“Right down there,” says Brian Krumm, front man for noirish roots-rock combo the Great Crusades. “It happened a week after I moved to Chicago.” He’s sitting by the window of Wicker Park’s Pontiac Cafe, pointing toward North Avenue and the spot where he was mugged nearly eight years ago.
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The robbery inspired “Are We Having Fun Anymore?,” the opening track on the Great Crusades’ fifth album, Four Thirty, released in February by the German label Glitterhouse. But despite the local color that saturates the band’s music–their entire previous album was inspired by a dive bar in Humboldt Park–the new disc isn’t distributed in Chicago, or in fact anywhere in the States. Neither are the previous two. The Great Crusades have been kicking around town for almost a decade without attracting much notice, but in Europe they’ve appeared on TV and earned rave reviews in mainstream outlets like Mojo, Uncut, and German Rolling Stone. “I never would’ve thought when we started out playing music that I’d be playing a show in Zagreb for 200 people,” says Krumm. “Or some village in Germany in front of two or three thousand people. It’s been amazing. It’d be nice if it was the same way over here, but how can I complain?”
After graduating in 1989, Moder went to the Berklee College of Music in Boston. Krumm and Hunt went to the University of Illinois in Champaign, where they launched a new group called the Suede Chain. They released a couple CDs on Parasol’s Mud imprint before disbanding in 1997, at which point Krumm started working on solo material that departed radically from the Suede Chain’s eclectic art-pop. “I had a fascination with Tom Waits and Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, but also stuff like the Replacements and Uncle Tupelo,” he says. “After writing those first songs it seemed to make sense that they kind of fell somewhere in between.”
Four Thirty veers away from the atmospheric roots rock of the previous albums and toward loud, heavy classic rock. “A lot of that comes from growing up in Saint Louis and listening to this station called KSHE 95,” says Krumm. “It’s the home of Sweet Meat, this pig wearing sunglasses, which is their logo. They’d play Rush, ZZ Top, Sammy Hagar, AC/DC. You hear that stuff all your life, it’s in your DNA.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Jim Newberry.
