It’s a Friday in late March–the same night as Coldplay’s show at the United Center–and former Guided by Voices front man Robert Pollard is onstage at the Metro, deep into a midset rant about the state of popular music. “Fuck Coldplay!” he yells, then walks over and throws an arm around his guitarist, Tommy Keene. “You know what else? Tommy Keene says fuck Coldplay too! You know why? ‘Cause Tommy Keene likes rock!”
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An Evanston native raised in Maryland, Keene has been based in LA since the early 90s, but for years he’s treated Illinois like a second home, at least as far as his music is concerned: he’s mixed half a dozen of his solo records at Jonathan Pines’s studio in Urbana, toured and played with native talents like Jay Bennett, Adam Schmitt, and the Velvet Crush, and recorded part of his 2001 live album in Chicago. On Thursday he returns to town to play a sold-out solo show at Schubas opening for Townshend Research, a code name for the Pollard band, and next weekend he’ll appear again with Pollard at the Intonation Music Festival.
Keene has been in bands since he was a teenager, and started playing professionally while at the University of Maryland in the late 70s. After a stint in New York, where he worked as a sideman for Casablanca Records artist Suzanne Fellini, he returned to Maryland and formed the first version of the Tommy Keene Group. After establishing himself on the east coast, he signed a two-record deal with the North Carolina indie label Dolphin and in 1984 put out the EP Places That Are Gone–his second release, but the first to be nationally distributed. In a year with a remarkable number of classic indie records (the Replacements’ Let It Be, the Minutemen’s Double Nickels on the Dime, R.E.M.’s Reckoning), Keene’s disc came in at number ten on the year-end CMJ album charts and was the number one EP in the Village Voice Pazz & Jop poll.
Though he’s threatened to give up music in the past, discouraged by his stubbornly modest sales figures, lately Keene seems to have made peace with his status as a rock ‘n’ roll lifer. “I’m not a quitter. That’s one thing I’m not. I’ll stick it out until the bitter end, for better or worse,” he says. “It’s funny, someone just told me, ‘You’re 47–it’s kinda too late for a career change.’ And that’s true. So I’ll keep doing this as long as I can. Maybe it’ll eventually come down to me pressing 1,000 copies of my records and selling them on the Web. If that’s the way it has to be, then that’s what I’ll do.”
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