Living in St. Louis in the 70s it was not uncommon for music tours of punk bands to bypath our town. The going saying back in punk zines of the day would be to call the STL punk crowd the fun 100. Of course there were more than 100 punk fans. Maybe 200. ha ha.
My friend Chuck DeClue found out that the Ramones were playing in Chicago Feb 24, 1979. The first time we saw them was at Rico’s in Belleville IL with the Runaways(sans Cheri). I had only been to Chicago once before I don’t think Chuck was ever there. Neither of us had a working knowledge of the town. On my previous trip I was staying at a friend of a friend out in the distant suburbs and only drove to Lake and was there for about 3 hours including a Planetarium show at Alder at which I promptly fell asleep since the drive up was undertaken overnight.
But our desire to see the Ramones was stronger than our typical lack of motivation and inertia. The decision was made to take a train up to Chicago. We had scarce monetary resources so lodging was not in the cards. The plan go up see the concert and head back home the next day without any clue as to where we would spend the evening.
This story is not so much about our rail trip up. It was exceedingly boring and long and that is about the most I can remember. St. Louis to Chicago via any method of travel passes nothing of interest and to my mind is only slightly less uninteresting than going through Kansas or driving through the Boot-heel of Missouri. Flatness for as far as the eye can see with only gas stations and farms to breakup the flat land.
We arrive at Chicago Union Station and somehow found a bus to take us up to Uptown neighborhood were the Aragon Ballroom, host of the show was located.
We were depending on a kind women in her early 60s for guidance. Which I thought peculiar as Chuck was in his black leather MC jacket. Me? I was not in punk attire instead taking the warmest jacket I could find which was from my dad. A nondescript brown jacket was puffed up with insulation like you would see in the cold weather vests.
It had snowed sometime recently in Chicago. I knew this because the snow was still on all the sidewalks. Unlike how it would be in St. Louis, especially in business areas at that time, almost none of it was shoveled off the sidewalks. What occurred in lieu of being shoveled is that the snow on the sidewalks formed like mounds with the ridge line in the center of the sidewalk. This created the none to amusing situation where while walking on the sidewalk you could slide off the top of the slick ridge and fall into the street. Unfortunately for us we had a lot of walking to do.
We made it to the neighborhood of the ballroom many hours early. We had to buy tickets. Afterwards we got one of those world famous delicious Chicago Gyros. We also spent some time in a faded fancy bar down the street, The Green Mill. A bar that had a layout and fixtures of an elegant 20s hangout that Al Capone used to frequent.
Show time and we made our way back to the Aragon.
The first band the FabulousPoodles went on and we didn’t pay much notice to them. They didn’t move the crowd much but they didn’t engender hostility. Wait for it…
The second band did bring out the worst in the concert goers. IN SPADES!!! The band was called the Godz a biker band from Ohio. I guess the promoter saw black leather MC jackets and figured that would be a good match up with the Ramones. He was wrong. Their music consisted of the crappy metal that was cluttering the airwaves of classic rock stations at the time serving as a prime motivator of driving people who would identify or listen to punk music away from mainstream rock stations.
This is not my first time seeing this band. As I once saw them open for Angel. This was a concert I went to out of boredom and that adventure started with Chuck and I going to the Peaches record store with the purpose of taunting Angel. We went there and shouted out “Get Funky Punky” to the guitar player Punky Meadows. How that morphed into us having tickets to see said band is beyond me outside of having played in a band with a guy who’s brother was the bass player of Angel.
Anyway the Godz played and they sucked and then they came up to the balcony to watch Angel. We were up there, even though it was a sparsely attended show we did not feel any need to get closer to the Angel vibe by going to the floor to get better seats. The hilarious thing in this story… there were some dirtbag white trash long hairs. The target market for the Godz sound. The dirtbags were yapping at the band members in animated gestures of band worship. You could almost see the discomfort of the band and… their backs were turned to us. The dirtbags stood in front of the band when Angel came on and played air guitar all night to show the Godz they were worthy. This was the entertainment value that I didn’t expect and quite frankly enjoyed about the concert.
Back to the previous story…
It wasn’t more than half a song in when anything and everything within the ballroom was being hurled at the Godz. It must have felt like a hard rain on the stage. Not too many songs in the lead singer and guitar player who was playing without a shirt and looking like a rummage store midget Mark Farner, asked for all the bikers in the club to come up to the front and kick all the punks asses. This groundswell of support never materialized.
As the debris throwing keep increasing the lead singer, who for some reason was wearing a knife in a sheath on his belt unbuckled the button on his sheath and threatened the crowd. This led to a Souxie style like punk girl wearing a black leather MC jacket and mohawk marching right up the front and throwing a whole cup of ice into his face. If the intent of the Godz was to garner compliance by fear it was not working.
