Issue date: 4/24/08 Section: The Weekly

Punk is dead? In Chicago, that depends on who you ask. For anyone old enough to remember the storied original scene, lasting from the late '70s to the early '80s, the current one may pale by comparison. But for a generation that grew up in the age of President George W. Bush and Green Day, a punk-rock act that has made a living off of responding to Bush's politics while making black nail polish popular, Chicago punk has never felt more relevant, diverse or pissed-off. And for adventurous civilians who want to explore the vestiges of the first scene or the heart of the current one, punk in the Windy City is often surprisingly accessible.

As John Kezdy, lead singer of The Effigies, explains, "A new scene is coming back." He should know: Formed in 1980 and still performing, The Effigies were among Chicago's first punk acts. Today, Kezdy plays as part of a scene that's undergone many transformations since its heyday, cannibalized by tiresome hardcore bands and tribalized by a multitude of punk subgenres. Nonetheless, Chicago punk remains a community of "people who are smart and desperate and really have something to say."

Perhaps because they're underdogs. The Chicago punk scene never got the star treatment lavished on London, New York or Los Angeles. Punk in Chicago started in 1977 when The Clash and Sex Pistols records started playing at La Mere Vipere, a Lincoln Park gay bar. A group of dedicated, disaffected misfits would gather to hear punk singles at the weekly "Anarchy Night" and soon enough, La Mere became a full-time punk bar. The very first Chicago acts - Tutu & the Pirates, Naked Raygun, The Effigies - formed in response to La Mere's new sound. When the club burned down the following year, the scene continued to grow in size and notoriety, eventually reaching mainstream venues like the Aragon Ballroom and the Metro.

Joe Losurdo, the former bassist for Life Sentence who directed the 2007 documentary, "You Weren't There: A History of Chicago Punk, 1977-1984," says the Chicago scene never had the cohesion found in the New York and L.A. scenes. "There wasn't really a defining sound," he says. "We were kind of media landlocked and geographically landlocked. Bands didn't sound exactly like The Clash or the Sex Pistols or The Ramones." In fact, most early bands didn't sound like anyone; they didn't even sound like each other. While acts like The Imports played Ian Curtis hooks over brawny pop-punk, Silver Abuse was singing "Jews Must Die" in tinfoil masks and Nazi gear.

Continued...

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