Sweet Pea recently “sat down” with Tart guitarist Joy Gregory via email to discuss the glory days.
Q: How did the band come together? (Who found whom, where?)
A: Tart started around 1992 or ‘93 when I first heard Laura Eason, one of my fellow members of Chicago’s Lookingglass Theatre Company, playing one of her songs on bass after a rehearsal. It was called “Roses.” I lit up 
with the idea that, instead of dating guys in bands (who turned out to be unreliable heartbreakers in general), I could get together with another friend and start our own band. I asked Laura to start playing each other our songs and it turned out we harmonized well together on each other’s material, and egged each other on to write more and write better. After a few months of living room practice sessions, we played a few casual shows for our friends with another Lookingglass member, Temple Williams, on drums. We made a four-song cassette demo called “Grumpy” and tried to get gigs. But soon after, Temple moved on to what would become his next career in television production in Los Angeles and New York. Thankfully, Michael Lenzi somehow heard about us while I was living in Hyde Park — he played with another guy in the H.P. scene and I think that’s how we crossed paths — and offered to play drums for us. To have an outsider who wasn’t connected to Lookingglass and wasn’t our friend hear us and express support and interest was just the encouragement we needed. I felt we became a real band only then. We had some happy months as a trio and started getting shows in town. Our two singles on Sweet Pea Records came soon after, produced by Rick Karr who would later join the band on guitar and additional vocals. Eventually Michael Sankowski replaced Michael Lenzi on drums.
Q: Where were some of the places you played live shows?
A: I think we knew we were starting to get somewhere when we played our first gig at the fabled and now departed Lounge Ax on Lincoln Avenue on a Sunday night. When one of the co-owners got a series of calls about our gig, I overheard her call someone to come in to do last-minute lighting for the show. That was the first time I panicked a little on stage about not being able to see my fingers on the fret board, but the lighting was awesome and we felt quite pro being up on the same little stage where I’d recently enjoyed seeing The Wedding Present, Jeff Tweedy and a host of local favorites. Lounge Ax and Empty Bottle continued to be our “A list” spots, along with Phyllis’ Musical Inn in Wicker Park and one really fun gig at the Fireside Bowl. The Beat Kitchen was “B list” — good sound (despite the always cranky sound guy there), but not a hip place, somehow. Maybe it was the remote location. We also had one memorable gig at Metro but never did make it to the Double Door. I’d say our highlight was a gig at The Empty Bottle with opening support from an awesome power-pop trio from Knoxville, TN called Superdrag. They continue to be one of my favorite bands from the era and I can’t quite believe they opened for us.
Q: Who were the band’s influences?
A: The Breeders, PJ Harvey, The Fastbacks. Maybe Kate Bush for giving me the courage to go Totally Girly and trusting we’d find an audience. I always remember one of our fans, a girl named Tamara with dark hair that covered half her face, would find me before a show and ask very seriously if we were planning to play a song of ours called “Ophelia.” When I said yes (we almost always played that song), she’d nod very seriously and walk away. Girls needed our shit at one point.
Q: When and why did the band break up?
A: Just like I knew we were getting somewhere when Lounge Ax had to call someone at the last minute to light our low-stakes Sunday night slot, I knew our time was on the wane when Bruce, the owner of The Empty
Bottle, had to ask me if we could really fill the place on a Saturday night for our one and only record release party. That was a Truth Bomb. I wrote a line in a play once; a kooky record producer says to the mother of a sister group who’s concerned that her girls might not be ready to record yet: “The thing is, music has its moment, and you usually don’t know it ’til it’s over.” I didn’t know we’d had our brief time in the sun until that sun was setting. I remember driving around Chicago the winter of ’96 and avoiding listening to the radio because I used to listen to it with hope and now that hope was circling the drain. “Champagne Supernova” fucking sucked. But finally it ended by degrees — Michael Lenzi, our original drummer, had long since moved on to focus fully on Sweet Pea label-mates, Number One Cup (we always used to joke that Tart was Michael’s Number Two Cup), then we had to leave our practice space, then the gigs stopped coming so easily. Recording sessions for our only full-length release, “Start,” were hampered by creative differences between our chosen producer, Rick Sims of the Champaign, Illinois punk band Didjits, and Rick Karr who was the band’s de facto producer. Lack of communication and clarity of roles led to an implosion, which was probably the death blow, though we did complete Start and release it and I’m still really proud of it. Finally, for a lot of reasons, I moved to Los Angeles to go to grad school in 1996 and that was the official end. We all moved on. We’d had our moment.
Q: Recount an amusing Tart story.
entire theater company appeared in a small movie together, directed by one of the ensemble members. There was some kind of party, either to celebrate the launch of the filming or maybe a wrap party, I can’t remember. But naturally, Tart took the stage. It was a movie about a 10-year high school reunion, so I found a cheerleader costume from the fictional high school in the movie lying around and threw it on, feeling quite sassy. Anyway, during our last year together, we’d started branching out a bit musically and I’d noticed that the moment before our band practice really “started,” when we were supposedly just tuning our instruments and warming up, had started to morph into a long, aimless, occasionally really cool jam. We never dared to try it on stage, for fear that it might turn into something flat-footed and clumsy, but this private gathering must have seemed like a safe place to try it out. I can’t remember if we planned on doing this amorphous jam that night or if we spontaneously cruised into it, but there I was in my cheerleader costume doing this long, droning, wandering, noisy exploration on stage. Somehow, without talking about it, the jam turned into the eight bar intro of the first song on the set list, a cover of Blondie’s “Dreamin’”. I stepped up to the mic to sing the opening line “When I met you in the restaurant…” and right at the moment of the first syllable, someone above the stage somehow knew exactly what we were doing and slammed a spotlight onto me the moment I started to sing. It was an impossible moment of synergy never to be recreated and I still don’t know how it happened. But I do have a photo from that performance, me in my silver platform shoes and cheerleader costume, and I treasure it.What does it mean to have been in a band in the 90s in Chicago?
