Metro

This guide to Metro in Chicago opens on the night the club opened in July 1982, when owner Joe Shanahan listened to an unknown Georgia band called R.E.M. tune up in a half-finished room. It follows the building's earlier lives as a Swedish community center and a jazz club, and how Shanahan came to name the place after the Paris subway. Listen for the story of Smashing Pumpkins' 1988 audition on the same stairwell you're climbing now.