Hooray For Me!
A Friendly Rant From Captain Spaulding

NAKED RAYGUN'S HOOK BACK IN ANGER

The band Naked Raygun is back together as a working unit. They played their first shows together in six years at Chicago's Cabaret Metro towards the end of last month, and have a few new cuts on an odds-and-sods collection called The Last of the Demohicans (Dyslexic Rekords). They're back, and I am one happy sonufa 'gun over it. The why:

History shows that oftentimes that which is most valuable is that which is least noticed. The history of rock-n-roll is the motherlode where that particular aphorism is concerned.

For somewhere in the interregnum between punk rock and grunge lived an awful lot of good bands that believed in the Woody Hayes credo of "three chords and a cloud of dust". Good bands that never got a dime's worth of airplay or a big major label push. History, that shameless tease, leaves us with a few names here and there...the Minutemen, Killing Joke, Husker Du, Social Distortion. Call them postpunk, pregrunge, hardcore, artcore, whatever you want. Why not call them "rock-n-roll", and just leave it at that?

The interregnum, also known as that fat and phlegmatic decade called the eighties, saw a thriving scene of such bands in Chicago. The roll call is a proud one: Strike Under, The Effigies, The Defoliants, Bloodsport, Articles of Faith, Breaking Circus, Big Black, and The Interceptors were among the bigger fists in that brawl of noise. But none walked taller than Naked Raygun.

In the True Rock-n-Roll Hall of Fame here by the shores of the inland sea, there hangs a black-and-white poster with the words "Huge Bigness at Last" on it and a drawing of a man, a woman, a dog, and a bug doing flips and karate chops. It is a poster for Naked Raygun's EP Basement Screams put out by Evanston's Ruthless Records in '83, and it literally looks as if someone had slapped it together in five minutes. There wasn't time for art design or promotions or meet-and-greets or A&R strategy sessions. There was only time for Huge Bigness. You got on, toed your mark, nailed the truth in a half-hour set or twelve songs--whichever came first--and got off the stage for the next bunch of guys, with whom you'd later split a round of beers and commiserate tomorrow's return to the day shift.

Tough, sensible laboring-class guys in buzz cuts, t-shirts, Doc Martens, and greasy work pants, prematurely aged by the Chicago winters and loaded with the town's no-nonsense-except-my-buddy's-nonsense brusqueness. Bands that worked union halls and hole-in-the-wall bars like Batteries Not Included and Club Stodola and counted themselves lucky if the five-watt stations on the left of the dial like Northwestern University's WNUR or Northeastern Illinois University's WZRD played their songs at two o'clock in the morning. That was the world where Naked Raygun was king.

It was a cool world. I saw it up close from the outside. I was a callow college boy who went to Effigies and Naked Raygun gigs and stood at the entrance, hoping that I wouldn't set off the club's b.s. detector and earn myself a faceful of knuckles. When Raygun frontman Jeff Pezzati sang, "Muscle Beach is now Pork Chop Hill"--and meant it, like he always seems to mean it when he has a microphone in his hand--I had the distinct impression that I was Frankie Avalon in a roomful of Bob Mitchums and Victor Matures.

I did have entree. I saw Strike Under's last show from backstage, a live WZRD session, before they broke up and bassist Pierre Kedzy joined Naked Raygun. I hung out with Breaking Circus, even lived with them while their The Very Long Fuse was being praised to the hilt by the critics and the band was preparing to relocate to Minneapolis. And I had the distinct non-honor of listening to Steve Albini hold forth on a couple of occasions in the tumbledown Breaking Circus apartment known as "the Lodge", back when the pre-Big Black Albini was just some skinny little know-it-all with a mouth as big as his native Montana.

And everyone I knew in that scene was in awe of Naked Raygun. Funny thing about Chicago--the city is so big that there are any number of little musical universes in it, little worlds spinning around little suns in little galaxies, and never shall these universes meet. In these separate little orbits, big things often happen. While this scene was going on in Chicago, house music was being invented by black and Hispanic deejays in abandoned factories on the city's South Side. Who knew? Unless you made the effort (like the city's current master scene-blenders, Poi Dog Pondering), you only lived in one universe at a time.

So if you have this little universe, you look to the band that best epitomizes it as your spear carrier. Naked Raygun had it all--great melodies, singalong choruses for all the morons and acerbic observations in the verses for the thinkers, a straight and true frontman in Pezzati, a 'tude that was angry without being malevolent, and a sound that had the lean power of an Abrams tank. From the early mule-kick wallop of Busted at Oz's "Libido" or Basement Screams's "Emperor Tojo" to the later punch of Throb Throb's "Surf Combat", "Managua", and "Rat Patrol" or Understand?'s "Hips Swingin" powered by drummer Eric Spicer, this was the band at the front of the line when they doled out all of the good songs. One listen to "Metastasis", and the "hey, hey-hey" refrain had you wondering if you weren't, indeed, a three-toed gecko just like the big boys.

And they were neither interested in the nihilism that was supposed to be de rigeuer for punkdom nor the cynical careerism of rock stars. They told jokes onstage. They hung out with the fans after the show. They rode the bus. They worked for a living. They were, according to the Chicago-white-boy code of honor, regular guys.

I don't know if they ever aspired to broader exposure or a major label; heaven knows what snob hackles such things raise up among the DIY true believers. Certainly the tastes of the day did not cotton to them; that had to wait for Cobain and Seattle in a later era. And I don't know if they could have handled anything larger. They were always prone to lineup changes. Pezzati is the band's only mainstay; their definitive axeman John Haggerty now plays guitar for his own band, Pegboy (whose album Three Chord Monte is running neck-and-neck with Lyle Lovett's Joshua Judges Ruth for album title of the decade). Bill Stephens is his capable, if not quite transcendent, replacement.

For the umpteenth time, Tom Wolfe may be proven wrong. It may be a new decade and the young toughs in the dancehalls might have different faces, but a good band can always go home again. Here's hoping that Naked Raygun can, and in doing so lead a whole new troop onward, onward to Managua.

Mele kalikimakaa, my little kahunas.

Captain Spaulding

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Previous Mountaintop Experiences with Captain Spaulding:

Hooray For Me #1-- One Margarita Too Many?

Hooray For Me #2-- Spitting at the Generations

Hooray For Me #3-- The One-Eyed Spokesmodel

Hooray For Me #4-- Semisardonic Over Semisonic

Hooray For Me #5-- Bury My Brain at Wounded Knee

Hooray For Me #6-- Tempest in a B-Cup

Hooray For Me #7-- Princess Diana

Hooray For Me #8-- Get Back, Honky Cat

Hooray For Me #9-- Mother Teresa

Hooray For Me #10-- Selling Johnny Cash

Hooray For Me #11-- Is the Male Ego a Hairy Beast?

Hooray For Me #12-- Why America Gets No Kicks from Soccer

Hooray For Me #13-- O Canada! Who Stands on Guard For Thee?

Hooray For Me #14-- Suicide is Painless, but Loss of Creative...

Hooray For Me #15-- Synergy for the Devil

Hooray For Me #16-- Of Hissy Fits and Human Freedoms

Hooray For Me #17-- Naked Raygun's Hook Back in Anger

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