Just home from working another New Year’s Eve, and decided I’d play along. I wanted to pimp an album where folks would actually be able to listen to it online legally, and I finally found one.
And it’s a doozy.
Let’s set the scene, first off. You start off with four young Chicagoans, right around, say, 1988. That’d be about a year after these four folks released a self-titled solo album with 500 pressings, and the handful of people who heard it seemed to enjoy it, even if it was a bit “sterile” and over-produced. In the time since that record’s release, the band feel like they’ve really grown and developed a bunch of ideas that are leaps and bounds beyond anything they’ve even attempted to play live, much less record.
So this band, they’ve got at least an album’s worth of tunes written. Unfortunately, getting all four people together to practice these songs is sorta tough, and for whatever reason, this new material–while undoubtedly brilliant and truly a major step up for the group–doesn’t get rehearsed as heavily as it should be. To complicate matters more, the fledgling indie label they’re contracted to wants a new record ASAP. As a final complication: this band is pretty much broke…and studio time isn’t cheap.
Through some friends they hear of a guy named Wink O’Bannon who lives five hours to the south in Louisville. Wink likes the band, and can get them studio time and produce the new songs. On one miserably hot “pollution alert summer day” as the band would later put it, they recorded their 12 tunes from 11pm through 5 am. Recorded them in a hot, claustrophobically tiny studio, fueled by Old Milwaukee. Pretty much everything they recorded, they recorded live. The legend of Eleventh Dream Day (that’d be the band, and maybe you’ve heard of them) was born that night.
See, thanks to the lack of rehearsal time, the band found themselves with two lead guitarists, and both guys seemed to have zero respect for the other guy’s space. Thus, on songs that maybe should be more placid, or songs that should be straightforward guitar pop tunes Rick Rizzo and Baird Figgi’s guitars sound like they’re trying to beat the living shit out of one another–jagged lead lines come flying in outta nowhere, elbowing the other guitar out of the way, only to have the other guitar come squalling in and attempt to reclaim it’s own space.
Looking back years later, Rizzo and Figgi would recall that a big chunk of their six-hour studio time was spent trying to figure out how to get Baird’s amp to stop buzzing. Eventually, they gave up and decided that “amp buzz” was going to be the theme of their record.
They also never really expected to release this stuff at first. The thinking that drummer Janet Beveridge Bean had was that the songs were “reference” material, and they’d end up going back and cleaning the songs up, figuring out who played which guitar leads when, instead of having them falling around all over each other the way they did that hot summer night.
“Reference” material or not, when the band actually sat down and listened to the tapes of that night (with O’Bannon’s production simply burying the needles in the red), the rawness, the eagerness, the earnestness…hell, the claustrophobia, the beer, the heat…it all came together brilliantly, and kudos to Eleventh Dream Day for realizing it. The album, “Prairie School Freakout”, has reference points in Neil Young’s Crazy Horse days, The Velvet Underground, and X (thanks to Rizzo and future wife Janet Bean’s vocal interplay)…but sounds exactly like none of those folks.
There might be better rock and roll albums by better bands out there, but those discs are few and far between. Eleventh Dream Day still gets together to play the occasional show in Chicago (and Rizzo still tends bar at the Rainbow Room in Wicker Park), and still releases a very occasional album. Their newest label, Thrill Jockey, re-released “Prairie School Freakout” this past year with liner notes and a bunch of extra goodies. In a very cool move, the whole thing is available to listen to here. Sure, go ahead and click each track in order if you want. But if you’re on the fence, at least give the incredible “Beach Miner” a listen. And be sure not to miss the best song EDD ever did, “Go”. Hell, seriously. Listen to all of these. It’s so worth it. As former OPtion Magazine editor Byron Coley puts it in the liner notes on the reissue, “Fuck, they were good.”