Harry and the Potters at The Moving Castle in Chicago, July 10th 2010
Harry and the Potters – July 10, 2010 – The Moving Castle, Chicago
Although currently on their first world tour, the immense underground popularity of Harry and the Potters has not affected the band’s willingness to play unostentatious venues. This last Saturday found Joe and Paul DeGeorge, the founding fathers of the Wizard Rock movement, at The Moving Castle in Chicago. The Moving Castle, in the Logan’s Square neighborhood, is a blue house at the end of an alley behind Ronny’s Bar on California Ave. By day it is home to 5 young people, by night it is a venue for screenings, workshops, and punk shows.
Harry and the Potters began their acoustic set in The Moving Castle’s small living room, surrounded by approximately 60 fans, surprisingly few of whom appeared to be below college age. Even at the start of the show, the heat in the living room was already above 90 degrees. Opening with “I Am a Wizard”, a classic about Harry finally receiving his Hogwarts Letter, Harry and the Potters proceeded to play acoustic guitar and glockenspiel (and briefly tenor sax) adaptations of many favorites, including “The Human Hosepipe”, “Wizard Chess”, “My Wizard Scar Still Burns For You”, and “The Missing Arm Of Viktor Krum”. They played a stunning five rounds of their signature live show sing-and-dance-along song, “Hagrid”. Also of note, were two newer songs, to one of which the only lyrics were “Dudley! Let me play Playstation!”, and the other a stirring rock ballad about the death of Hedwig, which ended in a, “TriWizard Tournament of voices”, sung by the crowd. The show, peppered with Joe DeGeorge’s hilariously awful Hogwarts jokes (“Where do puppies go to school to learn magic? Dogwarts.”) ended in a rousing chorus of “Save Ginny Weasley”, the band’s most popular song.
The DeGeorge brothers performed with amazing enthusiasm considering the 95 degree heat, their performance in Davenport, Iowa earlier that day, and Joe DeGeorge’s voice sounding very shot at the beginning of the show. The intimacy of the tiny show, coupled with the fact that the volume of the voices of the crowd were evenly matched with the voices of the DeGeorge brothers, made the show feel more like a wonderful and nerdtastic houseparty/singalong with friends, than a world tour show involving a band as well known as Harry and the Potters. It was one of the most memorable and fun shows I have attended in years. Seeing Harry and the Potters is always spectacularly worth the effort.
- Meg Dolan
To learn more about Harry and the Potters, please visit: http://harryandthepotters.com
To learn more about The Moving Castle, please visit: http://www.myspace.com/themovingcastle
To see photographs that weren’t taken on a Point-and-Shoot in a 95 degree crowded living room and are much more aesthetically pleasing, please visit: http://www.megdolan.com
