The Dishes

In 1994 Kiki Yablon resolved to pick up the guitar, and after mastering the opening phrase of Rocket From the Crypt’s “Hippy Diddy Do,” she concluded the instrument was within reach. While booking performances at Chicago’s Empty Bottle—a neighborhood tavern celebrated for hosting leading garage and punk groups alongside avant-garde jazz performers—she encountered Sarah Staskauskas, who worked behind the bar. Staskauskas had earlier performed in Cherry Rodriguez alongside Maureen Herman, later a member of Babes in Toyland. Bound by shared admiration for the Slits and Wire, Yablon and Staskauskas assembled the Dishes, who joined the Nerves among Chicago’s most prominent garage-punk outfits of the late ’90s.

The first configuration—Yablon on guitar, Staskauskas handling lead guitar and vocals, Kari McGlinnen on bass, and Leroy Bach behind the drums—delivered a series of loose performances throughout the city over the ensuing years. McGlinnen eventually departed to play bass with alt-country songwriter Chris Mills, while Bach, whose résumé already included bass duties for Liz Phair and would later encompass keyboards with Wilco, exited for 5ive Style. Yablon and Staskauskas nevertheless recognized a common sense of direction, and Yablon’s technique advanced sufficiently for rapid playing. They enlisted Sharon Maloy, whose background included stints in Bender with comic writer Jessica Abel and salsa engagements with Trenchmouth’s Fred Armisen, and they added drummer Rick Gasparini. In this formation the group entered the studio and captured seven songs that would constitute more than half of its self-titled debut album. The concise, forceful tracks prompted comparisons with Sleater-Kinney, yet these held true solely for Staskauskas’s incisive and imaginative guitar lines; the Dishes instead emphasized strong melodic momentum and participatory choruses, producing an overall sound closer to Wire refracted through Chicago’s Naked Raygun.

Another drummer soon became necessary. After Gasparini’s departure, Kim Ambriz joined and tracked six further numbers. With thirteen songs completed, Yablon launched No. 89 Records and issued the Dishes in March 2000, at which point she was also editing the music pages of the Chicago Reader. Ambriz then left to join Bees Are Black and was succeeded for six months by Graeme Gibson. Little more than a year after its release the album had recouped its costs. Gibson subsequently departed for the Aluminum Group. In 2000 drummer J.J. Klein, previously of Los Angeles’s Paper Lantern, completed the lineup alongside Yablon and Staskauskas.