A History of Bitchpork, Underground Chicago’s Answer to Pitchfork

By Daniel Margolis

Saturday, July 18, 2009. I’m creeping through an alley on Chicago’s southwest side, trying to find a show in a warehouse space. I see a guy standing near a back entrance to a building and call out to him, “Hey is this Bitchpork?” He says, “No you’re way off. That’s over in Union Park.” I say, “No not Pitchfork. Bitchpork.” He looks at me like I’m insane.

From 2009 to 2012, Bitchpork existed as an alternative to the Pitchfork Music Festival—scheduled the same weekend four years in a row. It cost way less to get in, was generally held in abandoned factories that felt like ovens inside in July, and boasted performances by dozens of bands and performers. Pitchfork began in 2006 as a festival designed to showcase the semi-obscure music the affiliated website champions. Bitchpork, meanwhile, brought what used to be called indie rock back to its roots: Bands that travel in vans performing in squalor in front of hundreds of college kids all using one toilet for hours on end.

The festival’s axis could be found within CAVE, a mostly instrumental, psychedelic quartet from Missouri by way of Chicago; its sometimes-singer and keyboardist Rotten Milk having organized the entire thing and its leader and multi-instrumentalist Cooper Crain doing sound and managing the proceedings throughout the festival’s four-year run.

According to Crain, the seeds of Bitchpork were sown in informal shows scheduled the same weekend as Pitchfork in 2007 and ’08. “We had always hosted some sort of one night big show with no name, just because friends kept coming into town during Pitchfork who weren’t playing Pitchfork,” he said. “They were like, ‘We’re going to be in Chicago in six weeks but we can’t get a show because of Pitchfork.’”

Without giving it too much thought, I decided I was going to make it into a festival that went the whole weekend. If I knew it was going to turn into an annual thing that tons of people were going to travel around the country to go to, I might have given it a different stupid name.

Rotten Milk described how it grew from there. “Without giving it too much thought, I decided I was going to make it into a festival that went the whole weekend,” he said. “If I knew it was going to turn into an annual thing that tons of people were going to travel around the country to go to, I might have given it a different stupid name.”

Crain is careful to state that, despite the name, Bitchpork was not anti-Pitchfork. “It was more just a dumb thing to be like ‘We’re doing something too!’” he said. “It really doesn’t have anything to do with Pitchfork; just the name stuck and we did it more years after that.”

As the festival ran for four years, the division of duties between Cooper and Rotten began to blend. “It started out with Cooper in charge of the sound side of things and me in charge of the curatorial things,” Rotten Milk said. “But as time went on over the course of the four years, Cooper took more of a curatorial role as well.”

Crain also evolved the sound of the festival itself, going from borrowed sound systems to rented equipment. The two also drew in volunteers—many coming from the spaces hosting the festival—and hired some help as well, including some of their band mates. “[Cave drummer] Rex [McMurry] and [Warhammer 48k guitarist] Steven Haslag were really good at doing the door because they wouldn’t let anybody in for free,” Crain said.

Door admission to Bitchpork ranged from $10 to $15 per night, apparently a hefty price to some. McMurry described this as his only difficulty in working the door. “There were so many bands that the shows were expensive,” he said. “Some people would turn up and have no real idea what was going on and not really care to support—I guess support would be the word I would choose.”

As you’d expect, much of the festival was planned months in advance via informal meetings, e-mails, and notebooks passed back and forth. “I’d say by year three we were getting it arranged by March or April,” Crain said. The only detail Cooper and Rotten never got around to addressing was the heat in the venues themselves. “It was always like, ‘Damnit, we forgot to get fans again, fuck,’” Crain said. “We didn’t ever get that down.”

Regardless, the festival always proceeded fairly smoothly; impressive considering the sheer amount of acts it presented. “Every year we stayed mostly on schedule except for one day on year two,” Crain said. “That was the year we had 65 bands, which was a little much.”

Rotten Milk admitted this could all be pretty nerve-wracking. “It’s definitely one of the more stressful things that I’ve done in my life,” he said. “I’d be a total mess leading up to it the last couple of days before it started, but then as soon as the first act would start, it’s like you’re at the top of the rollercoaster.”

In its first year, Bitchpork ran from July 17 to 19, 2009, at 1318 W. Cermak Rd., in a space called The Future. History records that its first night began with a performance from someone called David Diarrhea and ended with a set from CAVE, then riding high on its awesome new album Psychic Psummer.

According to Rotten Milk, CAVE’s set that night was a challenge for two reasons. The band had reached a level of popularity that made it difficult to play DIY spaces because the audience would become so raucous that they’d knock over their equipment, and CAVE hadn’t anticipated how tiring it’d be to run the festival all day, then headline it.

It’s also a funny situation where I’m in a room full of hundreds of friends and a lot of them are doing weird drugs or getting wasted or having a really trippy, psychedelic time, and even if someone were to offer weird drugs to me I wouldn’t be able to take them because I have to keep my wits about me enough to make sure that the thing that they came to can keep happening.

