from the Chicago Tribune, Oct. 30, 1992, Section 7, "Concert Line" column by Chris Heim


Bad Examples, Friday at FitzGerald's in Berwyn:



Last year around this time, the Examples settled into a local club for two nights to show what they had learned from some two years and 200 dates worth of experience. The result is a new live album, "Cheap Beer Night," whose release is celebrated with this show. The album boasts 16 tracks - 14 new songs, plus live versions of two favorites from "Bad Is Beautiful," the band's debut album. So what have these fellows learned from life on the road? Judging from a listen to "Cheap Beer," that life is both funnier ("Hey St. Peter," wherein Satan makes a cameo appearance in a John Hiatt T-shirt) and sadder (pick any one of about a dozen tracks on the new set) than they'd known or shown before - and that grungy rock and pop balladry round out their classic Midwestern pop sound and, to borrow a line from a tune that appears on both Examples' albums, that they're not dead yet.