This was enjoyable. I obviously have many thoughts about it but unfortunately I'm too buried in other stuff right now to really sort through them, so I'll have to revisit the episode in a few weeks.
-Cubby Bear and "Wrigleyville" is so incredibly lame now, and about to become somehow even lamer
-It's great to see Naked Raygun and Albini get the notice they deserve. It would have been nice to hear the reasons why there was no scene in Chicago, and why small music venues continue to struggle (stupid regulations). Albini's place is in Avondale, the community that neighbors mine to the southwest, but I'm not sure exactly where.
-How you talk about Chicago music and not mention house is beyond me, but house history awareness is just a crusade of mine
-The juxtaposition between wealthy white Evanston punk rock kids and black working-class migrant blues on the South Side is striking, and tells us much about both genres. Of course white suburban punks would 'never dream about making money' off their type of music. Didn't hear Buddy Guy say that, lol. Chicago blues was born for the market (romantic remembrances of Maxwell Street, aside). Some talk of race and segregation would have made a more complicated but accurate picture. But that's just the historian of postwar Chicago in me talking, I guess.
-Related to point above: the premise of the show--which I love--is that the urban cultural environment makes the music. But we never really get a sense of Chicago other than as a coincidental spatial container for artists.
-The Rockford Chamber of Commerce has to be so pissed that Cheap Trick is now a 'Chicago' band.
-I'm glad Grohl came back to the blues at the very end. Up to that point I really didn't understand what Chicago blues had to do with anything, other than that's what people think about when they think about Chicago music
-I think I'll have lunch at Piece Brewpub, co-owned by Rick Nielsen. They have a photo of Grohl, Smear, Nielsen, and Albini above the urinal and now I know why