T-Bone wrote:
Joe Orr Road Rod wrote:
I'm watching this right now. Good Albini stuff. Die Kreuzen t-shirt! Die Kreuzen- another American band better than Foo Fighters.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPQtOdwy4LwThought you might get a kick out of some of the punk references to Chicago and old pictures.
Yeah, that part was great. But it kind of felt the same as the Studio City documentary where I lost interest at the end when Grohl started playing.
You know, Pezzati and Albini and Santiago Durango and the Effigies are a little bit older than I am. And the guys that played in the next wave of bands, well, I would have been one of the older guys in that group. There was a definite divide in the "scenes". Raygun and the Effigies were playing bars. Vic Bondi and Articles of Faith were kind of the de facto leaders of the younger guys.
Vic put together all ages shows at a place on Broadway and Irving called the Centro American Social Club. They started to get all the touring bands that hit Chicago to play those shows. The Articles of Faith guys lived in a big blue house on Seminary that everyone called "Big Blue". The out of town guys would usually stay there.
For some reason there was a beef between Vic and the Effigies. And the scene kind of split right there. Raygun may have bridged that gap. As you saw in the show, they played all ages shows at the Cubby Bear. Those shows were surreal. You had these oddly dressed, strangely coiffed, very young high school kids walking in there and all these old drunks looking at them like "What the fuck???" When I see pictures of bands like Negative Element or Rights of the Accused they look like babies. Let alone Narducy's group with Grohl's cousin Tracy who actually were babies. One of the funniest things in the
You Weren't There documentary is when they show John Kezdy from the Effigies, an old guy now, and he starts slagging Rights of the Accused and the other younger bands and then it cuts to Mike O'Connell from Rights and he says something like, "Dude, you're still angry? You're a fucking lawyer and I'm a bartender. You won, okay?"
Back to Die Kreuzen, which was a band I loved. Those guys didn't really fit into the scene. They were from Milwaukee, but they played Chicago a lot. They didn't dress in any "punk rock" way. They looked like the regular stoners I went to high school with at Gordon Tech. But in those early days there was no uniform. You could get away with just being who you were.
My band at the time, the Maggots had a song about Die Kreuzen called "Frat Party Bash". It was based around the guitar lick from "All Along The Watchtower" or the Velvet Underground's "Rock and Roll" which, when you break it all down, are pretty similar. Of course we played the riff super fast. I can't remember all the lyrics but it was a true story about my friends and I hanging out on the Northwestern campus. We saw a flyer for a frat party that listed entertainment by Die Kreuzen. We couldn't believe it. What the fuck was this punk band doing playing a fraternity at NU? Getting paid, I guess. Anyway, we talked our way into the party and we were about the only guys there digging Die Kreuzen. They weren't exactly a frat boy band.
We ended up shooting pool with them in the basement of the house. They were good pool players. I still remember the first line of the song:
We were walking through Norris
We saw a sign
All the boys headed to Theta Xi.
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