Flying to Chicago/Eleventh Dream Day

Ick. Waking up at 5:30 is no fun, especially when you don't get to sleep until 4! As I was packing my laptop for the trip--the last thing I did--I discovered that the cat had played a nice trick on me. She has this ugly habit of playing with the keys, ripping them out of their places and leaving pieces of keyboard lying all about. It requires delicate hands and eyesight to put them back, and at 5:50AM, I had neither. I was lucky in that the "W" and the "\" keys hadn't been to messed up and snapped back into place without too much stress. The other key She played with, though, required all my patience and skill to replace. Unfortunately, I ran out of time, so it remains in pieces at home. Fortunately, it's a key I don't use. Unfortunately, being out of time, I hurried out, leaving an important travel companion behind--my iPod! That's no fun at all.
The flight was relatively uneventful, but my hotel doesn't have shuttle service to O'Hare, so I had to rent a car; a completely unnecessary expense. Oh well, it's just money, right?
The point of this quick trip to the Midwest? To see a concert by one of my all-time favorite bands: Eleventh Dream Day. Never heard of them? I'm not surprised.
Back in the mid-1980s, I used to go to Rhino Records in Westwood quite often. I had a good friend/ex-co-worker who worked there, and Westwood used to be the place to go to see movies on the big screen. One day I went in and saw a display for a new band that was going to play a show there later that afternoon. The display described the record as sounding Neil Young-like, which caught my eye. Good news: I bought the album (yes, it was an actual LP!). Bad news: I didn't stay for the show.
Eleventh Dream Day is a band seemingly cursed. They have all the talent in the world, yet have inexplicably never caught on with enough people to "make it". They even got signed to a major label based on rave reviews of their first couple albums, but in the time before Nirvana, bands that were noisy and guitar-driven needed to have big hair and no talent to sell records, so their label dropped them. After wandering the indie wilderness for another few years, Eleventh Dream Day stopped recording regularly as their members went their separate ways, trying new projects. Every 3 years or so, though, they have gotten back together to record a new album, do a few shows in the Midwest and east coast, then split up again. I have never gotten a chance to see them live--even at their "height", they didn't come out west too many times. The combination of my illness last year, the release of their latest album last month, and the announcement of a few dates caused me to drop everything to see them this time around. This could be my last chance, for any number of reasons (not all of them morbid), and one thing I realize is that I don't want to leave things undone if I can at all help it! Anyone who likes Neil Young at his Crazy Horse-wildest should do themselves a favor and check them out (although until their latest, their sound mellowed drastically, to the point where most of the songs are more like tone poems). I'm sure most of their CDs are available in the cut-out bins of your local used CD store, or on eBay for little dough, which tells the tale, doesn't it?