2005-10 Vital Source Mag – October 2005
Crazy Water Shines
By Catherine McGarry Miller Crazy Water 839 S. 2nd St. 414-645-2606 Dinner 7 days a week, 5-9 p.m.; Fri. and Sat. until ten Culinary performance artist Peggy Magister plays nightly in the window of her popular Walker’s Point restaurant, Crazy Water. She’s on stage more and closer to her audience than most Broadway stars. If I were in her clogs, I’m sure some choice expletives would escape now and then. “I do swear,” she admits. “You just can’t hear it over the fan!” Besides, she continues, “there’s really no one to swear at – the people I work with are too good. I like working in the open – I get to see what’s happening out front and get immediate feed back because I’m not removed from what’s happening.” The Milwaukee native was inspired by her mother’s home cooking, and as a girl started baking cinnamon and sugar pastry cookies from her mother’s pie dough scraps. She enjoyed duplicating fancy desserts from magazine covers, like caramelized walnut tortes and pastry shell jewel baskets bursting with fruit. By high school, Magister was hosting elaborate dinner parties for family and friends. “I subscribed to Bon Appetit. I have all of them and pull them out all the time. That’s how I learned to cook – mostly from magazines.” Magister studied business at Boston University and then completed a degree in nursing at Marquette. After working for five years as a nurse in Seattle, her mother died and she moved back to Milwaukee to be near her father. It was then that the would-be chef began administering to customers through their taste buds instead of I.V.s. A job at La Boulangerie was a vocational turning point. “I had no cooking skills whatsoever,” Magister says. “(Owners) Lynn and Dale Rhyan gave me my palate. Lynn, a classically trained chef, took me under her wing and taught me everything. She taught me how to taste something – that’s what I think is so important. There are tons of restaurants that are busy, but there not tons that have great food. Many chefs can do basics, but if you don’t have a palate, it’s like painting with technique but no sense of color.” The experience whetted Magister’s appetite for culinary education. She got her degree from the California Culinary Academy in San Franciso and on-the-job experience at Wolfgang Puck’s Postrio. Though the famed gastronome was rarely in attendance, she got valuable training in all aspects of cookery from butchery to bakery. Both homesick and wanting to make a mark in her field, Magister again returned to Milwaukee. Chip ‘N Py’s offered her the perfect opportunity. “I wanted a job with more responsibilities and didn’t want to start at the bottom. Chip ‘N Py’s was looking for a lead lunch cook to plan a menu, cost it out and implement it.” There she met Tony Betzhold, who became her business partner. Together, they launched a catering business and, later, The Fork restaurant in Cedarburg. Since then, the […]
Oct 1st, 2005 by Cate Miller
Kanye West
By Kevin Krekling On his new album Late Registration, Kanye West proclaims “I think I died in that accident, ‘cause this must be heaven.” Boy, is he right. Ever since the release of his monster debut The College Dropout, Kanye has been everywhere. He went from the Grammy’s to Hurricane Katrina benefits and, most importantly, the top of the hip-hop world. His beats are going for about $75,000 a song and a 16-bar verse might cost you more. Is he worth it? If Late Registration is any proof, the answer is a resounding yes. Knowing that it would be impossible (and boring) to make a College Dropout Vol. 2, Kanye ditches the “old soul sped-up sample” style he perfected and moves on. In an attempt to tackle some new sounds and genres, West enlists Grammy-award winning (and completely non hip-hop) Jon Brion to serve as co-producer for the album. A risky move indeed, but the gamble pays off. The result is the best hip-hop album of the year (although 2005 was a very weak year for hip-hop) and also the most imaginative. From the syrup-sippin’ Dirty South anthem “Drive Slow,” to the baby mama-drama of “Gold Digger,” to the overdramatic, James Bond-sampling “Diamonds Are Forever,” the album is chocked full of excitement. Initially, some cuts don’t seem like they should work (who puts Maroon 5’s Adam Levine on a hip-hop song, anyways?), but they do. The one knock on West is his mic skills. Although his flow is thought provoking, funny (“she said she want diamonds, I took her to Ruby Tuesdays”), and creative, West doesn’t have the natural voice of a Biggie Smalls or Method Man, and sometimes the music suffers. On the album’s best song, “Gone,” his vocal shortcomings are magnified when he is simply overpowered by the verses of superior MC’s such as Cam’ron and Consequence. But those moments are few and far between, so it is not worth shutting the album off. Late Registration is not The College Dropout. In many ways, it’s better. VS
