Local booking agencies became international players. Bookers became booking agents and managers. Lawyers got involved, some specializing in the independent/major interface, crafting complex documents that were more likely to expire unfulfilled than run to term. Radio payola guys made a mint buying airplay to break bands in different markets. Labels sank fortunes into promotion, buying out venues and offering tickets for free, paying headline bands for support slots and festival positions. He continues: “Speculators wrote absurd checks to bands on very little evidence, sometimes without a note of music in the shops. That was our peer group, but there was also a predatory layer, big labels sending scouts to shows with a buzz around them, labels like Matador and Sub Pop becoming imprints for major labels and just fucking burning their money.” Touch and Go became a distributor and manufacturer for a lot of them, doing millions of dollars of business with some of the weirdest music and people imaginable. Independent labels and bands stopped being sidelines and became going concerns. “ You can't overstate how much that changed everything. “There was a huge influx of money,” audio engineer, outspoken advocate for all things Chicago and DIY, and Shellac guitarist Steve Albini explains. in search of the next Seattle and the next big payday. In late 1991, Nirvana’s Nevermind was on its way to becoming a full-blown cultural phenomenon, sending label representatives “cool-hunting” in marginal hubs of artistic activity across the U.S. The NNWAC helped turn Wicker Park into a destination neighborhood for visual artists, filmmakers, and musicians, who quickly started to turn the cheap and plentiful industrial lofts in the area into live-work spaces. A non-profit built to support local artists who had historically been shut out of more traditional museums and galleries, the NNWAC set up an office in 1988 in the Flatiron Arts Building at the intersection of Milwaukee, North, and Damen Avenues, and began curating exhibits and performances and organizing studio tours. To understand why, we need to rewind to 1986, when the Near Northwest Arts Council (NNWAC) formed in the then-somewhat bleak neighborhood of Wicker Park, an area with a good deal of unused industrial space. All across the city there was a sense of musical playfulness and a lack of desire to be pigeonholed. There were regular house music nights at rock bars. Abrasive post-punk and indie rock crossed paths frequently with the city’s vital free jazz scene. In 1993, if you loved underground music, Chicago was a special place to be.
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