Yale's Holly Hobby Travel Journal

If I told you that the Swingin' Neckbreakers show in Chicago was awesome, would that come as a surprise to anyone?

So good in fact, that if Sandy Bullock and Carrie Brownstein from Sleater-Kinney came up to me during the show and asked me to come help them try on swimwear, I would have politely declined. That fucking good.

I'm batting like .85 these days for good rock shows, which kind of tends to make a brother paranoid. I guess I was raised to be wary of such prolonged good fortune. Will I soon be sentenced to live out the rest of my life in some sort of zero-gravity time loop where I'm forced to watch the Murder City Devils play while the girl from work that insists on saying "gambit" when she means "gamut" makes me buy her Bacardi Breezersâ„¢ all night, over and over, ad infinitum? Shudder!

So if you'll permit me yet another travel essay:
I managed to miss my flight on Friday morning. Hey, you try and hit the bank, your landlord's house, the coffee place, and Blockbuster video and make it to the airport by 9am, having stayed up until 2am the night before watching "Very Bad Things"! Plus the Denver airport is like 30 miles out of town and there was a major sleet storm going on, so I think I performed pretty admirably.

I was slated to meet my host, Mr. Shang Graff in downtown Chicago at 3:15 or so, but I didn't get there until 6. I tried using the little toy computers they have in the St. Louis airport to e-mail my tardiness announcement to Shang, but no dice.So I stood around in downtown Chicago for three hours, which was kind of a good time. They got some major dereliction going on with their homeless folks there. Guys in briefs standing in the street yelling out incomprehensible epithets. I love big cities.Finally, at 9pm, I reasoned that I wasn't even entirely sure that I was waiting for Shang in the correct place, and had no other way of getting a hold of him, so I decided I'd just take a cab to the Empty Bottle, where the Swingin' Neckbreakers were playing, and hope he'd show up there.Damn, that Empty Bottle place is cool. PBR bottles: $1.50. Sound: good. Crowd: not too congested, lots of bodacious sideburns. A band from Cincinatti called the Greenhornes was opening. I would have ordinarily enjoyed their Cynics-like output a great deal, but I was too overcome with distress that I'd never find Shang, and have to stay in some ptomaine Rock-a-Bye Inn in some godforsaken ghetto.Just as I returned from the bar, I espied a man whom I vaguely recognized as Shang's cousin and former (as in late 80s) Missoula scenester/rocker Keir Graff. Lo and behold, I'd found my boys. Ahhhh, such sweet relief rained down upon me, and the Swinging Neckbreakers were about to take the stage, making our joyful reunion one of exemplary timeliness as well.

Me and Shang got right up front to let the Neckbreakers pour their Trenton-style rock product over our heads.

Hit after hit they played! Even... well, I'll show the photo of the set list in a couple seconds here. Dig this:

And then right here, the guitar player Jeff Jefferson leapt into the fold, making for some good action shots. He was really fucking sweaty and grimy, though.

That last shot is him raising his fist and triumphantly returning to the stage.Here's a few more choice shots, the last two of which feature Shang and the set list (and Shang's bitchin' chest hair):

That guy's bass playing is a total fucking mind-blow! It's that and his John Fogerty-style vocal stylings that put this band on the very top of the rock heap.They rolled through THREE encores and whipped the crowd into a greasy frenzy.

After the show, the schmoozing was pretty heavy, but your man in the field Yalestar, got the job done as per usual:

I went up to buy a t-shirt (although I'm getting really tired of black band shirts anymore), and Head Neckbreaker, Mr. Tom Jorgenson walked up with his (extremely hot) girlfriend. I struck up a pretty standard Rock Talk routine with him, but to my utter amazement, all he would talk about was what a great mailman he is! I knew from the records that he was a real-live mailman, but I had no idea he was so enthusiastic about it: "Man, I show up five days a week, drunk, hungover, stoned, whatever, and I move ten times as much mail as these other motherfuckers! Man, I got ten years on some of these guys and they can't pull half the load I'm fuckin' pullin'!"(The other rocker dude in the top photo is from the Greenhornes and the guy on the left is the promoter.)Some Bulgarian girl named Lizette gave us a ride home, and Shang (who fell asleep on the stage monitors during the last encore) was out like a light in the car:

Shane's cousin writes for Playboy.com, and is quite an interesting fellow, so I stayed up until about four shootin' the shit with him while Shang snored on. When Keir left, I still couldn't sleep, so I read old Bevel Forum posts on Shang's computer, which brought me a great deal of joy until I finally nodded off.

Shane lives in a Vietnamese neighborhood, so it was cool walking around, feeling like I was in a different country. Oh, the highlight of the weekend for me came on Saturday morning. Shane and I were walking down the street (I was wearing his dad's mailman jacket, since I'd foolishly donated my own jacket to the Empty Bottle the night before), when we came upon a little black boy, not more than four or five, sitting helplessly astride a chain-link fence. "Can you help me down?" he peeped. Shane, without a moment's hesitation, lifted the kid off the fence. I don't know why, but it was the most heartwarming thing I'd ever seen. Just melted me.

Fuck, this is getting long, so let me fast-forward a bit. We met up with Keir and his lovely wife and went to a svelte cocktail party. Everyone was dressed to the nines (whatever the fuck that means), but I was all greasy and wearing a mailman's jacket that was two sizes too small, but nobody seemed to mind.Shane got us tickets to go see the Upright Citizens Brigade who (I'm told) used to have a show on Comedy Central. It was at the Chicago Improv Festival in this big old theatre. It was weird; there were two improv troupes that opened the show with hour-long sets, and then the Upright Citizens Brigade was on for like twenty minutes. Pretty cool, though. I'd never seen anything quite like that before.

The top shot is near Shane's 'hood. The next is Shane, Keir, and Keir's wife, whose name I won't even attempt to spell, but whose company I enjoyed greatly. The bottom shot is in the middle of the Upright Citizens. (I couldn't use a flash, so it's kinda blurry). The audience would yell out a word, then Steve &emdash;oh, by the way, that's Steve Albini on the left there; he was their guest for the night&emdash; Steve would tell an anecdote off the cuff, relating to the word. Then the UCB did little improv skits. Like I said, it was pretty interesting, but when we got back to Shane's pad, he showed me tapes of the TV show. The TV show is a total bombardment of genius, and kinda made the live thing seem lame in retrospect.There's a lot more to this wheezing travelogue, but I would much rather use the time to thank the Graffs for their hospitality and tell the world (or rather, the miniscule readership here) what an unbelievably quality fellow we have in Mr. Shane Graff. Gracious, humble, low-key, and exceptionally knowledgeable, this young man is in the 99th percentile of humans as far as I'm concerned. Keir was awesome too; he flooded me with Chicago historical data, and Mrs. Keir Graff (sorry; can't risk a misspelling of someone's name) volunteers her time to give tours of Chicago's architecture! Wow, I say.Oh, and here's a photo from the top of Keir's building, taken as we discussed the Mayor Daley/Mike Royko oligarchy:

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