Oct 1st, 2005 by Vital Archives
A Teenage Symphony to Milwaukee
I’ve been living in this city for exactly nine years – long enough to have left a wake of half-blurred musical memories behind me, but not quite long enough to have figured out what they all mean, how these haphazard fragments of rock shows, local bands, and desperate music can possibly fit together into a greater context. For me, the Milwaukee music scene – as well as the city itself – represents a decades old repository for the casually discarded memories of hundreds upon hundreds of musicians, bands, and the obviously troubled souls who perform on open mic nights. Beyond any particular style, movement or trend, it’s this random wreckage scattered throughout the past nine years that truly makes our music scene what it is: a long, collective, drunken night out. While brimming with good times and great oldies, it’s no secret that the Brew City warehouse has never exactly been a hotbed of breakthrough artists. In the obscenely short lifespan of rock and roll, how many life-altering, earth-shattering, “I lost it to that song!” bands have come out of Milwaukee? Here’s a hint: if you’re the type of person who needs to count using your fingers and you happen to be short one arm, you’ll do just fine. Along with this sobering statistic comes a peculiar breed of person who curses the local music scene, who wishes it ill will and tragedy at all turns: a nice place to live, but a terrible place for music. After all, they cry, has there ever been a more apathetic, unwelcoming city in which to shelter a Brit-pop/hardcore/shoegazer/art-damaged/early Kinks-influenced juggling act? Or how about a band (ahem) that owes its entire existence to They Might Be Giants and The Dead Milkmen? These people never tire in pining for the more “music-friendly” cities of Chicago, Portland, or – I don’t know – Hoboken, New Jersey. Their callous derision, their knee-jerk contempt, their out-of-pocket dismissal can only mean one of two things: they’re complete idiots, or, more likely, their bands simply suck. Over the past almost-a-decade, I’ve done what every semi-successful local musician has done – I’ve come to terms with this city. For every night of dwindling crowds, stolen equipment, or god awful opening bands, there’s been a dozen filled with unexpected revelations, note-perfect music, and unbridled joy. Seeing Of Montreal putting on a play at the pre-remodeled Cactus Club. Playing with Sylvain Sylvain from the New York Dolls. Or, better yet, opening up for the SuicideGirls Burlesque Show. The naysayers have it all wrong; it’s not about the final destination; it’s about the alcohol-infused folly along the way: the nights spent with tireless friends dragging equipment on-stage, with unknown fans singing along to every word, with effortless and stupid grins lighting our faces. Good times. This is Vital’s music issue, and strangely, I find I have little to say on the state of the scene. What’s missing is the distance needed to put everything in perspective, the cool detachment required for such […]
Oct 1st, 2005 by Matt Wild
Milwaukee Sound Environment Project
By Haven Langhout Milwaukee is an excellent place for local music of all stripes and it wouldn’t be too far a stretch to say that 91.7 FM WMSE has had a lot to do with it. Since its unlikely birth as the broadcast service of the Milwaukee School of Engineering in 1981, WMSE has been regularly playing locally made and played music, interviewing bands and aiding in producing local musicians’ albums. Ask pretty much anyone involved in the Milwaukee music scene and they’ll attest to what a great resource WMSE has been. “WMSE has given us on-air exposure, show opportunities and support. To have a local independent station that acknowledges and reaches out to smaller experimental bands is amazing,” says Faythe Levine of Wooden Robot. “[It’s] Music by the Milwaukee people, for the Milwaukee people.” Until