The Chicago Blackhawks lace up their skates this week for a ninth-straight season of playoff hockey, and things are awfully good on West Madison Street.
At least four future Hall of Famers will again be on the ice for this year’s Stanley Cup run, everyone in the stands is still buying replica jerseys and now you can find bourbon shots pushing $20 a pop throughout the United Center in case the nearly $10 draft beers won’t do.
But as good as we’ve got it, there’s one part of Hawkeytown that has never caught up with this golden age. In fact, it’s gotten worse.
The music.
I’m not just talking about “Chelsea Dagger.” It’s all bad. Real bad.
From the generic EDM thumping during warmups to REO Speedwagon’s “Ridin’ the Storm Out” heralding the third period, the Blackhawks approach in-game music like Don Cherry approaches a TV camera:
Stubborn, backward and stupidly loud.
Was that really Sublime’s “Santeria” blasting from the rafters?
Baby, you got it!
Did they just play three Pearl Jam songs or four AC/DC songs?
The answer is yes!
And are you sure they’ll turn it up for another dozen classic/hair/grunge rockers tonight?
They always do!
These tunes are all embarrassingly shopworn, but what’s galling is that, except for an occasional Smashing Pumpkins whine, none has a single thing to do with Chicago.
The Hawks play in a legendary musical city — home to Muddy Waters and Georg Solti; Earth Wind & Fire and Mike Bloomfield; Curtis Mayfield, Etta James, Kelly Hogan and a couple of thousand great artists who still aren’t Mavis Staples — but you’d never know it inside the United Center.
The games could be in Merrillville, Ind.
For a marquee National Hockey League franchise that amps up the national anthem as a game-night ritual, how can the Blackhawks be so inexcusably tone deaf the rest of the night?
Other musical hockey cities are skating circles around us. In Detroit, they do not disappoint. In fact, they play Stevie Wonder. And in Los Angeles, the DJ posts his musically varied set lists online and the team’s organist is a bona fide hometown celebrity.
Are we not better than Detroit? Than Los Angeles? Than all those soulless NHL towns that should be hoisting zero hardware this June?
The Hawks have proved it again and again on the ice, but in the stands we’re the Colorado Avalanche.
Please, Rockin’ Rocky Wirtz, let’s get this “One Goal” thing totally right. Let’s hear a little more Chicago in Chicago, sir. Some hoochie in the coochie, man.
And since he’s sitting up there behind that custom-built organ, how about we hear more of the old roar from Frank Pellico?
Let’s make it a house party. A backyard jam.
And then let’s bring back the Cup.
Brett McNeil is a writer and Blackhawks season ticket holder from Oak Park.
