Since 2004 Plastic Crimewave (aka Steve Krakow) has used the Secret History of Chicago Music to shine a light on worthy artists with Chicago ties who’ve been forgotten, underrated, or never noticed in the first place. Rose named the band the Five Bucks, and they made business cards mimicking (you guessed it) $5 bills. They started playing frat parties, mixing Beatles tunes and other hits of the day with their own early attempts at original songs....

The members of the Devil Makes Three grew up in New England but formed their trio in California in 2002. They’ve since moved their home base to Burlington, Vermont, and their crisscrossing migrations seem fitting for a group that draws on rootsy styles and sounds from across the continental U.S., including folk, bluegrass, country, blues, and ragtime, with traces of punk and rock attitude. For most of their career the Devil Makes Three have stuck to bare-bones, folky tunes played on acoustic instruments (Pete Bernhard on guitar and lead vocals, Lucia Turino on upright bass, and Cooper McBean on banjo and guitar), and their 2016 full-length, Redemption & Ruin, topped Billboard’s bluegrass chart....

In order to promote gelato—and encourage the Americas to catch up to Italy’s 39,000 gelaterias (the U.S. has only 900)—the Gelato World Tour is stopping in Millennium Park today through Sunday. Just don’t call it ice cream; the organizers would be quick to tell you how gelato is different (it has less fat, less incorporated air, and is served at a slightly higher temperature). They’d also tell you that gelato is good for you, which seems like a bit of a stretch....

Now and then something is so strange it must be a hallucination—but it isn’t. When I heard about the Chicago Reader “time machine,” it evoked the Flying Dutchman, the spectral ship that haunted mariners as both a symbol of vanished grandeur and a portent of doom. But by whom? And how? And why? Was this an inscrutable piece of installation art by someone unknown who wanted its weirdness to speak for itself?...

An old pair of shoes, the United States Postal Service, a loving spouse—when things have been around awhile, it’s all too easy to take them for granted. Chicago Jazz Festival Thu 8/29, 11 AM-4:30 PM and 6:30-9 PM; Fri 8/30-Sun 9/1, 11 AM-9 PM Thu in Millennium Park (Michigan and Randolph) and the Chicago Cultural Center (78 E. Washington), Fri-Sun in Millennium Park,jazzinchicago.org, free, all ages Many similar events stumble when it comes to sound quality, but the Chicago Jazz Festival is uniformly excellent on that score....

“Throw” the cocktail: pour it from one tin to another with ice inside one of the tins to chill it. Place a chunk of hand-chipped ice into a glass and pour the cocktail over the top. Brush the marigold with squid ink and float on top of the drink.

Chicagoans is a first-person account from off the beaten track, as told to Anne Ford. This week’s Chicagoan is Alan Salmi, tarot-card reader. “There’s a guy named Edward de Bono who developed something called lateral thinking. He says when you’re stuck in a problem, you’re usually stuck because your thinking is channeled in a certain way. And when you have a random input, the random input can get you thinking in new ways....

Since 2004 Plastic Crimewave (aka Steve Krakow) has used the Secret History of Chicago Music to shine a light on worthy artists with Chicago ties who’ve been forgotten, underrated, or never noticed in the first place. Older strips are archived here.

NICK THIENEMAN Sweet Cobra Tonight local heavy-metal stalwarts Sweet Cobra celebrate the release of their new LP Earth at the Empty Bottle, and they’ve just released a fresh music video to go along with it. The clip for “Future Ghosts,” today’s 12 O’Clock Track, is a wild, mesmerizing trip that splices shots of the trio performing in giant paper masks together with drugged-out, face-melting animations. The nonstop fast-paced editing borders on stimulation overload, the furious, outrageous images flashing along with the song’s massive D-beat frenzy....

While strolling south on Clark Street, I stopped momentarily to peer into the window of one of the neighborhood’s sports bars to see what baseball feat had prompted a deep roar from the thousands packed into Wrigleyville on Wednesday night. The night of game seven truly did feel like an ethereal dream, and not just because the Cubs won the World Series for the first time in more than a century....

