Could Chicago electronica darlings Prairie Cartel have better luck? Could their misfortunes seem any crueler? After making their name on the soundtrack to the Grand Theft Auto video game series, P.C. seemed about to make some serious noise amongst the big boys, were lacking no acclaim from the underground music scene (being called “the next big thing out of the Windy City” by countless rags), and even receiving that rare accolade of being featured on NPR. The road to success has been anything but simple for these lads, filled with rabid dogs, Motor City Witches, and the overall flakiness that is par for the course in the business side of rock n’ roll. This is a track from the band’s Where Did All My People Go, which might help you judge for yourself:

The Prairie Cartel – Keep Everybody Warm

Over the course of the next week we’ll be giving an inside glimpse at the band’s damaged psyche, the trials and tribulations of an up-and-coming young rock band, and all the perils of rock and roll decadence (that a studio and Lincoln Square can offer).

PART ONE: SPRING
by Blake Smith

Mike and I had just gotten dropped from a major label. Again. And again we had taken a perfectly good band, gotten it signed, and then proceeded to watch it get bent, spindled, and mutilated by the machine. What started as something respectable was now a junked-out shell of a group hunkered out in the alley trying to blow you for radio play. The problem was that we were in the alley voluntarily. When fed that classic label bit that our album was great, but just needed that one immediate track that radio couldn’t possibly refuse, we didn’t fight it. Fuck, we would write you four songs for radio. By tomorrow, if it meant the good songs got to stay on.  But to get on radio you have to write shit. And once you showed an A&R guy how easily you could turn shit out, you were doomed. Your record quickly ceases to resemble what you thought you had made. We were screwed (again). Why couldn’t we learn?

The sad math: two bands, four albums, three major labels, dropped, dropped, dropped. Never again.

Mike was back to waitering and I was back to doing fuck all. He had blown his advances on vintage wine and a wrap-around shark tank, while I had been smart with my money (I did nothing) and could now afford to sit on the couch during the day and watch Ghost on AMC for a few months. Thankfully, this inertia lasted two days. Instead of molting we took action. We were starting a new band. The rules: no labels, no producers, no outside money. No outside influence whatsoever.

To finance our plan, we took out an American Express card. This was right before the bank-shit hit the money-fan so they gave us a good-sized credit limit and asked no questions. This was good, but also very bad. We finally bought Pro Tools and learned how to use them (good), but now owed money to, well, we would find out eventually when the vaguely threatening phone calls began (bad.)

Mike and I were living in Lincoln Square about two blocks away from each other. It’s a neighborhood bordering a Korean area that had been an enclave of Eastern European immigrants since the 19th century, but had become gang-friendly in the 1990′s. At this point, however, it had begun gentrifying at hyper-speed. You now had lowered Honda Civics with tinted windows, old country transplants with too many layers of clothes for the weather, and stroller-pushers all pottering up and down the main strip. Also, the Old Town School of folk music had moved there recently so there was always some dude toting a bouzouki or some shit and wearing  a Jazzberry Beret looking to “sit in” with you.

Most mornings I would wake up and head over to Mike’s to record, passing the Korean bar that was only open between midnight and one (and then only if you rang the doorbell and were Korean, and even then only sometimes), a market called Star Wars that sold ice cream and lawn chairs, but not soda or gum, and the witch.

The witch had a couple of rapunzelesque beard hairs , wore burlap, and would roam the same half-block area each day, back-and-forthing like an 8-bit level boss from an NES game left on and abandoned long ago . On my daily pass she would either mutter something malevolent in cyrillic (I know it’s an alphabet, but trust me) or click her tongue menacingly. I would mutter and click my tongue back. One day after this exchange, she just hissed at me, but it was so chilling that I considered crossing the street.

Recording was going remarkably well. Our friend Scott had come by asking us to remix one of his tracks and he ended up joining the band, which was great because he plays guitar twice as well as me and has a vocal range of more than a minor third. Ideas were spilling out, we had no time constraints and even our limited gear was inspirational rather than stifling. MIke’s dog, a West Highland Terrier named Max, would bring us beers from the bucket in the next room and bark when anyone came to the door, so we barely had to move. With only one guitar, a ratty keyboard and an old broadcast microphone, we had finished four songs in about 5 days and had several more near completion. The mood was buoyant.

During the second week I was walking by the Star Wars Market thinking about writing George Lucas an irate letter about how shoddy and out of control his branding had become when the witch materialized slightly out of her accepted roaming area. While approaching I noticed she was standing curiously still and glaring at me darkly. She was also trying hide something she was holding behind her back. As I got closer I could clearly see it was a quart of motor oil.

Up to that point in my life, I had had limited experience with burlap-covered city witches carrying open quarts of motor oil, but my instincts told me to get to the other side of the street. Fast. Traffic was thick but I negotiated it quickly, knowing that she could not possibly have followed. But not only had she gotten across, she was ahead of me and pouring oil all over the sidewalk.  I decided to confront her. What the fuck, I said, Click click hiss click, was her reply. Then she spit on me and start making these weird hand gestures and chanting. Her eyes seemed to glow slightly, but I am probably imagining this part.

At Mike’s we had run a cable into his bathroom to do vocals. But every time we hit record, Max would start barking his head off. As soon as we hit pause he would stop. After several aborted attempts we decided to record it anyway and cross our fingers that he would be so far back on the track that no one would hear him besides other dogs. Well, other dogs did. on playback we notice some weird half-buried ambient sounds so we soloed up the vocal and discovered that not only could Max be heard, but other dogs were barking back. It sounded like a distant, spectral canine war. None of the neighbors had dogs. We were baffled. Subsequent vocals had the same problem, but we could never figure out the source of the other barking.

In the days following the Spirit Dog Incident™ other bizarre and annoying shit started happening. Entire songs vanished from our hard drive for no reason. The pizza guy couldn’t find the house anymore and he had been there a dozen times previously with no issues. Evil hung in the air like… evil laundry or something. And those fucking ghost dogs.

A few weeks later, Mike had a chance to break his lease and get out. We had salvaged Keep Everybody Warm. FYTW, Suitcase Pimp, Lost All Track of Time and Magnetic South, but we had lost many more. It was all obviously caused by the witch, so we picked up and moved to Wicker Park, where we were sure we would finish the album. We were wrong.

More to Come…