrymaking that you can think of - a hophead's dream come true.
Craft beer was a part of my life for years before I touched the stuff thanks to my father dragging my mother and I to brewpubs across the country throughout my childhood. By the time he left me at college with the instructions "When you drink, drink good beer," I was hooked. It's not coincidental that I was also getting pretty seriously into music around the same time as beer makes music sound better and listening to music is a perfect opportunity to drink great beer. With that in mind, I decided to make a minor contribution to #CCBW with an esoteric musical salute to the brewers that make Chicago such a great beer city.
Wellsir, today's the day everyone dreams about. It's a glorious late summer afternoon and I'm off to the Midwest Brewers Festival in beautiful Plainfield, Illinois! Although, I'm genuinely excited to sample beers from across the region and the country because I'm one of those poor benighted beer geeks you've all seen stroking their beards down at the local microbrewery, I figured it was a good time to indulge in a little irresponsibility as well.
With that in mind, this Six-Pack is a musical celebration of that blessed inebriation with six songs about the (beer) bottle and why we love (and hate) it so. I've called this Part 1 because something tells me that this will be too rich a vein to mine only once. So as the Poles say, "Napijmy się! Lepiej być znanym pijakiem, niż anonimowym alkoholikiem!" ("Let's drink! It's better to be a famous drunk than an anonymous alcoholic!")
Modern day Wilco is an industry unto itself. It's got everything from a sandwich shop to themed mittens to action figures. Also, they make music. The current incarnation of the band with Mikael Jorgenson, Pat Sansone, Glen Kotche and Nels Cline joining founding members John Stirrat and Jeff Tweedy has become known for it's impressive skill, passion and professionalism. That last word is key. Wilco's most recent albums have been immaculate and its concerts are love letters to fans where the audience can help choose setlists which are always strong on breadth and depth and are generally at least two hours long.
Those nattering naybobs of negativism who decry the so-called "dad rock" (though I reject the term on principle and merit) of today's Wilco still have much they can take from the band. During the mid-to-late 90's, especially the time touring around Being There, Wilco was a rock band in the mold of midwestern alternative OG's, The Replacements. Seemingly a second away from careening off the cliff at any minute, this incarnation of the ever-shapeshifting band took the classic ingredients of youth, pressure, talent and booze to create angry, sometimes-alienating but always compelling rock n' roll.
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