It’s a chilly Monday night in early March, and the wind nearly drowns out the muted singing emanating from inside the towering Epiphany Episcopal Church on South Ashland Avenue. But as one passes through the heavy wooden doors and proceeds down the cracked stone hallway, the chorus inside quickly grows more audible. Before long, the voices of 20 or so people can be heard rising in unison: “When I was a young boy, my mama said to me.”
While it’s not unusual to hear a choir rehearsing inside a church, it’s far more striking to hear a ragtag group belting out Wreckless Eric’s “(I’d Go the) Whole Wide World,” a song from the singer’s 1968 debut that is probably best known as the tune Will Ferrell’s IRS auditor croons to Maggie Gyllenhaal’s baker in “Stranger Than Fiction.”
But the Blue Ribbon Glee Club, which first got together in a cramped Bucktown attic in April 2007, is not the average choir; the group, whose roster can range from 24 to 30 members, fills its joyous sets solely with punk and indie rock standards. At this particular rehearsal, the singers, each armed with a blue hymnal/lyric book, work through rambunctious versions of Sleater-Kinney’s “Words and Guitar” (which, performed a cappella, contains a whole lot of the former and none of the latter), the Clash’s “Spanish Bombs” and an endearingly sloppy take on Marc Bolan’s T.Rex classic, “Children of the Revolution.” The group, a mix of amateur and performing musicians, doesn’t appear overly concerned with perfection; on this particular night, the rough edges frequently make the tunes sound like aural folk art.
A few days later, as a half-dozen members arrive at a bar/concert venue that is under construction in Logan Square to discuss the group and its music, the conversation takes on the same tone as one of its frenetic rehearsals. The singers crack jokes, finish each other’s sentences and spin off into countless tangents. Still, over the course of an hour, the group members manage to divulge the inspiration behind the Glee Club’s formation (“The Langley School Music Project,” a collection of 1976-77 recordings by a Canadian children’s choir), the best part of performing for new audiences (“That knowing laugh when people first recognize” the song) and the difficulty inherent when two-dozen-plus hard-core music fans are forced to choose a new song for the crew’s growing repertoire (one person threatened to walk when another jokingly proposed that they tackle a Melissa Etheridge tune).
The group has performed a number of surreal shows in the past year, including a slot at Looptopia in Daley Plaza a few weeks after forming and a September stop at Mortified, a poetry event at the Green Mill. But the members almost universally agree that opening for The Swell Season (whose members Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova picked up a best song Oscar last month for “Falling Slowly”) in November — a show that ended with the two groups collaborating on a pair of Pixies’ covers — was particularly memorable.
“We were crammed in a small room in the basement [of the Vic Theatre] for seven hours and we got a little unruly,” recalls Billy Helmkamp. “We ended up sending Glen and Marketa a heart-shaped card saying we were sorry. It wasn’t until way later that we found out they weren’t even mad.”
BLUE RIBBON GLEE CLUB
Join the chorus
When: 10 p.m. Friday
Where: The Hideout, 1354 W. Wabansia Ave.
Price: $8; 866-468-3401
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