Day 2: Chicago, IL
Nau mai
Yesterday we kicked off our requests tour with a show at the Concord Music Hall.
I picked up a quick to-go breakfast from the hotel’s cafe as I rushed to make it on time to lobby call. The cafe in the lobby of the Crowne Plaze hotel had unimaginative food offerings but featured a hectic array of design elements like 90s hand-painted coffee shop signs, led strip lights, mid century pendant lights, velvet booth seating, metallic ceiling tiles, and striped Parisian awnings.
I ordered a parsley and black pepper schmear on an everything bagel, a topping that you may just be able to make out in the hole in the centre of this baked toroid.
Shortly after 2pm we were picked up in a van, one of these off the books transportation services driven by an off the books minion that Annie seems to have in every city in the United States. Of course it was a Chevrolet Express, the standard minion vehicle, a stubby white passenger van wearing the rusty scars of a couple of decade’s worth of Illinois winters.
After driving for twenty minutes we arrived at the venue, right on the border of the neighbourhoods of Wicker Park and Logan Square, about six kilometres northwest of downtown. We entered through an alleyway and found the Concorde Music Hall after climbing about three or four flights of stairs. Soon after, our equipment sensibly followed us up in the elevator. Harsh fluorescent lighting illuminated a nondescript room with a wide stage and plenty of standing room on its polished concrete floor. At some point someone had decided against decoration and the walls and ceiling were painted stealth black, to avoid detection.
The wide, low stage of the Concord Music Hall.
We had one of the longest setups I can remember. Our set wasn’t until 11pm giving us around seven hours until the audience would start flooding through the doors. We would need the spare hours though, as we were sans Gabe due to this show being a late addition to the tour that clashed with his holiday. Standing in as sound engineer was a lovely man named Justin who had been fully briefed and was ready to dive into the deep end of mixing any one of fifty potential Beths songs.
We began to set the stage of the Concord Music Hall. It took ages without Gabe there setting up all the audio equipment. His carefully labelled cables and brackets were a godsend as we located and plugged in each microphone and neatly ran the cables exactly the way we had seen him do it.
There were other elements of the show to prepare. Two new members have joined the tour party, a brilliant pair of minds that you might know as Sports Team, but who also go by the names of Annabel Kean and Callum Devlin. They are responsible for the production elements of the unusual show we are putting on. As we were plugging our amps in they were doing tasks like constructing the chalk board, assembling the tombola, and preparing the fish plush to receive its internal microphone.
The raised balcony at the back of the room with its beer-proof seats.
*This next section contains spoilers for the show *
If you plan on attending and you would like to be pleasantly surprised by any of the segments we have prepared it might be best to stop reading at this point.
At 11pm we went out on stage and kicked off our “By Request” tour. The first request came from an audience poll that took place upon entry to the venue. The audience members could cast a vote for the opener by placing a token in one of two containers, each of which represented a suitable opening song. After playing this first track we deployed the first of many request-taking methods that we had prepared to fairly and efficiently fill up the set list. A verbal request screamed from the back of the room was somehow comprehended and added to the chalk board and then four more requests were delivered via airmail as a flotilla of paper planes glided across the room and onto the stage.
Another segment involved the fish plush being tossed into the audience and the catcher getting to speak their request into the internal microphone located in the fish’s mouth.
Later on the tombola would be used. The clear, plastic drum was carried out to the middle of the stage and after a good amount of spinning and tumbling one of the band members could extract one of the ping pong balls and read the prompt printed on the ball to choose a requester. I believe the prompts from yesterday’s show were “Pet Rats” and “Birthday”.
It was a hard show. Huge amounts of concentration were required. Plenty of deep cuts were called and felt like there wasn’t ever a moment to relax and settle into a familiar rhythm. At the beginning of the show we challenged this audience to create a perfect Beths set and looking back at the setlist, its hard to argue with this result.
This is the By Request tee, a garment that you can turn into a momento by hand writing the setlist you helped to create.
I’m not sure what the joke is, I was just trying to prove that I wasn’t pocketing everyone’s dinner money.
