Chapter 1: To Live and Die on the Northwest Side Part 1

I was living in a small factory town called Niles, which is located just over the far Northwest border of Chicago.  While it's conveniently connected to the city, the actual residential part of Niles is separated from Chicago by St. Adalbert Cemetery.  A mile long, half mile wide cemetery where all of my dead relatives are buried.  We moved to Niles in 1988, in middle of my eighth grade year from the Northwest Side neighborhood of Portage Park.  My parents said they wanted to be closer to the family.

It's two main arteries, Milwaukee Avenue and Harlem were my life line.  They connected me to the old neighborhood and more importantly to the Chicago punk scene.  The 270 Milwaukee and the 90 Harlem bus were my road way to liberation from small town boredom and blue collar frustration.  My parents, both Polish immigrants were drawn to Niles because it was closer to their places of employment and it had a Polish community.  My dad was a factory worker and my mom was a bank teller.  We scraped by with my dad moonlighting doing plumbing and HVAC for people who were more well off than we were and when I was old enough to get a job, I started working at the local grocery store.

A few miles south of Niles is the neighborhood of Gladstone Park, which is a sub-neighborhood of Jefferson Park.  This part of town was made up of city workers, Polish and Irish immigrants and most importantly Tim and his younger brother Pat.  They both attended an all boys Catholic high school in Niles, while I attended a public high school in Skokie, a neighboring town.  Our experiences in high school weren't very different and ultimately, those experiences helped build a bond cast in a mutual hate for normality and convention.  To be totally blunt, we were freaks.

In 1994, I was entering my second year of community college and Tim was entering his first.  I was still working at the grocery store and at the request of my manager, my mother and several neighbors whose children had grown more and more frightened of me, I shave my head.  It was the second time I'd ever gone "zero guard" with buzzers to my head -- the first time when I decided that being a "fruity new waver" (as the squares would call me) was no longer acceptable and I needed to look a bit tougher.  The second was the summer of 1994 when it was time to say goodbye to the mohawk.  I pulled out the buzzers and did it myself out in the garage.  By August, my hair was growing back in and looking a bit normal.  It was at that awkward length where I no longer looked like a skinhead, but I couldn't start combing my hair like young Morrissey.

Tim's friend D.C. also worked at the grocery store and I had a small rivalry with him.  I mostly thought he was a poser, because he had a nice-kid hair cut and would often times wear a Poison t-shirt with zero irony.  There was also an incident where I thought he set me up to have my ass kicked by another employee at the grocery store, but ultimately that was the doing of a girl we both knew.

That summer, Tim was unemployed and just out of high school.  He spent a good amount of time in D.C.'s basement smoking pot and drinking with a collection of the finest, most glorious mutants you could find this side of Foster Avenue.  At summer's end, D.C. suggested that Tim get a job at the grocery store.

His first day, I walked in for my shift and took notice of this kid with moppy, freaked out hair and glasses, wearing a pair of cherry red Doctor Marten boots and high cuffed black jeans.  I asked the girl who was the purveyor of the previous drama between D.C. and myself who this like-minded freak was and she said "he's one of D.C.'s friends.  He's pretty much a drug addict and you should probably stay away from him."

Being one who had dabbled with recreational drug use in his high school years, I thought it would be a much better idea to strike up a conversation with him instead of following the advice of the Drama Queen.

Being a cashier at the grocery store and Tim being a bagger, we ended up working the same register.  I looked for an "in" with him, but couldn't quite find one.  He would just glare and me and roll his eyes.  His impression of me was of this square with a normal hair cut and shiny black Doc Martens.  He thought I was a garden variety "Grunge Monkey" (a term we would throw around a bit when referring to those who worshiped at the church of Eddie Vedder) and a poser trying to edge in on his scene.

It wasn't until his friend Tom started working at the grocery store.  Tom was a tall, lanky kid with a 90's undercut and clunky shoes.  He was significantly more social and talkative than Tim, who much like me spent most of his time thinking about how much he hated all the squares we worked with.  Tom asked me who my favorite bands were, so I answered "Naked Raygun, the Pixies, the Cure, Screeching Weasel... stuff like that."

Tom told Tim about the major breaking news -- "that Chris guy is into the same stuff we are."

"So, I heard you like Screeching Weasel."

That was the first thing Tim said to me.  We talked at length about Weasel, Raygun, the Pixies, Nirvana, Black Flag and the Jesus and Mary Chain.  At the end of my shift, we exchanged numbers and the seeds were laid for what would become Squelch.

Prologue

This blog is my attempt to tell the story of my old band, Squelch.  We went through a few distinct periods in our evolution and each chapter will focus on each of those periods.  Each post will be part of the chapter; most chapters will be made up of several posts.

The story of Squelch is really a story about a circle of friends -- not all of them were in the band, but they all played vital roles in the band in one way or another.  Most names are real, some have been changed to protect the identities of those who didn't part ways with us on the best of terms, or those who I'm not in contact with anymore and might have a problem with me including them in our story.  This circle of friends would influence one another musically, emotionally, positively, negatively and sometimes chemically.  Really at it's root, the story is about love -- the love these people had for one another -- a love for the music they were making, the music they were consuming and, well, to be honest, Taco Bell.

At the root of the story, really the catalyst, are two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl who met under the most random circumstances and became virtually inseparable; intertwined in feedback, cracked walls, FX pedals, record collections, long car rides and mix tapes.   The pursuit of their dream and the inevitable break up.  The horrible spirals they fell into and the friendships lost along the way.

Enjoy.

Chris Decay