“Doin’ it up San Antonio style” — the motto on Alejandro Escovedo’s T-shirt announces his plain jeans-and-boots getup for this rather dressy cocktail-and-finger-foods show in the second-floor salon of the Nature Museum, overlooking Lincoln Park’s swank marinas and jogging paths. With a capo sticking out of his back pocket and a gaunt profile, he looks more like a carpenter than a rocker, which fits the fine craftsmanship of his compositions and storytelling.
Category: Music Reviews
“This is a vegetarian show,” says band spokesman and bari-sax player Martin Perna, and he explains what he means by asking for no hams, hot dogs, meatheads, or chickenhead-type behavior from the audience. With the venue packed to the point of suffocation during the first set of Antibalas’ return to Chicago, Perna and his mates ask a lot of their fans — not only to be cool to the people immediately around them, but to think about their fellow man, the impact of one’s profession, the many causes worthy of support, and people long dead and far away from ground zero of tonight’s booty shaking.
The entrance to the Big Horse Lounge looks like an average Chicago lunch counter turned taco stand — with a facsimile of the historic Villa/Zapata photo from the Mexican Revolution and soccer-fan paraphernalia on bare white walls glaring under greasy fluorescent wash — opening into a backroom cantina that has featured rock bands on its small stage since the height of ’90s Wicker Park popularity. Mixed identity is no new thing for the venue, which still goes by its former name for owner Armando Enriquez, who calls it “El Chaparral” when answering the phone. A native of Chihuaha, Enriquez has run the business for 14 years, in which time it went from serving the Latino community with Mexican music — rancheras, norteñas, and bandas — to providing another rock venue for the rapidly gentrified neighborhood. The bar’s musical format changed with new developments and tastes, and even though “white folks call it ‘Big Horse’,” Enriquez says, “this place is still Mexican.”
“We’re a straight-up alternative rock band, but with lyrics in Spanish,” El Guapo’s lead vocalist Mike Lopez once said.
In March 1989, University of Texas at Austin premed student Mark Kilroy disappeared during a drunken spree that led him and hundreds of spring-breakers from South Padre Island across the Texas border into Matamoros, Mexico. What promised to be a carefree week of surf, sun and cheap Mexican liquor became grisly grist for tabloids, as an international manhunt eventually discovered Kilroy’s body and the mutilated remains of at least a dozen others in a mass grave, located at what came to be known as Hell Ranch.
