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The group has origins in the All-American Anti-War Marching Band, an ensemble of musicians and activists Messing helped assemble in early 2003, just as the U.S. was readying for war. “We had about 80 people,” Messing says. “Maybe a dozen of them were musicians; the rest were activists.” They’d participate in protests, parading to the Daley Center making as big a ruckus as possible. But Messing, who’s been involved in various performance groups since moving to Chicago in 1979 and works full-time as a composer for films and theater companies like Redmoon and Lookingglass, thought the group could be transformed into something a little more long-term. “I was scheming about a band with odd combinations of instruments that could march around town as its own music-driven spectacle,” he says. The following winter he started inviting people to play at Maestro-Matic, his recording studio and business office in Humboldt Park.
In the fall of 2004 Messing approached Hideout co-owner Tim Tuten, who’d also been active in the antiwar movement, to see if the club would be willing to host regular performances by the group, which had taken the name Mucca Pazza. Tuten gave them one Monday a month. “I felt like the taverns that gave free stuff to the revolutionaries at Valley Forge,” Tuten says. “In Nicaragua during the Sandinista era, places like the Hideout were called ‘patriotic businesses.’ I felt like it was the least we could do to help.”
The national TV appearance naturally increased demand. “Last June, I asked them to play the Summer on the Square benefit in Logan Square,” says Tuten. “They’d never turned me down for a benefit, and they’d just done one for Hurricane Katrina kids in the Chicago Public Schools. Mark and Elanor asked everyone if they could play, and then felt really bad telling me they just couldn’t. They had three events in a row, including a show at Martyrs’ that sold out. It kind of hit me then: in our world Mucca Pazza was always big, but they were becoming ‘popular.’”
