PART III
special? "And it's never the girls on the
cards," he guffaws. "You never get the girl
that you see in those pictures. Vegas looks
glamorous, but there's this whole other
side that people don't really think about.
Unless you've been there and experienced
it yourself. Unless you've had a three-day
bender and you leave with your dreams
just dashed into the desert, like buried out
in the desert. It is so brutal. Some times you
come away a winner. But most times, you
come away losing something, which
means that you probably lost a lot of shit.
Luckily, I was never a gambler."
In some ways, Urie is ahead of the
game. Most rockers go through their carnal
phase for most of their 20s, and only gradually enter their spiritual phase in their
early, post-partying 30s. But he's already
jettisoned most of his baser urges from his
system, he reckons. "I've always kind of
considered myself to be a spiritual person –
I've always looked for deeper meaning in
everything I've done," he self-assesses.
Usually, when Panic is on tour, he just goes
back to his hotel room after a gig and
watches movies. Every once in a while,
though, he'll wind up going out. And every
time, he gets taught a harsh life lesson.
"There was one time in Vegas where I
went to an after party," Urie recollects. "But
I got so ripping drunk, it was terrible. But I
definitely learned from that one – I ended
Continued from page 18
Mississippi Delta.
Pullman porters on IC trains to
Mississippi often delivered copies of the
African-American
newspaper,
the
Chicago Defender, which organized
"migrant clubs" and arranged group discounts for train fare northward. The first
wave of the "Great Migration" began with
World War I, and
between 1910 and
1920 the number of
black Chicagoans who
were
born
in
Mississippi increased
from 4,612 to 19,485.
The rise of the
blues recording industry in Chicago attracted many musicians,
and during the 1930s,
blues artists here who
claimed Mississippi
roots included Willie
Dixon,
Memphis
Minnie, Lil Green,
and Big Bill Broonzy.
During World War II
the need for factory
labor helped fuel a larger wave of migration, and between 1940 and 1950 some
150,000 Mississippians moved here.
Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Bo
Diddley, Jimmy Reed, Sunnyland Slim,
Emore James, Sonny Boy Williamson,
No. 2 (Rice Miller), Otis Rush, and
Magic Sam were among the many who
arrived in the 1940s and '50s and found
recording opportunities with Chess, Vee-
26 illinoisentertainer.com december 2013
up puking in a corner, and my friend and
some random other guy ended up carrying
me up to a hotel room and just throwing
me on the bed and going 'Alright – sleep it
off!' And I woke up 12 hours later, thinking
'What the hell did I do last night?' I felt like
such an asshole. So that didn't ever happen
again."
Hence the metaphors the composer
employed on Too Weird, where – in the song
"Nicotine" – a dangerous cigarette substance comes to represent an equally dangerous femme fatale. "Because anything
can be seen as addicting," he declares. "I've
been addicted to video games, I've been
addicted to girls, addicted to playing music
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