“In Chicago, none of the bands really sound alike. Every band has a different sound. Really Good.”-Rights of The Accused Interview (Taken from Bullshit Monthly, 1984)
In reading a lot of old 80s hardcore and punk fanzines, I have been thinking about how local scenes developed in their infancy. While the details vary from city to city, there is a throughline you can follow. Everyone heard Black Flag, and suddenly, punk seemed too tame. Local scenes were transformed. Depending on who you ask, it was for the better or the worse. That is at least the consensus I see across all the various music histories I have read. A lot of information on Chicago during hardcore’s beginnings is scant. Unlike New York or DC, it has not been archived to depth. We don’t have something like the University of Maryland’s punk archive, which allows access to much history. There isn’t some old Blogspot from a decade ago that has uncovered some rarities originally intended as tape to give to a promoter (Rorschach is the one I’m thinking of in this case). I have heard of a couple of Chicago punk zines from the 80s but have been unable to locate any. If someone has a copy or a scan of Steve Albini’s, hit me up.
It makes it so we have to rely upon documentation that looks backward. Occasionally, I’ll find some info, such as the quick interview I took a quote from. But much of the information on early Chicago hardcore and, by extension, punk comes from a documentary called You Weren’t There: A History of Chicago Punk. It chooses a concentrated period, starting in 1977 and ending in 1984. There is a compilation that I recommend finding on YouTube that was released alongside it. The participants in it are representative of that era in that it leans heavily on punk. From my perspective, many of the participants still carry those same feelings of being a little anti-hardcore. The end of the movie has a similar refrain as all these music documentaries have. By 1984, that initial spark of the punk scene was gone and tainted. Everyone began to sound the same. The music was trying to be as fast as possible for its own sake.
While I am quick to ignore that refrain, it can partially explain why Chicago seemed to be a bit later to adopt hardcore than other cities. That is at least the impression I get whenever I come across any Chicago recordings from that time. Our nearby neighbors in Detroit had already made a significant impact, which may be due to other factors. It had a fanzine-turned-record label in Touch and Go, which provided the infrastructure to uplift the local music community. It had a short-lived venue in the Freezer. On the other hand, Chicago had a much-publicized feud between The Effigies and Articles of Faith, highlighting the division between those who were around before hardcore and those who came after.
This original context for Chicago hardcore can help explain some of the “small-town syndrome” I feel as someone who still goes to Chicago hardcore shows. Touring bands will give a passing mention to The Killer and some current ones. Older folks may mention AOF. Maybe Los Crudos and some 90s stuff will get mentioned. If you’re my friend, I may force you to listen to The Repos sometime. The East Coast still dominates the conversation with good reason. You cannot change that touring the midwest is different from other parts of the country, leading to situations where certain cities seem like they live on an island. It can occasionally lead to fruitful scenes, like Springfield, Illinois. It still feels odd for Chicago to be in a situation where I feel we are underdogs.
Thanks to the documentary No Delusions, we have gotten some documentation of Chicago hardcore in recent years. It looks towards the 90s and beyond as its source text. I rewatch pieces anytime I need to remember some Chicago lore. I wanted to take a closer look at what is a very short but essential period. 1980 to 1984 would create the building blocks for Chicago hardcore in years to come. Future years would give us releases from Bhopal Stiffs, Life Sentence, and others later in the decade. Not everything from that limited scope of time forty years ago has necessarily held up. It may be too silly or sophomoric. Early hardcore, too, was tasteless, looking for shock value, which comes with the fact that you are listening to music made by teenagers. I cannot deny that recording quality is the best and is sometimes unlistenable to 2024 ears.
There is some early Chicago hardcore that is worth your time. I still get something from What We Want is Free by Articles of Faith. It is one of the great hardcore debuts, and I can imagine the shift it signaled for Chicago at the time. Below is a sampling of what was happening alongside Articles of Faith, which dominates the history of early Chicago hardcore. And as always, I am not an expert. I am just a guy who loves thinking about how hardcore developed in Chicago and wanted to add my perspective to a conversation I haven’t seen much of beyond the spare few mentions. If a million people salivate over old hardcore ephemera from other cities, why can’t Chicago get a mention?
Articles of Faith
Articles of Faith's arrival in Chicago feels like one of those drawn lines, marking what came before and what was to follow. I imagine not everyone was on board, leading to some divisions I discussed in my little introduction. It was markedly different, moving up the tempo and distinguishing it from other early hardcore in Chicago. There were no post-punk dablings to be found. The origin of AOF came when Vic Bondi saw Bad Brains while in DC, shifting from Clash-indebted punk to something more aggressive. There are several iterations of this scenario across early hardcore, but Articles of Faith still stand out to me. The debut EP hits the spot between catchiness and playing as fast as possible. It has all the qualities of the best first-wave hardcore. Songs like “Every Day” and “What We Want Is Free” stick to me, all while channeling some need in me to hear music that may be incomprehensible to someone who thinks it just sounds like noise. Articles of Faith would break up in 1985, laying a path for the next generation to carry forward for the rest of the decade and beyond.
Rights of The Accused
The little info on Rights of The Accused identifies them as a band of teenagers with a jokey bent. The one live recording I found takes place at Cubby Bear. The performance is rough and hard to watch. It does feel like high schoolers who are just beginning to try out their instruments. That is the story with a lot of early hardcore, but it is even less put together than other bands from the time. When it gets into what people would call thrash at the time, I can see the appeal. There is some proficiency, and they know their way around the punk beat. There is one person who does a stagedive. The 1984 EP Innocence is the best version of the band. It is fast, with some semblance of melody. "Faith" is kind of catchy. The lyrics are simple, reading as what a teenage punk kid might send to MRR at age 16. The band would continue for years, abandoning hardcore for metal, following the same trajectory as many hardcore bands during the 80s.
The Bandcamp description for Trial By Fire’s posthumous release identifies them as “ one of the first Chicago bands to play thrash style hardcore.” I have no way to confirm that, but it lines up with the general timeline, forming around 1981 and releasing one demo. I imagine the arrival of Trial By Fire was somewhat momentous for Chicago at the time, given that it had Strike Under members who were very important for first-wave punk. In listening to the collection released in 2017, you can feel the tension in the band between wanting just to write fast-as-hell songs to slam to and play something a bit slower and more refined. It seems to be a recurring story of many of the early Chicago hardcore of this period. There were still vestiges of punk in it, looking to find some middle ground between hardcore and punk.
There is a feeling of what could have been when I listen to Trial By Fire, too. Most of the songs on the 2017 collection were never released in the 80s. It makes it more of an archival listen than anything else. All I can do is wonder how different early Chicago hardcore could have been if Trial By Fire had stuck around a bit longer. I do not think it surpasses Articles of Faith. That is an impossible thing to do, in my opinion. But I think it could have connected to people outside of the city, given the amount of interest in hardcore by 1982.
Savage Beliefs
Savage Beliefs is one of the more interesting artifacts from early Chicago hardcore. They released one EP that had more in common with punk. Only a couple of songs in their discography (Shake Your Neighbor’s Hand, Pink Shirt, What’s Left in The Fridge) feel tied to a hardcore lineage. It may be because Savage Beliefs had a member from Goverment Issue, intertwining Chicago and DC together at a pretty important time. But the band seemed pretty uninterested in writing, just ripping hardcore punk. The unreleased tracks on the compilation Alonha Dream released in 2015 strike me more as proto-indie rock and seem more interested in creating catchy lines than projecting aggression. With forty years of hindsight, Savage Beliefs is an example of the desire to move beyond the limited confines that hardcore had already been created in its few short years of existence.
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