by Quinton Shambles.
How does one sum up a decade in 1500 words or less? How does one take all the significant events in ones life and condense them into tidy sentences, quick turns of phrases that will delight and amuse a wide audience? And more so, how does one also weave into said essay the (let’s face the facts) rather dull and unimportant details of a band, the Luck of Eden Hall, long thought vanished and buried, its rather meager sonic output lost to time, a band whose members have at various times ignored me, disparaged me, taunted me, and once impaled me on an enormous, spindly and razor sharp cactus in Death Valley and left me to the vultures?  (And yes, I escaped that prickly prison. I wriggled my way free like a falsely imprisoned hero in a Hollywood mid-summer schlock-fest, and I wandered through the desert until I reached a forlorn looking gas station on the side of an unmarked highway.  The pungent attendant, Chip – and incidentally, this Chip had a gold tooth and was as sunken-chested and skinny as Harry Dean Stanton in that one ponderous movie about Paris Texas (actually Harry Dean Stanton's shattered appearance is similar in every movie, as he’s rather suspiciously been able to maintain his anorexic, aging supermodel body, with the unjust ravages of time only taking their toll on his waffle thin head, hollowed out eyes and hubcap ears) – this attendant, he foisted upon me a bottle of water and a Tabasco flavored Slim Jim, and had the gall to try and charge me four dollars. Four Dollars? For a tiny serving of water and a processed beef stick that resembled the shriveled penis of the female hyena?  (And yes, the female sex of this particularly mangy and scraggly creature does indeed have a non-functioning cock, a malodorous missile I had the misfortune of making the acquaintance of while I was festooned to that cactus – the gnarled beastie attempted to dry hump me and I had to fight her off with only the power of my mind.) And how has the rest of my decade gone, since the unfortunate impaling? Quiet well, thank you very much. I was briefly married to a rather stout woman of unclear ethnicity who one night seduced me in her El Camino – she enjoyed picking her teeth with wooden match sticks, and had an alarming addiction to “natural” cigarettes, which she was convinced wouldn’t harm her because they were free of pesticides and additives. Alas, she was dead wrong. Her doctor said she had the most tar-ridden lungs he had ever had the misfortune of examining on an X-ray. The woman (who was still my wife at the time) coughed out a gob of phlegm on the floor of the hospital room, and lit up two cigarettes, which she smoked in under a minute. She divorced me two weeks later, claiming I had driven her to smoke with my constant yammering. I reminded her that she was a heavy smoker when I met her, and had been an addict since she was twelve. She kicked me out of her Naperville home, and I moved back to my beloved Chicago, into a dilapidated apartment above a liquor store on Milwaukee Avenue not far from my old stomping grounds, The Double Door. I reclaimed my old job as a feature writer and general rabble-rouser at the fine underground local newspaper, The Comrade. Which brings me, in a round about way, to The Luck of Eden Hall. Although I rarely dabble in music criticism any longer, preferring to muse on the more serious issues of the day – the exploitation of the day trader, the CTA’s refusal to design a fare card that the electronic turnstiles can read through tight leather pants, and the marauding dog owners who have essentially engineered a hostile takeover over Wicker Park.  These well dressed yuppies with their cellphones and expensive coffees and their designer slobber-mutts are more nefarious than the drug addicts, gang bangers and winos they’ve displaced and gentrified all the way west to Humbolt Park. They allow the four-legged beasties to roam free in the park, like it’s a Lion Country Safari, and the damage they inflict on the fauna and flora of the lovely retreat is truly criminal – pissing, shitting, digging, rooting, snuffling and snorting and just the general mischief that goes along with being one of the most insidious creatures civilized society ever over-bred. Man’s best friend indeed! I rarely brave a journey to the park any longer, for fear that a loping Swiss Mountain Dog that has mistaken my beret for a floppy Frisbee will mow me down. But despite my avowed abhorrence of all that modern music represents, occasionally I’m forced to comment on a local band or a CD (or a download, or however the hell their cramming music down the innocent consumers throats these days). My boss, an emaciated vegetarian who goes by the nickname “Fossil” for some reason (he wears those absurdly skinny ties once so popular in the 1980’s and a foppish ladies hat), will plop a press kit or a CD on my rickety desk. “Review this Shambles,” he’ll say. “If you don’t, I’ll toss you out that window and right onto the train tracks where you belong”. As you can see, “Fossil” is the most unpleasant of fellows. Although the idea of him tossing me anywhere is somewhat laughable. He can’t weigh more than 90 pounds, including his silly combat boots. Why, I doubt he could toss a paper clip out the window. Or one of those celery sticks he’s always munching on, like a decrepit barnyard animal too sickly thin for the farmer and his family to even consider carving up and eating. And but what should plop on my desk the other day, but a copy of the new Luck of Eden Hall CD, Subterrene. “Review this,” the Fossil said, “it’s a new album from some old hippies. Supposed to be good or something. Psychedelic or some garbage. You like that shit, right?” As I examined the CD, all the memories came flooding back: the van, the shows at the Metro, the smelly cellist, the rotating drummers (Bruce “Bun E” Zimmerman, Paul “Sticks’ Healy, Joey Joe Jo Furlong). The Avalon, for Christ sakes! The long dead club with the low ceilings above a defunct Muskies on the corner of Belmont and Sheffield! And all this made me feel sad and old. I was not unlike a fossil myself, a stiff and useless thing. I was more of a relic, really, something someone might gaze at for a few minutes at a museum and then instantly forget. I was like a Native American arrowhead, or even worse I was something Polish (but what do the Poles have to offer of any historical significance? A horse skeleton? A preserved pirogi? A fondness for the drink or an inability or unwillingness to defend ones borders?)  But then if I was old, a used up thing, a windbag whose bag had long ago deflated, what of the Luck of Eden Hall? Were they not ancient too? And if so, how did they manage to summon up the energy to produce a new masterwork? Was it steroids, or HGH, or even cheap beer? It did take them over a decade to finish, I noted, as I unwrapped the precious thing. (And that’s not counting the once young and absurdly thick of hair guitarist/singer Gregory Curvey’s side project, Par Crone, or the once rail thin bassist Mark Lofgren’s rumored side project, The Babylon Sonic). And in glancing at the liner notes while I waited for the CD to load, I learned that the band had self-produced the new album as a two-piece band, “in bedrooms and basements”. Intriguing. And then I listened, and it all became clear to me. The Luck of Eden Hall haven’t gotten any older. They couldn’t have, for the music sounded just as vital and fresh to me as it had on that once spring day in 1992 when I first heard them play (it was the night I finally lost my innocence, to a lithe young thing named Heather Fortran). And then a giddy thought occurred to me, as the music played on, and the middle-eastern flavored track Assyria seamless merged with a pop song, Medicine: if they haven’t gotten any older, then neither have I! I did a little dance around the office. I hopped up and down and spun in tight circles, like one of those hyperactive mutts pillaging in Wicker Park, and I listened to the rest of Subterrene. My boss, the Fossil, he didn’t dare say anything. He saw the look in my eyes, the angry squint of a young buck ready for a scuffle (or for a war even). I was a teenager again, and I would toss his skinny carcass out the window, if so provoked. And suddenly I was reborn, all thanks to The Luck of Eden Hall.   Q return home>>

HOME designed by Tom Elliott of MotionVault