19 stories by "Steve Krakow"
Once again, Chicago has lost a legendary musician, and in this author's opinion there haven't been nearly enough public tributes. Jim Post was a crucial part of the Old Town […]
The post I…
Formed by drummer Christian Vander in Paris in 1969, Magma have made a career of defying convention, and the fact that they're still actively recording and playing live today is […]
The po…
The term "world music" has never been adequate to the task we've set it"even in its most benign reading, it implies a division between the listener and the rest of […]
The post The <i&g…
We won't know the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic for many years, not least because they haven't stopped piling up. Bodily sickness, mental illness, financial loss"everyone seems to have be…
It's sad when a talented band's closest brush with fame is almost finishing a soundtrack for a movie that never existed, ending up with nothing but demos where one of […]
The post Soul ban…
I can't rattle off a list of my most beloved guitarists, despite being a so-so guitar player myself, but I can quickly tell you my top ten bassists. One of […]
The post Genius bassist Rich…
Brooklyn is so closely associated with the American cultural zeitgeist of the early 2000s that it's easy to forget how newly "cool" the borough was at the time. During Oneida's […]
The pos…
Last fall Chicago drone explorers Bitchin Bajas released a cassette of synthesizer-only Sun Ra covers called Switched on Ra (Drag City). The trio of Cooper Crain, Rob Frye, and Dan Quinlivan…
Most musicians use their first professional endeavors to find a voice and develop their chops. So I love it when artists "spin off" into new sounds, even if they break up beloved bands to do…
As the world literally burns, it's a comfort to see performers we hold dear come back through town to offer musical relief. Singer-songwriter Marissa Nadler debuted in 2004 with the album Ba…
I'm a lifetime fan of vinyl records, but "record collecting" continues to befuddle and annoy me. I know I might sound like a pretentious gatekeeper pontificating about a trivial problem, but…
Paul Cotton, best known as a crucial member of country rockers Poco, died a year ago this month, and it was easy to miss the news amid all the chaos in the world"to say nothing of all the ot…
Lately it seems like every "lost" recording, no matter how inconsequential, is getting pushed on limited colored vinyl for a crass Record Store Day cash grab. Beneath the hype, "archival rel…
If I were forced to subscribe to any wild theory circulating on the Internet right now (we won't say the c-word), it wouldn't be about lizard people, a flat Earth, anything "secretly staged …
Given the myriad horrors American society faces, desensitization can be a survival mechanism as well as part of the problem. Numbness can easily turn to apathy when we're bombarded unrelenti…
I love a good mystery. Sometimes even my most exhaustive research turns up nothing more than a few details about a great musician, not enough to tell the full tale. As much as I might want t…
Secret History readers often assume I know every Chicago musician who ever lived, but luckily I'm still capable of experiencing the joy of discovery. One of my bigger thrills in life is buyi…
When I finished college downstate and moved to the Windy City in 1995, the Chicago no-wave scene was breaking apart. While still in school, I'd often driven three hours to catch gigs here, a…
Earlier this year, Japanese psych band Kikagaku Moyo announced that they would go on indefinite hiatus following their 2022 tour. It's always surprising when a successful, globe-trotting ban…
