The canonical punk scenes—in New York, London, and Los Angeles—were doubtless pretty dangerous places to be. But three decades later they’re the subject of a tall stack of books, and the stories that came out of them—Iggy trading his Raw Power jacket for drugs, Patti Smith doing a face-plant from a stage in Tampa, Black Flag fans brawling en masse with police on the Sunset Strip—have been softened by time and repetition into the objects of an often perverse nostalgia. (“Man, remember when the cops would kick the shit out of us for trying to go to a show?”) Those tales, tall and otherwise, are now as much a part of the rock establishment as the Beatles’ sojourn with the maharishi or Led Zeppelin’s escapades with the mythical mud shark—fairy stories for kids to tell each other while they wait for the ‘shrooms to kick in.
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Husband and wife Joe Losurdo and Chris Tillman, aka Regressive Films, use vintage concert footage and recent interviews with a busload of Chicago punk veterans to sketch the outlines of an outrageous scene that was indebted to the pioneers on the coasts but often outplayed and usually outweirded them. It’s hard to generalize about any punk community, and there’s not much you can safely say about Chicago’s except that the musicians were more likely to be unpretentious, working-class people—and like their LA cousins, Chicago scenesters had a less intellectualized idea of what it meant to be punk, rolling with a free-form, anything-goes party style.
When punks started actually forming their own bands, they discovered that the freaky La Mere vibe wasn’t welcome outside that protective bubble. Tutu & the Pirates, arguably Chicago’s first punk band, got kicked out of practically every club in town. “Basically, all of those early shows ended in fights,” says Losurdo. “Like that scene in The Blues Brothers where there are people whipping bottles at them.” Bands made do with illegal spaces and house parties for a while, and the impressive crowds at those shows convinced club owners to wean themselves from the cover-band teat. The punk scene had proved that original music could draw, and soon Chicago venues were booking all sorts of bands—even the occasional punk band.
The consensus among the people interviewed for the film seems to be that the scene fell off around 1985, after being overrun by teenage hardcore bands and then by newcomers looking for the brainless violence promised by lurid TV news stories on the punk menace. Somebody even calls out the “punk” episodes of Quincy and CHiPS, both of which aired in ’82, as the beginning of the end. “Some guys will say 1983. Some people say ’82,” Losurdo says, laughing. “The name of the film, You Weren’t There, was like a joke that me and my friends used to say about the old punks who said, ‘You weren’t there, man.’ It was all like, ‘If you weren’t there when we were there, then you weren’t there.’ It kinda took on another meaning because it was kind of like Chicago was a scene that sometimes you have to explain why it was good.”
The Mentally Ill, Negative Element, End Result, and others
Sat 11/24, 7:30 PM, Portage Theater, 4050 N. Milwaukee, 773-736-4050 or regressivefilms.com, $10
Sat 11/24, 10 PM, Beat Kitchen, 2100 W. Belmont, 773-281-4444 or 866-468-3401, $8, 18+
