DJ M-Dash writesFig Dish Returns With Two Singles and Two Sold-Out Shows

by Andy Frye

It’s been 27 years since Fig Dish released their last full-length album, but this Chicago-based band has not lost a beat. If you don’t believe me, ask **Steve.

The band of high school friends—guitarists and vocalists Rick Ness and Blake Smith, bassist Mike Willison, and drummer Andy Hamilton—put out their newest single "Burn Bright For Now” in June, with another to follow.

You can hear "Burn Bright” now on Spotify and other streaming services. Listeners who know Fig Dish will detect the same sound and fury the band was always known for. I spoke with Ness and Smith a week ago via Zoom, and they explained it all.

“People don’t realize that these are songs we recorded in 1998,” Smith said, “but we didn’t put out because the band broke up.”

“We were trying to put together our third album at that time,” Ness said of the 1998 recordings, “but we got dropped, and another label deal didn’t materialize, so we split up into our different projects.”

Fig Dish subsequently splintered into the electronic-tinged band Caviar, made up of Smith and Willison, while Ness formed a prog rock-influenced outfit, Ness, with Bill Swartz and Veruca Salt’s Jim Shapiro. After other projects in the late ‘90s and early 2000s, Smith took up work in the entertainment industry, and Ness got his Ph. D in English to become a college professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“Ragged Ones” — A first listen on CHIRP

Even if, for the moment, what’s old is new again, there’s more on the horizon for Fig Dish and the band’s nostalgic fans. First, Fig Dish is set to play two sold-out shows at the GMan Tavern, Sep. 5 and 6, with fellow Chicago scene members Menthol.

But if you don’t have tickets to the show, you can pre-order the next Fig Dish album Feels Like The Very First Two Times on vinyl on Forge Again Records here.

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DJ M-Dash writesThe True Story of Brad Wood, Producer

by Andy Frye

You might laugh—but Brad Wood has been working at home way, way before it was cool.

Years before the pandemic, this down-to-earth sound engineer and record producer set up Seagrass Studios adjacent to his home in Los Angeles. It has extended the continuum of his important work with some of rock music’s most innovative artists, which began back in Wicker Park in the ‘90s at Wood’s legendary Idful Music Corporation.

Over the span of his long career, Wood has produced albums from Placebo and Pete Yorn to Lisa Loeb and Oklahoma alt-rockers Skating Polly. But he’s best known among Chicago music diehards for producing some of the 1990's best albums, including Liz Phair's Exile in Guyville and Veruca Salt's American Thighs.

Two weeks ago, I spoke with Wood over Zoom about his exploits in recording music. He talked about the different kinds of bands he’s worked with as well as how artists and record labels seek him out.

“Liz Phair and Skating Polly—those two represent two far ends of my career, now that I’m nearing the end of my career,” Wood joked. “But, both came from someone behind the artist who knew of my work and said, ‘I have a record I’d like you to produce.’”

In both cases, he said the artists came from “tiny independent labels, (each) a one-person shop.”

At Idful, with partners Brian Deck and Daniel Sonis, Wood recorded and produced works by Tortoise, Red Red Meat, The Jesus Lizard, Eleventh Dream Day, Loud Lucy, and many others. Wood said that now, in 2024, the music business is different than it was during the exciting thrust of 1990s Chicago.

“Bands do not stay here,” Wood says of Seagrass Studios, explaining that most often, out-of-town artists do Airbnb. “Sometimes, I just get stuff to mix, or I might go where the band is, since it’s cheaper for one person to travel than a whole band.”

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