Every Halloween musicians don Kiss makeup or torture their hair into Misfits devil locks, and all year round a herd of mersh cover bands plays the hits of the 70s, 80s, and 90s to cash in on the Lincoln Park/Wrigleyville knucklehead circuit. But it’s something else altogether to cover a band as fearlessly inventive as the Minutemen—reigning champeens of musical thunderspiels, hailing from San Pedro, California.
Charity is all well and good, but Econoline have another hurdle to clear: they’ve got to satisfy die-hard Minutemen obsessives like me, for whom Double Nickels on the Dime exists in a sacrosanct musical space shared only by A Love Supreme and Trout Mask Replica. A lot of us really love this album, and they’d better not half-ass it.
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Double Nickels, like the Minutemen’s output in general, is aging better than much of the music from its era, emerging as the flannel-clad working-class punk-rock kid brother to Beefheart’s daring and iconoclastic oeuvre. This was the band that most stubbornly challenged listeners’ preconceptions about punk rock, and ultimately gave the world the gift of punk as idea rather than sound or fashion—the message was that it can be whatever you make it to be. With Double Nickels in particular, the Minutemen demanded that anyone who heard it reassess their juvenile loathing of certain types of music (country, funk, Steely Dan). More important, the band inspired people to pick up instruments themselves.
Econoline owes its existence to Kelvington, 43, who was born and raised in Pennsylvania and discovered punk as a 15-year-old in 1983. He moved to Chicago from Nashville in 1994, but he hasn’t been in a steady band since ’03. In May 2009 he started posting ads looking for musicians, hoping to find a creative outlet that would help him survive an unpleasant job in the locked psych ward of a local hospital.
“I see that and I say, ‘Oh my God!’” Kelvington says. He found Braddock’s website and e-mailed him; they met two days later.
“George Hurley?” he continues. “Not afraid of the crash cymbal. That man hits the crash cymbal on every measure.” He shifts into the drummer’s universal language of onomatopoeia, sounding out the syncopation characteristic of Hurley’s style.
Without the blessing of Boon’s brother Joe, who didn’t respond to attempts to contact him, Kelvington didn’t want to name anything after the late guitarist. Instead he and Econoline set up the Double Nickels Music Fund, whose aim is to fund one Girls Rock! camper each session who might not otherwise be able to go (tuition is $400). They’re hoping to make enough money at Lincoln Hall to last five or six years, and donations can be made online indefinitely, not just at the show.
Sun 2/20, 6 PM, Lincoln Hall, 2424 N. Lincoln, 773-525-2501, $15, $12 in advance, $5 under 17, all-ages.
