In July 2012, as Wicker Park Fest wound down, Chicago guitarist Ryley Walker was riding his bike south on Damen below Division when a hit-and-run driver clipped him from behind. He woke up in the hospital. “I cracked my skull, and I’m pretty much deaf in my left ear,” Walker, 25, says with equanimity. “Luckily, I was still on my parents’ health insurance.” As he recuperated at home after a couple days in Illinois Masonic, he made a decision: Though he’d been throwing himself into music since he was a teenager, his ravenous, equal-opportunity ears had made it tough for him to stick to any one sound, instead leading him by turns into punk rock, noise, folk, free jazz, and anything else that caught his interest. Now, he resolved, it was time to start focusing.
To paraphrase Joe Strummer’s lyrics, Walker’s career wasn’t born so much as it fell out. As a kid he was bored and unmotivated. “Rockford really sucks,” he says. “It’s a terrible place to grow up. There’s not much to do there. All I had was skateboarding and guitar.” Skateboarding came first for Walker, even though he says he was terrible. “I would ride and fall over, hurt my knee—I was the chubby little schoolkid running away crying.” Yet the culture appealed to him, and when he watched skate videos online, he started waiting for the end credits to find out who was playing the music that soundtracked them. As a teenager he got into punk and hip-hop.
Bachman remembers meeting Walker at Mortville. “After I was done, he came up to me drinking this big beer and said, ‘I thought you were going to fucking suck, but you were all right. Do you wanna get pizza tomorrow?’ And we did.” The two became fast friends, and in 2011 they recorded a collaboration for Plustapes called Of Deathly Premonitions. They’ve toured together frequently over the past five years, and Bachman even came along when I met Walker for our interview at the Logan Square Intelligentsia—he was on the road himself, and he’d been staying with Walker between gigs in town.
Walker had been touring extensively in the U.S. and Europe, solo and with the trio, when in May 2014 he and the band met Cooper Crain (Cave, Bitchin Bajas) for a session at Ben Balcom’s Minbal studio in Humboldt Park. They made Primrose Green in two days, including overdubs and mixing, joined by upright bassist Anton Hatwich and drummer Frank Rosaly to become a quintet. Rosaly had never played with Walker before entering the studio, but that didn’t slow anyone down: “I feel Ryley hired everyone in the band because he has faith in our instincts,” he says. “When we recorded, he didn’t give me instruction on how things should feel or sound. He let me be me without any hindrance or guidance. I was free to make choices compositionally, with the momentum and color.” Rosaly and Hatwich enhance the jazzy spring of the music, making its connections to Tim Buckley’s most expansive work more obvious.
Mon 3/30, 9 PM Chopin Theatre 1543 W. Division 773-278-1500chopintheatre.com $10 17+
