The first punk scene in Chicago was a motley assemblage of music geeks, drag queens, and wasteoids who gathered at a north-side gay bar called La Mere Vipere starting in early 1977—and it flourished for almost a year before anybody started the city’s first punk band. Judging by Joe Losurdo and Chris Tillman’s 2007 documentary You Weren’t There: A History of Chicago Punk 1977-1984—still the only major effort to chronicle this cultural moment—the city’s earliest punks were all about decadent self-expression but not so much about making their own music. Like the nascent house-music scene that had its center of gravity a couple miles south, this little cult was built around DJs and records, not bands.
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Similar second-wave scenes in San Francisco and D.C. frequently hosted or even became home to talent from the nearby punk centers of New York and LA, but Chicago was relatively isolated. This deprived local punks of the kind of support system that their peers on the coasts enjoyed, but being more or less ignored by the outside world also gave them the freedom to get weird, removed as they were from the trend hopping and scene orthodoxies that constrained punk’s original spirit in those other cities. And they stayed weird, at least until the mid-80s, when the local popularity of hardcore—and of bands like the Effigies, Big Black, and Naked Raygun—caused a sea change that birthed the current stereotype of midwestern punks as serious, unflashy meat-and-potatoes folks. Two new joint releases from Losurdo’s Regressive Records and the Brooklyn DVD and record label Factory 25, which also distributes You Weren’t There, make a case for just how weird (and just how good) Chicago punk could get: Tutu & the Pirates’ Sub-Urban Insult Rock for the Anti/Lectual 1977-1979 and Da’s Exclamation Point: (Un)released Recordings 1980-81.
Tutu & the Pirates were no Black Flag, but they were responsible for their fair share of public disturbances. The liner notes to Sub-Urban Insult Rock—by Losurdo, punk promoter and Tutu fan Eric “Nihilist” Kolkey, and Tutu guitarist Jimmy Socket—discuss the band’s talent for stirring up hostile crowds at the middle-of-the-road clubs where they somehow got booked to play. Socket recalls a performance at a Schaumburg club called B’Ginnings in early 1978: “It was pretty much a near-riot with ‘REO Speedwagon people’ fucking with punk kids who actually came out to this foreign land and awful place.” So many beer bottles, ashtrays, and glasses got thrown at the band that Tutu decided to play future shows in a hockey helmet. “They called the cops and I’m told it was the one and only time they ever had to shut it down,” Socket writes. “It was the proudest moment of my musical career.”
You Weren’t There: A History of Chicago Punk 1977-1984 from factory twenty five on Vimeo.