recently, the station’s efforts have been ongoing but ad hoc. This changed earlier this year with the launch of the Milwaukee Sound Environment Project, or The MSE Project for short. WMSE’s mission is to broadcast a wide variety of unique music unheard anywhere else on the local dial, and to provide a venue for artists to expose their work to the community. The MSE Project shares this goal and then some. On a recent Tuesday evening, I met up with WMSE Promotions Director Brent Gohde for a full explanation. Brent quietly greeted me at the station’s front door around 7 p.m. and we walked through the lobby, where the band Clamnation was setting up to play live on the air at 8. Sound engineer Billy Cicerelli checked the musicians’ levels. Behind them in the glass-walled booth, DJ Radio Dave was broadcasting his weekly program, Midnight Radio. We found a quiet spot in Studio C and Brent gave me the scoop. The MSE Project began as the brainchild of Polly Morris of UWM’s Peck School of the Arts and the WMSE Steering Committee. Morris saw an opportunity for a matching grant from the Milwaukee Arts Board to aid WMSE in their support of local musicians. Gohde, along with station director Tom Crawford and Cicerelli, fleshed out the idea for The MSE Project and applied. The Board awarded WMSE the grant for the full amount requested, renewing it again for another two years in June. The Milwaukee Arts Board allows a maximum of three years of funding, but WMSE is planning for the project to be self-sustaining by the time the grant is up. The Project has three components: the Local Live weekly radio program, the website www.mseproject.com, and the release every six months of a CD compilation of live recordings made at the station. Local Live happens every Tuesday night at 8 p.m. and is hosted by either Bob Midnight or Radio Dave of the Midnight Radio show. The featured local band plays several sets over the course of half an hour, their performance professionally recorded by Cicerelli. The DJs interview the band and promote upcoming shows, new releases or other band news. Perhaps most importantly – […]
Oct 1st, 2005 by Vital Archives
The Silent Players
By Evan Solochek With roots in rock & rolls infancy, poster art has long been one of the most defining avenues through which underground music scenes have endured. While in most cases the artists who create it never pick up a guitar or sing a note, they serve just as integral a role as the musicians themselves. We hooked up with three of Milwaukee’s foremost poster artists to find out what moves them. Vital Source: How did you get started making posters for bands? Damian Strigens: Whatever band I was in I just decided to do it. I was the default guy. Mainly it’s just having fun. It’s rock ‘n roll. It’s music. James Kloiber: Back in ‘98 I was going to shows at Globe East like every weekend and I was also going to art school and I wanted to do something to get my art out there. Poster art seemed like a very natural thing. It was something to help out the music scene and keep myself drawing. Eric Von Munz: I was involved in the underground music scene, I was going to shows like every weekend, and thought I could contribute something back to the scene on a visual level because I’m not a musician. VS: What was the first band you made a poster for? DS: The Sacred Order – 1984 JK: Avail w/Straightforward and Codebreaker – May 23, 1998 at the Globe East EM: Gus Hosseini’s Birthday Bash – 1993 VS: What inspires your poster art? DS: Vaughan Oliver really inspired me. He used a lot of inverted images and metallic inks. There is this one story of when the Breeders asked him to do a poster for them and he came back with something totally different from what they asked for and they were like “this is totally different than what we asked for. It’s perfect.” JK: When I got started, Frank Kozik and Coop and Derek Hess. EM: I only do posters for bands I like. So if I like the band, then the band is going to inspire me to do the art. I can’t just pull stuff out of the ether. VS: To what extent do the particulars of the band influence your poster? JK: Sometimes they don’t at all. A lot of times I’ll get the assignment having never heard them, which may or may not be a good way to work. Sometimes I’ll look at their website and see what sort of stuff the band likes for their art work, what the covers of their CDs look like, or look at their song titles for ideas. It’s usually just one little thing that I take to get an idea from. DS: It does and it doesn’t. Sometimes the most obvious thing, like a skull on a poster for a heavy metal show, leaves nothing to the imagination. I like something with a little more mystery to it, a little more abstraction. I like to push things away from the […]
