In the spring of 1995, I made plans, along with my friends Tina and Kelley, to travel from West Lafayette over to Champaign to see Veruca Salt, who was playing one of the bars at the University of Illinois. The task of acquiring tickets was left up to my sister, who joined us at the show.
Neither opening act, Hazel and Squash Blossom, were well known at the time, or have been heard from since. The headliners were just starting to make a name for themselves as part of the burgeoning Chicago alternative music scene. Their first hit, Seether, would have dropped the previous fall and they were just about to wrap up their first headlining tour.
The show itself is a bit of a blur all these years later, but I do remember that either Tina or Kelley went home with a guitar pick and we all ended up with some of the tape that kept the extra picks attached to the mike stand. Exciting, I know.
After the show, the girls headed off to stay with a friend while I crashed in my sister’s dorm room. The next day, we headed back to good old Purdue, with a stop off in Danville for what I fondly remember as the greasiest pizza I’ve ever seen. If you can’t trust the Danville Pizza Hut, who can you trust.
