Since 2004 Plastic Crimewave (aka Steve Krakow) has used the Secret History of Chicago Music to shine a light on worthy artists with Chicago ties who’ve been forgotten, underrated, or never noticed in the first place.

Lately it seems like every “lost” recording, no matter how inconsequential, is getting pushed on limited colored vinyl for a crass Record Store Day cash grab. Beneath the hype, “archival releases” are too often just so-so live jams or half-baked outtakes by established artists—and it’s usually clear why they hadn’t been released before. That’s what makes the decades-delayed album release by all-but-forgotten Chicago postpunks Stations so exciting.

While Stations were active, in the late 70s and 80s, they released only one single and a music video. But they also recorded a long-lost EP with Martin Hannett, architect of the distinctive postpunk sound of Factory Records and producer for Joy Division—most famously, that’s his work on the genre’s urtext, 1979’s Unknown Pleasures. The three tracks Hannett mixed for that EP make up the core of the first Stations release in nearly 40 years, the album Ghostland, forthcoming on Chicago label No Sé Discos. 

“It sounds like it could’ve been recorded yesterday,” says No Sé cofounder Jorge Ledezma. “I personally refer to Stations as postpunk futurists—they were way ahead of their time. The world can finally catch up.”

Stations never had a stable lineup for long, but the core of the group was always guitarist David Stowell and front woman George Black, who’ve been married since 1984. Stowell was born in Toledo, Ohio, on February 12, 1956, and raised in the countryside outside Columbus. His family moved to the Windy City in 1966, arriving the night of Friday, July 15, just as the Richard Speck murders on the far south side hit TV news.

Black was born at Loretto Hospital on the west side of Chicago on March 5, 1955, and raised in Lombard by parents she calls “very advanced hipsters of their time.” Her father was a well-loved bandleader, comic, and emcee, and she says he was in the running for the late-night TV gig that Johnny Carson eventually landed. Black’s great-uncle on her mother’s side was vaudeville-era singer and recording artist Sir Harry Lauder, who in 1908 became the first artist signed to Victor Records. 

“Our most exciting Christmas Eve was when my father had a Baldwin Acrosonic spinet piano delivered when I was around eight,” Black remembers. “I could play some songs by ear after listening to the recording. I began taking drum lessons at around ten years old. I saw the Beatles live twice!”

Black auditioned for Stations in February 1979 by answering a “vocalist wanted” ad that Stowell and guitarist Ed Yeo had placed in the Illinois Entertainer. They settled on the name “Stations” after about two weeks of rehearsal, having rejected several other options, including “Petrol.” Their first lineup was Stowell, Black, Yeo, Andy Cers (bass), and Marty Binder (drums). 

“The first song we ever played together was ‘Tired of Waiting for You’ by the Kinks,” says Stowell. Stations debuted at Katz & Jammer Kids on Lincoln Avenue in early spring 1979, playing originals and covers of Buzzcocks, Television, Magazine, Ultravox, and Gang of Four. “There were lots of other influences happening,” Stowell recalls. “Pere Ubu got listened to quite a bit, also straight-ahead rock like Sex Pistols, the Jam, and the Damned. We also dug Bowie, Iggy, Kraftwerk, and many others.”

This version of the band lasted till fall 1980—as Stowell describes it, they dissolved by “crashing into wreckage in classic Pete Townsend style at a performance at O’Banion’s with Ed Yeo smashing his Les Paul to bits.” Binder left abruptly to join Buddy Guy and Junior Wells on an international tour, Cers went back to Minneapolis to start architecture school, and Yeo joined 4XY (with drummer Harry Rushakoff, later of Concrete Blonde). 

Black and Stowell kept writing songs together and moved into a dilapidated house at 1648 W. Bloomingdale, formerly occupied by new wavers the Dadistics. “We found copies of their single sleeves scattered around the house,” Stowell says. “And needles.”

“Against the Grain” is the A side of the only Stations single, released in 1981.

When Stations released their lone single, “Against the Grain” b/w “Calendar,” in August 1981, it featured a new backing group: drummer Stevo Georgiafandis, bassist Doug Hayden (aka Dexter Veka), and keyboardist Greg DeLap. Technically the single came out on a label called DuVall Records, which Stations invented on the spot using the address of the Bloomingdale house. The seven-inch captured the band’s sound at the time: taut, rumbling bass; aloof but nimble vocals; straight-ahead, propulsive drumming; noisily coloristic guitar; and catchy synth accents. 

The B side of that Stations seven-inch, “Calendar”

This incarnation of Stations never played a live gig. Georgiafandis, better known as Stephen George, would go on to join a very early lineup of Ministry, and Hayden and DeLap moved to the west coast.

In an attempt to adapt to the high rate of turnover in Stations’ rhythm section, Stowell and Black bought what they’re pretty sure was the first Roland TR-808 Rhythm Composer sold in the midwest. It would soon become the world’s most famous drum machine, used on uncountable early new-wave, hip-hop, and synth-pop recordings, but at that point it wasn’t yet available in local stores. While the two of them wrote new material to suit their new equipment, they also threw something of a Hail Mary with the single they’d already released: they sent a copy to producer Martin Hannett via Pinnacle Records in London, which at the time distributed Factory Records.

