Led by singer-songwriter and Glenbard West High School alumnus Ralph Covert, the band has been busy working for benefits ranging from a recent "Rock With Israel" benefit at Niles North High School to Covert's solo performances at charity shows for places including the Greenview Arts Center.
They have donated their time to causes "since we got big enough that people gave a damn whether we were there or not," says Covert.
"We have a conscience, so we feel it's important to give something back," asserts the musician. Covert and the Bad Examples will perform at Synergy in West Chicago on May 12.
Last summer, they took part in a Leukemia Research Foundation benefit that raised $23,000 for the battle against the disease. That show had special meaning for Covert, who lost a friend to cancer. He wrote a song about the experience and put it out on a charity single bearing his name "Adam McCarthy."
The lyrics tell of the difficulty one friend has watching another succumb to a disease for which there is no cure.
Writing a song about the experience was a good way to deal with it, Covert says. "I took a real-life situation and I found a way of filtering it through music. When you do that, it becomes not the actual event but your interpretation of the event - how it affected you."
Covert is a prolific songwriter by anyone's standards. "I try to write 100 songs a year. That seemed like an unreachable number. If you try to write that many songs, inevitably you are forced to come face-to-face with your own bad habits. You have to find a way around them," he explains.
"You notice when you are repeating yourself. There are no excuses to hide behind."
He also subscribes to the "you're only as good as your last game" theory when it comes to writing music. "What song do I consider my best, my most creative? Probably the one that I finished most recently," he believes. "It represents some puzzle that I just solved."
And when you consider that Covert started writing songs when he was 8 (his first work, "Old Man Dan," can still be heard in a kindergarten class taught by a friend), that adds up to a lot of songs.
"In rock music, there is so much that you cannot control as a band," Covert says. "Songwriting is something that you can have control over, so you have to work at it the hardest."
So how did one of Chicago's top original pop-rock club attractions come about?
"The band has been together since the early '50s," Covert kids; eight years is the more accurate number. "I was a young songwriter in Chicago, and I went around to see literally hundreds of bands. I went up to the people I saw at shows who I sensed some connection with musically."
Covert formed The Bad Examples with drummer and Elk Grove native Terry Wathen in spring of 1987. They quickly recorded and released a cassette, "MEAT the Bad Examples," featuring an early version of "Not Dead Yet" (later covered by '80s rock giant Styx for their gold album "Edge of the Century").
The following year, bassist Pickles Piekarski, a Chicago native, joined the lineup. Guitarist Steve Gerlach is the newcomer in the band, arriving early last year.
"We have a sort of Don Juan attitude toward guitarists; our guitarists spontaneously combust like the drummers in Spinal Tap," Covert jokes of the band's four lead guitarists in its eight-year history.
The group released its fourth album together, titled "Kisses 50¢," Feb. 28 on Waterdog Records (it's available at Best Buy, Crow's Nest, Coconuts, Musicland and Tower Record outlets). Early sales are promising, said Covert, who also has two solo projects out himself. To date, their most popular album remains the 1991 release "Bad Is Beautiful."
The band has toured extensively in the past, from coast to coast in the United States, as well as in Europe. In 1994, they opened for such artists as the Lemonheads, Squeeze, Los Lobos and Lowen & Navarro. The band has enjoyed its most success abroad in Belgium and Holland, although they have also played everywhere from Italy to England. Covert even hooked up with English artist Jason Feddy, who is a fan of the band, to play on the BBC.
"We did an acoustic tune called 'From Ragtime To Rags,'" Covert says. Their touring plans for "Kisses 50¢" are on hold right now while the albums garners radio support from such stations as Chicago's WXRT.
Aside from that, and the touring plans, Covert also recently joined with playwright Gary Mills to write both story and music for "Jackie O in Hell," part of Live Bait Theater's upcoming production of "Dear Jackie," a 15-segment kaleidoscopic view of the "Queen of Camelot." The play opens May 25 and runs through June 13, and is billed as an omnibus of various artists' works about the last former First Lady.