Go To This!: Geronimo! @ Fireside Bowl – 6/22/10

June 21st, 2010 by Oswald Hobbes / Comment on this post

Do you remember the Fireside Bowl? I use the word “legendary” a lot, but this place was actually LEGENDARY. A decrepit, smelly bowling alley that hosted punk & indie shows all throughout the 90s, the Fireside always looked like it was going to collapse. Seeing a show there was exciting, not just because you were getting a fix of raw, awesome music, but because you could quite literally die. I unfortunately never got to see any of the really legendary shows there (Third World Timmy, to this day, still talks about the time The Fux became his favorite band, based solely on one live performance there; he still has a Fux poster in every room of his apartment), but last week I got an email from our friends in Geronimo! telling me that they’d be performing there this Tuesday. (That’s TODAY, if you’re reading this right now.) How pumped am I for this show? Well, let’s see. Geronimo!’s Fuzzy Dreams is one of the best rock records I’ve heard this year – a unique blend of post-rock, punk, and prog, featuring keyboards that don’t sound like keyboards and guitars that’ll slice your head off. And the drums? Don’t even get me started on the drums, mostly because I don’t know the correct terminology to describe what Matt Schwerin does, and also because I will never stop talking. Sometimes I’m air-drumming along, using every available surface, and it gets so intense that I have to punch myself in the face. That’s the kind of band Geronimo! is. Plus, I haven’t been to the Fireside since 2002, so it’ll be interesting to see what’s goin’ on there. (It was used for the bowling scenes in The Break-Up, so I’m thinking there’s been some serious renovation.)

Also playing: Warren Franklin, Bust, and The Please & Thank Yous. I don’t really know those bands, and I don’t like to try and do a rundown just based on their MySpace pages or whatever. But I’m willing to bet that they’re all cool, since they’re down with Geronimo!, and this show will probably be one of the most bro-tastic things you see all year. When I found out about this show, I immediately googled the Fireside to try and find out if they were going to have shows there on a regular basis; all their website mentions is bowling, so I don’t know exactly what the story is behind this. If you’ve never been there, I suggest you check it out – it’s part of Chicago history, and, besides, what else are you gonna do on a Tuesday night? GO TO THIS!