You’d never guess to watch her that Patti Gran has stage fright. Liz Phair used to freeze like a deer in headlights, and Chan Marshall would hide behind her hair or even turn her back on the crowd. But Gran, who sings and plays guitar with popular local art punks the New Black, is a powerful front woman with a hair-raising voice and a magnetic stage presence. Trouble is, her confidence is only a veneer. “It’s pretty bad,” she says. “I’m generally just about to puke before I go on.”

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As anxious as Gran gets about shows, she’s been looking for chances to make music for much of her life. Born and raised in the suburbs of Miami, she was a full-fledged metalhead by the time she got her first electric guitar at 15. “I wanted to learn every freakin’ Pantera song,” she says. “I wanted to shred really badly.” A year later, in 1995, she was into stuff like Fugazi and Sonic Youth, but her first band, the Red Shift, didn’t hold together long–she couldn’t find enough like-minded players. “Miami’s a wretched place to grow up musically,” she says. “It was all dance music and death metal–like really scary KKK death-metal bands too. Needless to say, I was out of place. So around 2001, I picked a city to move to and came up with Chicago.”

Kimball, who’d been struggling to get a decent band going in Albuquerque’s insular music scene, made the same decision in the summer of 2000. Shortly after arriving in Chicago he started playing in a four-piece called the South of No North with guitarist and singer Jack Flash, who’s currently fronting Bang! Bang!, and drummer Nick Kraska, who’s now in the New Black.

The band made the trip on their own dime, but managed to break even. “It was a great experience overall,” Kimball says. “‘Cause the kids over there are pretty excited to see anything. In a lot of the places we played, like Slovenia, we felt like we were Kiss or something.”

Gran continues to play with the Dials, though they’re reeling from the death of drummer Doug Meis in the July car crash that also claimed the lives of Silkworm’s Michael Dahlquist and the Returnables’ John Glick. In November the local Latest Flame label will release the Dials’ debut LP, Flex Time, finished before Meis was killed.

Where: Texas Ballroom, 3012 S. Archer (third floor)

Where: The Hideout, 1354 W. Wabansia