“In the brutally cold winter of 1980, with Reagan in office and John Lennon murdered, it was not exactly cheerful on the streets,” Stowell says. “We heard Joy Division’s first single, ‘Transmission,’ on the radio in the van—heater broken, legs wrapped in plastic, nine below zero outside, dark sky overhead—and everything fell into place. I thought, ‘This is the sound of the future! Stations has to work with Martin Hannett!’”

Amazingly, their blind mailing got results. “Some months later, in March of 1980, we got a call at the Bloomingdale house,” Stowell recalls. “A fellow with a pronounced Mancunian accent who identified himself as Martin Usher was hoping to stop by for a visit.” This was easier said than done: “Our place was stuck between an ancient railroad siding and an alley, no street access,” Stowell admits. “We gave him instructions on how to get to our place and he stopped by. Soon we were sitting down with Usher, who was not only a friend of Hannett’s but a skilled engineer who wound up building the gear that would make New Order’s sound possible some months later.” 

Stations were booked to open for Joy Division on what would’ve been their first U.S. tour, at Tuts on Belmont on May 27, 1980. Three days before the gig, they got the call: the whole tour was canceled, because front man Ian Curtis had committed suicide on May 18.

Stowell and Black were still working with their drum machine when a sculptor friend, David Kotker, introduced them to “this kid from Northwestern University named Steve Albini,” as Stowell puts it. “We worked out some songs with Steve on bass, Black on vocals and snare drum, myself on guitar and keyboards, and the new TR-808 as drummer. We did one live gig at Exit the night of an ice storm on December 17, 1981. It was pretty good considering the crap weather.” 

Albini didn’t stick around long either, though. “Steve liked to play his bass with the treble cranked all the way up, more in the guitar and vocal range of frequencies than the bass, so it became a really midrange-dominant sound we were getting,” Stowell says. “George and I both felt that Steve would take off better doing his own sound, and it turned out he did just that with Big Black.” He also later produced the likes of the Pixies, the Jesus Lizard, and of course Nirvana.

“Black and I kept scouring other bands for drummers and bass players,” Stowell says. Bassist Frank Brodlo and drummer John Elliott (who augmented his playing with the 808), both later of the group Dessau, completed what would turn out to be the most durable lineup of Stations to date, though that was an easy bar to clear. 

“We began working in earnest, writing new material rapidly and getting ready to play live gigs,” Stowell says. “In my mind that was the best iteration of Stations. We just clicked, and the songs started coming fast. We played better venues—Tuts on Belmont, Cabaret Metro, and multiple shows at the 950 Club, also known as Lucky Number.”

The Hannett saga was still unfolding as well—he’d contacted Stations through Usher just after Christmas in 1981, and they’d traveled to meet him in Manchester. Hannett had already done a record for another American group, proto-everything New York dance legends ESG, and he agreed to produce an EP for Stations. In summer 1982, Hannett flew to Chicago and booked a session at Studiomedia Recording in Evanston with Stations—who were by then firing on all cylinders with Brodlo and Elliott. 

“That same weekend we played a backup slot at Cabaret Metro behind Killing Joke, and Hannett did live sound for us,” Stowell recalls. “Martin had great ears, and was a wickedly smart and talented musician and bassist and a likable, generous guy. How many artists did he encourage and promote?”

To say Stations meshed aesthetically and philosophically with Hannett would be an understatement. “One thing about producing artists—you can try molding them, scolding them, controlling them, or inspiring them, or just finding and bringing forward something they themselves aren’t aware of in their work,” Stowell says. “Martin was ready to jump in and help, ready to experiment until something started to click. I only wish we could have done more with him.” 

Hannett returned to Manchester with the 24-track master on two-inch tape. Eventually he sent back a cassette of three rough mixes: “Climate of Violence,” “Demonstration,” and “In Defense of Cosmetics,” the last of which featured R. Lewis Floodstrand of 8½ on saxophone. Hannett had mixed them at Strawberry Studios in Stockport, the home base of 10cc for much of the 1970s. It was also where Joy Division had recorded Unknown Pleasures. 

Black frequently talked to Hannett on the phone, and the band hoped he’d shop their EP to Factory Records. But Hannett and Factory cofounder Tony Wison were feuding, and Hannett was frustrated and angry. Hannett’s heroin addiction—he was “chasing the dragon,” as Stowell puts it—made everything worse. Stations never received final mixes, and the rough cassette that Hannett had sent essentially became a time capsule. Stowell says it’s “been heard by less than 20 people in the entire span of its existence.”

Stations soldiered on, going through several more lineups around the core of Black and Stowell. From 1982 onward, Black says, they tended to gig only four times per year. She recalls a show at Exit in December 1982, when a winter storm had been blowing all day and it took them an hour to drive three miles to the venue in her Honda station wagon. 

“By showtime, we stood astounded that the club was packed!” she says. “All these people made their way to the show in a blizzard. Afterward I went out front on Wells to fetch my car to load gear out the back. Two drag queens we knew who followed the band were having a fight on my car. I opened the passenger side door to climb into the driver’s seat, and they both fell in after me, one strangling the other on the console. I talked them down and said, ‘Look, I can give you a ride somewhere.’ But they stopped, made up, and wandered off into the silent city streets at 2 AM.” 

The only other Stations release during the group’s lifetime was this video for “Fear & Fascination.”

