Essay Preview: Eggs
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* I Still Cant Congratulate You
* Tuber
When Kevin Frank, Ryan Rapsys, Zac Conway, and I got together to explore the mellower side of our musical tastes, the result was Sweater Weather, who for two years in the mid-1990s rocked the Chicago music scene to sleep.
Kevin (who is now in Haymarket Riot), Adam (now in American Heritage), and Zac (now location unknown) had been in Target together when we were all in high school, part of a suburban Chicago movement (contemporary with the now-retroactively-famous Capn Jazz) to fuse the basement-show punk aesthetic to melody and lyrics more literary than anti-establishment anthems. If The Arcade Fire would use a lot more distortion and pick up the tempo, theyd be a direct continuation along that line of thought. I seem to remember that after a while Target came to be referred to as jazz-core, though I could be remembering it wrong. Whatever the moniker, we all liked Target quite a bit.
When it ended, Kevin and Ryan Rapsys helped to form Gauge (who shined at the time and, incidentally, toured extensively with Green Day when the latter still played basement shows and 200-capacity clubs), while Adam moved to Champaign, IL for an aborted attempt at college in 1991, the same year I did. I think we dropped out at around the same time, too. He and the other American Heritage members-to-be, Mike and Ray, along with the dulcet tones of Miss P., were known as Grout Villa in those days. None of the college kids quite knew what to do with them, for good reason. Ill post some songs someday.
After Gauge came to an end, Kevin convinced Alex Dunham (ex-Hoover) to come from DC to Chicago for a week to record the Radio Flyer project with Ryan and I. We all had a lot of fun, and the musical results werent bad either. So after Kevin drove down to New Orleans to rescue Zac from undesirable circumstances