The Wesley Willis interviews: The Howards frontman Matt Berglind
Object Permanence by Leor Galil
One of the challenges of attempting to track down anyone who was the subject of a Wesley Willis song is many of those folks were not public personalities when Willis originally released those songs. The bands Willis praised in song are a little easier to find—sort of. I managed to track down Matt Berglind, who fronted The Howards, the subject of a song on Willis’s Double Door album. But attempting to find The Howards’ music online proved elusive. Discogs has listings for two of their four releases—a full-length CD titled Called In Sick and a ten-inch record called Pretty / Ugly, but not their 1991 EP or a subsequent single, which Berglind mentioned to me in an email.
Berglind played alongside guitarist Jim Castillo, drummer Keith Houghteling, bassist Mike Lesch, guitarist-trumpeter Dave Winer, and saxophonist Dave Smith. They concocted a surreal, punky post-blues whose songs lurched in unusual directions, sometimes incorporating bits of rumba rhythms and ska tempos. When I first spoke to Berglind, I told him about my trouble tracking down any digital versions of The Howards’ music, and he later emailed me a YouTube playlist of some of their material. All the songs were uploaded about a month ago and all have fewer than 100 plays, and this digital document serves as a great example of the variety of music that emerged in Wicker Park’s eclectic scene during the early ‘90s. Which is one of the joys of pursuing this Wesley Willis song project: I’m learning a lot more about the breadth and depth of the alternative era.
Below is my conversation with Berglind; it’s been lightly edited and condensed.
How'd y'all form?
Matt Berglind: We met in the late '80s through some mutual friends. We wanted to start a ska band, initially. That wasn't our forte or anything. We would do, like, tango songs, or country songs, or rumbas and blues songs. It was all this postmodern melange, I guess. The different styles were the point. But we were just guys from the city; a couple north-siders, a couple south-siders, who got together and had similar interests. It was a funky and diverse type of band that we put together. And a fun band.
What part of the city are you from?
I'm from the south side, the drummer was from the south side—Beverly. The guitar player and the bass player were from the northwest side; they went to Lane Tech. And then Dave [Winer] was from Lincolnwood, I want to say, or Evanston, one of those two. We were mostly city kids.
That's from one tip of the city to the other.
Right? We got smooshed together in Wicker Park, pretty much.
What attracted you to Wicker Park in the late '8os?
Affordability. Affordability primarily. In the late '80s and early '90s, we were part of the problem, 'cause we were the gentrifiers. When we moved there, it was all about, honestly, rent and affordability. But it was also—and maybe it's a little grandiloquent to say it was—like, New York in the '70s, or Berlin in the late '20s and early '30s. But it was a fun place to be—obviously, with types like Wesley walkin' around. Just a super creative and fun place to be. A little bit dangerous, I guess, but there was a lot of creative energy in Wicker Park and Ukrainian Village—and in Bucktown, somewhat, to a lesser extent back then.
How did that energy and creative energy influence the direction of your own music?
Well, that's a great question. We were polyglots. So we would go to a lot of shows at the [Empty] Bottle, Phyllis' [Musical Inn], and places like that, and absorb all the different types of styles that were being played then. It wasn't like there was one sound coming out of Chicago. It wasn't just the Eleventh Dream Day sound, or The Handsome Family sound. It was a whole bunch of different styles. And that really interested us. We loved the band Shrimp Boat, so we'd go to see a lot of the Shrimp Boat shows. There was so much diversity with regards to the music, it wasn't just one style, and that really appealed to us.
I found a Tribune story in which you praise Shrimp Boat and The Coctails. Your eclectic taste is interesting.
Yeah. If you heard us, Leor, you'd probably be like, "What, they're like a blues band." I always thought I was Howlin' Wolf. Of course, that was completely immodest and completely inaccurate, I could never be anything like Howlin; Wolf. But we brought in all these different styles, like ska. So you sort of take Howlin' Wolf and ska—it doesn't make any sense, but we tried.
You mentioned ska not being your forte. What was your forte prior to starting The Howards?
When we started, my thing was I wanted to start a ska band. Maybe I was into The Specials or English Beat or something. But what we quickly learned is our guitar player, who is a really good guitar player, he was more of a blues guitar player. So we naturally shifted our sound. A lot of this happened organically. Now I can look back and say, "Well, the diversity of the styles of music that we played were the point of The Howards." But, when we were doing it, it was literally someone bringing in an idea for a song that would be a rumba or... almost like a jazz song. Or a surf song, for example, which was enjoying some sort of renaissance back then as well. So somebody would bring a surf song, we'd play a surf song.
