How Big Can a Trio Get?
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“This is what we’ve always wanted,” Skiba told me a few days before the Metro shows. “I’m really psyched that so many people are paying attention to us, and I’d be lying if I said we didn’t want to see how big our band could get.” With the Trio’s first video in production, negotiations under way to release their records in Europe through Epitaph, and constant touring planned through the fall–including a short stint next month with the Top 40 pop-punk band Blink-182–it would seem he’s about to find out.
Skiba, who’s 25, grew up in McHenry, where he played in a handful of bands, including Jerkwater and the Traitors, and drew inspiration from suburban pop-punk sensations the Smoking Popes. “They were selling out the Metro once a month, and I think everybody wanted to do what they were doing,” Skiba says. “They were from Crystal Lake, the middle of nowhere, and they got really big.” He moved into the city in 1995 to study design at Columbia College, but after a year he changed his plans.
Before the personnel change, Vagrant owner Rich Egan had offered the band a supporting slot on a Face to Face tour and then a record deal. They had already promised their third album, Maybe I’ll Catch Fire, to Asian Man, but they knew it would be the final release on the label, because owner Mike Park, who runs the business out of his parents’ garage, wasn’t interested in upsizing in accordance with the Trio’s popularity. Still, they initially told Vagrant no.
“The Art of Club,” the current lecture series presented by the Visiting Artists Program at the School of the Art Institute, focuses on folks who blur the line between high and low culture. Among the upcoming speakers are composer Robert Ashley (April 9), Fugazi documentarian Jem Cohen (April 16), and Charlie Ahearn, director of the 1982 hip-hop movie Wild Style (April 30). Call 312-443-3711 or visit www.artic.edu/
