RoosterCow Records Releases Live @ The Winthrop House Digital LP and Zine
In case you missed it, RoosterCow Records has released Live @ The Winthrop House, an 18-song digital album accompanied by a 28-page zine. This LP and booklet documents a microcosm of Chicago’s underground music scene in the mid-to-late ‘90s.
The Winthrop House was the nickname given to the 3-flat graystone in Chicago’s Edgewater neighborhood where numerous bands lived, practiced, and performed between 1995 and 2007. The digital album and zine will be available through the RoosterCow Bandcamp page, and the zine (with download codes) is available at Quimby’s Bookstore (NYC and Chicago).
Originally conceived by musician and local music booster, Mike Wing, the project started in 1994 when Winthrop roommate and recording engineer Scott Ramsayer assembled a makeshift recording studio in his bedroom. At this time, the house was becoming an informal but welcome stop for touring punk, noise, indie rock, and underground bands passing through Chicago, as well as a practice and performance space for several local bands.
Stream the Album/Buy the Zine
Live at the Winthrop House is a zine and digital music compilation documenting a particular music scene in Chicago at the turn of the last century.
Stream or download the live album on the RoosterCow Bandcamp site. Download the 28-page companion zine here.
In 1999, Wing and his wife, Lori Kolb, relocated from Chicago to Fort Collins, Colorado, where Wing booked shows for bands on the Descendents’ short-lived record label O&O as well as former SST Records co-owner Joe Carducci’s Upland label. Though he became deeply involved in the Colorado music community — including musicians connected to the extended SST orbit — his connection to Chicago’s underground scene endured. Years later, after rediscovering a box of live cassette recordings from the Winthrop House, Wing sent the tapes to fellow Chicago expat Kris Poulin in San Diego for mastering. The project was ultimately organized and assembled by Chris Auman for release on his RoosterCow label.
The recordings captured between 1995 and 2000 feature performances by house bands alongside touring acts looking to fill Midwest and U.S. tour dates. The Black Lips played an impromptu show after a local booking was cancelled. Candy Snatchers rehearsed in the basement after losing a band member on tour. Future Burn the Priest/Lamb of God guitarist Mark Morton was a member of several of the bands connected to the house.
Among the artists represented on the LP are legendary SST recording engineer SPOT performing a solo acoustic song; an early incarnation of The Handsome Family, and Richmond, VA’s noise rock legends hose.got.cable.
Making A Scene
Every city has an underground music scene. This big, sprawling city of Chicago, with its public transit dead zones and unforgiving weather (often frigid, sometimes sweltering), has many. They’re spread across neighborhoods throughout the north, south, and west sides. This was true 30 years ago, as I’m sure it is today.
In Chicago in the 1990s, these separate music scenes coexisted and sometimes overlapped in a Venn diagram with dive bars (The Mutiny, Big Horse, Gallery Cabaret) and music venues (Empty Bottle, Lounge Ax) at its center. Many of these places are gone now.
Live at The Winthrop House
Starting around 1994, in the northside, lakefront neighborhood of Edgewater, one of these music microcosms formed at The Winthrop House. Also known as Club Winthrop or the OFFWhite House, it wasn’t a house at all. It was a three-flat graystone rental property. The building was home to a revolving lineup of roommates/bandmates, out-of-town guests, touring bands, and folks who couldn’t find their way home after having ended up there the night before.
To have any impact beyond its immediate surroundings, a scene needs a record label, a zine or two, as well as artists, writers, and photographers to help present it to the world. It needs people willing to learn silkscreening for t-shirts and posters, someone willing to book shows and promote them, and people to talk about all of it.
Record Label
The Winthrop House had all of these things. There was OFFWhite Records, which relocated from Ohio with Perry Finch and his bandmates in Vambo Marble Eye. RoosterCow would later release records by bands affiliated with Winthrop. My zine, Reglar Wiglar, reviewed records by and interviewed bands connected to the house, while the short-lived, hilarious gossip sheet, The Uptown Enabler, detailed various house happenings and the goings-on of its inhabitants.
Perry also silkscreened t-shirts while Vambo’s Mike Wing booked shows and tours, and was a tireless booster of the bands connected to the house. Mike Dixon designed flyers and album covers. Scott Ramsayer set up a makeshift recording rig to document live shows and record music by the bands that practiced in the basement. And, of course, there were the parties. These weekend shindigs, which included an occasional Sunday afternoon, featured live music from the house bands as well as touring bands that needed to fill a date on their US or Midwest tours.
Bandmates / Roommates
Band members lived on at least two of the three floors in the building, and there was a steady stream of roommates flowing in and out for over a decade, with drummer Cory Stateler being the last to depart in 2007 when the building was sold.
Most Winthrop residents were restaurant drones who worked at places like the Chicago Diner, Beat Kitchen, Goose Island Brewery, and the Green Mill. Almost all were night owls. Those who weren’t suffered through many sleepless nights.
VME Interview
My introduction to the Winthrop House came in 1994 when I met Mike Wing the day I started as a line cook at the Chicago Diner. He looked familiar. A few months before, I’d seen Vambo Marble Eye play the Empty Bottle. I had never heard of them, but Tim Davison, who was visiting from Cincinnati, knew VME from Toledo, and he got us on the guest list. It was a memorable show that, at one point, had touring band Buttsteak spreading chocolate frosting on their guitar player’s naked butt cheeks.
Wing and I hit it off from jump thanks to a shared appreciation of dozens of bands. At the time, I was writing about music for any publication that would let me. That included the short-lived Pure Magazine. This is when the unholy trinity of Liz Phair, Smashing Pumpkins, and Urge Overkill dominated local music coverage. The gig didn’t pay, but I could choose what I covered. I proposed VME. The interview took place in the first-floor kitchen at the Winthrop House. I didn’t know then how much time I would be spending in that kitchen over the next ten years.
Edgewater has changed a lot since then. The apartments in the Winthrop House are now condos, but hopefully, in the basement of a building a few doors down, there’s another Winthrop scene percolating.
Live from the Winthrop House LP
Each of the 18 songs featured on the companion compilation was recorded at basement shows from 1995 to 2000. There were shows before and after this time, but they either weren’t recorded or the tapes have not been located… yet.
Live at the Winthrop House Track List
Good Puss – “Tang”
New Rob Robbies – “Captain”
hose.got.cable – “pigstar (the white tracker)”
Caboose – “Dirt”
Smitten – “Crack Cocaine”
Handsome Family “Skeletons”
Boogie Man Smash – “In a Daze”
SPOT – “I’m a Fool”
The Renfields – “Unbound”
Gone Daddy Finch – “Honey Pop Jag”
The LERS – “All Saints Day”
Vambo Marble Eye – “Pussy Soup”
Gravelbed – “Driving High”
Team Satan – “That Man Was Crazy”
Chapstik – “Catboxx”
Booker Noe – “Kansas City Wiglar’
Reagaon National Crash Diet – “Everything’s Changed”
Winthropes – “High Altamonte”
Limited to 100 Copies
Get your hand-numbered copy of the Live @ The Winthrop House zine from the RoosterCow Bandcamp Page. Copies are limited.