Al, 1980
Photo by Ken Mierzwa,
copyright © 2003-2006
Photo by Ken Mierzwa,
copyright © 2003-2006
Nothing on the Radio
Not everyone has the opportunity to experience a paradigm-shifting subculture firsthand. These things only come along once a generation or so, and one must be in the right place, at the right time, and in the right frame of mind. There is a lot of luck involved.In my case, I wasn't even born yet when Kerouac and Burroughs published the seminal beat works. I was just a little late for the 60s thing, starting high school in late 1969. Yes, I participated in a protest or two, but we - most of the people my age - never really understood what it was about. Vietnam was winding down, and although I had a draft card, for me there was never a lot of risk of lugging an M-16 through the rice paddies.
But I was there in the mid-1970s when "punk" music swept out of London and New York. It arrived in Chicago a year or two later. I was just out of college, in my mid-20s, and was questioning everything. My uncle, the only true intellectual in my family, had just died at the age of 60. He left a few tangible things, but all that knowledge, all those ideas, survived only in the books I inherited and the ideas he had passed along to me. He had never published a word. It threw me into an existential tailspin, delving into Camus and Sarte and anything else I could get my hands on to try to figure out if there was any point at all to life. So besides being in one of the right places at the right time, I was certainly receptive to anything that would turn the world upside down for a few years. It might have been the last good chance for a while. I feel sorry for today's kids, the corporations have got a pretty good handle on packaging revolution and making a profit from it these days. Oh, someone will eventually find a way to undermine that, but it's going to take a little extra effort now. After all, rebels don't usually have access to a sophisticated marketing staff and top ad agencies and law firms. The early 80s also might have been the last time that celebrities, even cult-level celebrities, were relatively accessible to anyone outside the establishment press. Today every band with any sense has an agent to control access and spin the image.
But in any case, I believe in documenting whatever one is lucky enough to experience, especially when it something that relatively few have had the opportunity to experience.
Through much of the 1970s the music we heard on the radio was abysmal. Some of the recent efforts to market 70s nostalgia are just appalling. I lived through it, and it sucked the first time. Disco was the worst, mostly a bunch of people who could count their IQ on their fingers and spent their whole paycheck on clothes and fancy cars to try to impress each other. All show, no substance. I'll never know how I survived the BeeGees. The rock scene was a little better, but by then it was all about big name bands, endless guitar solos, and singers with overgrown egos. It might have been OK if the record companies hadn't been trying to shove the whole thing down everyone's throat. But it was the time of the top 40, and we were forced to listen to the same few hits over, and over... and over again. It was like an endless broken record.
There were attempts to do other and more creative things. Even in Chicago, Triad radio offered obscure music not heard anywhere else, but after a few years they faded away. Really it was just a leftover from the innovations of the 60s. By the mid 70s change was in the air, although you'd never know it in the Midwest. I remember on a 1975 trip to Toronto seeing a record store window on Yonge Street, plastered full of New York Dolls record covers. There were rumblings in London and New York by then which were soon to change the music industry.
The first "punk" bar in Chicago was La Mere Vipere, on Halsted Street. It opened on May 5, 1977, and ended less than a year later, with a mysterious fire, on April 27, 1978. Years later lots of people claimed they had been to La Mere Vipere, but Roseann usually said she had never seen them there.
O'Banion's opened in June of 1978 and had the scene almost to itself for a little while, providing a showcase for early Chicago new wave bands like Bohemia. The only other early venues for music were the first incarnation of Oz, and Gaspar's, a neighborhood tavern which booked bands on weekends. They were soon joined by Neo, Misfits, Lucky Number (later Club 950), Tut's, and other clubs. Most of the clubs were in marginal neighborhoods, either abandoned industrial areas or places with bums and winos on every corner. It certainly contributed to the mood:
January 7, 1981: I'm looking at some notes I made about a week and a half ago concerning alienation and estrangement. Then, when I had spent many consecutive nights in the inner city, I could feel those afflictions. The subdued fear that permeates the spaces in and around those numerous buildings, and all who inhabit those spaces for more than a few hours. Not conscious fear in the usual sense, but something that seems to hang in the air like fog, that one is sometimes aware of but cannot touch. And it is always seen in others.Through 1980, a handful of local bands played wherever they could, and most even were able to cut a single or two. Poison Squirrel, The Dadistics, Phil n' the Blanks, Skafish, Immune System, probably a few others I'm forgetting. Bohemia even managed to cut an EP. But none of the first batch of local bands ever enjoyed more than regional success; they were about to be overshadowed by a succession of British bands touring the states.
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Kenneth S. Mierzwa shadowplay2@mac.com
February 5, 2003 - Updated: March 27, 2006
February 5, 2003 - Updated: March 27, 2006