Last Modified: May 31, 2003 at 8:17PM (EST)

When	What Happened
Over millions of years.	Evolution of skunk.
Late Paleolithic (ca. 12,000 BC)	Man domesticates dog.
	The goddess Hathor brings beer to humanity.
1800 BC.	Date of the most ancient image of music-making: A guy with stag horns, a furry coat, paws and a tail playing a flute and dancing to his own music (a deeply Skuntry character). Discovered in a cave in the Pyrenees now named after the discoverers, "Les Tres Freres," the three brothers (three fried men?).
1100.	First compositions by William of Aquitaine, the first troubador and the first lyric poet in a modern European language ("he wandered around the world seducing women," his biographer noted).
Before 1754	(when a "banjar" was first listed in an ad for a runaway slave): The African brings the banjo to America.
August, 1927.	The Carter Family first records in Bristol, Tennessee. Asked what they did between sessions, Sarah said, "Why, we went home and planted the corn."
1935.	Fruit tree salesman, mountain lawyer and song collector Bascom Lamar Lunsford first records his immense memory collection.
1946.	Pops Farrar botches a Roy Acuff lyric and is booed off a Merchant Marine stage in St. Petersburg, Florida.
1958.	Nymah Kumah arrives in New York City from his native Liberia and sees his first tombstones, so he writes a song: "If I die tomorrow, who will bury me? The Mermaid in the ocean is rich enough to bury me."
January 20, 1963.	Recording date of historic Skuntry jazz album, The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady by Charles Mingus
1979.	Richard Skubish borrows an autoharp from the fat kid at school and on a window ledge in Granite City, Illinois, he and Chris King write their first songs.
1984.	In a large old house just inside the St. Louis city limits, Heidi Dean sings along to Miriam Makeba, David Bowie, Blood on the Tracks, the Man of La Mancha, and Chopin. She also looks after her younger brother, fights with her older brother, talks to the family dog, begins formal voice training and learns that every song is really about love.
Dec 22, 1985.	D. Boon, soul of the Minutemen, great poet and bandleader, dies.
1986.	Matt Fuller discovers Guitar Johnny Minkoff in John’s dorm room at Washington University. Everything he owns is in a pile on the floor, except one very small photo of Lou Reed, which is the only thing on the walls. They form a band, Butt of Jokes; their sound becomes virtually the only evidence in St. Louis that the Meat Puppets exist.
1987.	Chris King interviews Paul Westerberg for a campus newspaper before a Replacements show. Chris gives him a beer distributor shirt, and though Westerberg acts appreciative – "It’s my only shirt that doesn’t stink!" – he gives it to his next interviewer, a girl from the campus radio station.
	A talented young musician dissipating his talents in hippie jazz groove bands is given a fiddle and a banjo. His name is Elijah Anderson Shaw.
Aug, 1989	At a graduate student party, a young poet named Joe Esser informs some drunken clowns talking about forming a band that he has a bass and used to know how to play it. He is dubbed the bassist.
Sep. 29, 1989.	Rock for Reproductive Rights – first (well, actually third) Enormous Richard gig, Soulard Preservation Hall, south St. Louis. We botch our opener so stop and start again, close with "Welcome Back, Kotter" and are immediately written up in the daily paper.
Oct. 18, 1989	Enormous Richard opens for Alex Chilton at the old Cicero’s and persuade him to play the Big Star ballad "13" on Skoob’s guitar as we singalong, crowded in the restaurant bar’s pantry. Then Chilton is discovered receiving fellatio on the load-out steps.
July, 1990.	We want to record all our songs before we break up because Johnny is moving to D.C. and Elijah to Hong Kong. In a basement in Granite City we record over 30 songs live to two tracks in two days while engineer Meghan Gohil snoozes upstairs, and release Why It’s Enormous Richard’s Almanac to cassette, which we love so much we don’t break up.
Fall, 1990 – Winter, 1992.	A mysterious period, desperate by Skuntry standards but relatively popular in the eyes of the world, known as the "ass pop" period, dominated by Chris Bess’ mighty accordion and two songs that would cement our reputation as a goof band: "The Chemistry Song," Skoob’s howler about the rigors of undergraduate life in a chem. lab, and "Tamp the Fucking Driveway, Richie!" a punk rave-up about his worst summer job. These songs are documented on Enormous Richard Answers All Your Questions, which few critics would credit as Skuntry music.
January 17, 1991.	Our first road gig at the Cabaret Metro in Chicago. After sound check, walking past Wrigley Field to where we’re staying, someone yells out a passing car, "We’re at war!" Operation Desert Storm is newly underway.
April 14, 1991	Enormous Richard issues its first press release. Several major gigs are landed for an upcoming East Coast tour based solely on this document. At least one club manager admitted he didn't even listen to the demo tape included in the package we mailed.
	We open for Uncle Tupelo at the Blue Note in Columbia, Missouri, determined to be serious like them. Determined to be goofy like us, they perform in cheezy tuxedos. Skoob fails to win their old blue van in a late-night pool match with drummer Mike Heidorn, so we purchase it instead. Little did we know, the van had been overhauled and maintained by Pops Farrar.
June, 1991	Our first East coast tour in the blue van. We get one day off in two weeks, and spend it in Josey’s home in New Jersey, scared away from New York by the horrendous traffic on all the bridges. Our day off coincides with the Ticker Tape Parade for "our returning heroes" from Desert Storm, which has now screwed us personally coming and going.