Thankfully they ran out of songs or just gave up and left the stage in frustration (it was the latter).
With the Ramones coming on next Chuck and I inched our way up towards the stage. Slowly we turned… step by step… inch by inch… until we were about 4 rows from the front. Then all hell broke loose.
Chicago concert bouncers, a distinct species from St. Louis concert bouncers in that they looked like they might have been the Godz target group had the Godz been actual bad asses. They were tall and they were wide and they were beating the fuck out of people in the front. Not sure what it was about and as Chuck and I started inching backwards to escape one of the biggest and meanest bouncers who was not busy kicking someone’s ass at the moment yelled at us. I was frozen in fear. He said, “Sit there” and pointed to two seats in the second row. So we weren’t going to be thrashed but instead forced to sit in a prime location.
Not going into a long concert review here. Suffice to say the sound quality was much better than the ear shattering experience at Rico’s. And the set was top notch. But all good things must come to an end and so did this show and we had like 14 hours or more to kill before our morning train. What to do?
Being strangers in town we didn’t have a hook up for any afterparties but had overheard that O’Banion’s would be a club to check out. But how the hell do we get there?
There’s an El station next to the Aragon and people were filing in to catch trains. Chuck went over to some punk girls who looked like the kind that would go to a punk club after a concert and asked them the directions to O’Banion’s. As women do in big cities, they completely ignored him not making eye contact or anything. To my great surprise and shock in a frustrated shout he said, “it’s not like we’re going to rape you.” I had to grab his arm and take him away from the scene of his outburst lest the situation deteriorate and us getting arrested.
The recollections of how we got to where we got are hazy this many years on but we ended up about a mile from said club which again because of the condition of every fucking sidewalk in the city was a challenge to walk on because you could slide off the snow ridge and end up in the street or a building.
For any younger readers to this journal of debauchery I want to make clear. This was in the time way before smart phones and the only humans equipped with GPS were military personal, government staff working with world leaders and millionaire fishermen. Back in the day we had to figure all this getting around on the fly with no tools. Constantly depending on the kindness of strangers to steer us in the correct directions. Thinking back on those days, if I can be quite frank, I don’t know how I ever got anywhere. Total mystery to me now.
As I was saying we were attempting to find our way to this club and as luck would have it we had a walking companion. An out of town business man type because of course we would. We were walking, all of us unsure what the nature of the neighborhood we were walking in was like and talking about that. Maybe we gathered as a group for self-preservation. Although who was to say that we weren’t bad guys or he wasn’t carry human dismemberment tools in his briefcase.
Somehow we did make it to the club and the party was going strong. Our finances were not though. I can’t recollect what they actually were as we were still taking trains but they must have been low because at a certain point we stopped buying drinks and instead searched for unattended drinks.
There were all kinds of super stylish young punk women at the club but as luck would have it we ran into a very unpunk woman who was interested in our company. We told her our tale of being wondering indigent rock and roll fans without shelter or food. She told us we could stay at her place in the Hyde Park area of Chicago.
It was an offer we couldn’t refuse and.. she has wheels to get us there. So long snow ridge street walking. We arrived at her her apartment when things started going south for me. As we entered her apartment it appeared to be a row of about 5 sleeping bags on the floor of a room. These were occupied by young people. WHAT?!? I don’t recall her mentioning that she was the mother of many children, which she was. She spoke to one of the sleeping bags and we moved to the kitchen where she had promised us beef stew. At long last food!
As we entered the kitchen there were a number of bowls on the kitchen table that contained uneaten portions. She took the bowls which contained a stew that had a green gravy and deposited them into a big pot, the mothership of the uneaten stew. My appetite disappeared immediately. She turned on the pot to reheat the leftovers from the eaten portions on the table and whatever was left in the pot. My mind raced trying to figure out a polite way to get out of Denver.
Chuck probably tired from walking on snow ridges, yelling at women who wouldn’t provide him directions and probably famished did not seem to share my panic to escape. She presented us with the warmed up green stew and he begin chowing down. I took one bite and honestly even though I was earlier taking drinks of unattended beverages at the club, at least that had the purification properties of alcohol. I couldn’t even…
I don’t even remember my excuse but jumped up and said we had to catch the El back to Union Station. She tried to let us know it would be hours before the first train arrived. I could not be deterred. Whatever was in store for us if we stayed I wanted no part of. Chuck fortunately, reluctantly, agreed to leave with me.
We did wait those hours in a cold February morning alone is cold station. Chuck was able to fall asleep. I kept awake high on the adrenaline of our escape.
We caught the train, had to walk several miles to Union Station on snow ridges caught our train and made it home not being gone quite 24 hours.
It was just another day, in the rock and roll days.