Red Red Meat — it’s a nice place to visit, but Tim Rutili wouldn’t necessarily want to live there.
When Red Red Meat, one of the finest bands ever to come out of Chicago and emblematic of a ’90s rock scene rich with creativity, plays Monday at the Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park as part of the city’s excellent, free “Downtown Sound” series, it will likely be the quartet’s last show for quite some time.
The band briefly reunited last year to play a handful of shows when Sub Pop re-released the quartet’s 1995 album “Bunny Gets Paid.” But now that brief reunion is nearly at an end, and Rutili says the band won’t continue unless it writes new material and records another album — something he doesn’t see happening for at least a year.
He’s got bigger endeavors on his plate at the moment, not the least of which is “All My Friends are Funeral Singers,” a movie scripted and directed by Rutili with a soundtrack by Califone, his current band. Rutili and company will headline a series of concerts at museums and art galleries in the fall, including the Museum of Contemporary Art on Oct. 10-11. Califone will play the soundtrack live while the 90-minute movie is screened. Rutili describes the movie as a “surrealistic black comedy thriller,” starring Angela Bettis (“May,” “Girl, Interrupted”), and is aiming for a theatrical release next year.
Rutili, who studied film at Columbia College in the early ’80s and now lives in Los Angeles, has been making videos and smaller-scale movies for years. But “All My Friends are Funeral Singers” was a major step up in terms of scope.
“It’s the most ambitious thing I’ve done besides raise a child,” says Rutili, who has a son about to begin high school.
The film was shot at a friend’s dilapidated beach house in Indiana on a $30,000 budget, which Rutili says was primarily because he was able to “scrimp, save and ask friends for favors.”
Rutili says the project means Red Red Meat will go on the back burner for a while — not that it wasn’t fun while it lasted. The band’s evolution in the ’90s is still crucial to Rutili’s creative DNA, in large measure because of the strides he and the band (drummer Brian Deck, percussionist Ben Massarella and bassist Tim Hurley) made in making “Bunny Gets Paid.”
Red Red Meat stood poised on the brink of wide recognition after it made “Jimmywine Majestic” in 1994. With distribution by the label of the moment, Sub Pop, and a sound that put a few well-turned twists on all sorts of cool classic rock references, “Jimmywine” is among the best albums of its era.
But Rutili found the material a chore to play on a subsequent tour.
“I don’t mind the record so much, but touring took the wind out of playing that way for me,” he says. “It made me more determined to try different things on the next record. The ‘Jimmywine’ approach had quiet parts and loud parts over a certain kind of rhythm. It was basically rock music. With ‘Bunny’ we let things breathe a little more, created some space where you could hear the room. We became more ourselves.”
Massarella went nuts with different percussion effects. “He was breaking glass, banging on toilet seats, just experimenting with sound and texture,” Rutili says. Yet the band never felt it was doing something particularly strange. “We felt we were making a rock record, like Big Star’s third album or [Van Morrison’s] ‘Astral Weeks,’ a record with real presence and atmosphere. It ended up way different sounding than those records, but we got something that we were proud of.”
The shift from the “Jimmywine” sound was jarring for some fans. “We were playing a show and one guy left a note at my feet that said, ‘Get off the heroin and play some real rock.’ I thought it was funny, but it was like, ‘Bye-bye.’ We were going to start really sucking if we did that.”
Red Red Meat made one more album before drifting apart, but the influence of “Bunny Gets Paid” continued to inform Rutili’s music-making in Califone, a more esoteric and yet more popular band than Red Red Meat ever was.
“Red Red Meat is still basically a rock band even when it was playing strange stuff, whereas Califone isn’t a rock band at all,” he says. “But Califone is a continuation and refinement of what I was doing back then. And once in a while it’s fun to go back to Red Red Meat and just play really loud again.”
Greg Kot cohosts “Sound Opinions” with Jim DeRogatis at 8 p.m. Fridays and 11 a.m. Saturdays on WBEZ (91.5-FM).
Red Red Meat
When: 6:30 p.m. Monday with Rural Alberta Advantage
Where: Pritzker Pavilion, Millennium Park
Price: Free; millenniumpark.org
Califone
(performing “All My Friends are Funeral Singers”)
When: 7:30 p.m. Oct. 10-11
Where: Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago Ave.
Price: $20; mcachicago.org
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