When the Noise Pop festival invited us to join them in Chicago on this date in 2001, we thought we’d try something a little different, having played three shows in the city the previous year, one with Mac McCaughan and David Kilgour, and two as a trio. We got to town a day early and did a warmup of sorts in Evanston with Deanna Varagona, although our mostly-covers set bore little relation to what we planned for the next night. Susie Ibarra–who played on two tracks on And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out–sat in on various percussion for the whole set. (We had done that once before in New York in June, 2000.) I am afraid I cannot recall how she reacted when during the penultimate number, a version of “Time Fades Away,” our guest guitarist Rick Rizzo had his pants pulled down by his Eleventh Dream Day bandmate Janet Bean, though no doubt she was relieved that, according to my research, Rick “neither lost his cool nor his grip on the guitar.”
