Artist	Song
Skafish	Disgracing the Family Name
Strike Under	Elephant's Graveyard
Subverts	Radiation Nation
The Effigies	Haunted Town
Naked Raygun	Libido (live)
Da	The Killer (live)
Silver Abuse	Bomb Shelter (live)
Strike Under	Fucking Uniforms (live)
Subverts	March Forth (live)
The Effigies	Quota (live)
Da	Dark Rooms
Silver Abuse	Plastic Rows
The Mentally Ill	American Dream
Articles of Faith	Bad Attitude
Big Black	Texas (live)
Anti-Bodies	Gun Control
Negative Element	Police Beat (on Me)
Savage Beliefs	Big Big Sky
Toothpaste	Palestine
Out of Order	Survival of the Fittest
Naked Raygun	Only in America
Rights of the Accused	Innocence
Gross National Product	Death Farce
Nadsat Rebel	Nosferatu
Articles of Faith	In Your Suit (live)
Seismic Waves	Lip Synch to the Go-Gos
The Effigies	Rather See None
Naked Raygun	Rat Patrol
Big Black	Kerosene
Screeching Weasel	Say No! to Authority

Comment:

I knew next to nothing about the Chicago punk scene when I went to see a screening in 2008 of a documentary called You Weren't There. For longtime Chicagoans it was a trip down Memory Lane, but for me it was a prod to learn more about the great (and not so great) music I heard in the film.

Punk was late coming to Chicago, insular as the city's music scene was, and from the start it was inclusive of misfits of all sorts -- maybe more so than in some cities. Early bands like Tutu & the Pirates (who sadly never released a recording) and the long-lived Skafish combined performance art with anarchic energy, performing for diverse crowds at the legendary club La Mere Vipere. When Vipere burned down in 1978 -- some say at the hands of the police, others that the cops just stood around watching -- clubs like O'Banion's and Oz took up the torch.

Oz in particular, originally a gay bar, lived a troubled life. Owner Dem Hopkins didn't advertise, didn't hang out a sign, and didn't card minors, and the club was forced by police harassment to move to two subsequent locations. It was also where important Chicago bands like Naked Raygun and the Effigies played their first shows, and there was room for goth-y acts like Da that weren't really punk but weren't really new wave either. (Visiting bands like Black Flag also played Oz, and that's where Hüsker Dü infamously splattered their audience with blue paint.) The third and final space was the location for three nights of live recording in March 1981 that would become the infamous Busted at Oz record. The gigs were played secretly, with engineer Timothy Powell trying to keep his mobile recording truck inconspicuous to the cops. In fact, two months later, the police did shut Oz down for good.

The scene continued to evolve, with bands swapping members left and right, and the usual schisms and feuds. (The Effigies' John Kezdy and Articles of Faith's Vic Bondi sound like they still hate each other, and Big Black's Steve Albini seems to have alienated just about everybody.) Unlike other cities, Chicago never had a huge presence on the national radar, and even the so-called Big Four -- Naked Raygun, Effigies, Big Black and Articles of Faith -- were less well known outside the region than the big acts from New York, D.C., L.A. and elsewhere. But it also seems to have taken longer for the mohawks and metal studs to show up here, and when that happened some of the best bands began lamenting the homogenization of the scene. In the end, the Windy City deserves to be remembered for more than just having given the world relative latecomers Screeching Weasel.

When I started this project, I had only one of these tracks already in my collection. I purchased what I could, but most of what's here came from scouring the web for out-of-print recordings. If you're interested in learning more about Chicago punk, a great place to start is punkdatabase.com.

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