In 1983 at Columbia College, Stations made what would turn out to be their only other release, a video for the song “Fear & Fascination” shot on black-and-white 16-millimeter film and edited on videotape. Dan DiNello directed the clip, and it came out in 1984. “It might be the first American goth video—a song about the limits of language and the arising of new forms of human communication,” Stowell says.

Stowell and Black got married on June 26, 1984, the day after playing a show at Neo to promote the “Fear & Fascination” video (a special occasion in and of itself, since the club rarely booked live bands). “We were betrothed by a City of Chicago marriage clerk,” Stowell says, “invested with the abysmal power of the County of Cook.”

Stations played their last gig at Medusa’s on March 3, 1989, with bassist James Kirk and drummer Steve Cullens, both from New York. Black says the end came because they couldn’t keep going as they had been, approached by labels and then snubbed, over and over. “We had taken it as far as we could at that time,” she says. She and Stowell were both in their mid-30s. Hannett died in 1991 at age 42.

Stowell and Black didn’t entirely abandon music, though—in 1998 and ’99, they recorded at their tiny apartment in the South Loop (on Federal Street south of the Harold Washington Library) on a TEAC cassette four-track. “We took the best of those recordings and had them mastered by Rick Gallo and then released them on CD under the band name ROPS 56,” Stowell says. That self-released disc, the only extant music from ROPS 56, is titled The Other Upriver.

The couple also began supporting themselves with a catering business, which launched in Chicago but eventually took them to Portland, Oregon. “Our clients were changing, moving, and we were ready to change everything and start on a new chapter in our lives,” Stowell says. “We left Chicago in September of 1999 and started first a popular food cart, then a popular restaurant called Veganopolis Cafeteria, which became a hit with touring musicians.”

Stowell and Black published a popular vegan cookbook in 2010 and got involved in promoting Oregon bands such as Blitzen Trapper. They recorded a song called “Strange Weather,” but they never released it. 

The saga of Stations might’ve ended there if the couple hadn’t returned to Chicago in 2009. Stowell got a job bartending at a Whole Foods, where he and coworker Jorge Ledezma bonded over music after Stowell played Kraftwerk on the store PA. “Jorge and I started talking music, and I was blown away by the fact that he’d done a tour in Finland with Damo Suzuki from Can,” Stowell says. “I told him about our demos with Martin Hannett.” 

Ledezma plays in tropicalia-influenced Latine psych-rock band Allá with his wife, Lupe Martinez, and his brother Angel. (The Ledezma brothers also anchored long-gone space-rock outfit Defender.) Last year the three of them founded No Sé Discos, a family- and artist-run south-side record label that focuses on uplifting Black and Brown musicians. “We are all working-class musicians,” Ledezma says. “This is what binds us, and this is how we met David—while working together in food service.” 

Read More

Since 2004 Plastic Crimewave (aka Steve Krakow) has used the Secret History of Chicago Music to shine a light on worthy artists with Chicago ties who’ve been forgotten, underrated, or never noticed in the first place.

Lately it seems like every “lost” recording, no matter how inconsequential, is getting pushed on limited colored vinyl for a crass Record Store Day cash grab. Beneath the hype, “archival releases” are too often just so-so live jams or half-baked outtakes by established artists—and it’s usually clear why they hadn’t been released before. That’s what makes the decades-delayed album release by all-but-forgotten Chicago postpunks Stations so exciting.

While Stations were active, in the late 70s and 80s, they released only one single and a music video. But they also recorded a long-lost EP with Martin Hannett, architect of the distinctive postpunk sound of Factory Records and producer for Joy Division—most famously, that’s his work on the genre’s urtext, 1979’s Unknown Pleasures. The three tracks Hannett mixed for that EP make up the core of the first Stations release in nearly 40 years, the album Ghostland, forthcoming on Chicago label No Sé Discos. 

“It sounds like it could’ve been recorded yesterday,” says No Sé cofounder Jorge Ledezma. “I personally refer to Stations as postpunk futurists—they were way ahead of their time. The world can finally catch up.”

Stations never had a stable lineup for long, but the core of the group was always guitarist David Stowell and front woman George Black, who’ve been married since 1984. Stowell was born in Toledo, Ohio, on February 12, 1956, and raised in the countryside outside Columbus. His family moved to the Windy City in 1966, arriving the night of Friday, July 15, just as the Richard Speck murders on the far south side hit TV news.

Black was born at Loretto Hospital on the west side of Chicago on March 5, 1955, and raised in Lombard by parents she calls “very advanced hipsters of their time.” Her father was a well-loved bandleader, comic, and emcee, and she says he was in the running for the late-night TV gig that Johnny Carson eventually landed. Black’s great-uncle on her mother’s side was vaudeville-era singer and recording artist Sir Harry Lauder, who in 1908 became the first artist signed to Victor Records. 

“Our most exciting Christmas Eve was when my father had a Baldwin Acrosonic spinet piano delivered when I was around eight,” Black remembers. “I could play some songs by ear after listening to the recording. I began taking drum lessons at around ten years old. I saw the Beatles live twice!”

