By Mark Caro
Chicago Tribune reporter
http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/
August 3, 2010
The BoDeans in concert. (Courtesy of Peter Wochniak)
The BoDeans return to Ravinia on Saturday night for the 11th time in 11 years (they didn't play there in 2002, but played two nights in 2004), their enduring Chicago-area popularity a rebuttal to the notion that the Internet and electronic media have rendered regionalism obsolete.
Later this month, the band will perform at a 500-seat club in San Francisco (tickets still available) and a San Diego dinner-theater venue that seats about 350 (ditto). Ravinia boasts a 3,200-seat pavilion and room for another 14,000 patrons on the lawn, and although tickets remain for Saturday's show (with Big Head Todd and the Monsters), the band has sold out the place in previous years. In fact, Ravinia associate communications director Amy Schrage said it was the BoDeans' jam-packed 2000 show, with an estimated crowd exceeding 20,000, that prompted the venue to start capping its lawn capacity the following year.
Why are the BoDeans still so huge here?
"Because I think Chicago really likes our music," band co-leader Kurt Neumann said on the phone from his Austin, Texas, home. "Really, I don't know what else to say."
Back before rock radio became homogenous and reliant on the say-so of New York programmers, bands typically would rise in their home regions, then spread nationally if they were fortunate. Rock history is studded with acts that thrived locally while having varied success elsewhere: Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes in New Jersey, the Hooters in Philadelphia and even Styx in Chicago, with WLS-AM championing "Lady" long before the song and band broke out nationally.
Norm Winer, program director of WXRT-FM 93.1 (disclosure: this writer's wife, Mary Dixon, appears on the station's morning show), noted that despite its hallowed reputation now, the Band was primarily an East Coast act in its heyday, so although Martin Scorsese shot the 1978 farewell concert film "The Last Waltz" in San Francisco, that city "was not a big Band market."
Country singer Pat Green currently plays stadiums in his native Texas, where last month he was honored as the decade's most-played artist in the state, yet his 2008 show in Chicago was at Joe's Bar.
Then there are the BoDeans. "We're a Midwestern band, and our following is in the Midwest," Neumann said, noting that Ravinia is an especially natural fit. "I think the BoDeans outside in the summertime is just classic … and Ravinia kind of sets up a great format for that."
"I think the party aspect of it certainly is very popular," Ravinia President and Chief Executive Welz Kauffman agreed, "and if you walk the lawn or even go through the pavilion, you'll see people who were together in college who reunite to go to that concert. People's taste in popular music tends to kind of freeze in college, and those memories they associate with the college experience tend to be with them the rest of their lives."
The BoDeans certainly were a big college band in the late '80s and early-mid '90s as they arrived offering tuneful roots-rock amid a sea of Bon Jovi and Poison. Formed in Milwaukee by Neumann and fellow singer-songwriter-guitarist Sam Llanas, the band released its first album, "Love & Hope & Sex & Dreams," in 1986, and songs such as "Still the Night" and "Fadeaway" received ample airplay from WXRT.
Subsequent albums, with such radio-friendly singles as "You Don't Get Much" and "Good Things" (which both had the flavor of U2 by way of Mars' Cheese Castle), raised the band's national profile, which peaked when the TV drama "Party of Five" made 1993's anthemic "Closer to Free" its theme song. The song's 1996 re-release reached No. 16 on the Billboard Hot 100, the only BoDeans song to make that chart.
"Closer to Free" introduced the BoDeans to a new audience — and also resulted in what Neumann called "the worst year of our touring existence" because the band was playing to listeners who didn't really know it, often in shows packaged by radio stations that had no affinity for its music. "You were just this latest pop song, and it was just very bland and very uninteresting to me compared to how we've always (toured), where it's just going town to town playing our two-hour shows and letting people really digest who we were."
Neumann said the common thread where the BoDeans have lasted is radio. "You can't really think of BoDeans in Chicago without XRT," he said. "For a band like us who's not a big pop band, you just need that kind of radio help in a city, or people may not really hear of you."
Said WXRT's Winer: "We've always played them, and wherever they were played consistently from the beginning they've become known and loved — because their music transcends trends."
Chicago isn't the only city that has stuck with the BoDeans, whose new album, "Mr. Sad Clown," has landed the songs "Stay" and "Say Goodbye" on adult album alternative stations and helped maintain interest in the group. (The new "Headed for the End of the World" also has been used to promote the just-released documentary "Countdown to Zero.") Winer checked Mediabase, which monitors nationwide radio play, and found that six other U.S. cities have given more radio spins to the band than Chicago in 2010: Minneapolis, Austin, Madison, Denver, Spokane, Wash., and Seattle. But WXRT, the only local station currently playing the band, has spun the most BoDeans songs this year: 22.
Neumman said Minneapolis and his adopted hometown of Austin remain among the band's biggest markets. Milwaukee, where Llanas again lives following a stint in New Orleans, "has trailed off."
Still, the regional pull has remained strong even these days, when almost any band is accessible via a mouse click.
"I expected with YouTube and all that that some band from Iceland would be super-popular here in Texas right now, but I haven't seen that yet," Neumann said. "It still seems like people relate to their regional music a little more. Our music certainly still resonates in the Midwest, and if computers were able to spread it virally really well, there would be just as big a demand in Russia right now for me, but there's not."
Neumann said he is just happy there remains a demand for his group in the Chicago area. Playing here, he said, is "like going home to your family, people who have grown up with you. They know you. They've been around for 20 years. Some people have seen 30 shows. They've been around for all the records. They've seen lots of incarnations (of the band) and all the ups and downs. It's really more like family as opposed to just going to some place where they don't know so much about you, and you're playing your show, and they're real nice about it, but it's not quite that intimacy that you have with a city who's just always been there for you for so long."
mcaro@tribune.com
When: 7 p.m., Saturday
Where: Ravinia Festival, Lake-Cook and Green Bay roads, Highland Park
Tickets: $55 pavilion, $27 lawn ($32 day of concert); 847-266-5100
Copyright © 2010, Chicago Tribune
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