Oct 1st, 2005 by Vital Archives
Snapshots in Analog
By Blaine Schultz To quote the Velvet Underground, “those were different times”… It’s real easy to not get misty-eyed about the old days. Before desktop publishing and 24-hour Kinko’s became commonplace, crude music fanzines and gig posters were laid out by hand and mimeographed. Before laptop home studios and Gap ad campaigns, you could get beat up for throwing original music in the face of the bar band status quo. Bands actually put out their own albums… wait a minute, we’re back to that one. In the late 1970s, the term “Rustbelt” was coined to describe all the manufacturing jobs exiting cities like Milwaukee. But true to its European artistic roots, young bands exploding with original music made sure they had venues to perform in. There really were no rules, maybe just a few role models like the Beats or the Stooges or the Ramones. DIY was not an option, it was the lone muddy trail. So before you groan about the lack of a local music scene, take a look at these folks. Like Crispus Attucks, they were the first. Before punk turned into new wave turned into MTV/college/indie turned into alt-country, there were no lines to blur. Everything was a blur. A real cool blur. Ken Baldwin Drummer Ken Baldwin ran the Starship, a club on 4th and Wisconsin that followed Zak’s as Milwaukee’s top club for live original music. The Starship was a disco, pool hall and a watering hole for hookers and businessmen. Buddy Jim Richardson managed the Voom Voom Room, played drums in Death, Milwaukee’s first punk band, and later with power pop legends The Shivvers. “I lived downtown in the old Klode Furniture building on 2nd and Plankinton,” remembers Richardson. “In the early 80s, there was nothing going on downtown to speak of. Water Street didn’t exist. The Voom Voom Room was the focus of lots of press and when Ben Marcus got behind the push to shut us down, it was just a matter of time. That was around ‘76. The other two clubs on 5th were the New Yorker and the Casino. The Casino became the Starship.” Jerome Brish(a.k.a. Presley Haskel)& Richard LaValliere With the Haskels, and later LaValliere with the Oil Tasters, these guys were two of the city’s musical visionaries. Haskel fronted groups until his untimely murder in 1991. LaValliere lives in Brooklyn, New York. Shepherd Express A&E Editor Dave Luhrssen was a young writer on the music scene in those days. “Jerome Brish was a talented songwriter, but his greatest skill was to imagine that a punk-rock scene could exist in Milwaukee and then to make it happen. He had business sense and people sense along with musical ability. It was Jerome who talked Damian Zak into transforming his club into Milwaukee’s CBGB. But the Haskels wouldn’t have been as interesting without Richard LaValliere, whose songs and slightly wacky stage presence added an arty, surreal edge to the proceedings. “Haskel Hotel was a big old four-unit house on Arlington. They […]
Oct 1st, 2005 by Vital Archives
Melly LeBaron’s Indiana Song
By Melly LeBaron We all have our favorite rock and roll songs. Some tunes become magnets, pulling us back to our past. Jammin’ songs make life downright bearable – sure, your moment of revelation from listening to a gritty rock and roll song may not last forever, but at least you’ll remember a great time before any crap can hit the ceiling fan. My ultimate traveling song for driving down a lone highway is Golden Earring’s “Radar Love.” Barry Hay captures the magic and lure of being out on the road, one hand on the wheel, the other sailing out the window. “No more speed, I’m almost there / Gotta keep cool now, gotta take care / last car to pass, here I go / and the line of cars drove down real slow …” I was bored out of my mind growing up in Indiana. One day, my boss assigned me to clean a chunky white bus with a guy I didn’t know. Plugging the ignition key into the keyhole, my right hand rotated the dial through the different radio stations. It was then I heard the pulsating guitar riffs of “Radar Love” and immediately stopped. Turning up the volume, I sporadically jerked my