Over the course of the next week, ChinaShop will be featuring a series of pieces on the Chicago band Prairie Cartel. This is Part 2 from a 3-Part series chronicling the group’s dealings in the precarious racket that is indie rock n’ roll. Here’s another track off their latest, Where Did All My People Go:
PART TWO: SUMMER
By Blake Smith
We had just fled from what was clearly a witch’s curse placed on the band up in Lincoln Square. Only four songs had survived from a wealth of material that had begun to dwindle, vanish, abscond, and generally decamp straight off our hard drive in swift and mysterious fashion. Mike told us he had just rented a basement apartment in Wicker Park, which is kind of a nightmare if you are normal, but really great if you are the shade of orange that can only obtained from spray-tanning or walking through an Earl Scheib with goggles on. Couldn’t be worse than what we were leaving and Mike could ride his effete Honda Scooter to his job pretty quickly which left us more time to work.
Mike’s new place was on a weird sliver of street between Ashland and Milwaukee that had a 24 hour taco stand on one end and a public housing project on the other. Definitely on the iffy margin of the neighborhood. We were between a vacant lot and a used car dealership that was basically six cruddy Camrys and a ’78 Porsche 944 in mediocre condition that all six salesman leaned up and smoked against from open until close. Not much to look at for musical inspiration, but we wouldn’t get any noise complaints either.
The weather had gone from “bucket of penguin shit” cold, to “geez God, what’s your problem” hot in a period of two weeks which is normal for Chicago in June. Scott and I pulled up with our modest pile of gear to set up shop and finish the record. Mike was out front waving and yelling at us to pull in the alley in back and bring our stuff in through the garage. We had the windows down and everything smelled like grilled carne asada from the taco place. I was into it, but Scott’s a vegetarian and was already looking a little green.
We inched around the taco place into the narrow back alley and were surprised to find an entire secret world between the ramshackle fences and battered garages. Dumpsters had become BBQ apparatuses. Cardboard boxes had been origami-ed into discrete living areas. What looked like an improvised bar had been fashioned from plywood and old bike parts. Humans lurked and lumbered everywhere. The place was alive. We had stumbled into some kind of alley-Atlantis, a fully developed society that ran on the determination of the American disenfranchised. And chihuahua cheese and lesser, but well-seasoned, cuts of meat.
Mike met us in back, coming out of the garage looking anxious. Hurry, was all he said. So we did. Amps and guitars were rushed down some stairs to the basement and the garage door slammed down like a medieval portcullis. I caught several interested pairs of eyes looking at us through the side window as Mike hit the lock. I said: They seem friendly enough to me. He said: Do not go out there after dark, the Soggy-Bottom Boys will get you.
For the first time we had enough space to set up and play in the same room we recorded in. Previously, we had been playing in Scott’s practice space which was shared and passed down by several generations of Chicago bands, beginning with Smashing Pumpkins in the late 80′s. There were tons of old pieces of gear in there left by bands nobody remembered, but when you foraged around looking for gold you were as likely to come across a vintage microphone or effects pedal as you were a vintage cup of Billy Corgan’s pee, so there was some risk involved. It was a dank, windowless necropolis of broken dreams and crushed hopes and I couldn’t stand it, although Scott still uses it even now with no apparent side effects. But now we were someplace relatively clean and we could instantly record any ideas we came up with as a band instead of layering everything one sound at a time.
A few days in and our security worries were resolved as well. Mike had struck a deal with our guys in the alley. We dropped them off a big bag of tacos very few days, and they would keep an eye on things for us. Seemed reasonable.
This new set up equaled speed. One day Scott and I heard Robert Plant’s Burning Down One Side as we pulled in the alley. One of the Soggy-Bottom Boys said “that sure is some cool music.” This got us to discussing the song and wondering: if there is something burning down one side, what is happening on the other side? We went into the basement and wrote and recorded Burning Down The Other Side by dinner time.
Ten Feet of Snow, Cobraskin and Homicide (a 999 cover we recorded for Grand Theft Auto IV) happened quickly too, so we decided to take a few days to try to mix some of this stuff. We set up a couch and a desk in an adjacent storage room and got to work. The room wasn’t as depressing as “adjacent storage room” implies. There was even some glass brick that let in a little sunlight from above. On day three of mixing, I ran down the alley to the taco place to pickup lunch for us and pay tribute to the Soggy Mafia, and when I returned Mike had out a fly swatter and was doing battle with some dirigible-sized winged thing. It was slow-buzzing, but surprisingly agile. We gave up and decided to ignore it and get back to work. By the end of the day this was impossible as there were now three of these fuckers hassling us. Buzzing simultaneously, they actually made a din. We debated the life span of the average fly for a second and knocked off for the day hoping to return to three ex-flies and silence in the morning.
Coming down the alley the next day, there was something in the air. The Soggy Bottom Boys were tense. There were some new faces and bonfires in places there weren’t before. We got inside to the mixing room and Mike was putting up fly paper. The strips he had already hung were covered in flies, all in various stages of meeting their little maker. Some sat still in the goo, exuding a quiet dignity, while others struggled. I swear I could hear tiny insect cries. None of us could take it. We shut the door on them and called the exterminator. Please don’t judge.
While the exterminator went to work ( and when the exterminator yells “holy shit” from the next room you know you have a serious problem), MIke told us the garage had been broken into the previous night and his scooter was stolen. We asked him if he talked to the Soggy-Bottom Boys, they must have seen something. He said there were not cooperating. They appeared worried. The fumes from the bug spray were too much so we put off mixing another day.
The next morning the police were there. A body had been found in the abandoned lot next to us. The time of death explained our fly problem. It also appeared that the victim was the King of Soggy Alley and that some sort of violent coup had occurred. A window had been smashed in and Mike’s bicycle was stolen. We packed up our gear and put the record on hold until Mike could move again.
More to Come…
