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Califone performs "Spider's House"

Perhaps Tim Rutili cuts the perfect figure of what an underground rocker ought to aspire to. The unassuming, bearded, bespectacled gent is an artist who mastered surviving and parlayed it into thriving. Rutili didn’t hit it big for a minute like contemporaries in the 1990s. He made it through deaths, the rise and fall of “alternative rock” and the winds of changing taste. He continued to focus on honing his craft, and the result is his growth as an artist. Now leading the genre-defying collective Califone, he sits at the front of American rock underground’s rank and file.

Rutili got his musical start in the late 1980s Chicago rock combo Friends of Betty, along with bassist Glynis Johnson and multi-instrumentalist Ben Massarella. The band’s sound presaged the wave of Chicago bands to follow. The city would steadily gain a reputation as an underground rock center with acts like the powerpopping Material Issue and hard glam arbiters Urge Overkill (whose Blackie Onassis/aka John Rowan was formerly Betty’s drummer) exhibiting punk-rooted and informed approaches. Rutili and bandmates, however, started taking things in a different direction entirely by forming Red Red Meat, with a sound owing more to the stripped, guttural blues rock that the Rolling Stones perfected two decades prior than to anything else.

Yet just as Red Red Meat was finding success around 1992—including the release of a self-titled debut and a supporting slot for stratospherically ascendant fellow Chicagoans Smashing Pumpkins—there was trouble well beyond the usual band politics and infighting. Johnson, who had been romantically involved with Rutili, had also been plagued by illness and it forced her out of the band. She died that November from complications of AIDS.

Instead of folding up Red Red Meat, the band soldiered on with the notion of Johnson’s spirit guiding them. In 1994 they issued Jimmywine Majestic on favored indie imprint Sub Pop Records. Other releases followed but RRM ended in 1997, closing out with the fuzzy roots rock of There’s a Star Above the Manger Tonight (Sub Pop).

Beginning a solo endeavor in 1998, Rutili began recording off the cuff songs on his computer. A pair of EPs followed and so did some of the usual suspects, namely Massarella and Brian Deck from RRM, and another band was born. Califone’s Roomsound represented a culmination of the sculpted, blues collaging and reimagined Americana that Red Red Meat had worked toward but by their end couldn’t fully realize. The concept for 2004’s Heron King Blues came to Rutili from a recurring dream he had since boyhood about a humanoid bird beast that turned out to be a druid god. The result is a beautifully fractured, psych-blues languor of surreal imagery and wordplay, snaking guitars and layer upon layer of varied, textured sounds.

Following up a near-masterpiece like Heron King Blues was no easy task, but with 2006’s acclaimed Roots & Crowns (Thrill Jockey) Califone managed to best themselves. The current lineup features Rutili, long-termer Massarella, Jim Becker and Joe Adamik drinking from the same waters of previous efforts but refining the sounds even further. They pull together for an abstract synthesis of delta and mountain music, mini Brian Wilson and Wrecking Crew epics (“Spider’s House”), jagged funk, ethereal balladry (covering Psychic TV’s “Orchids) and found electronic snatches that coalesce into an elegantly structured set of songs rife with terrific minutiae. This is Califone’s finest musical achievement. While Heron King was inspired by dreams, Roots & Crowns is a soundtrack set to the varied hours of sleep’s story sequence, from the bleak visions of anguish and fear to the joy of hopeful vistas and all that happens in between.

To benefit Califone’s widescreen sound in a live setting, the supporting act on this tour, Bitter Tears, will provide a horn section for Rutili and company’s set. Califone will be back home on July 14 for a slot on the feted Pitchfork Music Fest in Chicago, playing among the cream of underground acts. It’s fitting that Rutili and Califone will be sharing the stage with the likes of Sonic Youth, Slint, Yoko Ono, Cat Power and Iron & Wine. This is the company they have earned.

Califone plays Mohawk Place this Sunday, June 3, with Bitter Tears and Buffalo’s The Stay Lows.