The Pravda Records empire spreads far and wide throughout the northwest corner of Wrigleyville, from the label’s almost luxurious corporate offices on Southport to an almost spacious retail store on Clark Street beneath Cabaret Metro. Pravda’s most successful and longest running group is the Service, a hard-livin’, hard-rockin’ outfit whose members include front man and songwriter Rick Mosher, keyboardist (and Pravda capo) Kenn Goodman, and drummer John Smith. The band’s genesis goes back eight years, when all three attended Northern Illinois University in De Kalb. The first time Goodman laid eyes on Mosher, the latter was having some trouble with a dorm drinking fountain: intentionally or not, he was drooling water out of the side of his mouth. “I have a drinking problem,” he explained, and the two have been together ever since.
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Recently there’s been talk that the Service was breaking up, and indeed their latest series of local club dates was originally billed as a farewell tour. But now the news is that bassist Gary-Elvis Schepers has left the group and Mosher, Goodman, and Smith will carry on with a fill-in bassist. So the farewell tour has turned into just another display of the Service’s trademark mix of blistering guitar attack and alcoholic revelry. Its next stop is this Wednesday, as they headline a Rock Against Depression Night at the Cabaret Metro.
Plastered, the band did its best to rip the club apart that evening. Smith, with just a bass drum, snare, and cymbal, drummed swimmingly and grinned broadly behind sunglasses and a straw hat. Goodman, with a nifty tartan plaid bass, tried to keep a straight face as Mosher went all out. Amid numerous cracks about Rockford (the band knows the town well from its De Kalb days), Mosher turned “Joe Shanahan” into “Robin Zander,” for the Rockford native and lead singer of Cheap Trick. During a searing cover of Hasil Adkins’s rockabilly classic “Chicken Walk,” Mosher failed miserably to provoke a chicken-walk contest in the audience, but saved the moment by doing his own version. And during a stirring anthem to “Jagermeister,” the syrupy liqueur favored by the band, Mosher made a valiant but vain attempt to throw up onstage. Undeterred, he swaggered to the front of the stage, pulling the brim of his Jagermeister cap down over his eyes. “I don’t just wear this hat,” he told the audience. “I live it.” The set ended with Mosher flat on his back, so disabled that Goodman had to operate his wah-wah pedal. The audience, awed, brought the band out for an encore, an unusual event for an unknown opening band playing its second gig.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photos/Sheila Sachs.
