INTERVIEW
[OBIK: This interview gets more and more incoherent as it goes on--I think maybe the person who transcribed it wasn't having a good night...nonetheless there's a great deal of interesting stuff in it. Grammar and spelling has been corrected. Mostly.]
In the past year now, Chicago has been witnessing a new strength in its music scene. The Effigies are Chicago's foremost potent "hardcore punk band". Among their attitude and beliefs there is a persistent feeling that comes across seeing their gigs or just talking to them.
The Effigies consist of:
- J John...vocals
- P Paul...bass
- S Steve..drums
- E Earl...guitar
Including in this interview are three Coolest Retards:
- C Craig
- D Diane
- K Karen
C: Maybe you can tell us about the EP?
P: It's going to have five songs.
C: At this point do you know what the five songs will be?
S: It's going to be the "Haunted Town" EP, the five songs are We'll Be Here Tomorrow, Mob Clash, Below the Drop, Strong Box, and Haunted Town.
C: I don't know if you can say at this point, that Tim was the producer?
P: Tim is the engineer, we produced it ourselves.
J: Tim the enchanter.
K: Is this EP going to be on Autumn Records?
J: Yes definitely. Unless something...Warner Bros had just called me up the other day.
P: And I was talking to Epic about a Europe tour.
C: What's up with the Oz LP? What songs are on that?
P: Guns or Ballots and Quota.
J: I guess it hadn't taken off cause they're having trouble with money. He said (Dem, their manager and owner of OZ) if he makes some good money at D.O.A. it will give him a start.
J: I guess the whole thing has been pretty mixed down.
P: It' won't be out before July.
C: And your EP may also not come out until June?
P: It takes 6-8 weeks to press it, as soon as we get the money it will be 6-8 weeks from there.
C: What clubs do you like to play in Chicago?
J: The only bars worth playing in Chicago are Oz and O'Bannions.
D: Don't you think you're getting the same audience at them?
J: We're forming a trap of being a Oz house band right now.
S: Except for Strike Under and a few other bands we're trying to avoid that, were trying to play bigger audiences. We have played Space Place with Black Flag and the Plasmatics. When we did play with Black Flag, Space Place was real paranoid. From Dem there were five bouncers stationed around the place.
P: The bouncers were scared.
S: They didn't know what to expect.
C: Has there been any reason conjectured up?
P: Well, they see people jumping up and down going crazy and they think people are hurting each other, they're just having fun.
S: There has never been one serious incident at all among the three bands. No reason for them to conjure up all these ideas, these things that have been stated--it's all bullshit, they dream it all up. I can't believe they do all this. I don't know what kind of satisfaction they can get out of this.
J: Alot of this stuff has been from a basic misunderstanding of punk. Me bashing Earl's head in the front line at concerts is different from some jerk bashing my head, who I don' even know. It's different if some bouncer wants to bash my head, it's not the same kind of violence. It's the punk attitude among themselves.
C: Why is Oz getting busted so much?
P: It has to do with paying the policemen.
J: No, no they had a file on Oz the old Oz alot of little incidents added up to a nice fat police file down at city hall, and they just took the reputation of what they wanted. I think it's a total different crowd now.
K: To change the subject a bit, but during the summer last year, you guys and Strike Under, you felt that you had to form a band to get a different scene going, away from the existing new wave/punk bar bands. Now that you guys have made a name for yourselves in Chicago, how do you feel that you're attracting new people around, and bringing back some of the 77 punks?
J: Those people don't really like us.
P: There was a need to form.
S: Chicago is never mentioned in any of the other music papers. No decent punk bands, only pop bands with nothing to say. It's so typical new wave.
J: Like now, I would not call myself a punk now, because of all the bullshit that has been tagged along to it. The thing is these bands, the new wave thin tie, they just took punk as a fashion and corrupted it a bit. It's what you got now; it's just bar bands with a different uniform, playing music that's a bit pop.
S: There are two directions that come across either it's threatening, or wimpy. They think you wear a thin tie and see Bohemia and think Devo is a punk band, which is far from it.
K: But, what about people who come to see your gigs now, and say five months ago they used to listen to Devo and seeing the Effigies, they think it's real cool to see a real punk band?
