By Paula Salhany

For a long time, Ryan Butterfield has had the idea of putting together an underground rock concert featuring Art Institute employees’ bands.

“But it ended up always being like a lunch date that was never followed through,” he said.

“It was talked about in passing and a few people had talked about it seriously, but it just never got organized,” Butterfield, organizer of the concert and member of The Plods and Wonderloaf, said.

But now it’s going to happen.

Ten bands whose members are AIC employees will be playing a concert called “Don’t Quit Your Day Job” at the Beat Kitchen, Friday, Oct. 17 at 7 p.m.

Butterfield, who works as an art handler and installer in the Asian Art Department at AIC, said some of the bands would play together periodically. He speculated about how great it would be to get all the bands at AIC together for a big concert.

“We thought this concert would be a good idea because even though the Art Institute puts on an art show at Gallery 2 for employee artwork, some employees, like me, don’t do visual arts,” he said. “My art and creativity is through music and this is a way for us all to get together and show that.”

Ray Ramirez, art handler in the African/Amerindian Art department of AIC and member of both The Plods and Precious Blood, which can be classified as a chick band that requires big ears for hard-hitting lyrics, said he thought the sheer quantity of museum employees who are in the music scene was interesting.

“I’ve been to other museums around the world and I have never seen such a musical presence anywhere else,” he said.

Ramirez said it’s about time that the museum music scene was tapped. Eventually, he said, it was going to be discovered; there just needed to be someone like Butterfield to organize it.

Butterfield said it was not as hard as one might think to organize the show. Once word got out, he said, people kept coming up to him and asking if they could be in the line-up.

Overall, he said it took about two days to get everything set up. Butterfield said the bands’ individual styles are as eclectic as a concert can get. Everything from folk to Americana to psychobilly to blues will be represented.

Even the two bands Butterfield himself is in are quite different. The Plods is a power trio that combines metal and hard rock with the influences of old time rock and jazz. The sound comes out to be a mixture of hard rock and artsy punk.

On the other hand, Wonderloaf is, as Butterfield put it, a combination of Ween and early Beck with a folk twist.

All eleven bands will be playing on the stage at the Beat Kitchen in Belmont.

Sarah Guernsey, member of the band Naughty Candy and Production Coordinator of the AIC Publications Department, said Beat Kitchen will be a great place for all ten bands to play.

“It’s a nice stage, you’re kind of in the air and the place is set up with a bar in the front room and the concert all in the back,” she said. “This way it’s easier for people who really want to hear the music to do just that.”

Guernsey, who has played at Beat Kitchen before, said it’s not a cakewalk to get to play at the Beat Kitchen. Bands have audition sessions, interviews, and trial runs on off-nights during the week before the venue will book the band on a Friday or Saturday night.

Butterfield said the Beat Kitchen seemed like an ideal place to play this concert.

“It’s one of the better places to play around Chicago, and a lot of people know about it,” he said, and added that the biggest problem now is how to get all ten bands up on stage before they have to stop.

“We plan on having each band playing about a 25-minute set,” he said. “We’re starting at 7 p.m. and we’re planning on going till one or two in the morning.”

The idea of getting ten bands on stage before the night is over is not intimidating to Joe Kleeman, Mechanical Engineer at AIC and member of Los Gatos Diablos, a three-piece rockabilly band which has been together for about three years.

“We once played in a concert that put 30 bands on stage in 60 seconds,” he said. “Each band had about a two minute set. So it can be done.”

Kleeman said he thinks it will be interesting to play with so many different kinds of bands and that though it was not destiny per se that brought this concert together, he’s glad it’s happening.

Guernsey said she thinks it will be interesting to see who shows up to this concert. In the past when one or two AIC bands have played, the audience has included everyone from department heads to first year students.

Butterfield said he is looking forward to making this be the first annual AIC concert event. “We want this to grow to include student bands as well as employee bands,” he said. “We also know that we haven’t found all of the employee bands and eventually want to make this a bigger and better concert.”

Bands included in the line-up, in no particular order, are Tweed, Cooksie, Danger Adventure, Descendro Allegro, Los Gatos Diablos, The Mast-Head, Naughty Candy, The Plods, Precious Blood and Wonderloaf.