Black auditioned for Stations in February 1979 by answering a “vocalist wanted” ad that Stowell and guitarist Ed Yeo had placed in the Illinois Entertainer. They settled on the name “Stations” after about two weeks of rehearsal, having rejected several other options, including “Petrol.” Their first lineup was Stowell, Black, Yeo, Andy Cers (bass), and Marty Binder (drums). 

“The first song we ever played together was ‘Tired of Waiting for You’ by the Kinks,” says Stowell. Stations debuted at Katz & Jammer Kids on Lincoln Avenue in early spring 1979, playing originals and covers of Buzzcocks, Television, Magazine, Ultravox, and Gang of Four. “There were lots of other influences happening,” Stowell recalls. “Pere Ubu got listened to quite a bit, also straight-ahead rock like Sex Pistols, the Jam, and the Damned. We also dug Bowie, Iggy, Kraftwerk, and many others.”

This version of the band lasted till fall 1980—as Stowell describes it, they dissolved by “crashing into wreckage in classic Pete Townsend style at a performance at O’Banion’s with Ed Yeo smashing his Les Paul to bits.” Binder left abruptly to join Buddy Guy and Junior Wells on an international tour, Cers went back to Minneapolis to start architecture school, and Yeo joined 4XY (with drummer Harry Rushakoff, later of Concrete Blonde). 

Black and Stowell kept writing songs together and moved into a dilapidated house at 1648 W. Bloomingdale, formerly occupied by new wavers the Dadistics. “We found copies of their single sleeves scattered around the house,” Stowell says. “And needles.”

“Against the Grain” is the A side of the only Stations single, released in 1981.

When Stations released their lone single, “Against the Grain” b/w “Calendar,” in August 1981, it featured a new backing group: drummer Stevo Georgiafandis, bassist Doug Hayden (aka Dexter Veka), and keyboardist Greg DeLap. Technically the single came out on a label called DuVall Records, which Stations invented on the spot using the address of the Bloomingdale house. The seven-inch captured the band’s sound at the time: taut, rumbling bass; aloof but nimble vocals; straight-ahead, propulsive drumming; noisily coloristic guitar; and catchy synth accents. 

The B side of that Stations seven-inch, “Calendar”

This incarnation of Stations never played a live gig. Georgiafandis, better known as Stephen George, would go on to join a very early lineup of Ministry, and Hayden and DeLap moved to the west coast.

In an attempt to adapt to the high rate of turnover in Stations’ rhythm section, Stowell and Black bought what they’re pretty sure was the first Roland TR-808 Rhythm Composer sold in the midwest. It would soon become the world’s most famous drum machine, used on uncountable early new-wave, hip-hop, and synth-pop recordings, but at that point it wasn’t yet available in local stores. While the two of them wrote new material to suit their new equipment, they also threw something of a Hail Mary with the single they’d already released: they sent a copy to producer Martin Hannett via Pinnacle Records in London, which at the time distributed Factory Records.

“In the brutally cold winter of 1980, with Reagan in office and John Lennon murdered, it was not exactly cheerful on the streets,” Stowell says. “We heard Joy Division’s first single, ‘Transmission,’ on the radio in the van—heater broken, legs wrapped in plastic, nine below zero outside, dark sky overhead—and everything fell into place. I thought, ‘This is the sound of the future! Stations has to work with Martin Hannett!’”

Amazingly, their blind mailing got results. “Some months later, in March of 1980, we got a call at the Bloomingdale house,” Stowell recalls. “A fellow with a pronounced Mancunian accent who identified himself as Martin Usher was hoping to stop by for a visit.” This was easier said than done: “Our place was stuck between an ancient railroad siding and an alley, no street access,” Stowell admits. “We gave him instructions on how to get to our place and he stopped by. Soon we were sitting down with Usher, who was not only a friend of Hannett’s but a skilled engineer who wound up building the gear that would make New Order’s sound possible some months later.” 

Stations were booked to open for Joy Division on what would’ve been their first U.S. tour, at Tuts on Belmont on May 27, 1980. Three days before the gig, they got the call: the whole tour was canceled, because front man Ian Curtis had committed suicide on May 18.

Stowell and Black were still working with their drum machine when a sculptor friend, David Kotker, introduced them to “this kid from Northwestern University named Steve Albini,” as Stowell puts it. “We worked out some songs with Steve on bass, Black on vocals and snare drum, myself on guitar and keyboards, and the new TR-808 as drummer. We did one live gig at Exit the night of an ice storm on December 17, 1981. It was pretty good considering the crap weather.” 

Albini didn’t stick around long either, though. “Steve liked to play his bass with the treble cranked all the way up, more in the guitar and vocal range of frequencies than the bass, so it became a really midrange-dominant sound we were getting,” Stowell says. “George and I both felt that Steve would take off better doing his own sound, and it turned out he did just that with Big Black.” He also later produced the likes of the Pixies, the Jesus Lizard, and of course Nirvana.

“Black and I kept scouring other bands for drummers and bass players,” Stowell says. Bassist Frank Brodlo and drummer John Elliott (who augmented his playing with the 808), both later of the group Dessau, completed what would turn out to be the most durable lineup of Stations to date, though that was an easy bar to clear. 

“We began working in earnest, writing new material rapidly and getting ready to play live gigs,” Stowell says. “In my mind that was the best iteration of Stations. We just clicked, and the songs started coming fast. We played better venues—Tuts on Belmont, Cabaret Metro, and multiple shows at the 950 Club, also known as Lucky Number.”

