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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. Williams joined the Fabulous Turks in the mid-60s, when they were already well-established and gigging around Chicagoland. According to Williams, the group recorded at the Columbia Records studio in 1961 and at the One-derful label’s Tone Recordings in ’64, but he doesn’t remember any resulting releases (and I can’t find any evidence either)....

On a hot afternoon in early June, artist Marcos Raya stood on a ladder propped against a concrete wall on 18th Street and applied a fresh coat of gray paint to one of the oldest surviving outdoor antiwar murals in the country. The artwork, Fallen Dictator, shows a crowd of gun-toting revolutionaries—including one carrying a placard of Che Guevara—standing behind the upended statue of a Latin American military leader. A car rolled by, honking its approval....

Al Scorch plays the banjo like he knows the most scenic spots on the Appalachian Trail. The 30-year-old roots musician, who grew up on Chicago’s northwest side, takes inspiration from all over—he also loves hardcore punk—but his creative process is less about inhabiting different genres and eras and more about putting himself into other people’s heads. “So much of songwriting is getting out of your own experiences and trying to think of what it’s like to be other people,” Scorch says....

When I caught local four-piece Avantist at Ian’s Party in January, front man Fernando Arias smoothly inserted some lines from Frank Ocean’s “Nights” into a cyclonic, humid jam. While I recognized that the lyrics belonged to someone else, Fernando belted them out with such conviction and folded the words into the swirling music so naturally, I might have assumed he dreamed them up himself. The experimental quartet, who blend furious punk with exacting prog rock, are such a force that when you see them play it feels as if no other band can deliver music quite like them....

Ayanna Woods has had her music performed by Third Coast Percussion, featured in the theater project No Blue Memories: The Life of Gwendolyn Brooks, and broadcast on the Emmy-nominated show Brown Girls, but the funky, far-reaching R&B she makes with her band Yadda Yadda has a special place in her heart. Woods started writing some of the songs on her upcoming The Yadda Yadda EP in high school, and she calls them “a home to me over the years....

British singer-songwriter Beabadoobee is only 20 years old, but on her debut album, Fake It Flowers, she’s written songs that sound like alt-pop favorites from the decade before she was born—mostly the Sundays with a hint of Tanya Donelly. To my ears, her music’s combo of sugary sweetness with a hint of bile defines the “alternative” era’s pop songwriting as precisely as a flannel shirt signifies its rock fashion. Beabadoobee (born Beatrice Laus and also known as Bea Kristi) got her first break when YouTube’s 1-800-LOVE-U channel shared the video for her 2017 single “Coffee,” which she’d recorded in a friend’s bedroom—she racked up more than 300,000 views in just days, and in 2018 she landed a contract with West London label Dirty Hit....

When I started at the Reader in 2009, the Road Trips Issue was known as These Parts, which ran in May a couple of weeks before the Summer Guide. After a print redesign in 2011, we made the decision to roll both issues into one, combining the summery travel stories with the summery lists of things to do. This year we split them up once again. We packed the Summer Guide with additional meaty feature stories and gave the travel writing some extra breathing room in an edition two weeks later....

Over the past several years, Graywolf Press has developed a knack for publishing young female essayists who write intelligently and frankly about their lives as women, particularly their experiences of the female body and motherhood. Leslie Jamison considered female pain in The Empathy Exams, Eula Biss examined her decision to vaccinate her son in On Immunity, and now in a worthy successor, The Art of Waiting: On Fertility, Medicine, and Motherhood, Belle Boggs delves into the complicated subject of infertility....

This story is part of the Marshall Project’s “We Are Witnesses: Chicago” series. In 15 direct-to-camera testimonies, this collection of videos gives voice to Chicagoans affected by the justice system. Watch the videos at themarshallproject.org/chicago. At age 12, Colón witnessed her mother’s boyfriend beat her so badly that she was left unconscious. The incident led Colón and her family to flee from Florida to Chicago, where her grandparents lived. But the six-unit apartment in South Chicago they moved into turned out to be a gang headquarters....

In 2010, Chicago underground music maven Patrick Scott (formerly of My Lai and 97-Shiki) launched postpunk label Modern Tapes with the self-titled debut cassette from Carbondale coldwave three-piece Staring Problem. The band have since relocated to Chicago, and Scott now lives in New York City, but their relationship has remained intact: Staring Problem’s first vinyl full-length, Eclipse, arrives as Modern Tapes celebrates its tenth anniversary. Eclipse wears its DIY pride on its sleeve, and the rawness and cavernous echo of Staring Problem’s lo-fi recordings keep their most skeletal arrangements from sounding too thin....

Happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day and welcome to the Reader’s morning briefing for January 18, 2016. Remember the following are closed for the holiday: Chicago Public Library locations, Chicago Public Schools locations, most suburban schools, banks, government offices, post offices, and courts (except Cook County central bond court). Stay warm! Good news for Chicago Public Schools teachers fearing pink slips Chicago Public Schools chief Forrest Claypool warned of layoffs coming down February 8, which would mean pink slips would have to go out today....

It’s a dangerous thing to attempt to categorize Stanley Tigerman, but it’s probably safe to say that Chicago’s resident architectural curmudgeon is not a preservationist. “My buildings—I’ll be happy if one or two show up in the history books,” he said. “But save them? I don’t think so.” Tigerman is in a wheelchair and on oxygen, and says he “feels as embattled now as ever,” but nothing kept him from speaking without notes for an hour and half, explaining—among other things—the most glaring contradiction in his famously nonconforming career: his reverence for Mies....

Donny Benét cuts a memorable figure—he plays up a lothario image in his music and often wears a bright white or salmon pink blazer straight out of Miami Vice. The Australian multi-instrumentalist’s look is seemingly crafted for maximum “Is he serious or not?” confusion, especially since Benét’s chosen paradigm is sly synth-dominated 80s disco-pop with a heavy bass groove. But there’s a huge gulf between disingenuous pastiche and a loving albeit tongue-in-cheek tribute to another era, and Benét clearly has a lot of admiration for his disco forebears....

It’s Leo Sowerby’s summer. Had 2020 gone as planned, musicians across the city likely would have launched into 125th-anniversary celebrations for the late Chicago composer (1895–1968) and onetime St. James Cathedral organist. Any such plans were obviously tabled, but luckily for us, quasquicentennial recordings of Sowerby’s chamber works are nonetheless bubbling to the top of Cedille Records’ catalog, starting with this Lincoln Trio album (and continuing with his Organ Symphony in G on July 9 and his symphonic jazz forays on August 13)....

Julia Thiel Homemade Irish cream Last November, when a couple of friends from college said they’d visit me in early January, I promised to make them homemade Irish cream. I can’t remember why, exactly, but I know I had been reading about how to do it—it sounded like a fun project, but at the time I had eggnog to make, age, and then taste. About an hour before they showed up I remembered the promise and took a quick trip to the corner store for the necessary ingredients: cream, sweetened condensed milk, and Irish whiskey....

Julia Gham was seven months pregnant, with a toddler and just $100 to her name in 2015 when the financing for her restaurant fell through. For ten years she’d had multiple jobs—slinging ice cream, working hotel gigs, driving a cab—preparing an ambitious business plan to open a spot specializing in the food of her native Cameroon. Just as she’d attracted enough backing to make it happen, an angry text from her jealous fiancé scared off her investors....

Kokopelli, the flute-tooting Hopi trickster fertility god whose emasculated likeness appears on more tie-dyed T-shirts, skateboards, beach towels, and fanny packs than Bob Marley’s, arrived in Wicker Park a few months ago in the form of yet another upscale taco joint. If the neighborhood seems to have hit critical mass for this particular kind of cheffy taqueria (see Big Star, Antique Taco, Takito Kitchen, Authentaco, and occasionally Xoco Bistro), it’s because the City Council secretly rezoned it as a taco increment financing district, subsidizing the proliferation of $4 tacos....

Ryan Smith Reenactors in period garb gathered in Springfield for the 150th anniversary of Lincoln’s funeral. Clad in a blue wool Civil War-era military outfit, an actor playing Major General Joseph Hooker wrapped up a stately reenactment of Abraham Lincoln’s burial on Sunday in Springfield with a famous line from former secretary of war Edwin Stanton: “Now he belongs to the ages.” Burlingame’s speech was compelling but felt hollow as I stopped to look at the faces of the several thousand spectators gathered in the shadow of Springfield’s Old State Capitol to celebrate “the black man’s president....

Excess wealth has always been a rich topic for comedy because the power to act on any material whim tends to expose and even foreground people’s foibles. Rollo Treadway, the lonely millionaire played by Buster Keaton in The Navigator (1924), is so spoiled he gets his chauffeur to ferry him to a house across the street. In the Depression-era fantasy If I Had a Million (1932), W.C. Fields and Alison Skipworth, whose treasured automobile has been totaled by a road hog, use a sudden financial windfall to buy a fleet of cars and purposely smash them into the autos of inconsiderate drivers....

Michael Gebert Iliana Regan with ramen noodles If you wanted to do something cool in the food scene at the moment, you could have a tasting menu, make doughnuts, hold a pop-up, or offer ramen. But the only person it occurred to to do all of those at once is Iliana Regan, whose Elizabeth will continue with its new chef de cuisine (as reported yesterday) while she prepares her “microbakery” Bunny for a spring opening in Lakeview—and she’ll use Bunny’s space after hours for a pop-up space called Wunder POP, which will host a variety of different concepts and formats over time....