Good news for the Double Door. The owners of the Wicker Park music venue and its landlord struck a deal to keep the place open. Throngs turned up in court today in support of the club as they were about to start the trial over the lease dispute. The Double Door web site has more details, but the short version is that the landlord claimed that the tenants didn't provide proper notice to renew their lease. The Double Door claimed that they had done so and that the landlord was just trying to force them out to replace them with a chain retail store. The Tribune has the full story.

Others will trot out names like Liz Phair, the Smashing Pumpkins and the Rolling Stones as proof of what an important institution it is, but my own list of highlights for the club skews more towards the obscure, which is why it's important to have clubs with capacity for a few hundred. Some life-affirming performances I've seen there:

New Bomb Turks
Magnetic Fields
Idlewild
Detroit Cobras
You Am I
Cynics
Therapy?

It was also one of the locations in High Fidelity, a movie about obsessive love of music. Lounge Ax, where another scene was filmed, has closed since the movie was shot six years ago. I'd hate to see the list of closed venues grow.