The Hannett saga was still unfolding as well—he’d contacted Stations through Usher just after Christmas in 1981, and they’d traveled to meet him in Manchester. Hannett had already done a record for another American group, proto-everything New York dance legends ESG, and he agreed to produce an EP for Stations. In summer 1982, Hannett flew to Chicago and booked a session at Studiomedia Recording in Evanston with Stations—who were by then firing on all cylinders with Brodlo and Elliott. 

“That same weekend we played a backup slot at Cabaret Metro behind Killing Joke, and Hannett did live sound for us,” Stowell recalls. “Martin had great ears, and was a wickedly smart and talented musician and bassist and a likable, generous guy. How many artists did he encourage and promote?”

To say Stations meshed aesthetically and philosophically with Hannett would be an understatement. “One thing about producing artists—you can try molding them, scolding them, controlling them, or inspiring them, or just finding and bringing forward something they themselves aren’t aware of in their work,” Stowell says. “Martin was ready to jump in and help, ready to experiment until something started to click. I only wish we could have done more with him.” 

Hannett returned to Manchester with the 24-track master on two-inch tape. Eventually he sent back a cassette of three rough mixes: “Climate of Violence,” “Demonstration,” and “In Defense of Cosmetics,” the last of which featured R. Lewis Floodstrand of 8½ on saxophone. Hannett had mixed them at Strawberry Studios in Stockport, the home base of 10cc for much of the 1970s. It was also where Joy Division had recorded Unknown Pleasures. 

Black frequently talked to Hannett on the phone, and the band hoped he’d shop their EP to Factory Records. But Hannett and Factory cofounder Tony Wison were feuding, and Hannett was frustrated and angry. Hannett’s heroin addiction—he was “chasing the dragon,” as Stowell puts it—made everything worse. Stations never received final mixes, and the rough cassette that Hannett had sent essentially became a time capsule. Stowell says it’s “been heard by less than 20 people in the entire span of its existence.”

Stations soldiered on, going through several more lineups around the core of Black and Stowell. From 1982 onward, Black says, they tended to gig only four times per year. She recalls a show at Exit in December 1982, when a winter storm had been blowing all day and it took them an hour to drive three miles to the venue in her Honda station wagon. 

“By showtime, we stood astounded that the club was packed!” she says. “All these people made their way to the show in a blizzard. Afterward I went out front on Wells to fetch my car to load gear out the back. Two drag queens we knew who followed the band were having a fight on my car. I opened the passenger side door to climb into the driver’s seat, and they both fell in after me, one strangling the other on the console. I talked them down and said, ‘Look, I can give you a ride somewhere.’ But they stopped, made up, and wandered off into the silent city streets at 2 AM.” 

The only other Stations release during the group’s lifetime was this video for “Fear & Fascination.”

In 1983 at Columbia College, Stations made what would turn out to be their only other release, a video for the song “Fear & Fascination” shot on black-and-white 16-millimeter film and edited on videotape. Dan DiNello directed the clip, and it came out in 1984. “It might be the first American goth video—a song about the limits of language and the arising of new forms of human communication,” Stowell says.

Stowell and Black got married on June 26, 1984, the day after playing a show at Neo to promote the “Fear & Fascination” video (a special occasion in and of itself, since the club rarely booked live bands). “We were betrothed by a City of Chicago marriage clerk,” Stowell says, “invested with the abysmal power of the County of Cook.”

Stations played their last gig at Medusa’s on March 3, 1989, with bassist James Kirk and drummer Steve Cullens, both from New York. Black says the end came because they couldn’t keep going as they had been, approached by labels and then snubbed, over and over. “We had taken it as far as we could at that time,” she says. She and Stowell were both in their mid-30s. Hannett died in 1991 at age 42.

Stowell and Black didn’t entirely abandon music, though—in 1998 and ’99, they recorded at their tiny apartment in the South Loop (on Federal Street south of the Harold Washington Library) on a TEAC cassette four-track. “We took the best of those recordings and had them mastered by Rick Gallo and then released them on CD under the band name ROPS 56,” Stowell says. That self-released disc, the only extant music from ROPS 56, is titled The Other Upriver.

The couple also began supporting themselves with a catering business, which launched in Chicago but eventually took them to Portland, Oregon. “Our clients were changing, moving, and we were ready to change everything and start on a new chapter in our lives,” Stowell says. “We left Chicago in September of 1999 and started first a popular food cart, then a popular restaurant called Veganopolis Cafeteria, which became a hit with touring musicians.”

Stowell and Black published a popular vegan cookbook in 2010 and got involved in promoting Oregon bands such as Blitzen Trapper. They recorded a song called “Strange Weather,” but they never released it. 

The saga of Stations might’ve ended there if the couple hadn’t returned to Chicago in 2009. Stowell got a job bartending at a Whole Foods, where he and coworker Jorge Ledezma bonded over music after Stowell played Kraftwerk on the store PA. “Jorge and I started talking music, and I was blown away by the fact that he’d done a tour in Finland with Damo Suzuki from Can,” Stowell says. “I told him about our demos with Martin Hannett.” 