“The truth is never in good taste.” —War Paint Which is too bad, because that narrative is pretty fascinating. But then the function of “If I’d Been a Man” isn’t to get at a truth about our protagonists. As far as I can tell, it’s meant to soften them up some so they don’t come across as complete monsters. A really damning representation of Rubinstein and Arden would first of all be seen as politically backward, and, second, offer the show’s stars no opportunity to ingratiate themselves....

Everyone is so good when they’re dead. The only thing wrong with landing a Steinberg obit is that you have to be dead to get it. (No reason to think he’d be doing mine, but if you are, Neil, go right ahead.) 

The evolution of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s filmography has been one of the more encouraging cinematic developments of this decade. The most internationally successful Turkish filmmaker since Yilmaz Güney, Ceylan was a still photographer before he became a writer-director; his early features (among them Clouds of May and Distant) speak to the influence of his first medium, trading in landscapes, fixed perspectives, and extended wordless sequences. Though consistently lovely to look at, his films soon grew stale on a thematic level....

Lincoln Park venue-slash-bar Tonic Room is no more—technically. When the space reopens later this month, it’ll be called Golden Dagger, after an actual knife that a previous owner found inside the 127-year-old building’s walls. Though it will still be a venue once it’s safe and practical to host live music again, to start it’ll be a coffeehouse first and a bar second. Owner Donnie Biggins, who also sings and plays guitar in the Shams Band, says he’s wanted to transform the venue since he bought it in 2016, and he decided to make the best of the COVID shutdown and finally start renovations....

Artistic inspiration often occurs unexpectedly. In 1979, Tseng Kwong Chi, born in Hong Kong, educated in Vancouver and Paris, and at the time living in New York City, went to meet his parents for dinner at the top of the World Trade Center. He had nothing formal to wear, so Tseng, a carefree prankster, improvised: he put on a Mao-style suit that he’d bought in a thrift store. Yet instead of being treated like a commie, he was accorded the respect of a foreign dignitary....

Chicago reedist Dave Rempis is well established as one of the city’s finest improvisers, a player who can adjust and adapt to fluid, unexpected musical situations with stunning alacrity, sensitivity, and ingenuity. But his ability to live in the moment doesn’t mean he’s not a thinker and a planner. Rempis has developed a strong practice as a musician through years of toil and focus, and he looks at the big picture with wide-eyed vision....

Back by popular demand: The Back Room Deal features radio personality and longtime Reader political writer Ben Joravsky arguing local Chicago politics with Reader senior writer Maya Dukmasova. With sharp wit and stinging analysis, Joravsky and Dukmasova cut through the smokey haze of the elections to offer you a glimpse of the 2020 Chicago-area Illinois primary races—local and Cook County-level and, of course, U.S. presidential. Will these historic elections be determined in back-room deals, like so many in Chicago’s past?...

This week’s gig poster features a fantasy concert at a real but defunct Chicago venue. Artist Eric J. García created this image in honor of former Pilsen community center and neighborhood anchor Casa Aztlán. García wrote the following to explain his inspiration for the poster: “Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the famed poet and intellectual genius of 17th-century New Spain, LIVE! Her brilliance was so powerful that she was banished from the public and cloistered away by the Catholic church....

Chicago producer Jerome Derradji juggles lots of projects—not only is he a busy DJ, but he also runs a label called Still Music (and its imprints, Past Due and Stilove4music) and organizes a flurry of events under the Still banner. One of those is the new loft series the Church of Black Gold, which makes its debut at Avondale arts space Elastic on Saturday, April 9. The venue is hardly the kind of grungy warehouse space where countless underground dance parties helped breed a thriving culture in the 80s, but the Church of Black Gold isn’t just another concert: Illuminated Brew Works and New Belgium are slinging craft beer, and Logan Hardware is hauling in a pop-up record shop....

The last time Canadian twin-sister duo Tegan and Sara came through Chicago, they were on the road celebrating the tenth anniversary of 2007’s The Con. At the time, it seemed like a fairly standard move—lately it seems like practically every long-running band has dusted off a fan-favorite album for a special show or tour. But what could’ve been just a victory lap became the catalyst for a revitalization. According to an interview the duo did with Apple Music, revisiting The Con inspired a burst of introspection that led to two major projects, the first of which is their recent memoir, High School, which looks back on the sisters’ adolescence....