The Empty Bottle in Chicago is the last great indie rock dive bar standing. It’s a spot that seemed like a good place to host bands at some point because it simply existed, but went on to become legendary. As Brian Case of the Ponys and Disappears says in The Empty Bottle Chicago: 21+ Years of Music / Friendly / Dancing, the forthcoming book about the Chicago venue edited by John Dugan, “It's a rock club with no other ambition than being a rock club, and that goes a long way these days.”
But big “rock clubs” like New York City’s Bowery Ballroom—people don’t hang out there when there isn’t a show, and it’s definitely not a neighborhood spot. The Bottle, on the other hand, is a bar you can go and drink at before the music starts up, a beautiful little mess that might actually be held together by all the band stickers stuck to the walls. Somebody might not walk in there and immediately think, “The Flaming Lips and Uncle Tupelo played here,” they’d probably just assume that the place has seen some shit. Yet that’s exactly the kind of music the venue has specialized in since 1992, when Bruce Finkelman decided to open a spot in a part of town that you probably didn’t visit unless you lived there or knew somebody who did. That’s why it became the club every underground band the world over needed to hit up while traversing across the post-Nirvana indie rock landscape.
In 1992, hardly anybody cared about the kinds of bands the Bottle had on its stage, and real estate in its Ukrainian Village neighborhood wasn’t skyrocketing. Along with clubs like the Metro, Lounge Ax, and Fireside Bowl (the bowling alley that nobody bowled at), the Bottle was part of a small batch of clubs that helped launch careers for bands from Jesus Lizard and Wilco, hosted everybody from Neutral Milk Hotel to Yo La Tengo throughout the 1990s, gave a home to burgeoning genres like Chicago alt-country and post-rock, and did it independently of big corporate sponsorship or a ton of national attention. The Metro was the first, an early haven for Chicago house and industrial music. Lounge Ax opened right down the street from DePaul University in 1987, just before “college rock” was called “alternative.” Fireside was the all-ages punk club. And the Empty Bottle was the 21+ place where underage kids might pass and wonder what was going on behind the big black front door and the glass brick of a window that made it impossible to see what was going on inside, besides a few flashing lights.
Time and money changes everything. The Fireside turned back into a bowling alley that didn’t have nightly live music in 2004, and Lounge Ax closed in 2000, as the neighborhood it was located in—Lincoln Park—filled with “trendy restaurants, stylish boutiques and affluent young professionals,” going from a mostly Puerto Rican and working class into a part of town too expensive for a weird little club. The Metro is still around, now oftentimes playing home base to bigger act looking to play an intimate setting. But the Bottle is still going strong, doing the same thing it has always done. It’s like that person who works at the record store who might seem like a dick, but will never give you a bad suggestion.
Death at the Bottle in 2009; photo by Robert Loerzel, from "The Empty Bottle Chicago"
This new book focuses almost entirely on the music, from an introduction written by Mountain Goats singer/novelist John Darnielle, to testimonies from Will Oldham saying that the shows he went to at the Bottle were, “especially great and memorable because the performers didn't succumb to the dodgy layout of the venue. They played to its strengths,” to local rockers like Alex White, who started playing the Bottle when she “was still a tender teen” (“Basically, I had permission to play there because I didn’t drink; I was respectful of that”). There are stories all right, like the time Guided By Voices took a then-fledgling band named the Strokes on the road as their support and played there until two in the morning. The set involved a stripper and ended with one of GBV’s guitarists falling back into his full Marshall stack after too much whiskey.
It can be a little torturous, perusing the long list of bands the Bottle hosted long before anybody gave a shit about them: local alt-rock heroes Veruca Salt in 1993; Josh Homme with Kyuss in 1994, and Low two nights later; the White Stripes opening for Delta 72 in 2000; the Year Yeah Yeahs in 2002, playing their first show in Chicago to about ten people; LCD Soundsystem in 2004, long before they could pack basketball arenas; the Hold Steady in 2005, when the band once described as “best bar band in America” still played bars; Flying Lotus in 2008, and countless others. What you don’t get is the experience of sitting in the Empty Bottle, the type of thing a book—no matter how engaging or filled with beautiful photos and fliers—can provide.
Vampire Weekend at the Bottle in 2007; photo by Clayton Hauck, from "The Empty Bottle Chicago"
There’s a book-length history of Chicago’s indie rock scene in the 1990s that will be written someday, about how it was basically an overlooked version of Seattle in many ways, a hotbed for the best music of the decade. No doubt bands like90 Day Men, U.S. Maple, and Dianogah will be mentioned, along with how local record labels like Drag City and Touch and Go put out early records by Pavement, Royal Trux, and Slint. But what can’t be captured on the page is what it’s like to drink in a place like the Empty Bottle—the things you overhear, the people you meet, and the sheer amount of booze that flows throughout any given evening. Chicago is a drinking city, and you should be ready to put a lot of booze into your body if you visit.
The Bottle remains a damn good bar to just drink in, and that is central to its importance as a clubhouse. Sure, the comparison to the snooty record store employee might make you think otherwise, and if you get there after a certain time you’re probably going to have to pay a cover, but wander in when the show is over or on a Saturday afternoon to see what the place is really all about. Soak in the history of the music that maybe changed your life still echoing into the sticker-and-graffiti-covered bathroom, look at the old silkscreened posters from shows past, and try not to get choked up from all the dust and soot that has been collecting on the walls long before the indoor smoking ban took place.
Remember that you don’t go to drink at the Empty Bottle looking for fancy cocktails from the pre-Prohibition era. The top shelf of the bar is really just more of a structure thing, and in no way signifies that the Southern Comfort is a better whiskey choice than Buffalo Trace because it sits above it. They do have Old Style as the glowing sign above the front door implies, but there’s also beer on tap from Goose Island and Two Brothers if gut rot isn’t your thing. The bartenders are cool unless you aren’t, and maybe the most important mark of a great no-frills bar is that they only take cash. You can trust a bar that doesn’t want your credit card to be good, or at least interesting.
That’s the thing about a place like the Empty Bottle; it’s got cool scars, the kind of wear and tear newer bars pay to try and replicate to look more authentic. The sound system isn’t world class, you get your occasional douchebag who wanders in and audibly wonders what kind of music they’re hearing, and the place hasn’t really changed since it opened—but that’s part of what’s so perfect about it. There’s a mystery shot available for three bucks, the shows aren’t expensive, there are regulars who don’t even have to tell the bartenders what kind of beer they want, and—maybe most importantly—is that the place doesn’t cash in on the nostalgia factor. Sure, you can buy t-shirts and beer koozies with the bar’s name on it, but all the while the Empty Bottle is still going strong, still vital to American music, and forever the last of its kind.