NIGHTCLUB JITTERS: ESG IN MILWAUKEE

A MEETING OF LEGENDS

Last Friday, I flew to Milwaukee to see ESG play a benefit for and at the Bay View venue Cactus Club. It was the first time I had flown anywhere to see a show. It was also the most amount of money I had spent on a concert ticket by a fairly large margin. But I had to be there. The fact that these two entities were coming together, the fact that the legendary Bronx family band ESG were playing a show in Milwaukee at a small venue I’ve been coming to for over 20 years… The whole thing seemed too improbable to miss. 

It’s hard to figure out what to explain first: the club or the band. Both have played a role in my life. Cactus Club has been around since the 1950s, but it turned into an indie rock venue in the ‘90s. I started going there in the early 2000s. Even before I stepped foot in the club, I knew the reputation: it was the home of some of the first White Stripes shows outside of Detroit; it hosted early career gigs for everyone from Queens of the Stone Age to Death Cab for Cutie. No doubt, it was a room for rockers. 

Since my first evening at Cactus, an all-ages record release party for local garage heads The Mistreaters, I’ve played dozens of shows at the venue and attended a lot more. Throughout a personal timeline filled with failure, self-hatred, and humiliation, Cactus Club has always been there for me. I’ve forged a relationship with many employees, too—probably none as important as my collaboration with sound engineer Alex “Pekka” Hall. Pekka has joined me on many tours. There is a story to tell about a particularly memorable support run trailing Public Enemy’s bus across Canada in his Toyota Corolla, but that is not a story for today. 

Over the years, Cactus has expanded its scope, which only turbocharged when employee Kelsey Kauffman became manager of the club in 2016. (Kelsey and I went to high school together. I’m telling you, this shit runs deep.) She bought the club in February of 2020—about as unfortunate a timing as possible. Kauffman and the entire Cactus crew weathered the pandemic with resilience and imagination. They are now working on becoming fully ADA compliant, which is no easy feat for a building that is over 140 years old. They booked ESG as part of a larger initiative to raise funds.

I’m not sure if this is a cool way to communicate the following sentiment, but I’m still going to do it because it’s the truth: ESG remains one of the coolest bands of all time. There’s no real way around it, people. They are a singular entity whose music is a testament to the power of elimination. Around the time that DJs and dancers in The Bronx realized that the instrumental break was the sickest section of any given record, the Scroggins sisters were isolating the energy of a James Brown bridge for the duration of a song. ESG’s minimal version of funk ran parallel to both hip hop and punk rock, and the band interfaced with both worlds in their own way. 

There’s all the boilerplate lore: Formed in 1978; discovered by no waver Ed Bahlman of 99 Records at a talent show; beloved by Tony Wilson, who co-released an EP with Factory Records in 1981; and sampled by pretty much everyone. A staggering amount of rap and dance producers have flipped ESG to the point where, in the ‘90s, the group put out a record called Sample Credits Don't Pay Our Bills. (I don’t not understand the sentiment when producers talk about shit like “sample snitching,” but I would also love to see one of those heads look Renee Scroggins in the eye and tell them that they have used her band’s music without giving them royalties.) ESG were beloved by post-punkers of the 2000s, though the band probably doesn’t get dropped enough nowadays. I think the first time I heard their name was actually in an early interview with Liars, who coincidentally happened to sample ESG on their first record. Angus Andrew of Liars: “We’d love to play with them, if only to clean their instruments and pour them drinks backstage."

So, anyway. I took a plane to Milwaukee and my friend Willy picked me up and we worked on music for a bit and ate cheeseburgers and ice cream and then we made it to Cactus Club. Christreater—a former bartender at Cactus and the former singer of The Mistreaters who now owns a bar and a restaurant in town and recently went on tour with Jack White as his opening DJ—was spinning records. I saw a few people whose bands I played shows with over 15 years ago. I looked at the same bar, the same back room, the same stage, and the same stickers on the wall that I have been looking at, on and off, since I was 16. But headlining that night, after room-warming sets from Diamond Life (local Italo disco) and Clickbait (Chicago dance punk), was not an indie rock band or a local rapper or a breakcore DJ. It was ESG.

ESG has broken up and reformed several times. It might seem tedious to do a roll call, but for any act that has pushed past the four-decade mark, it feels sort of necessary. That night, the band featured two Scroggins sisters—guitarist and lead vocalist Renee and percussionist Marie—plus Nicole Nicholas, whom Renee gave birth to three days after the band played an opening show for Public Image Ltd. in California. Rounding things out: Nicole’s brother Nicholas on percussion and hype, and Mike Gio, the only real outsider, on drums. The band set up their gear and fairly unceremoniously started their set with the slow-burner “Come Away.” The small room filled up. 

Look, when you are dealing with a “legacy act,” you never know what kind of show you are going to get. You could get a meandering, under-rehearsed thing or you could get a tight set of hits, performed with an unbroken stream of spirit. That night, you got the latter. A knee injury kept Renee Scroggins seated, but her voice was as good as ever, bratty and soulful and perfectly reverberated by Pekka. Nicholas made up for any lost energy with a Bez-like performance (the Factory Records connections run deep). Gio, the ringer drummer, played the band’s signature urgent pocket and precarious around-the-kit fills with an uncanny accuracy. (I wasn’t expecting costumes. Nicholas and Marie put on alien masks during the eternal “U.F.O.” and a toucan mask got rocked during “Moody.”)

At one point during the show, I thought back to all the music that I’ve seen on that Cactus Club stage, both in real life and virtually, from Wolf Eyes to AyooLii, and I started to feel a twisted sense of temporal vertigo. Was that really them? The concert was both surreal and ordinary—just another Friday night in Milwaukee, watching ESG at the local indie rock bar. The odd specificity… I’m getting loose here, and I’m not exactly sure what I’m on about—read those last nine words with a British accent—but I guess what I'm trying to get at is that by the time Renee Scroggins stood up for the set’s final song, the punk-funk classic “Erase You,” I stopped thinking about anything at all. The beat goes on!