A look at the 70s/80s Chicago, Illinois, punk scene

This is an article that gives a quick view of Chicago punk and alternative music in the 70s and 80s.

Remembering Chicago the 70s and the 80s: Punk

Credit: Psycho Cindy

Chicago was home to a number of underground music scenes in the ’70s and ’80s, but none perhaps more unruly than the emerging punk and hardcore scene in 1977. Inspiration came from the New York artists then playing Chicago, including Patti Smith, television, Lou Reed, and mostly, the Ramones. Its earliest hotspots were dance clubs, not concert venues. La Mere Vipere on Halsted Street was a gay bar that morphed into Chicago’s first great punk bar with an edge that would be reflected in some of the bands that eventually came out of Chicago – a mixture of British-influenced punk, art school vibe, New York new wave feel, and definitely not hippie contrariness with an antistyle style and plenty of attitude. La Mere was located on a stretch of Halsted Street south of Fullerton and it burned down under mysterious circumstances in April, 1978, only to be replaced by a liquor store. When saddened fans complained publicly to Patti Smith at her Park West show that “they burned it down,” she said, “So your club burned down. Start another one!” The punk/new wave DJ/dance clubs O’Banion’s, Lucky Number, Neo, and the Smart Bar followed. 

Everyone was waiting for the Sex Pistols to hit town, and tickets to their 1977 New Year’s Eve show at the Ivanhoe Theater on Clark Street were printed and sold ($4 general admission). The band was famously falling to pieces in front of audiences across the country before they finally imploded on stage in San Francisco at the Winterland Ballroom. They never played Chicago.

The early Chicago punk/new wave bands were a mixture of inspirations and styles. Jim Skafish’s band Skafish was notable for its inventive musicality and the absolute eccentricity and unabashed ugliness of its lead singer/songwriter/musical genius, Skafish.  Tutu and the Pirates were like crazed, fun-loving misfits from the ’70s basement rec room run amuck. The Immune System sported art school cool and minimalist aesthetics and Desmond carried working-class blues influences, but musically and theatrically it was dominated by the raging, roaming, intense vibe of its lead man, Jim Desmond. Plus there were The Dadistics. They could be heard at such places as Tuts, Gaspars, the Cabaret Metro (with the Smart Bar, Waves, and Stages all in the same space at different times), Misfit’s, Ruts, Medusa’s, C.O.D’s (which also burned down), and Exit.

Records could be found at Wax Trax on Lincoln north of Fullerton, and at Sounds Good on Ashland north of Belmont, which had a huge inventory of 45s, including Patti Smith’s “Hey Joe” backed with “Piss Factory.”

The shows were unpredictable and potentially explosive, even cathartic. They skirted the edges of chaos and good taste, and yes, they held a mirror up to society’s ugly underbelly, but mostly they were good, bratty fun, with city and suburban kids behaving badly and loving it. Stuffy, it wasn't; it was down and dirty. Dye your hair some shocking color and rip your stockings, honey. We’ll pogo til dawn.

Oral history of the 80s Detroit, Michigan, punk scene - part 9 of 10: Corey Rusk and Touch and Go Records

  This is just a part of a longer piece from Longreads on the Detroit punk scene in the 80s.

An Oral History of Detroit Punk Rock

In Detroit’s empty buildings and troubled streets, restless kids squatted, ran punk clubs, pressed their own records, and made their own magazine. They mostly stayed out of trouble.

Detroit is known for many things: Motown, automobiles, decline and rebirth. This is the story of Detroit’s punk and hardcore music scenes, which thrived in the suffering city center between the late-1970s and mid-80s. Told by the players themselves, it’s adapted from Steve Miller’s lively, larger oral history Detroit Rock City, which covers everyone from Iggy and the Stooges to the Gories to the White Stripes. Our thanks to Miller and DaCapo for sharing this with the Longreads community.

by Steve Miller

Corey Rusk: Sometime in late spring of ’81 I got a job at a lumberyard, specifically because I wanted to make some money so that the Necros could record another record. I had the idea of the Process of Elimination EP too. So I have to get some money together so I can record all these bands to get a compilation out documenting what’s going on. I was just an amped-up kid. I wanted to do shit. So I worked all summer, loading trucks and saving my money.

Tesco Vee: I officially handed Touch and Go Records over to Corey when I moved to DC in ’82, but he was handling it before that. The Process EP was when the passing of the torch went down. Corey called me up one day, and I realized that I had no interest in running a record label. I was doing it out of necessity, as a companion to the magazine. Corey was like, “I want to take it over,” and I said, “Go for it.” We were friends, and he thought, “This is what I want to do.” And this was a perfect, already established name. I was getting ready to pull up stakes and go to DC. I lost my teaching job, unemployment in Michigan was 16 percent, and I didn’t have money to pay the rent, much less put out records.

Chris Moore: People made fun of Corey behind his back because he was so serious and ambitious. He had such a drive to make something of this music that was happening. He wasn’t much fun, but he really looked out for us in a lot of ways.

Marc Barie: Corey’s dad was really interesting. He manufactured something for the auto industry. One day we were all around Maumee and he took us over there. The line workers looked at us like we were demented. We had all the punk rock chains and boots, and Todd Swalla had a Mohawk. I think Corey got his business sense from his dad, who made a lot of money.

Corey Rusk: I was living with my grandmother in Maumee, Ohio. I had a little recording studio in my basement and so I started recording bands for Touch and Go. All the crappy sounding records were recorded there—the Meatmen EP, the Negative Approach EP. The Blight thing was recorded there, and that was one of the better-sounding things that was recorded there. That was one of the first things that I did there that I thought, “Wow, this sounds really heavy and great.”

Chris Moore: We had the run of Corey’s house, and we had a skateboard ramp we built in the front yard or the driveway. We would record and skate all day and burn ourselves out on that. No one was into drugs or anything. The older guys drank beer, but we just skated.

Corey Rusk: I put bands up all the time, even when I lived with my grandmother. I brought Flipper back to my grandma’s house, which sounds like a potential disaster. But they were so nice to her; we all hung out and had pizza. Suicidal Tendencies also stayed at my grandmother’s. We all went swimming in the river, since the house was on the banks of the Maumee River.

Read the full piece here.