Chicago’s Green Return to Milwaukee

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The archival video displays a young trio, filled with exuberance and optimism. To mangle a lyric, the timing was never on their side:

Chicago band Green released a debut EP in 1984 and followed with a string of seven well-received and critically-acclaimed albums through 2009’s The Planets. Leader Jeff Lescher effortlessly added to the canon of great American and British pop music. While the general public yawned, those in the know, knew.

Green plays Anodyne Coffee on Bruce St. Friday, 8 p.m. with Elephonic and Cabin Essence.

Ever the underdog, Green was always the odd-band-out in times of fleeting grunge or industrial dance fads. Lescher wore his influences on his sleeve (in pre-Americana 1992 he recorded an album with Janet Beveridge Bean in tribute to the music of Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris) and never lacked wit—the band’s 1988 EP REM was the music nerd’s answer to REM’s album Green.

Lescher had barley released a solo album All Is Grace; with Green he played Circle A shortly before the pandemic hit. It was another star-crossed chapter in the band’s history.

The Brass Ring

“When I think of all the times we came so close to a really great record deal that miraculously fell through or we got calls from this bigwig or that titan who never called back,” Lescher waxes philosophically, “the sheer nearness of success that never materialized in full, it makes me think that either the songs and recordings were not what I think they are (I’m nuts—probably, the most likely explanation) or else there is a confederacy of dunces opposing me and us.”

He said The Planets turned out so well that he thought that it should be the last Green album, “because I didn’t think that we could top it and I wanted the last album to be as good as the best of our recorded output.”

Longtime fans will cite the one-two punch of the album White Soul and the EP Bittersweet (which followed up the underground classic LP Elaine MacKenzie) as exhibits in Green’s overlooked reasons for widespread recognition.

While it appeared that the band couldn’t get arrested at home and seemed to be moving away from the pulsebeat, they gained traction in Europe; Holland’s Megadisc label reissued Green’s catalog.

As you might imagine, Green’s history could be a documentary; long-time bassist-songwriter Clay Tomasek’s contributions are key, opener Elephonic guitarist Mike Jarvis spent time in Green managing to see Europe in the process and one-time bassist Ken Kurson would form The Lilacs before writing a financial column for Esquire Magazine. Bob Mould picked Green to open Hüsker Dü’s final Chicago performance.

The Next Chapter

These days, Lescher continues to write new material and is working on a follow-up solo album. “I got an offer to record a second solo album and I jumped on it. I thought the first solo recording would be the end of my recording “career” so I sold almost all of my music gear. Now, I have to buy all the same stuff again!” he says. “I just wasn’t able to stop cold. You think of some great bit or riff or title and it’s impossible to just let it go. Things that I am doing for the new album have me so pipped that I’m completely on tenterhooks until I get the recording finished.”

So, in reference to the Rolling Stones lyric, is time ever on anyone’s side? When he was a child, Lescher says he really loved the romantic irony and tragedy of Beethoven going deaf while he composed some of the most magnificent music human ears will ever hear.

“While I’ll never get within several leagues of magnitudes of creating anything in the Beethoven-type category, I am losing my hearing—so we do have that in common,” he says. “I am going to conserve what hearing I have left by playing only acoustic instruments and limit most of my listening to classical stuff. So, in five years, I see myself languidly plucking a lute in a ferny copse.”