While James Teitelbaum was out with Pigface in 1994, playing keyboards on future industrial classics like “Suck,” “Asphole,” and “Fuck It Up,” none of his bandmates had any idea that he was living for the moment he could slip into a Hawaiian shirt and make a beeline for the nearest tiki bar. Teitelbaum, a newbie recording engineer at Chicago Trax who’d been drafted for the tour, had become obsessed with what he calls “the lost relics of Polynesian culture” two years earlier, while studying recording in Florida. But he kept it to himself–both in Pigface and then in Ministry, when he toured as that group’s programmer and keyboard tech in 1996.
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Teitelbaum photographed the bars he visited on the road, and those pictures provided the inspiration for the Tiki Bar Review Pages on his Web site (www.tydirium.net). He created the site in 1995 primarily as a way to teach himself Web design, but other tiki enthusiasts soon discovered it and began crawling out of the bamboo. “At the end of the 90s,” he says, “when I got to different cities there’d be people waiting to drive me to these places to help me check them out.”
Teitelbaum is now totally out of the tiki closet. Since last July he’s organized Tabu Tiki Night, which features bands, hula dancers, and of course tropical drinks in containers almost as big as your head. The event takes place on the third Wednesday of every month at Trader Vic’s, in the basement of the Palmer House Hilton–which, Teitelbaum asserts, has the highest TiPSY Factor of any bar in Chicago.
Today Teitelbaum’s musical tastes have veered far away from industrial. “I’ve definitely gone backward in time in the last ten years, because I think some of the older music is a lot more interesting than what is coming out today,” he says. “But I have a lot of other music that isn’t Martin Denny. I also own a condo that has a dining room completely jammed wall to wall with tiki stuff, but there’s pretty much no tiki in any other part of my home. The tiki obsession is just one facet of who I am, just as that room is one part of my home.”
When: Wed 4/20, 7 PM
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Jim Newberry.