Summer 1991	We are written up for our first New York show. The critic observes that we play like the Holy Modal Rounders and "sound like we tour in a haycart with one loose wheel." That critic, Neil Strauss, will go on to write for Rolling Stone and The New York Times and ghost-write the Marilyn Manson autobiography.
1992	The second coming of Johnny Minkoff: He moves to Chicago and is smuggled back into the band behind Chris Bess’ back. With one ragged lick from his roadhouse guitar, the ass pop years are over. When Elijah returns from Hong Kong wearing a skeleton mask, and he gets smuggled back in the band, the Chris Bess years are over, too. This transition period is documented in Warm Milk on the Porch.
	We open for legendary, deranged one-man rockabilly band Hazil Adkins in the mountains of West Virginia, half our band zapped on LSD. Hazil’s one question: "Is Jerry Lee [Lewis] still doin’ it?"
	On a band tour, Elijah’s mom, Julia Foote, introduces us to Nymah Kumah at Walden Pond.
	The ass pop masses having given up on the new, which is to say the old, the real Enormous Richard, we change our name to Eleanor Roosevelt. The masses don’t much notice. Later (Summer, 1998) Chris will briefly live in a Greenwich Village apartment building Eleanor Roosevelt once made her home, just across Waverly Street from a hotel Bob Dylan once made his home.
	Meghan Gohil records us for his school project (sessions intended for an unreleased record called Walker with His Head Down), and the advisor who reviews his mixes is Elvis’ old producer, Bill Porter. One song from these sessions, "Espoontoon" (lyrics from The Journals of Lewis and Clark), appears on a Bloodshot Records compilation of "insurgent country." Two others appear on a vinyl 7", Head in a Hummingbird’s Nest, which also features our first recording of a song from Bascom Lamar Lunsford’s memory collection. These releases are the first authentic Skuntry to appear since the Almanac. The Bascom song, "The Dewdrops are Falling on Me", features Joe on bass – the second coming of Joe Esser.
	Elijah moves to Tennessee to study recording studio technique and eventually lands a job at an independent Nashville studio called Alex the Great. The gear he starts to accumulate form the basis of the mobile studio Hoobellatoo.
	Matt and Chris write the quintessential Skuntry statement, "Rum in the Workshop," in Matt’s apartment just down from the great Korean diner. It is recorded when we next try to get everything down before we break up (again), unreleased sessions known as Crumbling in the Rain which feature long-time soul brother Dave Melson on bass. We like them so much we don’t quite break up this time either. After Matt moves to L.A., a few of these songs seed the first Three Fried Men set list.
October 1995	Elijah and Chris record seven hours of Nymah Kumah’s memory collection in a one-room brick church in black Boston, Roxbury, releasing a fraction of it on cassette – the first release of world Skuntry music and the birth of Hoobellatoo, a field recording project focused on overlooked elders. A road song about the journey, "Somewhere Down the Road," is recorded for the first Three Fried Men record, Dance for an Orphan’s Wedding.
October 1995	While recording jump blues legend Rosco Gordon in his Queens apartment, they consent to taking Rosco’s dog to be "destroyed" (put to sleep). On the way to the vet, Rosco tells tales about touring with Little Richard, and our old band name comes full circle in this anecdote from Rosco: "We were all on tour, you know, and some gal wanted all of us, til it got to the end and she said, ‘Oh, no, put that away Richard, that’s too big!’ And Richard, you know, he’s a little sweet. One time he tried to put it up me, so I said, ‘Oh, no, put that away Richard, that’s too big!’
Summer 1997	On a Hoobellatoo journey we climb Hanlon Mountain, Bascom Lamar Lunsford’s native mountain in North Carolina, then record "Dry Bones," a spiritual we learned from his memory collection , in a small hut sitting on land where Bascom once called square dances.
Summer 1998	Pops Farrar performs for the first time in fifty years, opening for Three Fried Men in the Duck Room, where Chuck Berry has a steady gig, then we have a two-week Skuntry retreat at Pops’ spread in the dead heat of summer, working on the next Three Fried Men record, Water, Bread and Beer.
Dec 18, 1998, around 1:00 AM.	On their third, complimentary round of Guinness at a Queens, NY pub, Matt, Lij and Joe decide that making one-off CDs of their wealth of recorded material and trying to sell them over the Internet could be a potentially sound business proposition and a whole lot of fun. Skuntry.com is born.
1999	Our inaugural releases, Dance for an Orphan's Wedding by Three Fried Men and Memory Music by Pops Farrar, are released, sort of. Is burning a few hundred CDs and building a Web page the same as releasing a record?
Dec. 8, 2000	WSKU -- "all Skuntry, every once in awhile" -- airs its 10th show, a theme program dedicated to breaking the law.
Feb. 22, 2001	Leo Connellan, the poet laureate of Skuntry, dies.
August, 2001	The Skuntry Museum (formerly known as a Shed Called Skuntry) opens in the Village of South Floral Park, NY. The curatorial staff christen it with Ommegang ale and Replacements bootlegs.
Jan. 24-27, 2002	The Skuntry Museum becomes the staging ground for a bitter war between a sleeper cell of anarchist squirrels and curatorial staff. Skuntry vanquishes and exiles the varmints.
June 11, 2002	Rosco Gordon, "the seed of reggae" and Skuntry elder, dies.
Aug. 9. 2002	Pops Farrar, one of the souls of Skuntry, dies.
May 25, 2003	"Crossing America" CD launch at the Bowery Poetry Club
May 31, 2003	"Crossing America" profiled on The Verb, the BBC's spoken word show on Radio 3