Rotten said, “It’s also a funny situation where I’m in a room full of hundreds of friends and a lot of them are doing weird drugs or getting wasted or having a really trippy, psychedelic time, and even if someone were to offer weird drugs to me I wouldn’t be able to take them because I have to keep my wits about me enough to make sure that the thing that they came to can keep happening.”

An early act on the second day of Bitchpork was a trio of girls in bikinis doing a strange, pornographic play titled Handjob and Gargle on an overhead projector that featured transparent puppets with enormous moveable penises. This was followed by the Savage Young Taterbug, a one-man act out of Iowa City, Iowa, who made quite clear for anyone who’d been in Union Park earlier that day that you weren’t at Pitchfork anymore. You had been struggling to see bands across a field separated by thousands of people. Now suddenly you’re standing right in front of a dirty kid belting out a tune on a nylon-stringed guitar with no mic. The evening also saw sets by Religious Girls, a group from Oakland, CA, that tackled a morass of drum kits, keyboards and effects pedals, and the contemporary Chicago prog band Ga’an.

Finally came Columbus, Ohio’s Times New Viking, which was then a couple years away from becoming the semi-professional band that would open for Guided By Voices on tour. Their set that night proceeded like a sloppy practice of brothers and sisters fighting. Beth Murphy used audience members to hold her keyboard up to her arms and her mic up to her face. At one point guitarist Jared Phillips broke a string and was trying to tune a replacement by ear as Murphy kept blaring away. Adam Elliott poked her with a drumstick and both yelled at her to stop, which she did, briefly, before resuming blaring and they all started shouting at each other again. This was all so amusing that it threatened to overwhelm the band’s surprisingly catchy material.

In its second year, Bitchpork ran from July 16 to 18, 2010, at 2106 S. Kedzie Ave., in a space called Mortville, which was three stories high and boasted an outdoor roof-patio area. This was extremely useful given the massive humidity.

Bitchpork’s schedule circulated the week before and the name on it that drew the most snickers was “Turd Thrower.” On the second night, it turned out that Turd Thrower was Lightning Bolt playing a secret show. The next day at Pitchfork, on the same day that CAVE opened the festival, dedicating their song “Teenager” to “anyone here who lives with their parents,” Lightning Bolt’s drummer Brian Chippendale asked if anyone there had seen Turd Thrower at Bitchpork the night before and laughed about it. Much later, before their last song, Pavement’s Steve Malkmus said, “Don’t forget to go see Psychedelic Horseshit and Times New Viking at Bitchfest,” making a dismissive gesture with his hand. Bitchpork had invaded Pitchfork.

Basically, a lot of folks that were on tour doing small avant-garde things wound up playing to the largest audience they’d ever played to and got paid the best they’ve ever gotten paid for a show.

Via this connection, Bitchpork’s audience swelled. “Folks were showing up at the door that had no idea,” Crain said. “They were just at Pitchfork and were told ‘Oh, have to go to Bitchpork afterward.’” Rotten Milk noted the beauty of this: “Basically, a lot of folks that were on tour doing small avant-garde things wound up playing to the largest audience they’d ever played to and got paid the best they’ve ever gotten paid for a show, and that seemed entirely because the Pitchfork festival was happening.”

Singer/guitarist Jeremy Freeze played the second and third nights of Bitchpork that year; on Saturday as part of a set from lo-fi pop outfit Heater and on Sunday with the dosed, devastating duo Jerusalem and the Starbaskets—both from Columbia, MO. All he remembers is that it was hot and weird. “It was the first time I had ever played in shorts,” Freeze said. “You play a million warehouse spaces and basements and slaughterhouses and stuff, but then Bitchpork took first place as far as weird places to play. I remember being weirded-out by a woman who was doing this performance-type thing where she was having people from the audience come up and staple pieces of paper to her body.”

In its third year, Bitchpork ran from July 15 to 17, 2011, again at Mortville. Early on the first day, a skuzzy-looking, tall clown was carrying around a Fisher-Price boombox playing a cut-up tape of “Black Hole Sun” in the rooftop area, which seemed like a good sign. Around 11:00 p.m., now-defunct Chicago noise rock power trio Bad Drugs played a typically relentless set to a violently boisterous crowd. When the set was done I walked to the back of the room and saw Josh Johannpeter, drummer for Lazercrystal and Mahjongg. Practically manic, I hugged him (I barely know this guy) and said, “The Bad Drugs ride is closed! You must be this tall to go on the Bad Drugs ride!”

Around this time, the Chicago Police Department entered Bitchpork. McMurry found “the super hard ass Chicago cops” to be the strangest characters he encountered at the door the entire run of the festival.

