NP: King Crimson, Frame By Frame

It's way too quiet today. And by that, I mean I have not seen nearly enough mention in the media of tomorrow night's 3Friends Memorial and Benefit show at Metro. DeRogatis gave it a good amount of ink in today's Sun-Times, and it's been tagged as one of the "other good bets" on the front page of section 3 of the Reader. I thought I saw either EXO or The Dials on the cover of another alternative weekly, too.

But that's been it, and it doesn't feel like enough. On the web, Chicagoist, Metroblogging Chicago and Eric Zorn have been surprisingly quiet, and while they still have some time before the event, I'd imagine they get much of their traffic during normal working hours. Gapers Block has a basic listing, but that's it. In the more content-heavy "Merge" section, they even make reference to another tragic local music death today.

Then again, I don't know what would make me satisfied here. The local music scene can be dispiritingly invisible to the large majority of Chicagoans, so why should that change now? It's not like I'm one to proseltyze about it to people who aren't already in tune with said scene. What do you say? "Hey, you should go see this band, because I kinda knew their drummer and he and some other guys died"? If they don't already know the people involved, at least tangentially, that makes for an awfully uncomfortable conversation.

The whole situation has an air of surreality to it, and I'm certain that will continue well into tomorrow night's performances. The good news is that this isn't the sort of thing that you should have a programmed response on how to deal with, and by that I mean that this sort of tragedy is rare.

Regarding the details of the DeRogatis piece, I would have liked it to take a bit wider of a view than just the situation of the one band DeRo thinks is really good. Even with his approach, the notion that here you have two different bands that Doug had recorded new drum tracks for, and that they've each responded to his passing differently -- the Dials forging ahead, while EXO is bowing out -- makes for a much more rich story.

And I'm having another one of those goosebump moments as "Fallen Angel" from King Crimson is playing as I put the finishing touches on this post.