Hey, y’all, I have not been blogging as much here lately. I had a lot of big ideas and let them mostly get away from me. Mostly too exhausted to get to work and have mostly been reading old zines I have bought on eBay the past few weeks and filling in blind spots. If you have a few spare dollars, I would recommend blind-buying a random zine. It is a fun way to jump into random moments in a subculture. I bought two issues of Pains. It is from about 2009 or 2010 in Toronto. I have already discovered how hard it was to find music online from that time. Some reside on Bandcamp; for others, I would have to spend money on Discogs.
I am getting away from myself. Last week, I published something on the hardcore blog No Echo if you are interested in reading it. Lately, I have become fascinated with Chicago punk and hardcore, which were in the 80s. So I talked to my friend Doug Ward, who was getting into stuff around 83 84. What you see is only a tiny portion of our chat. There was one little tidbit I felt like sharing with whoever came across this page. It was a random aside that came up when I mentioned Fireside Bowl and one that did not feel right to sit on my Google Doc. Here it is below:
"How Fireside Bowl gets started goes back to Underdog Records. Underdog would have our weekly meetings on Monday or Tuesday. Russ is still around but not as involved in Underdog. He had found Fireside when it was just an empty bowling alley. After our meetings, we weren’t too far from Fireside. 5 or ten of us would go over there. It looked like it was dead. Beer was 3 dollars a pitcher, and nobody else was there. That started happening, and then Russ stopped doing Underdog. We would go there once a week. There was no jukebox or music or anything. He’d been getting into the first wave of retro nostalgia for tapes. He put out a fanzine called 8 Track Mind.
So he would bring a goofy eight-track and start putting in eight tracks so that they would have music. A lot of the eight tracks were disco stuff. That had been happening for a couple of months, and more and more people started coming. There was a TV show called Wild Chicago on WTTW. It was a half-hour show where they would find something zany going on in Chicago. The original had a pith helmet like he was an explorer. He heard about disco bowling. He went and did a bit of bowling at The Fireside with Russ and his 8-track tapes. Because people knew he was coming, they camped it up a little bit. They did the bit, and more and more people started coming.
There are no shows. One of the people involved in bowling was doing a cable access TV show, and she wanted to do a fundraiser. She asked the guy if he could have bands play here. He said no. Eventually, she talked him into it. It was a weekend thing. They put risers out on the four middle lanes of Fireside. It was a big hit. Other people got excited about it. About that time, Jim’s dad retired. A few different people were putting on shows, and it took off into the 90s when it became a thing. Once again, Russ Forester and Underdog Records had our hand in getting something going, although indirectly."