Around this time, the Chicago Police Department entered Bitchpork. McMurry found “the super hard ass Chicago cops” to be the strangest characters he encountered at the door the entire run of the festival. “I remember distinctly that one of them was smoking a cigarette,” he said. “They just came in and were acting super intimidating. They were putting on such a thing. Even if that’s their real way of conducting themselves, it’s funny, because it seemed like hyper-real versions of what you imagine a cop being like.”

They proceeded up to Mortville’s outdoor roof with flashlights and yelled, “YOU DON’T HAVE TO STOP DOING THIS BUT YOU CAN’T DO IT OUT HERE.” So all Bitchpork’s attendees went inside Mortville to face brutal temperatures. Crain found a quick solution: “We paid a few friends, just like, ‘Hey, can you stand here for eight hours and just drink and make sure nobody goes out on the roof?’”

Chicago dance rock trio Lazercrystal was having technical difficulties trying to start their set so Crain suggested Warhammer 48k just go ahead and play in the next room. The whole audience migrated to them. Warhammer 48k was an art-metal heavyweight from Columbia, MO, made up of two guitarists, a bassist and Crain on drums. At that time, the band had been broken up for years but reformed for Bitchpork, partly because Cooper and Rotten wanted to see Warhammer bassist Pat Kopine play the festival. The result was an incredible one-off set that demonstrated its four musicians had done a considerable amount of woodshedding since they last played out. In front of a swelling crowd nearly crushing people near the front of the stage, Warhammer shoved out one intense rock jam after another, breaking them up with tension-building one-chord bursts here and there. During this, Lazercrystal finally got its laptops rebooted in the next room and as soon as Warhammer was done played a ridiculously funky set under a big lit-up pyramid to close the first day of the festival well after 3:00 a.m.

The big event on Bitchpork’s second day was a partial reunion of Mahjongg, a dancey, post-rock band that ruled Chicago in the 2000s, releasing three albums while gradually falling apart under the weight of its own flakiness. The reunion brought guitarist Jeff Carrillo, a crucial component, back from retirement in Tennessee but lacked the equally essential members Caryl Kientz, now in California, and Gabe Viles, who was actually at Bitchpork that night. I asked him why the for-real original line-up of Mahjongg wasn’t playing. He joked, “That’s more Pitchfork.”

In its fourth year, Bitchpork was supposed to be at Mortville yet again, but the Chicago NATO Summit in May 2012 derailed that. “When the NATO conference was in town, cops shut down a lot of warehouse venues because maybe they had always wanted to and didn’t have a reason yet,” Crain said. “Most times they were trying to find terrorists or whatever.”

Rotten Milk didn’t want to do Bitchpork this year and says he was talked into it. When Mortville was shut down, Cooper and Rotten had already started booking bands and were left with a festival with no home. “I wasn’t that stoked about being like a speculative real estate guy or something, which is what I felt like going around and meeting people who had weird spaces,” Rotten said. “I found myself talking to near-strangers about doing the festival and it just didn’t feel right.”

At one place they moved everything the night before—they moved all their rooms—because they just lived where it happened. It was just like ‘Oh shit; this is going to be a nightmare.’

As a result, Bitchpork happened at four locations spread throughout the city—sometimes two in the same day—from July 12 to 15, 2012. Some locations were kept secret until hours before the shows began. “It wasn’t as enjoyable for me because every day I had to move a PA and set it up as opposed to getting some sleep because I’m up all night,” Crain said. “At one place they moved everything the night before—they moved all their rooms—because they just lived where it happened. It was just like ‘Oh shit; this is going to be a nightmare.’”

Its later setting on Saturday was a factory space in Humboldt Park that, with no windows or ventilation of any kind, was Bitchpork’s hottest venue yet. The crowd responded to this by going completely mad, aggressively heckling a duo out of Austin, Texas, called Attic Ted, which consisted of a shirtless man behind a tribal mask playing a bank of effects pedals and a female cellist, who challenged the hostile crowd, “You get up here and do something then.” They did just that. The members of Spires That In The Sunset Rise leapt onstage, commandeered Attic Ted’s instruments and began playing a mocking version of their material. This went on for several minutes before Attic Ted was able to regain control of the set. Up next in the other room was Solid Attitude, a punk band out of Iowa City, Iowa, whose frenetic, staccato riffs and out-of-tune strumming stirred the crowd into a whirlpool of steaming sweat. The night was closed out by Detroit’s Tyvek, a trio whose dense punk compositions and tense demeanor recall the best days of SST.

Sunday, which would turn out to be the last day of Bitchpork ever, went down at a multi-level space in Logan Square. It began with a large ensemble performance of Terry Riley’s “In C” conducted by Dan Quinlivan, which consisted of a platoon of musicians exploring the full height, width and depth of the C chord, to completely mind-blowing effect. This played out in a room with windows facing street level. Later, deeper down in the same space, came a proper set from Spires That In The Sunset Rise, a female duo from Madison, WI, who play flute, cello and assorted effects while shouting incantations into a handheld microphone. This was followed by Apache Dropout, a scrappy garage trio out of Indiana reminiscent of the Seeds.