Sonic Youth released the live album Smart Bar Chicago 1985 on November 13, 2012, through their own Goofin’ Records. Its 14 tracks came from the band’s August 11, 1985, performance at Smart Bar in Chicago, Illinois, recorded by Rich Menning on four-track cassette. The show caught them touring behind Bad Moon Rising with a new drummer and early versions of songs that would reach their next studio album.
Steve Shelley had joined the group earlier in 1985. Bad Moon Rising, their second studio album, had been recorded before his arrival, making the Chicago set a chance to hear him playing material he hadn’t recorded in the studio. The concert drew heavily from that record, including “I Love Her All the Time” and “Ghost Bitch,” but followed its own running order. “Hallowe’en” and “Death Valley ’69” came before the pairing of “Intro” and “Brave Men Run (In My Family)” that opened the studio album. The recording preserves an early stage of Shelley’s work with the band’s existing songs.
Two selections looked ahead. “Secret Girl” and “Expressway to Yr Skull” were already part of the live set before their studio versions appeared on EVOL in 1986, the group’s first studio album with Shelley. The Chicago recording of “Expressway to Yr Skull” runs just over nine minutes, the longest track on the release. In that chronology, the concert provides a connection between the repertoire Shelley inherited and music he would help record for the follow-up.
It also preserved “Kat ’n’ Hat,” a previously unreleased live performance placed between “I’m Insane” and “Brother James.” That rarity gave listeners another reason to investigate a set largely built around songs available elsewhere in the catalog.
Turning the cassette into an album involved one of the musicians who had played the show. Shelley and engineer Aaron Mullan mixed the recording in 2011 at Echo Canyon West in New Jersey, and John Golden mastered it. Working from the original tape source, they prepared a release that appeared on a single CD and double LP. Liner notes and previously unpublished photographs accompanied the recording, adding period material to the account of the concert.
The project belonged to a wider effort to organize the band’s recordings. In an October 2012 interview with Pitchfork, Lee Ranaldo discussed digitizing audio tapes and sorting video footage. “A lot of these songs found their full character in the live setting,” he said. The Chicago set offered examples of that process before several songs had reached a studio release.
That archival work continued. Speaking to Bandcamp Daily in 2020, Shelley recalled that the group had recorded shows whenever possible from the time he joined, accumulating cassettes with handwritten details about the gigs. Those recordings helped supply the band’s expanding Bandcamp archive. “Making this stuff available seems the best way for it to survive,” he said.
