Tim Tuten, one of the owners of North Side music club The Hideout, is up on his stage, and he is in almost full carnival-barker mode.
He’s introducing the next band, Tiger Bones, a powerful, rhythmically pulsing outfit self-described as “surf-garage.” But Tuten has careened from their music into overt Chicago rock boosterism. The words spill from the stage at the back of the almost shotgun-style building into the club’s front bar:
“We are gonna to send a contingency of, like, 50 bands. … They’re all different, they’re all weird, they’re all diverse.”
That musical contingent is heading to the famed South by Southwest Music Festival in Austin, Texas — Valhalla, still, for rock musicians on the make, despite changes in the character of the festival and the nature of the music business.
On this Saturday before SXSW week begins and bands begin piling into their vans to head down, the club is hosting its annual “All Day Hideout SXSW Sendoff Party” in and around its location on an industrial block near North and Elston avenues.
In the alley out back, there’s a beer tent for the bands, cans of Miller High Life staying cold in the damp March air. In the upstairs green room, band members waiting to go on talk about what their book club is reading, who was in marching band in high school, what their plans are for Texas.
Out front, where the city’s massive Department of Fleet Management facility serves as backdrop, the Hideout’s front porch is temporarily gone — torn up as Chicago remakes Wabansia Avenue — but smokers, fans and musicians, still cloud the entrance.
Five years old, the event is equal parts music fest, scene bash and hand of kindness: The bands earn goody bags stuffed with T-shirts and flip-flops from sponsor Threadless, walk off with a case of beer when they finish their sets and get to split the day’s door proceeds, every performer winning an equal share. Often that cash is hand-delivered by Tuten or his wife, Katie, down in Texas.
“We run around, we go to see the shows, we see our bands from Chicago, we hand them the cash,” says Tuten. “We literally will hand them envelopes with, like, 800 bucks inside.”
The send-off party is designed to simulate circumstances in Austin for the musicians: The day’s 11 bands will play 40-minute sets, usually with the house’s “backline,” drums and amps. Adhering to a strict time schedule, they could play in daylight or darkness, surf-punk next to acoustic next to acid-glam, before hundreds of rabid fans or half a dozen uninterested barflies.
As the party has gained a reputation, Hideout talent buyer Jeanine O’Toole starts fielding requests to play beginning in January, she says, and is able to cherry-pick her lineup, mixing newbies such as Tiger Bones and Rabble Rabble with the evening’s traditional closer, the more widely known Waco Brothers.
“It sort of sets up the vibe for the rest of the week, drinking all day and playing a rock show at 3 in the afternoon,” says O’Toole, herself a singer in the band The 1900s.
“It’s, like, organized, but in a disorganized way,” says Krystina Mikolowski, a 21-year-old college student standing in front of the club. “I like the location, ’cause it’s like, ‘What?'” — she gestures at the unprettified surroundings — “and I like the idea to just hang around and explore new music.”
On the other side of the door are Chicago music fans Sam Westerling and Jen Larson.
“This event is pretty much the top bands in Chicago right now,” says Westerling, who works in video production.
“I really liked Paul Cary. That was a nice surprise,” adds Larson, who writes for Groupon. “The diversity here is great.”
There’s even age diversity. Late in the afternoon, Wendy Pick, in her 60s and the former owner of the Charleston club in Bucktown, shows up, to warm greetings from the Tutens. (“This is like our idol, our role model,” says Tim.)
“I just wanted to see the bands going down to Austin,” Pick says. “Music is important, and supporting them is important. Katie and I are sort of like-minded. It’s a philanthropic bar.”
For a Chicago band to go to SXSW is no easy decision.
There’s the driving, close to a full day of it, with scant prospects for picking up a gig along the 1,200-mile route. Fuel costs for the big, old vans many drive are brutal: “I think on the highway, we get, like, 11. Plus, our gas gauge is broken,” says Ralph Darski, a guitarist and singer in Rabble Rabble, which opened the day’s music at 3 p.m. “Gas itself is, like, 600 bucks.”
Those holding down day jobs have to figure out how to get the time off work. The band Chaperone, which has the 7:30 p.m. slot, posted the day before on the Sendoff Party’s Facebook page: “Our ride is leaving Tuesday, but our drummer just found out he can’t leave til Wednesday evening. Any one have an extra seat and need some help with gas? It would just be on the way down.”
And on Saturday, in the green room, the band Mickey — “beautiful, ferocious scum-glam,” wrote Brian Costello, local music journalist (and drummer in Outer Minds, 6 p.m.) — faces a similar issue.
Mickey’s lead guitarist Troy Canady doesn’t think he can leave until Wednesday morning. But drummer Christmas (“like the holiday”) is saying, “We’ve gotta leave Tuesday night. It’s 18 hours.”
And then once they get to Texas’ capital city, the bands are competing for hotel rooms with the well-heeled music industry types that the festival now attracts. They’re also fighting to be heard amid hundreds of other groups that have made the pilgrimage, some by official invitation, many just there to play the day parties, soak up some springtime warmth and taste something different.
But all that is a few days down a long road. Right now, for Mickey, there is a more pressing concern.
“Hey,” says Christmas, “somebody want to call Mac and tell him we’re, like, playing soon?”
Mac Blackout is the band’s singer, described by Costello as “one of the most genuinely weird weirdos making rock music in Chicago — and I should know, since I was in the Functional Blackouts with him till the band imploded in 2006.”
Blackout makes it and spends much of the band’s set in front of the stage, thrashing about amid the crowd.
When Mickey is done, the singer, sweaty and seemingly spent, remembers, almost as an afterthought, to say something else that’ll serve the band well going forward. “We’ve got merch at that stand over there,” he mumbles, almost apologetically.
Another band member, walking by the front door, collects the complementary case of Miller from O’Toole.
“Put it away,” she says. “Hide it. Save it for when you really need a beer.”
