Documenting Doo-wop
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Raised in and around Chicago, Pruter, 52, got hooked on rock ‘n’ roll as a teenager in the mid-50s, listening to the new sounds on WLS. But during his college years in the early 60s he gravitated toward the more provocative sounds of rhythm and blues on WVON. A weekly oldies program hosted by legendary DJ Herb Kent clued him in to the music of the previous decade that he’d missed listening to WLS: doo-wop. Pruter was obsessed with black music by the time the formative rock press–magazines like Rolling Stone and Crawdaddy–began publishing. “The way those magazines treated rhythm and blues really struck me,” he says.
After earning his BA and MA in history from Roosevelt University, Pruter began writing about Chicago R & B for a variety of record collecting fanzines, including Goldmine, with the idea that he would collect these articles to form his book. “I was a combination journalist and detective,” says Pruter, who later became Goldmine’s R & B editor (and contributed occasionally to the Reader). “I had to find all of these people and dig up facts.”
Not to be confused with the post-Grateful Dead Furthur Festival that comes to the New World Music Theatre on June 30, Even Furthur is a three-day outdoor rave that will be held in rural Wisconsin this weekend. Organized in part by Chicagoan and dance-music writer David J. Prince–who’s moving to Los Angeles to chronicle Timothy Leary’s impending expiration for a book called Design for Dying–the annual event will include techno, ambient, house, and drum and bass DJs from all over the country and, in the case of the terrific Mixmaster Morris, from England. There’ll also be psychedelic light shows, some rock bands–such as Poi Energy Inc. and Low–and plenty of Herbal Ecstacy. Call 509-6334 for information and directions or hook up with the Web site at http://taz.hyperreal.com/raves/mw/mwravescalendar.
