So much happened so fast in 1981, that looking back it's hard to believe that it was really such a short period of time.
By now, the scene had taken on a decidedly post-punk flavor. A few of the early bands were still out there, but in general things were now much more diverse. The creative spark of the late 1970s had flown off in a number of different directions. Most conspicuously for us, some of the British bands were now touring the U.S.
As the snow melted, life returned to the city streets. It kicked off with Joe "King" Carrasco, a fun band from the American south with a strong tex-mex influence, at Tut's on March 6th.
Tut's was a second floor club at the corner of Belmont and Sheffield. The neighborhood included a couple of cheap corner liquor stores and a tattoo parlor frequented by sailors in town for the weekend. The Ravenswood elevated tracks (now the brown line) ran right past the building. The 1981 incarnation of Tut's was the first, as far as I know, to book really innovative music into the space. The second floor layout included two rooms, a music room with a raised stage, and a smaller back room with a bar. There was a hallway connecting the two rooms, and the stairs up from the street intersected the hallway. The bouncers sat at the top of the stairs. There were a couple of smaller rooms off of the hallway, an office and an ambiguous room not open to the public where Val, the owner, hung out with a few mysterious characters.
There were two bartenders at Tut's. Kathleen was a muscular woman, a bodybuilder, with short hair. Veronica was more petite and feminine, with long brown hair and a propensity for wearing short skirts and tight tops. She was very good at flirting with the customer's. Every week there were a couple of personal ads in the Reader (Chicago's free weekly paper) proclaiming lust for Veronica in an assortment of creative ways. I never really understood that, especially later when I got to know her well. Under all the glam, she was really just an ordinary girl.
Veronica
The real attraction of Tut's was that the back room and the hallway were reasonably quiet. It was possible to carry on an extended conversation even when a band was playing. On many a night I ignored a bad band to talk about politics or philosophy instead. But on March 7, 1981, the band was very good and the back room was empty.
Bauhaus came out to a modest crowd, perhaps a little over a hundred people. I was up in front, pressed against the edge of the stage. It was a fantastic show, and I was mesmerized - but kept taking photos. Under the harsh glare of a spotlight, and dressed in black, Peter Murphy did his best Bela Lugosi imitation, while Daniel Ash made a guitar do amazing things and David Jay pounded out a vibrant bass. After an EP and a succession of singles, Bauhaus had just put out their first album (In the Flat Field). The show included most of that early work.
At the end of the show, the crowd dispersed. I came back into the music room after a while, and Peter Murphy and Daniel Ash were walking around with no one to talk to. So I went up and talked to them. They seemed almost shy, so strange after the animated stage performance. I took a few more photos, although it was more difficult without the bright spotlights.
On April 11 the British influence returned to Tut's. This time it was Echo and the Bunnymen, a psychedelic/existential bunch from Liverpool. Like Bauhaus, they were still at cult-level status after one single and with an album (Crocodiles) recently out, but no real hits yet. The music was relatively subtle, and the lyrics sometimes not entirely rational, but often profound. It took a few listens, but to this day I still like some of that early work.
I was in what was to become my usual spot, pressed against the stage just to the right of the main microphone, camera in hand. Ian McCullough managed to do a solid and coherent show, despite funny-looking eyes and a bottomless glass of vodka and orange juice.
At the time I was using a Nikon FM for location work, lightweight, durable, and with an inconspicuous black body. I was usually so close to the stage that a fast normal lens was more than sufficient. Sometimes if there was enough light I'd use a short telephoto, a 105mm, to grab really tight head shots. Tri-X was the film of choice at the time, there really wasn't anything much faster.
One night I was in the hallway at Tut's when suddenly one of the big windows in the back room shattered. Some guy had just thrown a chair through the window; I never did learn why. He jumped from the window across to the elevated tracks only several feet away. His buddy tried to follow, but missed. He plunged two stories down onto the concrete sidewalk. The paramedics came to remove the body.
There were a few other interesting bands that spring. Problem Dogs, a local outfit, played at Space Place, just west of the loop, on April 25.
On the night of the 26th, D.O.A. swept out of Vancouver and into Oz. I think that was the Broadway incarnation of Oz; there were so many, it was hard to keep track. Oz was a bar in name only. It had no liquor license, and had no intention of trying to get one. Mandated closing times were ignored. After a while the cops would shut it down. A week or two later it would sprout like a mushroom, in some other low rent space, in some other dark and obscure corner of the inner city. Because there was no sign on the outside and no advertising, only word of mouth, it usually took the cops at least a few weeks to find it again. The crowd was usually small, mostly hard-core punks and anarchists, lots of black leather jackets.
On that night, I was with my friend Diz. D.O.A. set up in the front of the room, on the floor under the boarded up window. Of course, there was no stage. There weren't very many people present, but the area in front of the band quickly filled with slam dancers. It was almost all guys... and Lisa. A tall, strikingly beautiful girl originally from Nebraska, she slowly ventured onto the dance floor. She was very drunk, barely able to stand, and in spike heels. Within a minute she was flat on the floor. She staggered to her feet, only to be knocked down again. This repeated several times. Eventually she retreated to a safe distance, apparently unharmed.
A more permanent Chicago institution was Wax Trax records. On Lincoln Avenue just north of Fullerton, next to the Biograph Theater where John Dillinger was gunned down, it was THE place to buy records. They always had the latest British import music, an unbelievable selection of it, and a knowledgeable staff. The fanzines were in a rack toward the back, and upstairs was mostly clothes. Through 1981 it was one of the very few places to buy black straight-leg jeans in Chicago. Ask for them in any of the mainstream franchise stores, and not a chance, they were still selling bell bottoms.
Sometime in April of 1981 I took a photo of Carol, one of the staff at Wax Trax, in the doorway of the store. She was wearing her "A Certain Ratio" button (another of the Factory Records bands out of Manchester). It was one of those random moments, she was out for a cigarette break as I walked in or out. There are two negatives. I didn't see the sadness in her eyes at the time, but it's evident enough in the photo. She's looking right through the camera. By summer she was dead, having carefully copied the exact methods used by Ian Curtis a little over a year earlier.
Carol - April 1981
Note:
This is an excerpt from Ephemeral Creation... the story of my journey from wide-eyed newcomer to jaded post-punk journalist. I'm currently in the process of updating the hard copy book version, because the first edition has very nearly sold out. Updates will be posted here as available.
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November 20, 2007