As I said, the diversity was the point. It was almost like a postmodern approach to music, where we would take this style, and this style, and this style, and this style. I think that made it a little bit hard for The Howards to differentiate themselves in a way, because you wouldn't say, "OK, I'm going to see this band and they play 'X' type of music." You would go to see The Howards and you would see ten different styles of music.
Our songs were kind of weird 'cause they were long. I remember one time we were playing at the Bottle, and somebody came to see us, and they asked, "Are The Howards on yet?" The doorman said, "Yeah, they're on now, and they're on their fifth 25-minute song." We were a different band, definitely.
You played the Bottle, where else did y'all play out?
All over. Wesley saw us at the Metro; we played the Metro once or twice, maybe. We always tried to play Lounge Ax—that was the big one. We were one of the first bands to play at the Bottle, that opening weekend at the Bottle. At the end, we went on tour, we came back, and settled into a quasi-residency at Phylis' Musical Inn. Shrimp Boat had done that for a while. Souled American was sort like that—they only played at Phyllis' when they played in Chicago. Once a month we pretty much played Phyllis', and we became really comfortable only playing there like once a month. We drew crowds, we had bands open for us that we liked. It was a real comfortable situation for us, and a very fun situation for us.
Who were some your peers around that time? You mentioned all these other bands in your field of vision, but who got what The Howards were about?
We loved this band called Kingsize, which is the same name as the studio over on Western Avenue—they opened for us a lot. [Editor's note: Kingsize cofounder Dave Trumfio played in The Pulsars, The Mekons, and Ashtray Boy.] They're gone too. But we hung out a lot with the Phyllis' crowd a little bit. Crackpot was a band we played with quite a bit. We had a whole bunch of shows with The Handsome Family early on, when they were getting started before they moved out of Chicago. And they were really great people. Dave Smith, the saxophone player in The Flavor Channel—[he and] Dave Winer played in a band called The Baltimores. We hung out a lot with the Phyllis' crowd, pretty much.
Dave Smith, he also recorded on that 10-inch [Pretty / Ugly]?
Yeah, he did.
The name The Howards, what's the significance?
Well, it was sort of the El—that was an influence on it. We were looking for a name, we wanted something catchy and simple like The Smiths. I didn't like very elaborate band names, so we were looking for something pretty simple. But it was the El—must've been riding the El that day, and we were looking for something simple.
The reason I reached out was Wesley. How'd you first come across him?
Well, a couple ways. Gradually and suddenly, right? I'd heard Wesley before as an artist, I want to say in the late '80s. I remember him going around places, and so I had heard of him.
The Howards lived in a house all together—we lived in a house, a bungalow, underneath a billboard on Wood Street, like Wood and Webster, in the middle of nowhere, 'cause we could practice really loud. We were the only house on the block, and we lived under a billboard. All of us were at home one night, and under the influence of something, probably, and someone brought home a Wesley CD. Playing it, I didn't know who was being played—so this was probably '92 or '93. We found it pretty funny, initially.
I think that's probably a lot of peoples' entrees, maybe they laugh a little bit about some of it, because of the repetitiveness of it—duplication is a better word than repetitiveness. But also that sort of funny, melodic REM track that he sung a lot of his songs to, that sort of jangly, rhythmic track that he sang to.
We were all thinking, like, "Man, what's going on here?" I don't think I'd seen him around, but I think, at that point, we saw him everywhere. I mean, he was one of the people that made the whole Wicker Park thing fun and interesting. So he would come into Phyllis’, or he'd come into the Bottle, and he'd do the "bump on my head thing," with the big bag full of stuff. We'd just see him around—Gold Star, Rainbo, wherever. It's very easy to talk to him because he's approaching you, peddling his wares, right?
The whole social aspect of Wesley was fascinating. Sometimes if you're in a bad mood, or you talked to him the night before, you didn't feel like talking to him, but he'd sort of talk to you anyway. So we'd see him all over. I don't remember seeing him at the show at the Metro, but it's always a point of pride for us—he's such an unreliable narrator when it comes to numbers, I'm sure we didn't have 500 people at our show at Metro. But, yeah, that's how we ran into him. We'd see him everywhere, and he sort of became, like, I don't know if you're familiar with the tamale guy or the bread lady; there's a whole bunch of folks who were basically entrepreneurs in the neighborhood selling stuff the sort of pastiche of Wicker Park.
Do you remember the nature of your conversations? Do you remember much of what you shared together?
He talked a lot about selling stuff. The conversations were elliptical a lot, and a little bit hard to follow sometimes. He was a really nice guy and very sweet guy. But also, he'd talk about stuff that would happen to him on the bus—something bad happened to him on the bus, or somebody mistreated him on the bus. Or he had a thing about the cops. There was a lot of stuff about the cops that he'd talk about a lot. And a lot of times that was the sort of nature of the conversations.
