I Seen Her At the Local Diner or Don't These Kids Know That Slam Dancing Kills?

I've lived in or around Chicago for my entire life. I grew up in the Portage Park/Belmont-Cragin neighborhood on the northwest side and then moved to Niles for a while during high school. My first true exposure to punk rock was a couple random punk rock shows that happened in this bar called the Krocodile, somewhere around the mid to late 80's. I was about junior high age and one random Friday night, my friends and I noticed a lot of mohawks and shaved heads hanging around the neighborhood 7-11 and we figured we should probably find out what was going on, so we got up the courage to ask this random skinhead. He said something about some band and offered to sneak us into the show. We declined out of pure fear of what went on at punk shows (we'd all heard stories and saw the punk rock episode of the TV show Quincy as well as various propaganda on day time talk shows). The image of a bunch of punk kids hanging out really stuck with me, because although I assumed that there'd be extreme sex and violence going on (I'd heard the Exploited song on WVVX, the local metal station at that point, which was my only real exposure to punk or hardcore) and that any sense of community would explode into a giant nihlistic cacophony of mass destruction. Of course, I would later figure out that any violence that occured at punk shows was usually cause by one or two idiots who would commonly be dealt with by the audience (this of course is almost non-existent these days, because kids are more willing to deal with a few bullies at a show by ignoring them instead of putting them on their ass and removing them from the show).
Once I got to high school, a friend of mine took me to see No Empathy and Sludgeworth at McGregors, a small club in suburban Elmhurst, which is where I realized Chicago had a really amazing local scene. I had already heard No Empathy and was already a fan, but aside from them, Naked Raygun, Screeching Weasel and the Effigies, I didn't really know anything about Chicago punk. In fact, I knew little about Chicago music at all. I knew that my guitar teacher's metal band played at the Thirsty Whale a lot as well as a bunch of other hair band types, but I had no idea that Chicago had a fairly well organize punk scene. Somewhere around 1992, my friend Dan handed me a flyer for a show at McGregors that featured the Smoking Popes, Los Crudos, the Vindictives, Los Crudos, Trenchmouth, Eskimo Nation, Prophets of Rage and a bunch of other bands. The show was a benefit for the "Underdog Collective," who were putting out a comp. called Achtung Chicago: Zwei. This was one of the best punk shows I've ever been to, hands down. Shortly after that, I discovered a band called Winepress, who not only destroyed me, but impressed the hell out of me, because they were younger than me and writting songs that were better than anything I'd written up to that point. I still hold Winepress in high regard, despite the fact that I've grown and my tastes have changed. The link that follows is a link to a Winepress MP3 that's currently housed over at the Harmless Records web site. The song, Disapointed is probably the definitive Winepress song and should be checked out. Thanks to Scott for making this stuff available. Winepress is playing on Oct. 15th at the Darkroom with the Mushuganas and should be pretty damn amazing.

Winepress - Disapointed

Speaking of reunions, I'm still kicking myself for missing the Los Crudos reunions at Southkore Fest over the summer. Crudos is one of my hands down favorite hardcore bands and seems to be constantly overlooked outside the hardcore community. It's unfortunate that in the grand scheme of things, they'll never be held in the same regard as bands like Minor Threat or Black Flag. They might be in Latino communities and in Spanish speaking countries, but scene wide, the average pimple faced Wonder Bread hardcore kid will never click with them. I guess you have to go with what you relate to, but the energy of Los Crudos surpasses that of Black Flag and Minor Threat combined. I remember taking the L and buses to the shadiest regions of early 90's Pilsen to see this band. Where it was weird for white kids to be walking around 18th and Halsted at night. Granted, I grew up in the city and I was comfortable in that environment, I was always able to tell that my friends weren't. Many of them dropped out of the trips to see Crudos and the only time they'd see them would be the random McGregors show. It wasn't until the Fireside Bowl started doing shows that some of these kids started coming out to Crudos shows on a regular basis (but at the that point, most of my friends had dropped out of punk rock for less adventurous scenes like college [apparently, you can't go to college and like punk rock anymore, which never made any sense to me at all]). I'll probably do a whole post on the current Chicago punk scene and more specifically, the Southkore scene, where I'll post some MP3's for the listening.