It’s hard to find a room at Fort Knox — the sprawling Irving Park rehearsal studio, not the military base. A walk through its labyrinthine halls pummels the ear with strains of punk and hardcore.
Press your ear against a studio door deep into the complex, though, and you’ll encounter something a little different: good old lyric-driven rock. The lyrics in question, however, are the most unusual of all.
Ulysses, glory of the Greeks draw near,
Thy vessel stay, and our sweet voices hear.
None ever passed this way, and went from hence,
E’re they had feasted their auricular sense.
Yes, that’s Homer’s “Odyssey” — specifically, Scottish polymath John Ogilby’s 1665 translation. A grungy guitar intro kicks off “Dust & Gore,” a retelling of the bloodbath at the epic’s climax. Ulysses (aka Odysseus) and Telemachus’ reunion, after 20 years apart, becomes a spare solo ballad.
Bringing it to life are the five members of the Mortal Fools, so named for a line from “Midsummer Night’s Dream”: frontman and songwriter Jonathan Salem Baskin, bassist Todd Rowan, guitarist and synthist Ted Sofios, drummer Michael Ressler and keyboardist Andrew Hollander-Urbach. Baskin formed the group in late 2022 on an audacious premise: What if we adapted classic literature as rock tunes, and put on a show around it?
“(I thought), ‘This is nuts, count me out,’” Rowan told me during a visit to their studio, to chuckles and nods from the other guys. Rowan — who plays in the Joynt Cheefs, summer regulars at the Dock at Montrose Beach and elsewhere — was the first to be connected to Baskin by a mutual friend. They briefly talked out the idea over the phone. Then Baskin emailed him a cache of audio files.
“It was every song written perfectly, with every instrument recorded and ready to roll. I listened to it and I called him right back (and said), ‘I’m in,’” Rowan says.
“He said, ‘OK, well, what’s it gonna take?’ I told him it doesn’t matter what it takes. I’m all in, and let’s go.”
Like their taste in lyrics, Mortal Fools is atypical, as far as bands go. Its members get together infrequently — every several months — and when they do, they perform each show just once, at Evanston SPACE. This upcoming “Odyssey,” for instance, sets sail on Jan. 15, and Jan. 15 only.
“It would be a real gas to have SPACE or somebody say, ‘Could you play the show a second time?’ But I’d have to think long and hard about it, because it really does violate a lot of why we’re doing this,” Baskin says. “You start going down that road, you risk it becoming somewhat of a routine. I kind of like finishing the songs and going, ‘Yeah, on to the next.’”
The Mortal Fools’ first outing, in February 2023, took on John Milton’s “Paradise Lost” — in excerpt, of course, as will their “Odyssey.” Last April, they adapted selected Shakespeare sonnets. (Baskin is more lukewarm about that project in retrospect. “They’re all the same exact frickin’ meter. … After the third song, you’re like, ehhh.”) A “world tour” T-shirt from that performance lists just one stop: the April 1 date in Evanston.
“We’re not striving for commercial success,” Baskin says, with his usual dryness. “But, I mean, we’d take it.”
Unlike his co-conspirators, who play in local bands running the genre gamut from metal to synthwave, Baskin, 64, insists he’s not a musician. He works in tech communications by day. But from 2018 to 2022, by night, he was a student at the University of Chicago’s Basic Program of Liberal Education for Adults, a four-year boot camp in the Great Books. Baskin credits that program with reigniting his passion for the classics, decades after he graduated from Colby College with an English degree. (It’s never entirely left him: Baskin’s PR firm is named after Tom Stoppard’s eloquently eggheaded “Arcadia,” a nod to his undergraduate obsession with the Romantics.)
“This is great stuff — there’s such human drama in it. But it’s so hard to access, unless you’re in a class or you really make the time,” Baskin says. “I thought, there has to be another way.”
This will be the Mortal Fools’ third gig ever, again at Evanston SPACE — an out-there booking for a venue whose 2025 talent so far includes Emmylou Harris and Josh Rouse. But SPACE general manager and talent buyer Davis Inman says Baskin’s pitch for the band stood out in a sea of solicitations. And they’re reaching some audience: the Fools’ shows routinely sell out, or close to it, he says.
“We get a lot of cold booking emails,” Inman says. “None of them are taking classic literature and turning them into songs.”
Unlike the Fools’ previous exploits, taking on Homer forced Baskin to contend with an extra wrinkle: translation. Fidelity to the text was a hallmark of his Milton and Shakespeare projects, but singing in Ancient Greek was a non-starter. Instead, the SPACE show begins with an ambient sound installation layering in a reproduction of how bards may have intoned the original.
Even Sofios, who speaks modern Greek, can barely parse it.
“The rhythm of it is similar. Some words pop out that I might understand. But there’s a lot of syntax in there that’s really … interesting,” he says, laughing.
That left Baskin to sift through several leading English translations — including a recent one by University of Pennsylvania classicist Emily Wilson, likely the first by a woman. Here, for example, is Wilson’s rendering of “The Odyssey’s” opening lines:
Tell me about a complicated man.
Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost
when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy,
and where he went, and who he met, the pain
he suffered in the storms at sea, and how
he worked to save his life and bring his men
back home. He failed to keep them safe …
But Baskin was ultimately drawn to more economical translations, even if they were faithful to a fault — a criticism long lobbed at Ogilby’s. His take on the same lines below:
That prudent Heroes wand’ring, Muse rehearse,
Who (Troy being sack’d) coasting the Universe,
Saw many Cities, and their various Modes;
Much suffering, tost by Storms on raging Floods,
His Friends conducting to their native coast;
But all in vain, for he his Navy lost …
“Many translators try to unpack the lines,” Baskin says. “We like them packed.”
Unlike the generations of bards before them, the Mortal Fools won’t play their “Odyssey” from memory. When the bards did, epithets — repeated phrases associated with specific characters, places, things or events — and a reliable poetic meter kept their memories jogged over the course of the multi-hour epic.
Baskin has replicated that somewhat in his rock “Odyssey.” The band cycles through the same chord progressions, with slight variations, to denote when Ulysses is recounting his exploits through his own eyes. Baskin also set the final song to the same tune of the first — a deliberate callback.
“It’s like your average prog rock album,” he says.
I ask the other Fools if two years of delving into these works with Baskin has fostered a greater appreciation of the classics. They look at each other sheepishly, waiting for someone else to pipe up.
Ressler bites.
“It’s less intimidating,” he says. “Before, it seemed unattainable unless it was directly in your wheelhouse.
“I think that’s the beauty of what we’re going to present. People are going to be entertained and enthused, and they’re going to learn something.”
Hannah Edgar is a freelance critic.
“The Odyssey Retold” with the Mortal Fools, 7:30 p.m. Jan. 15 at Evanston SPACE, 1245 Chicago Ave., Evanston; tickets $12-$15 at evanstonspacemusic.com