Welcome to On Tape, CHIRP's weekly exploration of Chicago music in films, videos, and beyond. Each week, our editors will reach back into the archives for the interviews, music videos, live concert appearances, and found footage of the city's most important musical icons. This week: Naked Raygun.
Punk's not dead. Punk's been dying since it started, but it's not dead. It certainly didn't die, contrary to the pearl-clutching at the time, when Sid Vicious OD'd or Johnny Ramone voted for Reagan or the Clash released "Rock The Casbah." What punk did do, however, was migrate. Punk spread out from skids of London and New York and colonized new populations: the doper surf burnouts of Orange County, the disaffected anarchists of Washington, DC, the Nordic ragers of Minneapolis, and (most importantly, for our purposes), the Rust Belt troublemakers of Chicago. It inhabited the voice of Naked Raygun lead singer Jeff Pezzati, whose band would quickly become the standard bearers of the city's scene. On the night depicted above, the band's dominance of Chicago punk was already evident; they play to a packed, sweaty house at the Metro, thrashing around Wrigleyville in the days before boutique pizzerias and condo buildings full of recent Big Ten grads repeating a continuous loop of embarassing decisions. Though the neighborhood's changed, the impact of shows like this one linger; this summer, Pezzati and the rest of Naked Raygun's current line-up will play the venue across the street, sharing a bill with the super-fans in the Foo Fighters. May everyone in the outfield who asks "Who?" be flung immediately into the nearest mosh pit.
Video courtesy of YouTube user RoCkiN' ReX NY.