Ledezma plays in tropicalia-influenced Latine psych-rock band Allá with his wife, Lupe Martinez, and his brother Angel. (The Ledezma brothers also anchored long-gone space-rock outfit Defender.) Last year the three of them founded No Sé Discos, a family- and artist-run south-side record label that focuses on uplifting Black and Brown musicians. “We are all working-class musicians,” Ledezma says. “This is what binds us, and this is how we met David—while working together in food service.” 

Read More

In 2016, Monty Cole made his directorial debut in Chicago with Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape at now-defunct Oracle Productions—and what a debut it was. His staging of the story of Yank, a swaggering stoker on a steamship who is ultimately destroyed by a society that sees him only as a brute, brought together a stellar ensemble of six Black actors. Cole incorporated percussive live sound and hypnotic movement interludes in O’Neill’s expressionistic text, while interpolating subtle call-outs to contemporary abuses of Black men by police and others.

Cole, a native of Oak Park, has been busy since then: he went off and got an MFA in directing at the California Institute of Arts, and he’s also been developing his voice as a playwright; American Teenager was written as a commission from the Goodman, where Cole was part of the 2019-20 cohort for the theater’s Playwrights Unit, and the Repertory Theatre of St. Louis is currently developing his stage adaptation of John Howard Griffin’s Black Like Me, in which the white Griffin recounted his travels in the Jim Crow south disguised as a Black man.

Fences 
7/1-8/6: Thu-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 2:30 and 7:30 PM, Sun 2:30 PM; no performances Sat 7/9 2:30 PM and Sat 8/6 7:30 PM; Theater Wit, 1225 W. Belmont, 773-975-8150, americanbluestheater.com, $25-$45

For his first live production onstage in Chicago since the pandemic, Cole is digging into a contemporary Black classic: August Wilson’s Fences, the 1950s chapter in the late playwright’s monumental Century Cycle examining Black American life in each decade of the 20th century, opening in previews this weekend with American Blues Theater at Theater Wit. The play has of course been done frequently in Chicago and elsewhere. And the 2016 film starring Denzel Washington (who also directed) as Troy Maxson, the embittered Pittsburgh sanitation worker and onetime Negro League star, and Viola Davis as his long-suffering wife, Rose, won Oscar nominations for Washington and Davis, with the latter winning best supporting actress for her role. (A bit puzzling, since Rose is far from a supporting role, but that’s how it goes in Tinsel Town.)

Cole has never directed a Wilson play before. “This is kind of crazy and exciting, because I think I see Wilson differently than maybe folks that have traditionally directed Wilson before,” he says. “And that’s the reason why maybe I’ve been a little scared to direct Wilson—because of how his work has been produced and created before. It fits within a certain lineage, a certain tradition, almost like in the spirit of the griot passing an aesthetic down from generation to generation. And this production is sort of breaking that.”

Specifically, Cole says, “I don’t see Wilson as realism at all. I would say the guts of his plays are spirituality. Almost every play that he writes, the thing that’s turning the gears of the play is some sense of spirituality. Whether it’s the City of Bones in Gem of the Ocean, which we just saw at the Goodman, or some sort of ancestral plane. In Fences, it’s in the sense of talking to Death and talking to the devil and the fence [which Troy is building around his house throughout the play] sort of symbolizing the American dream. I’m kind of leading with that. I’m really allowing the play to have these strange moments where talking to Death or Troy being strangled by Death is really prevalent.”

Cole notes that Kamal Angelo Bolden, who plays Troy in the ABT production, is younger than Troy’s 53 years. But he says, “Troy doesn’t die of old age. Troy dies because of a type of spiritual rot that happens over the course of the play. He dies from a type of individualism that the American dream sort of forces you to partake in. And it’s the community that he’s kind of shut down in order to seek his own individualism. And right now, that’s crazy relevant as we’re about to head into a new recession and people in my generation are trying to have their own American dream. What are you willing to sacrifice in order to have that American dream?”

Fences and Black Like Me are far from the only projects on Cole’s docket. He’s also working with playwright Isaac Gómez, whom he met when they were both working at Victory Gardens Theater several years ago, on a digital project for Teatro Vista called La Vuelta. 

“Isaac is working with the ensemble individually to kind of talk about, ‘What have you been allowed to play before? What have you been allowed to work on? What have you been allowed to do and what do you want to do? What have you not done?’ And we’ve been trying to find some themes between these things, and we’ve been talking about it as if it’s an anthology web series. And so we are going to film these beautiful moments between the ensemble.”

Cole has also created his own film projects; his short film Sons of Toledo, written with Matt Voss, about a mourning barber giving his slain brother one last haircut, has appeared in film festivals around the world and won Best African American Short at the 2022 Phoenix Film Festival. But even with all the directions in which he’s been moving, there’s something about tackling Wilson that he finds daunting and yet exhilarating—which is why he knew it was time to do it.

“My wife and I are starting to think about having kids ourselves. And so I’m in this middle place of how I’m considering fatherhood and how I’m considering what I need to do in order to make a child’s life successful here in America as a Black man. And with all those things coming together, I’m reading Fences and it’s hitting me harder than it’s ever hit me before. And so I’m like, oh God, I think I have to do this.”

