Perishable Perishable?
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
A beguiling mix of revisionist roots rock, improvisation, and quiet soul, Roomsound cemented Califone’s position as one of the city’s most exciting bands. They quickly came to rival Him as the label’s best-selling act, garnering reams of critical praise, and by December the lineup, always loose, had coalesced around Rutili, Massarella, banjoist and guitarist Jim Becker, bassist Matt Fields, and drummer Joe Adamik. Perishable got a visibility boost as well, which didn’t hurt subsequent records by the Fire Show, the Sinister Luck Ensemble, the Fruit Bats, and most recently Tim Kinsella’s new project Friend/Enemy. (According to Massarella, every Perishable release since number eight, Frontier’s Suture EP, has turned a profit.) Yet Califone recently decided to license their next album to Thrill Jockey–and what’s more, Perishable’s future release schedule is currently blank.
While working on the new album–now about 80 percent done–Rutili and Massarella began thinking about devoting more time to Califone. “It’s been a long few years trying to do both, play and run the label, whether from here or from the road,” says Massarella. “We’d be setting up and doing sound checks while spending 20 minutes on the cell phone discussing Him’s tour of Japan.” Perishable has also recently lost two of its more active bands: the Fire Show, led by Michael Lenzi and Seth Cohen, played its farewell show last weekend, and the Fruit Bats, the rustic pop outfit led by onetime Califone member Eric Johnson, are in negotiations with Sub Pop.
While none of them is perfect, most of the big city-sponsored summer music festivals are fairly broad-minded and accessible, designed to attract Chicagoans from across ethnic and neighborhood lines. The gospel, blues, jazz, and Celtic fests recruit top-notch performers and cover a wide range of styles within their given missions. The glaring exception remains Viva! Chicago, the city’s annual Latin music festival, which seems to get more provincial every year. In an interview for this column in 1999, longtime Viva! programmer Enrique Munoz claimed that the festival was “for the whole city” and intended to represent the admittedly daunting breadth of musical traditions from the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking world. But now as then the event is dominated by artists of the same ethnicity as most of Chicago’s Latinos–Mexican and Puerto Rican–despite nationwide crazes for Cuban and Brazilian music and the increasing popularity of rock en espanol. This weekend’s Viva! schedule is depressingly predictable, promising yet more slick salsa, merengue, cumbia, and regional Mexican pop. Even the fest’s most artistically commendable booking, veteran Puerto Rican salseros El Gran Combo (who headline the Petrillo Music Shell on Sunday, August 25), feels stale–they just played here in late June.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Lori Wolan.
