Rockers watch your back!

For the second time in as many years, the City Council has backed off on plans to force Chicago concert promoters to get prohibitively expensive licenses before throwing events, an ordinance that would dampen the vitality of the scruffy independent music scene we know and love.

Under the scrapped set of rules, as I understand them, any Joe like me would have to purchase a $500 to $2000 license and purchase $300,000 worth of disaster insurance before throwing a single rock show anywhere in the city. Like fast rock 'n roll in cheap dives? Expect a lot less of it if this law ever passes, as many of the small fries who put these shows together just wouldn't be able to scrape together that kind of lettuce or bother with the headache.

This latest City Council retreat notwithstanding, these proposed rules likely aren't going away, and neither should the voices of protest. As the Reader's Ben Joravsky explains in the article linked to above, the ordinance will now go back to committee. Daley, who seems increasingly power-hungry and irascible, will demand action, seeing as he promised to do something, anything in the wake of the E2 fire. Rather than get his fingernails dirty with the actual details of the situation- that no new law is needed, only enforcement of laws already on the books, that other cities are killing themselves to get the free publicity a healthy indie rock scene brings with it-he and his lackeys in the Council will surely attempt to ram a similarly bad ordinance through in the coming months.

This is just one tiny, tiny example of how true city bosses, to whom voters and council members have ceded their power, function. Grand schemes occupy these bosses' daily schedules, not the delicate tapestry of the city's neighborhoods and scattered communities. If a boss says publicly he's going to do something, no matter how unnecessary, it must be so. Ego and the politics of power demand it.

The moral? If you care about this issue, be vigilant. Sometimes these fake-outs have the combined effect of dissipating and confusing the opposition. And if you don't like the way this is being handled, remember that there are scores of other constituencies that Daley is treating the same way.