the empty bottle. friday. november 22, 2024. 9pm.

ew ew girl. damn. after countless near misses, we finally landed a show at our favorite chicago venue, the empty bottle. the show was made extra special by the presence of gabe's dad (also a bassist) and younger brother (also a lady-killer), who traveled from cleveland with gabe to rock hard. our caravan of dodge caravans pulled up to the empty bottle around 5:30 and after load in gabe's dad bought us all dinner at the bottle's "bite" restaurant which delivers garlicky goodness like it's neighbor delivers rock power. in the time left before the show we watched the simpson's (the grease collector) sans audio while alphabet soundchecked, but luckily travis and gabe were able to fill in most of the audio for us ("it tastes like fishsticks"). while the braves soundchecked, we faced off in a pathetic centipede tournament which found travis's minuscule 6580 topping all of our other, still more crappy, performances. the show was one of our more rockin, to the point where once again instruments began to crumble in our hands. for the second show in a row (see the list of seconds from the last show!) travis found himself using his second string guitar and this time, not to be outdone, robert destrung his guitar causing the remaining three of us to revamp the set list and play a short handed but apparently nonetheless earpiercing version of too close while robert played al's guitar shop. all said, the show was cool, and by cool we mean totally sweet! new song and sentence rocker "perfect radio faces" went off with controlled grammatical correctness and mk of the planck length gave us the best complement we have ever received saying it "added three years to his life." thanks are in order to everybody who came, but most notably: julie, anne's sister, who after over 30 e-mails dating back to our first show, saw us for the first time! leah, who shaved her head to protest the war. tim and justin for graciously driving people home. joe alonso for the massages. molly and posse. pete and bruce at the empty bottle and tche who played a tremendous sound board. and finally, to gabe's dad for helping to bring gabe both into the state and into the world.