He'd ask where we were going or what was playing a lot. The conversations never got really deep. The one thing I do regret, he would ask if I wanted to buy a picture, and I never knew Wesley well enough to have him give me something like a picture. But, as an artist, I thought he was fantastic. Those line drawings—the ballpoint pen on the poster-board—just fantastic drawings. They were beautiful, right? But I never bought one because it always seemed to me that the five or six bucks I had in my pocket, it was more important to buy a couple Budweisers than it was to buy a picture from Wesley. When I think about Wesley, that's what I think about, is those great drawings and how talented he was as a visual artist.
Given how he was a part of your world in Wicker Park—and part of that entire universe—how did that connection to Wesley change over the course of time that he was in your world?
We stopped seeing a lot of him. He kind of disappeared for a while. I want to say, like, 95ish. I didn't see him for a long time. I don't know where he was. You might have a better sense. I feel like I didn't see him for a long stretch of time. And then after our band broke up, I basically stopped going to shows and stuff like that—so I didn't see a lot of him after, say, 95. Do you know if he left for a while or was gone for a while?
Those specifics I don't know, but I'm hoping to learn more as I do this. There's a few documentaries about him. I've seen Joyrides; it's been a few years since I watched that. This project, I hope, will give me a better sense of the timeline of his life.
He might've gotten into a different scene for a while, just went to different places. I think, at that point, The Fiasco was playing too. Geographically, he might've been—I don't know if The Fiasco was in Wicker Park, but that might've been different too. I feel like, for a long stretch, I didn't see him.
I can't even remember the last time I saw him. It didn't really grow, it was always sort of [an] "I'm running into him" type of relationship. He'd come to our shows on occasion and he wouldn't stay the whole time, and then he'd sort of duck out the back. Our relationship, it stayed pretty acquaintance-like.
You mentioned the song in passing, regarding the numbers of attendees at your Metro show. What did you guys think about the song when you heard it?
We felt a little bit like outsiders on the scene a little bit, because we were a little bit different. We weren't particularly connected to the scene except for Dave and Dave—they played with a lot of bands. It felt, we got played on XRT on Johnny Mars's show, the Big Beat, and that was very validating for us—some of the other local folks played us, and I think we had some of the college towns, they played us. But it was validating to have Wesley do a song about us. Maybe that was the point—we should've broken up at that point, right? It wasn't gonna get any better than that. But it did sort of say, "OK, well, we did make our mark on history. There's a Wesley Willis song about us." So that's funny that you ask that question, but it did feel, in a way, validating, about what we were doing, and people [were] paying attention. I always joked that we had more people at our show than The Flaming Lips show in a Wesley Willis song.
Why'd you break up?
Internecine things. Some guys wanted to go in a different direction, I was probably a little imperious about what direction I wanted to go in. It's a typical band thing; such a hard relationship. There's all sorts of creative people getting together with all sorts of visions, and it just amazes me that any type of enterprise like a rock band lasts longer than three or four years. We lasted six or seven or something. We did have a 20th anniversary show in 2016—20th anniversary of our breakup. At any rate, we wanted to go in different directions or some personal conflict, any type of similar band type of situation... it was people going in different directions pretty much.
We broke up on stage though. We did break up on stage before The Replacements did. [Editor's note: The Replacements broke up July 4, 1991.] And it was probably nastier than The Replacements, when The Replacements broke up onstage—it's just that there wasn't 20,000 people there.
Given the time that has passed—given where your life has progressed to now, and given how it had been a few years since you'd seen Wesley—what do you think about Wesley and what he means to your life now?
I guess it's the visual art thing. I think that's how he's enriched my life. I'm a big fan of that type of art—before Wesley I remember an artist in Chicago named Lee Godie, who is a woman who, not too dissimilar to Wesley, would do portraits of people on Michigan Avenue, and give them to them, or sell them to them. She was famous; Lee Godie, if you're familiar with her at all, her art is in galleries all over the world. And, you know, Bill Traylor drawings, I love Bill Traylor drawings.
I think in a way—it's certainly the fond memories of Wicker Park, Wicker Park in the 1990s, and that sort of bohemia. But I really think about his artwork and how much I enjoyed his artwork. I think I have a poster downstairs. So it's fond memories and definitely, like I said—and you agreed with me—is the importance of him as an artist.
This is the third interview in a series focused on people who’ve appeared in Wesley Willis songs. The first two participants were The Flavor Channel's Matt Heaton and former Q101 on-air personality James VanOsdol.