Brandon Wetherbee says he learned everything he needed to know about publishing when he edited the Fenwick High School newspaper, the Wick, in 2000. But he also quickly learned that he didn’t like the Oak Park school’s administration telling him what to do. “I hated having to write about local town crap and not being able to write about stuff that interested me,” says Wetherbee, who’s now a sophomore at DePaul. So he quit the paper and started Foul, xeroxing and giving away 1,000 copies of the 12-page zine.
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But Foul, full of Wetherbee’s musings on topics like the 1997 Kyoto conference on climate change, Abbie Hoffman’s Steal This Book, and the John Waters film Cecil B. Demented, didn’t endear him to the administration either.
Music with Meaning got off to a rough start as well. He launched the series in December 2001 with a fund-raiser for the Rape, Abuse, & Incest National Network. (“A lot of my friends were affected,” he says, “and I wasn’t. This was my way to help.”) He borrowed $650 from his mother to rent out Oak Park’s Ernest Hemingway Museum, then charged $8 at the door (plus two cans of food for good measure). There were 12 bands on the bill, and each played a different type of music. “There was a lot of walking out and a lot of booing,” he says. “We broke even and couldn’t even give to a cause. But we were able to give 300 cans of food to the Oak Park Food Pantry.”
