Kevin J. Frank, guitar
Zac Conway, guitar & vocals
Paul Obrecht, bass
Ryan Rapsys, drums

Songs

• Valet
• Waking Apart
• Fields Grass Run Play
• Sweater Weather
• Wisconsin (Polyvinyl Records)
• St. Paul (Polyvinyl Records)
• I Still Can't Congratulate You [missing a bit]
• One-Sided Coyne
• Sky Painting
• The Worst Math Student in the World
• Tuber
• Lemon Krippola

Movies

• I Still Can’t Congratulate You
• Tuber

When Kevin Frank, Ryan Rapsys, Zac Conway, and I got together to explore the mellower side of our musical tastes, the result was Sweater Weather, who for two years in the mid-1990s rocked the Chicago music scene to sleep.

Kevin (who is now in Haymarket Riot), Adam (now in American Heritage), and Zac (now in The Mighty Heard) had been in Target together when we were all in high school, part of a suburban Chicago movement (contemporary with the now-retroactively-famous Cap’n Jazz) to fuse the basement-show punk aesthetic to melody and lyrics more literary than anti-establishment anthems.

When it ended, Kevin and Ryan Rapsys helped to form Gauge (who toured all over with Green Day when they still played basement shows and 200-capacity clubs), while Adam moved to Champaign, IL in 1991, the same year I did, both of us in an aborted attempt at college. I think we dropped out at around the same time, too. He and the other American Heritage members-to-be, Mike and Ray, along with the dulcet tones of Miss P., were known as Grout Villa in those days. None of the college kids quite knew what to do with them, for good reason. I’ll post some songs someday.

After Gauge came to an end, Kevin convinced Alex Dunham (ex-Hoover) to come from DC to Chicago for a week to record the Radio Flyer project with him, Ryan, and I. We all had a lot of fun, and the musical results weren’t bad either. (We made this guy's top ten ever list!) So after Kevin drove down to New Orleans to rescue Zac, we four decided to try our hands at Sweater Weather. We played a bunch of shows, pulled off a couple of small tours, the one with Joan of Arc through the midwest out to Philadelphia and back being the most memorable. We recorded two 7"s, one a split with Days in December, and some other assorted tracks. Even though we had our own eight-track recording studio in-house, we somehow never got around to documenting many of our songs except with a crappy boom box thrown into the room when we practiced.

Lately, Mr. Rapsys has been working on Ambulette, Euphone and Noyes, as well as various side projects. His Subpop Records release with Five Style’s Bill Dolan, under the name Heroic Doses, is also quite good. You can read a pretty funny interview with him here.

The movies and the photos come from a show we played in 1996 at the Fireside Bowl, an old bowling alley near Fullerton and Western in Chicago that for years hosted $5 punk and indie DIY shows. It was an anchor of the Chicago music scene but, like Lounge Ax, is now defunct.

For more Sweater Weather, see also: Divot Records. For Sweater Weather and Radio Flyer, see also: Polyvinyl Records.

For my audio sketchbook, see: EMFSR