THE EVENING of December 30, 1995 was classically wintry, Chicago style. A cool crisp electricity charged the air, accompanied by gentle, freshly falling snow. Des Plaines, a nearby (northwest) suburb of Chicago, had never previously been known as any sort of hotbed of musical activity, but in recent times it had begun flirting with the notion of bringing some of the city's punk rock and more eclectic music to a suburban all-ages audience. The vehicle for this idea was a series of shows booked by notorious Chicago promoter, Brian Peterson, that took place at the town's historic Bog Theater.

The bands on this particular Saturday night bill were Sidekick Kato, Punjab, Tetsuo, and CHEER-ACCIDENT. Everyone in CHEER-ACCIDENT (myself included) was especially psyched to participate in this event because most of us had grown up in these very same northwest suburbs. We were anticipating an evening of "giving back" the rock to a roomful of decidedly unjaded teens.

And, yes, the rock was generously delivered on this night. I look back at this show as pivotal, the point at which the Dylan/Jeff/Phil/Thymme phase of the band really started to gel. Sure, there had been some memorable performances before this one, but the way in which the older material was starting to become synthesized with the brand new material (and this was, after all, an extremely prolific time) had now evolved to a place that was approaching the sublime.

An added bonus on this particular evening was the onstage presence of Maggie Posa, Dylan's 15-year-old sister, who would occasionally walk up to the mic (as the band decrescendoed in anticipation of her words) and then demurely just stand there, silently, intimidated by her first experience with public speaking. Finally, toward the very end of the show, she approached the mic one last time: "Ummm..." (The band brought the music down to near-inaudibility) "I don't believe in soulmates." The crowd went wild...

One of the "decidedly unjaded" audience members was a 16-year-old named Eorl, a tall, scraggly-haired boy whose demeanor somehow implied a person much older than his years and, simultaneously, someone quite a bit younger. The way that his world-weariness and wide-eyed innocence existed side by side made him instantly likeable. As it turns out, this Bog performance was not only the first "punk" show he'd ever attended, it was his first rock concert, period. I did not meet him that night.

He did, however, make his presence known at the next all-ages CHEER-ACCIDENT show at Fireside Bowl. He graciously helped me load in my drums, while expressing his disappointment at not being able to attend our most recent Lounge Ax show. His presence remained known (and became more and more known) in the years to follow, as he managed to attend every single all-ages (and a few not-so-all-ages) CHEER-ACCIDENT performance. His ways became more and more stalkery and we began to see him at the shows that were in towns five and six hours away from Chicago. We'd be setting up our equipment for soundcheck in Iowa City and... in would walk Eorl, looking just the same as he would have if he'd walked three blocks to see us. Someone in the band would invariably say something like "OK. It's official. You're insane." Eorl would then simply give that familiar, slightly-pained smile, reach into his pocket, and pull out his "dream set list" for the evening which would never fail to include four or five songs from some CHEER-ACCIDENT cassette that only ten people in the world had ever heard. I suppose we would have started to find his behavior a little frightening had he not been so darn endearing.

Eventually, enough years went by for Eorl to have turned 21, thereby making every CHEER-ACCIDENT show a very real legal possibility. I believe he was 22 when I finally got around to giving him a cassette I'd been promising to give him for years: It was a collection of the earliest CHEER-ACCIDENT music, recorded from 1981 through 1984, the bulk of which we made while we were still in high school. As I was making him that tape over at my parents' house in Palatine (where all the early "masters" still reside), this thought entered my brain: "Wow. Eorl is now older than we were when we recorded this stuff." This reminder of how the passage of time constantly shuffles and re-shuffles people and events hit me with a powerful poignancy. I paused for a few seconds before writing these words on the spine of his tape case: Younger Than You Are Now.