With a seemingly endless string of icons shuffling off this mortal coil, 2016 has been a bad-news year for the rock world. But a nice distraction — especially for ’90s kids — has been observing the 20th birthdays of so many landmark albums from the twilight of the alternative-nation era. Weezer. Modest Mouse. Rage Against the Machine. Local H.
Wait — Local H?
Yes. Whether you’ve always realized the Chi-Town duo’s greatness or just remember them as the guys who introduced the word “copacetic” into your vocabulary, their 1996 sophomore album As Good as Dead belongs in that conversation. Singer-guitarist Scott Lucas and original drummer Joe Daniels — who left the group in ’99 but is temporarily back in the fold — will perform it as part of a three-act, two-plus-hour set Friday at Exit/In.
Much more than a mere vehicle for the radio hit “Bound for the Floor” — aka the “Keep It Copacetic” song — the gold-certified As Good as Dead’s conceptual achievement is oft overlooked. A not-so-distant younger cousin of Hüsker Dü’s 1984 punk-pop opus Zen Arcade, the 13-song cycle touched on similar themes of suburban boredom and despair, deftly balancing Nirvana-nodding rage and McCartney-indebted melody.
The observational humor on the album’s other three singles “Eddie Vedder” (with its perfectly snarky couplet “If I was Eddie Vedder / Would you like me any better?”), “Fritz’s Corner” (immortalizing a local watering hole in the band’s hometown of Zion, Ill., a depressed industrial burg midway between Chicago and Milwaukee) and the self-explanatory anti-jock jam “High-Fiving MF” instilled Local H’s no-frills sonic palette with a strong sense of time and place: the post-grunge ’90s, the Midwestern boonies.
“We made this record about dead-end towns, dead-end people,” Lucas tells the Scene, speaking by phone from a tour stop in New Orleans. “But we were always very proud we were from Zion. And with that pride comes that feeling like, ‘Hey, we can talk shit about our town, but you can’t.’ ”
That proud-outsider sensibility has sustained Lucas and Local H through an improbable three-decade career, and the group’s live shows — which treat small clubs like stadiums — are its bedrock. Though Local H never repeated AGAD’s commercial success, the band’s conceptual streak has informed all of their records since, from 2008’s Twelve Angry Months, about the time it realistically takes to get over a tough breakup; to Hallelujah! I’m a Bum, a politically minded double LP released last presidential-election year, 2012.
As such, the As Good as Dead concert is not your run-of-the-mill full-album nostalgia fest — i.e., perform the record front-to-back, maybe a brief encore, then call it a night. Instead, it’ll kick off with 45 minutes’ worth of some of the noisiest, most ferocious material off the band’s other seven records — 2015’s Hey, Killer being the latest — with Daniels pulling double-drummer duty with Ryan Harding, who’s played with Lucas since 2013.
Harding will then sit on the bench while Lucas and Daniels revisit AGAD — though not necessarily performed in the same order as on the original release — before returning for an anything-goes encore.
“The idea was floated to do the full-album show, and that didn’t really appeal to me,” Lucas explains. “So we [found] a way to say, ‘Hey, let’s make this tour about this record, but not just about this record.’ ”
The catalog-spanning result caters to both types of Local H fans: those who came on board in the ’90s and never got off, and those who only owned that one disc but loved it. The two-drummer arrangement rewards the long-haulers for decades of fandom with something they’ve never seen before, while catching up the nostalgia-trippers on what they’ve been missing out on the for the past 20 years.
If you fall into the latter category, you definitely don’t want to miss that first act. As long-running rock bands go, Local H isn’t the arty, experimental kind. If you dug them then, it’s practically guaranteed you still will.
“My tastes haven’t shifted that much,” says Lucas. “Pavement, Bettie Serveert, things like that. I still listen to records that Matador puts out. All that stuff had [an] impact on us. We were never too interested in what was on the radio alongside us.”
And while for a lot of artists, commemorative full-album tours are done somewhat begrudgingly — like, did I really peak in my early 20s? — that’s not the case here.
For Lucas, now 45, re-examining AGAD “has been interesting,” he says. “Something like ‘Freeze-Dried (F)Lies,’ I was [surprised] playing that song, like, ‘Ah, the 25-year-old me knew a little bit about … me.’ I was kind of impressed by my own insight, what made me tick. So it was nice to reacquaint myself with some of those ideas and emotions I was going through. And my concerns aren’t all that different today.”
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