Ahead of their Highland Park fundraiser livestream tomorrow night, we spoke with Billy and Chloé Mendel about reclaiming ‘space In the community’
“When are you going to have all these awesome musicians come together in a room and play with a common passion to heal and help people and just have a great show?” Mendel says. “It’s going to be unique and special. Just the names alone — they’re all world-class musicians. Even if it didn’t have a charitable goal, I’d be watching it too.”
“Our main thing is just to put on a real positive and unifying show while raising funds for the community,” Corgan adds. “After talking to so many people who have been affected and were there — people who work with us, members of their families, people in local businesses, friends of ours who are doctors and were a block away, so they rushed in to help treat people — and hearing those stories again and again and again, you feel like ‘Gosh, I really want to do something.
“Highland Park is such an influential and affluent community that it might just be Highland Park that finally tips this debate publicly and gets some real change going with legislation,” Corgan says. “This is a very liberal and progressive community. These issues really matter to this community, and they mattered to this community before this horrible event. I think the level of motivation here can move things in those directions and really sort of step up.
With Lollapalooza kicking off a day later in Chicago, Mendel and Corgan know that they could’ve made Together and Together Again into a significantly larger production. They could’ve pulled some strings both locally and within the music industry to make it a pre-Lollapalooza spectacular, but a modern-day Live Aid didn’t feel right for the occasion.
“The beauty is [Madame ZuZu’s] is made to be intimate, and I think the intimacy, in this particular instance, is perfect,” Corgan says. “It’ll be a warm, inviting atmosphere that we’re going to take to hopefully the world — or at least whoever wants to watch and hopefully donate. I think we’ve all seen the big concert with all the A-listers, whereas this is really a representation of this community. There’s a different sort of vibe up here. It’s a little laconic, a little bucolic.
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