Ben Weasel with The Lillingtons

This is a fairly random photo I found in my old zine stuff last night. It's of The Lillingtons with Ben Weasel (of Screeching Weasel fame) singing along for a song at the Fireside Bowl in Chicago. I was a huge Screeching Weasel fan and always sent a copy of my zine to Ben's label, at some point he started advertising in my zine. I never thought Ben actually read my zine though. I'd never met him or talked to him before. But one day out of the blue he calls me to rant about the current state of the punk scene (this was probably around 2000 or 2001) and we end up talking for about an hour. In the end he said he wanted to write a column in 10 Things, the kind of stuff he couldn't say in his column in Maximum RocknRoll. I was ecstatic! Here one of my punk heroes not only called and talked with me for an hour, but he wanted to do a column for my zine. And Ben totally followed through and the column later was reprinted in his book "Punk is a Four Letter Word" with credit to where it was first published. Cool all around.

Oh, I should add I didn't take this photo, it was taken by Joel Myrene, Bellingham show booker and ex-member of a bunch of bands, including the USS Horsewhip. I plan to start running a few other people's photos and writing on this blog in the future. The next up is a great story by Fred Speakman from the band Zero Down talking about growing up punk in Seattle during the '80s and early '90s. I just need to put together some photos to run with it.