If you went to an underground show in Chicago in the past ten years, you probably saw Ray Ellingsen. Any time a band played eccentric, noisy, outre rock in a basement, loft, apartment, or converted warehouse, more likely than not he’d be there: snapping photographs right up front, hovering over the merch table to check out cassettes and T-shirts, chatting with musicians between or even during their sets. He hummed with enthusiasm that seemed as tangible as the aura drawn around a comic-book superhero.
Ellingsen suffered from sciatica and back problems, and for the last few years of his life he was unemployed, getting by with the help of government disability benefits. (Before that, he’d sold his art and photos at fairs and markets.) His unusual schedule made it possible for him to attend hundreds of shows—he preferred underground spaces such as Mr. City, the Mopery, and Mortville, but he occasionally went to legitimate venues, most often the Empty Bottle. His dedication to the community and its strange, subversive music inspired many people who knew him.
The few people on the scene who had Ellingsen’s phone number couldn’t reach him. On October 16, a friend of Ellingsen’s from high school, Kurt Sheffer, posted about his death on Facebook, below an Ellingsen concert photo someone else had shared a few weeks earlier. Maybe because the thread had gone quiet by then, the news didn’t spread quickly in the underground music community. Nathan Gregory (previously of local psych band Nude Sunrise) found out in early December, after he tried to message Ellingsen on Facebook, and started telling his friends, including Yingling. By the time Yingling posted his eulogy on December 6, it had been nearly two months since Ellingsen’s death on October 12.
Ellingsen’s friends in the underground music community would like to finish the book he started about the scene, adding their own thoughts about him, and many are keen to help Karen Gullett sort through the collection of his stuff in her care. (Coogan has already made one trip to the suburbs to pick up material for the April memorial.) The photos, letters, magazines, T-shirts, cassettes, ticket stubs, and other paraphernalia Ellingsen left behind are clues not only to decades of musical history but also to the life of the man who cared enough to keep it all.
Compendium coeditor John R. Dwork wrote to Ellingsen in October 1997 requesting permission to use his images, and Karen Gullett found the letter among her brother’s collection of Grateful Dead T-shirts, tickets, backstage passes, and clippings of his photos from magazines such as Relix and Dwork’s Dupree’s Diamond News. “Your photo would be a wonderful addition,” Dwork wrote.
Albert Schatz, who plays in Wume with April Camlin, moved to Baltimore in 2013 (he works tour sound for Dan Deacon), but when he lived here he was in Bird Names, one of Ellingsen’s favorite bands. “When I was younger, the amount of people who went to shows—the social aspect was huge,” Schatz says. But Ellingsen was different. “He was definitely 100 percent there for music; socializing was just secondary to that.” And Ellingsen’s support could take some of the sting out of a particularly discouraging set. To show their appreciation, Bird Names overdubbed a recording of Ellingsen talking about tapes onto one of their albums.
Mon 5/18, 9 PM Empty Bottle 1035 N. Western 733-276-3600emptybottle.com 21+ Free