head around in a crazy attempt to match the beat. Though I am usually a quiet person with strange people, I had no choice but to let go of my sanity with this bluesy rock and roll tune. Surprisingly, Daniel Rader (the staff guy I barely knew), began to wildly play the air guitar along with the music. I joined his antics by twirling imaginary drumsticks onto a giant, invisible drum set. Rader’s shaggy brown hair, tattered jeans and wide grin were all the encouragement I needed. I began experimenting with my newfound drumming skills as Golden Earring huskily sang the unforgettable lyrics: “And the radio played that forgotten song …” During spring break last year, I returned to northern Indiana. My friend Jeff Russ flipped his car stereo on as he drove me through South Bend, my childhood town. Almost as if on cue, Hay sang again of how the road has him hypnotized. Singing along, Russ drummed his fingers on his steering wheel and I let the song wash over me. Third time’s a charm, right? This past summer, Russ and I were visiting Bloomington, Indiana, for the day. The thought about how ironic it would be to hear Golden Earring again did occur to me, but I harbored my usual doubts. I didn’t bother to cross my fingers, and thought nothing more of it. Until, of course, I heard the beginning of my treasured tune on the car stereo. Russ turned it up a few notches, and I again marveled at the timelessness of this classic. Next time I visit the Hoosier state, I wonder if my Indiana song will hit the airwaves. Or if I’ll meet another lifelong friend by bonding on a great rock and roll song. VS
Oct 1st, 2005 by Vital Archives
Redemption Song
Here’s the thing about Liz Phair. If you’re a great admirer (as I am) you might be intimidated by the prospect of speaking to her directly (as I was). Even as a seasoned feature writer with two decades of bylines in my files, I was so nervous that when her publicist patched us together that I kind of froze. “Hello?” she said, her speaking voice a little higher and more melodic than I’d imagined. “Are you there?” Tongue-tied, I almost hung up, but I was on assignment, so instead I did the only thing I could under the circumstances. I confessed my insecurity, potentially sealing my fate as a pathetic amateur in her eyes. “God, don’t you hate that? That happened to me not too long ago.” She giggles, but it’s a conspiratorial girl-giggle, meant to put me at ease. She then tells the story of being in Michael Penn’s home recording studio, working on tracks for Somebody’s Miracle, when Joni Mitchell popped in. Penn invited Liz into the kitchen to meet her all-time musical hero, but, she confesses, “I was so freaked out, my ass was frozen to the couch. Absolutely frozen. I could not get up. When I finally did, I kind of hung back by the doorjamb. I had nothing interesting to say to her.” She goes on to tell about meeting Mick Jagger (again) recently, and how she tried to lighten things up by being friendly and cracking a joke. But everything she said seemed to come off as offensive in some way, so she just shut her mouth. We agreed that it was probably the difference between being Midwestern and being from, well, about anywhere else. I pushed aside unbidden thoughts of the great girlfriends Liz and I would surely have been in a different life and pressed on. Here’s something you may not know. Liz Phair is at peace with herself. This is a relatively new development, a spiritual transition years in the making. Nothing shakes up one’s world quite like parenthood, except perhaps a painful divorce or a career inexplicably on the slide. For some, the death of a much-loved relative can turn everything upside down. And when it all comes down more or less in a continuum, there’s no time to process each piece individually. It’s a true “get real” moment, fall or rise. Liz has risen, and her first big step was self-forgiveness. “There is an acceptance in me now,” she says. “I feel like I turned a corner in my personal life where I stopped running from all my bad qualities and said ‘enough is enough.’ I don’t want to live the rest of my life alone; I don’t want somebody making excuses for me, I don’t want to be somebody that my son needs therapy to get over.” But inner equilibrium is learned behavior for the woman who had the (mis)fortune of releasing one of the most acclaimed debut records of all time, then proceeded to ride celebrity like […]
Oct 1st, 2005 by Jon Anne Willow
