Format: Streaming video from Amazon Prime on basement television.
I think I’ve mentioned before that a lot of my musical tastes come from my older brothers. You pick up what you hear, naturally, and I grew up around a lot of prog rock and yacht rock from the ‘70s. What this means, though, is that the artists I discovered on my own are going to in many ways be much more important to me. Ike Reilly, and now the Ike Reilly Assassination, is one of those artists. I first heard him on the big Chicago alt-rock station, WXRT a couple of years after the release of his first album, Salesmen and Racists. I missed the name of the artist and had to call the station to find out who he was, and I’ve loved him ever since.
Ike (Michael) Reilly is one of those artists that has somehow managed to elude fame and popularity outside of a crop of dedicated fans. I have a fondness for songwriters who are storytellers more than anything else. There’s a lot of Tom Waits, Bob Dylan, Nick Cave, Woody Guthrie, and Warren Zevon in his work (as well as lesser known writers like Eef Barzelay, Freedy Johnston, and Dan Bern). He’s the type of artist who, if you ask 1000 people if they have heard of him, 999 will look at you with their head cocked like a dog hearing a sound it doesn’t know. But that one person who does know him is going to be someone who knows their stuff. His fans include people like Penn Gilette, David Lowrey from Cracker, and fellow Libertyville, IL alum, Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello, who is also the film’s executive producer.
The film is less about why he never hit big and more about who he is, a sort of blue collar poet. His past jobs include hotel doorman and grave digger. His stories include digging the grave for his childhood friend (“Put a Little Love in it”) and being stiffed as a doorman by Donald and Ivana Trump (“Took it Lying Down”). It won’t be a shock to learn that Reilly is not a fan—no less a luminary than Stephen King said that one of the only good things to come out of Trump’s presidency was the protest music—with Reilly’s “Bolt Cutter” named as the example.
There are naturally a lot of parallels to other films about bands, both documentary and not, that can be drawn here. Searching for Sugar Man, Anvil! The Story of Anvil, and Almost Famous are the natural choices, but I am much more put in mind of I am Trying to Break Your Heart about fellow Illinois band Wilco pursuing success against huge difficulties. In Reilly’s case, a lot of those troubles weren’t just the bad luck of missing those golden ring opportunities, but also too much booze and too much time on the road. His partying cred comes from a real place—he’s got a song on the Chris Farley documentary because he knew Farley.
What comes across more than anything is that Ike Reilly, like most of us, is a man who is torn between wanting to love the world, love life, and love the people he is with, dreaming of the way the world should be and being supremely and righteously angry at the way the world actually is. He's a blue collar stiff trying to figure out why the world isn’t fair and hurts so damn much all of the time, wondering where the next kick is coming from. And while the specifics of each song and the characters they are about aren’t our exact experiences, they are instantly and completely relatable. He’s been through the things he talks about.
The reality of Don’t Turn Your Back on Friday Night is that like Ike Reilly’s career, it should be something that makes him famous and probably won’t. And here’s the thing: that’s both a shame and exactly the right thing. It’s a shame because Ike Reilly is a true modern American poet who ought to be someone spoken in the same sentences with the musical greats of the last 25 years. But it’s also appropriate because Ike Reilly being a downtrodden underdog, singing about the way the world should be to an uncaring populace is what gives the man his power. And now, watching him perform with his kids only adds to this (and his sons sound like him).
If you’re not an Ike Reilly Assassination fan, you’re unlikely to pay the $6 to watch this right now. Eventually, hopefully, this will stream for free and you should watch it, and then you should buy some of his music. And more than that, you should tell other people to listen to him, because his music won’t make you feel less downtrodden by the world, but it will make you understand that there’s beauty in the world no matter where you are in it.
Why to watch Don’t Turn Your Back on Friday Night: Ike Reilly should be far more famous than he is.
Why not to watch: Your musical tastes suck.