E.M. Davis and Rose Hamill of Broken Nose Theatre Courtesy Spenser Davis

Broken Nose leaders to step down

Earlier this month, Broken Nose Theatre—one of the most lauded storefront ensembles to emerge in the last decade—announced that they were going to embark on a search for a new leadership team. Artistic director E.M. Davis and managing director Rose Hamill will step down from their leadership roles effective September 1. 

The two took over their roles from founding artistic director Benjamin Brownson in 2018 and steered the company through the upheavals of the global pandemic (during which they continued to produce digital programming, including the annual Bechdel Fest of work by women playwrights). 

According to the press announcement, the company isn’t in a big hurry to name new leadership. Instead, they plan to establish a transition committee comprised of board members, staff, and ensemble members to “reimagine the current structure of the organization in the context of our recent growth” and with the aim of incorporating the company’s “recent assessment and work around racial equity, access, diversity and inclusion.” The future plans also call for expanding the ensemble; BNT plans to be back in 2023 with two full productions. Meantime, they will hold a fundraising gala in August and continue with plans for the ninth edition of Bechdel Fest.

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Back in the Before Times, I saw Carisa Hendrix perform as her alter ego, dipsomaniacal Lucy Darling, at the Chicago Magic Lounge. Combining va-va-voom Golden Age of Screwball Comedy glitz and sass with sleight-of-hand involving making bottles of whiskey appear and disappear, Hendrix/Darling’s act both celebrates and upends the “sexy assistant” trope in magic. She’s not just for show. She is the show, and her “assistants” tend to be the men she pulls up onstage as her comic foils—the Ralph Bellamys to her Irene Dunne.

Lucy Darling: Indulgence
Through 7/16: Thu 8 PM, Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 3, 7, and 9:30 PM; also 10 PM Fri 7/15; no show Thu 7/14; Rhapsody Theater, 1328 W. Morse, 888-495-9001, rhapsodytheater.com, $35-$75

Lucy Darling: Indulgence is the kickoff show for the new Rhapsody Theater in Rogers Park, run by magician/neonatologist Dr. Ricardo T. Rosenkranz. (In a sly nod to Rosenkranz’s day job, the art deco-style curtains for the stage have caducei woven into the panels in between two huge lush golden peacocks.) The space has been refurbished from its time as the Mayne Stage, but it retains intimacy and warmth, along with more room to move onstage than the Magic Lounge offers. In an interview in May, Rosenkranz told me that he hopes it will be a center for more illusion-based magic, rather than solely Chicago-style close-up art; while Lucy Darling: Indulgence doesn’t fully lean into illusion, the bigger stage feels fitting for its star’s larger-than-life persona.

Hendrix has a gift for sussing out who is game for her teasing (one wonders if a woman magician performing without that persona would find the same reception among the audience). Her “magical mixologist” mixes and matches up patrons; on the night I attended, Joe the investment adviser and Skye the theater professor were reborn with a top hat and a fan, respectively, as “Fernando” and “Esmeralda” for a bit. And of course, participants are also asked what they’re drinking (if you frown on glorification of alcohol use, this won’t be your show). 

But no matter how you dress it up, magic is about how well the artist makes you suspend disbelief, and Hendrix nails the “how did she do that?” aspect. She could perform in khakis and a plaid shirt and it would be as impressive. But not as much fun, and definitely not as sparkly. Why go for beer when you can get girl-drink drunk with Lucy Darling?

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Back in the Before Times, I saw Carisa Hendrix perform as her alter ego, dipsomaniacal Lucy Darling, at the Chicago Magic Lounge. Combining va-va-voom Golden Age of Screwball Comedy glitz and sass with sleight-of-hand involving making bottles of whiskey appear and disappear, Hendrix/Darling’s act both celebrates and upends the “sexy assistant” trope in magic. She’s not just for show. She is the show, and her “assistants” tend to be the men she pulls up onstage as her comic foils—the Ralph Bellamys to her Irene Dunne.

Lucy Darling: Indulgence
Through 7/16: Thu 8 PM, Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 3, 7, and 9:30 PM; also 10 PM Fri 7/15; no show Thu 7/14; Rhapsody Theater, 1328 W. Morse, 888-495-9001, rhapsodytheater.com, $35-$75

Lucy Darling: Indulgence is the kickoff show for the new Rhapsody Theater in Rogers Park, run by magician/neonatologist Dr. Ricardo T. Rosenkranz. (In a sly nod to Rosenkranz’s day job, the art deco-style curtains for the stage have caducei woven into the panels in between two huge lush golden peacocks.) The space has been refurbished from its time as the Mayne Stage, but it retains intimacy and warmth, along with more room to move onstage than the Magic Lounge offers. In an interview in May, Rosenkranz told me that he hopes it will be a center for more illusion-based magic, rather than solely Chicago-style close-up art; while Lucy Darling: Indulgence doesn’t fully lean into illusion, the bigger stage feels fitting for its star’s larger-than-life persona.

Hendrix has a gift for sussing out who is game for her teasing (one wonders if a woman magician performing without that persona would find the same reception among the audience). Her “magical mixologist” mixes and matches up patrons; on the night I attended, Joe the investment adviser and Skye the theater professor were reborn with a top hat and a fan, respectively, as “Fernando” and “Esmeralda” for a bit. And of course, participants are also asked what they’re drinking (if you frown on glorification of alcohol use, this won’t be your show). 

