Smoking Popes, Behemoth Bob and a Closed Curragh: Slacking in the Suburbs, Parts 4, 5 and 6

You gotta love a band where the drummer looks like the bastard son of Sebastian Cabot (Mr. French from TV’s Family Affair, not the other one from history class). Or he could be the result of a Bachman Turner Overdrive appearance at a town festival somewhere in the Chicago suburbs sometime in the early 80s.

Either way, the guy plays for Smoking Popes, one of two bands from where I call home that have almost made it big. Funny thing is the Popes front man has accepted Jesus Christ as his personal savior, while the other group, Alkaline Trio, holds lapsed Catholics who flirt with that Anton Lavey Satanic silliness.

Both bands also play melodic punk rock with singers who are crooners instead of the whiny kid that usually moans his way through similar music. The head Pope, Josh Caterer, is even partial to show tunes. And you haven’t lived until you have heard a pop punk cover of You’ll Never Walk Alone.

“Almost made it” is a theme I can relate to, and probably most people can. And when you come from here, calling one of your major label albums Born to Quit and the other Destination Failure makes perfect sense.

The Popes played a homecoming show of sorts out this way last Friday in front of about 500 people, about a third of them claiming they went to high school with the band. The guys are all in their 30s and according to some bullshit in the recent New York magazine, if they were East Coast they’d be called “grups,” people approaching or at middle age who still maintain some of their youthful hipsters habits.

Fuck New York magazine. I’ve been accused of acting like I’m 23 since I was 23. And just because people have figured out they don’t have to wear suits or Dockers, can still listen to whatever the hell kind of music they want to and some writer wanted to get paid to hang out with them, they get this label.

The people who still wear ties all the time - those are the ones who scare me.

One of the Popes wore leather pants, which was funny, not scary.

Sad, and sort of funny was running into a friend I hadn’t seen in five years at a bar called River Lee’s, which is nothing like any place I’ve ever visited in the Ireland from where the name comes. It’s more like a pre-old man bar, a smoky island of misfit toys kind of place.

One guy there fancied himself Gary Busey and was dressed in shorts and a Hawaiian shirt, perhaps because of the Jimmy Buffet concert going on inside his head or his Hunter S. Thompson outlook on life. It felt like it was going to snow outside, so looking at him only made me colder.

Seeing my former friend was just a tad disheartening. What do you say to someone you haven’t seen in five years? It’s not like we had a falling out, more like neither one called the other. A guy thing.

Anyway, now he’s huge, close to 300 pounds I would guess. You can’t exactly say, “Hey, you’re looking good.” Do you offer to buy a Lite Beer? Make an Atkins joke? Be honest and say, “What the hell happened to you?”

Instead I teased him about the Cubs and his Amish beard and pretty much left him alone with this two other drinking buddies. We had run out of things to say to each other, which is really tense for an idiot like me who oft times can’t shut up.

Awkwardness is what bars are for anyway, right?

Despite that, I am glad I went into this place if only for learning that they now make plastic beer pitchers with a compartment by the handle in which you put ice to keep the brew cold. I’m going to by one for mending ankle sprains. I figure I can put my foot into it, too, which might improve the flavor of your typical domestic low calorie beer while allowing me to heal.

On the other end of the bar spectrum, I closed my weekend out by heading to the last night of the Curragh, an Irish place by Woodfield Mall in Schaumburg.

Why is it closing? Did the River Lee’s crowd show up one night and scare off the yuppies?

Nah. The place is was doing fine and was seven years old. The owners (Greeks, by the way) got an offer it couldn’t refuse, from Tiffany’s, not Tony Soprano. Apparently the store wanted the retail space (because Lord -- and Taylor -- knows there is nowhere to find bling in the burbs) and offered $6 million for the spot. They will tear down the building and put up a new one.

The regulars were moaning about not having anywhere decent to hang out at in Schaumburg. Well, duh. You moved to Disney World, you deal with Mickey Mouse places and It’s a Small World approximations of a good time.

You gotta go find your fun out here. Just drive safely.