ABSTRACT
On a Thursday evening in September of 1993 I made my first visit to Chicago’s West Side neighborhood Wicker Park. I went to see a band. I’d moved to Chicago a year earlier to begin graduate studies and found myself mostly confined during that time to the South Side’s Hyde Park neighborhood. But Erik Miller, my roommate from undergraduate days in Berkeley, gave me a call to let me know that his fledgling rock band had decided to go on a tour of the country from its San Francisco base, and that the band would be performing in Chicago. It was a stereotypical indie-rock odyssey, complete with the unreliable used van in which band members would often spend nights nestled among amplifiers, guitars, and Erik’s drum kit. They were scheduled to play at Phyllis’ Musical Inn, at 1800 W. Division Street. This venue was unknown to me at the time, as was the Wicker Park neighborhood in which it was located. Still, I could hardly pass this up.