But no matter how you dress it up, magic is about how well the artist makes you suspend disbelief, and Hendrix nails the “how did she do that?” aspect. She could perform in khakis and a plaid shirt and it would be as impressive. But not as much fun, and definitely not as sparkly. Why go for beer when you can get girl-drink drunk with Lucy Darling?

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There is no shortage of rumors today, as NBA free agency officially opens up. Leading up to this period, the Chicago Bulls have been connected to several players in trade rumors and free agency rumors, but nothing big has happened yet via trade.

Now, things can really start happening as free agents will be allowed to agree to deals Thursday night.

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The most coveted NBA draft prospect in the world is on the move.

Victor Wembanyama, ranked No. 1 on the 2023 ESPN mock draft, has opted out of his contract with ASVEL Villeurbanne and is signing a two-year contract with Boulogne-Levallois Metropolitans 92 from Paris, a source told ESPN.

The 7’3, 18-year old with a 7’9 wingspan and 9’7 standing reach has wowed NBA executives for the better part of three years now with his exceptional combination of fluidity, perimeter skill, shot-blocking instincts, and feel for the game, cementing himself as the likely No. 1 pick barring a major surprise. He was named French LNB Pro A Best Young Player of the year two years in a row.

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Wembanyama was pursued by teams and leagues around the globe, including G League Ignite, the Australian NBL, Real Madrid, Barcelona, Paris Basket and many others.

Wembanyama will be coached by long-time French national team head coach Vincent Collet, who has been at the helm of the Tokyo Olympic silver medalists since 2009. Collet has won several titles domestically in France also, being named Coach of the Year in France on five separate occasions, including most recently this season.

Collet coached then-19-year old Nicolas Batum in Le Mans prior to him entering the NBA Draft in 2008, giving him an opportunity to showcase himself in the Euroleague despite his youth. He’s well-regarded for his player development ability and willingness to showcase young players, which played a major role in Wembanyama’s decision.

Wembanyama had an opt-out clause in his contract with ASVEL that needed to be executed by June 29th, which he ultimately did after the team ended their playoff run with a championship in a five-game series over Monaco.

Wembanyama played 33 of 76 possible games this season in the Euroleague and France, dealing with several minor injuries which played a role in his departure. He averaged 9.4 points, 5.1 rebounds and 1.8 blocks in 18 minutes per game in Pro A France, shooting 61% from 2-point range and converting 70% of his free throw attempts.

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The grounds are defined by meandering turns of grass and dirt, a rainfall of lightbulbs, a shining blue curve that sometimes picks up projections and reflections of what might be ghosts or clouds, and a dotted line made of glass bottles of water. Amid these clear and reflective surfaces, natural elements and their simulations curbed and contained, stands Madeline Fielding Sayet, Acokayis. Named for Fidelia Fielding/Flying Bird/Jeets Bodernasha, the last fluent speaker of the Mohegan language, and renamed Acokayis, “blackbird,” Sayet has been tasked from every saying of her name to contemplate this language and its loss. 

Where We Belong
Through 7/24: Wed-Thu 7:30 PM, Fri 8 PM, Sat 2 and 8 PM, Sun 2 PM; also Sun 7/3, 7:30 PM, Tue 7/12, 7:30 PM, and Thu 7/21, 2 PM; touch tour and audio-described performance Sun 7/7, 2 PM (touch tour at 12:30 PM); Spanish subtitles Fri 7/15, 8 PM; ASL interpretation Sat 7/23, 2 PM; open captions Sun 7/24, 2 PM; Goodman Theatre, 170 N. Dearborn, 312-443-3800, goodmantheatre.org, $15-$45

Where We Belong, written and performed by Sayet, directed by Mei Ann Teo, with production design by Hao Bai, presents Sayet as Sayet, a descendant of Uncas, “known historically (to the colonizers) as ‘friend of the English,’” who enabled the survival of the Mohegans by allying with the invading enemies in an effort to make peace. 

Sayet walks a similar line in her story, in which she begins as a PhD student studying Shakespeare in England. She travels back in time to her adolescent discovery of escape and belonging in the world of the Bard, when “to be Native in CT, is basically to be told every day that you don’t exist, and decide whether or not today’s the day it’s worth fighting about.” (“Sooooo, you think you’re a white person now?” says her mother before sending her to confront her teachers with a history it pains all parties to remember.) And yet, to forget is the greatest pain: to learn your own language from a dictionary and never to speak it natively; to find your ancestors jumbled in a crude catalog of the British Museum’s collection of 12,000 human remains (not counting hair); to be represented as an artifact, a curiosity, a mocking stereotype in redface, or not at all; to stand on the border of your own land and wonder if the law will allow you to enter. All these are confronted with humor and sadness in Sayet’s story.

Sayet speaks throughout with urgency, rapt with a need to recite the words that otherwise may be lost and keep speaking a language that she says may make her a madwoman to us, just as Flying Bird continued to speak her language though there were no longer any living listeners. The lights stay on in the house throughout the performance, and though we listeners sit beneath the stage, she addresses the air above us—perhaps in defiance of the unnatural border of the stage and what it creates of the human before us making an art of her own story.“My career began—because I created a show—that asked: What would happen if Caliban could get his language back?” she says. “Would anyone have cared about those Mohegan words—if they didn’t come from Caliban?”

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