My neighbor friend Karla told me about this couple they'd met who lived across the alley from us. The connection was made because, like her and her boyfriend, they were also dog people and members of Lakeside. This couple was wanting to start a band, so she'd talked me up. "But I haven't touched my guitar in over a year, and frankly I'm not interested," I said. "Too bad," she quipped, "I gave them your phone number."

I spent the next couple weeks dreading the ring of the phone and jumping out of my skin the few times it did. Just when I thought I was off the hook, I was talking to Karla, who chided me, "How come you don't answer your phone?!!" "What?" I replied, "when it rings I answer." Apparently this couple had written down my number wrong. That misunderstanding corrected, my phone rang, and I had to go on a blind date. I didn't know what to expect. I wound up in their basement. The guy was a microphone dude; his wife was a drummer. As the 6-string man, I was supposed to come up with the music. After a few months, they found someone interested in playing bass. The rest is, as they say, history.

The line-up:

Shows: Small fish that it is, Minnow has tended to play tiny gigs. The list reads rather like the janitor/busboy duskjacket c.v. of a young first-time novelist. Basements, livingrooms, pizza parlors, coffee shops, social halls. But then Britt Walford asked us in July '07 to open up a few shows for Slint, so the Abbey Pub in Chicago and Webster Hall (the old Ritz) in New York City got added to the list.

Recordings: In January of '07 we went into the studio with Chris Owens at Headbanging Kill Your Mama Music down on Logan Street and recorded 6 songs. It took us a few months to decide we wanted to polish the mix to possibly to a little self-release. Unfortunately, by then the unbacked-up raw tracks had been vaporized in a hard-drive crash at the studio. Bummer. Plans are to later in the fall record an album's worth of material.