Rick Potts at Lampo Previewed

Gapers Block discusses this upcoming Chicago show.

Who’s doing what to whom, now? Well, Rick Potts, he of the esteemed Los Angeles Free Music Society (LAFMS) will play playing THIS SATURDAY at Lampo (216 W. Chicago, 2nd Floor) at 9 p.m. $12 at the door.

Potts is a member of the hippest lot on the west coast throughout the ’70s (and beyond), the LAFMS, a group that preciently sucked up gargantuan chunks of avant-garde weirdness, modern classical discipline, pop-cultural flippancy for stodginess, and a love for learning to do things in the most unintuitive way, and mashed them all together into a bundle of color and sound whose reverberations are still being felt. The core of some of the craziest Japanese sound of the late ’70s and ’80s pledged their allegiance to LAFMS, and today, scenes in San Francisco, Portland (who now host longtime LAMFS’ers Smegma), and elsewhere show strong traces of the then-unheard combination of righteous pursuit of new sound with tongue-lolling cartoon-mallet-to-the-head craziness.