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Fireside bowl logan square8/16/2023 ![]() Sure, you can add some tricksy ingredients and charge $15 for three, but that doesn’t make it better. It’s simple because, honed through centuries, there is no better way to make a tamale than corn flour and meat steamed in a corn husk. ![]() The tamale guy tamale is simple, but calling it that seems patronizing somehow, as if the Mexican-American who made it just wasn’t aware Mexican food would be better stuffed with dino kale, saffron and trendy ingredient du jour (I think it’s bone marrow this week). It’s a person trying to make some money by filling a need. It’s not locally sourced except that the source is quite possibly the dude handing you the baggie of tamales when you’re four or five sheets to the wind. It’s not from a cool food truck with an agile social media presence. The tamale guy tamale is not a cool thing. I never went to a Fireside show either - I stay the course on being an out-of-touch nerd.īut it’s not OK to have never bought a Ziploc baggie of tamales some dude made in his kitchen and carted around in a cooler to various bars. It’s forgivable to miss bands, old punk venues or any number of other time-sensitive cultural norms. ![]() I had to tell a different coworker a few weeks earlier that Fireside Bowl used to host punk shows. My bowling team coworkers are nice, if young. It was media league night at Fireside Bowl and our little cadre of courthouse reporters had clustered a table as we lost badly and repeatedly to a local news blog that rhymes with schmee-schmen-schmay-schminfo. My coworkers at the paper looked around incredulously at each other. But somehow it managed to shock me that none of my coworkers had ever bought a tamale off a tamale guy. The Cubs won the World Series and, electorally, orange is the new black, so I should be through the looking glass on surprises this month. “Tamale!” I yelled, walking up from the ATM. He turned to the others clustered around the table. Marc from the office got a strange, quirked look on his face. Check out a video we posted a couple days ago.“Tamale!” he yelled, lifting the small red cooler to demonstrate his wares. The drummer inflects jazz rhythms and dynamics that make it impossible to toe-tap, but rather force the listener to concentrate and figure out how exactly this band manages to stay in time with each other. Keyboardist and singer Amelia hits plastic ivory and twists knobs as if defusing a bomb our lives depend on her precision. Tempo changes and odd time signatures abound when the band actually does play in 4/4 time, they do their best to make it sound like anything but. The few empty spaces the band embraces collapse unto themselves into chaotic mindbenders. Next up, Shapers: a band that certainly doesn’t allow a music writer any conveniences. Catch them again at the Empty Bottle on November 5th as part of the Giant System showcase. Driving tempos and hypnotic bass carried the set full steam ahead. The reverb-laced female vocals allowed the bowling alley to breathe more vertically than horizontally. ![]() The term psychedelic will be used all too prevalent with this band, hopefully more as a description rather than a pigeonhole. Verma started off the night with wah-powered jams reminiscent of instrumental Flaming Lips and Spacemen 3. What better introduction to the Fireside than with a couple of bands that Chicago can claim its own. Listening to Allister eulogize the historic Logan Square bowling alley in junior high, I had no idea it was located in the city I grew up in the suburb next to. Finally, a chance to acquaint myself with the legendary lanes of the Fireside Bowl.
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