Cory Clifford
Cory Clifford lounges in a chair at Filter Café, appearing perfectly at home in the artsy Wicker Park coffee spot. He explains how his band, Laverne, draws from many rock genres, leaning more toward indie pop than garage rock. But the band’s frontman hardly looks like a pop singer. Clifford carries himself with a confident, hipster style – wearing a khaki bomber jacket decorated with an Old Style pin and a flat-bill hat, and sporting a semi-handle-bar mustache.
“There's always been just this little part of me that's always heard a bit of music in my mind. I think that's just the way I'm wired.” Clifford is a 26-year-old, self-taught singer-songwriter and guitar player for the Chicago band Laverne.
Laverne: Kinsey Ring, Sam Brown, Cory Clifford and Ed McMenamin
"I almost got a better guitar education that a lot of kids because
instead of just learning 'Sweet Child of Mine' over and over again I was learning
Roy Orbison songs. I was for the longest time really obsessed with playing 'Moonage
Daydream' by David Bowie."
-Cory Clifford
As of now, the band is working on their upcoming album, implementing a freeze pedal in some of the songs, which makes for a funky, new sound. By other musicians, the pedal is normally used to buffer between songs, but in this case, Laverne is using it to mimic the sound of an organ with its infinite note sustainability.
Clifford likes to break from the norm with his experimentation in music. When he was a self-proclaimed degenerate slacker in high school, Clifford was stealing books from Gordon Tech’s library on Chicago’s north side. The lack of metal detectors made it easy for Clifford to slip out with poetry books in tow.
Clifford described the instructor as the antithesis of the type of musician he hoped to become, so he turned instead to his friends. Once he was working with like-minded musicians, Clifford’s musicianship began to blossom.
“By the time I was 21 (or) 22, I was like, ‘OK I've got to really do this for real, people tell me I'm good at it, I should probably take it seriously,’” Clifford says. It wasn’t until he and his friend were evicted from their Logan Square apartment seven years ago that he began to make it happen.
“We got evicted from the place and I got fired from my job all in the same week,” Clifford says. After the eviction, he moved with his dad and stepmom to Texas and made music writing his main priority.
Clifford began recording and saving his original songs under the name “Pinebocks,” which would become the name of his first band when he returned to Chicago.
Clifford made friends at Dumpster Tapes, the Chicago tape label when he moved back. His friends and roommates McMenamin and Alex Fryer are the faces behind the label. Pinebocks’ EP “Success” was the label’s second release.
“We always wanted to start a label individually before we met, and then realized, ‘Hey, this is someone that I can start a label with. We have friends in bands who are great, let’s put out their stuff and kind of see where it goes from there.’ It's just been its own thing,” McMenamin says.
However, things got complicated with band members getting sick, living too far away or concentrating on other bands, and Pinebocks fell by the wayside. In that time, McMenamin and Clifford became roommates and started discussing Laverne in fall 2014. Laverne put out their first album, which was self-titled, the following March.
“We’ve kind of become a little family since living together,” Murphy says.
Aside from designing the logo and cover art for Laverne’s debut album, Murphy is also responsible for all the visual pieces for Dumpster Tape’s Monster Comp, a compilation of local bands. She shares her artwork with Laverne and other Dumpster Tapes’ bands.
“It’s mostly just friends helping friends,” Murphy says, explaining that sharing her hobby with her friends is payment enough. “But I have so much fun with it.”
Murphy’s involvement reflects the deeply interconnected dynamic of the band. Laverne has a friends-relying-on friends approach to every aspect of their group, from rooming together to pitching in to design a logo. Truly DIY, Laverne’s members are more concerned with making art with people who complement each other than making a profit.
Photography by Brianna Lesley
“I think it all kind of fits together like one bigger puzzle.”
-Ed McMenamin, Laverne
Old City, Fresh Tune: The Lead Singer and Band to Keep Your Eye On
By Ariana Dolce
Edited by Ana Serna
Laverne consists of Clifford, lead singer and songwriter; Ed McMenamin, lead guitarist; Sam Brown, bassist, and Kinsey Ring, drummer. This band is a close-knit group of friends, especially since McMenamin and Clifford live together, along with Kati Murphy. Murphy is a young professional working in the restaurant industry but has a passion for art. She designed the cover art on Laverne’s debut album – a detached
feminine hand with pink painted fingernails rolling a pair of dice. The band liked the design so much they use it to visually represent them as their official logo. McMenamin also plays a special role in Laverne other than being a guitarist; he helps lead Dumpster Tapes, the cassette tape label that put out Laverne’s first album. Besides digital streaming, that’s the only medium that the album’s available on.
Just a year later, Laverne is slowly but surely becoming a staple local band in popular venues all over Chicago, such as Empty Bottle, the Subterranean, Crown Liquors and Lincoln Hall.
The school’s collection introduced Clifford to the poets that would shape his own writing styles, such as Patti Smith, Sylvia Plath and Federico García Lorca. His guitar skills developed in much the same way as his self-taught songwriting. As a kid, he ditched his first and last guitar teacher after one lesson.
“He had this very ‘Rap is dumb and rock rules,’ or ‘Electronic music isn’t cool,’ or ‘Playing great is the only way to play’ attitude. I automatically, at 15, knew that was bullshit,” Clifford says. “So I just took this chord book, and I had a little tuner, and I would tune it and just learn chords constantly.”