J(?): Better to see us than listen to that stuff.
S: The fact that most people are sheep and assholes. People who listen to us are pissed off against something, they try to express themselves in a different way. They're not sheep they're into it for a long time. They understand what's it all about, they listen to the songs and lyrics.
P: There are alot of people out there who like the B 52's, that style, they just don't know about different bands. You tell them about U.K. Subs...
E: That's right.
K: But what about the people who start glossying that, making punk chic. They take punk bands from England and start getting that image.
J: (under his breath) Adam and the Ants.
E: Of all the bands that do that you can tell they're pretty influenced by all that glamour and all that bullshit bands. Any of the good bands coming out of England are not going to go along with that shit. You know the Subs, Crass. You think they're going to go along with some bullshit scheme as that just to make cash? They're not going for that.
(at this point the new UK Subs single is mentioned about the cover photographs and their pompous clothes [OBIK: sounds like the Keep on Running single, the Subs' regrettable "New Romantic" release.])
C: What motivated you to get the Effigies started? What is motivating you to keep continuing?
J: Nothing...right now I'm walking out.
S: First of all we like to play new rock n roll music and...
E: It's just what it is with different lyrics.
S: Decent lyrics with something to say. We're not trying to progress to any thing great.
P: Better than driving a truck, or something. I don't want to drive a truck anymore.
C: Why did you choose the name Effigies?
J: I knew it had to come up, sooner or later.
S: It's s great name.
P: We had hundreds of names...
S: About five less than that.
J: It's not political in any sense. We just sort of evoke certain things.
E: Just because of what the word means it doesn't mean of us in any political thing.
S: It's the symbol of people taking hatred out of themselves.
J: Punks were effigies.
D: What were your other choices?
P: Our first choice the...Snotrags. Naw, it was the Corrosives.
J: We don't want to talk about that.
C: Have you seen the copy of the fanzine Short News from NYC? They mentioned Chicago as being the possibility of the second punk city as opposed to San Francisco or NYC.
P: The only thing I've noticed with the West Coast and Chicago, they have more money and more people in the record business and millionaire kids. Chicago is a blue collar town, and out west there's record companies and studios left and right out there. There is no industry for any punk band here.
J: It's still an independent industry. So far nobody, no punk band, has been tied with a major label unless you get a few bands in England.
P: Because so many bands come and go so fast.
J: You take Black Flag all the punk bands in the U.S. here have never been signed to a major label they don't have any big money.
K: It seems that the Effigies draw a pretty good crowd in Chicago. I know you guys don't play often for the purpose of becoming a Friday night band every week. Say that it starts dragging (the following), will you be forced to go to LA to get some recognition?
J: We will go on our own. The idea right now, every dime we make is going towards the release of our record and setting up a tour. We will take a tour. When Black Flag came by they offered to make connections in the South West, in Texas they have a big following. As far as university towns, we thought we could do it sometime this summer, but we will have to wait till fall, which is the best time, also for financial backing. The thing is we can't play this city all the time.
P: We would like to play Milwaukee and Lansing, try to get a midwest recognition.
C: Milwaukee on the most part, I heard were surprised at the Strike Under/Da show. Their idea of Chicago bands are Bohemia and the OD'd, really, a bad image of what Chicago is all about.
P: A friend of mine saw Poison Squirrel and they fell asleep.
J: These bands, what the hell are they? They at ways take their influences from the wrong people. There is a right and a wrong. They take what few influences they have and corrupt them to such a point where it is unrecognizable. I'm sure if you talk to these people, these are generations of musicians that, way back from 3-4 years ago they played different from this new wave. Everybody, except for Earl this is our first band. We all have our bullshit skeletons in our closets...but I mean we had too much influence of good stuff.
P: I've been influenced by thousands of different kinds of bands.
J: So have I. I used to listen to bullshit bands I'll never commit myself to now, so don't bother asking.
C: Do you try to discourage violence?
J: There has never been violence at any of our gigs.
E: We just play, we don't say wreck the place.
P: Like we played Northeastern it's too big and there were empty chairs and I was just out of it. No excitement. The next night we played Oz people went crazy.
S: We had this drunk singing with us that night.
K: Do you get mad when people don't get across what you say?
J: That's the whole separation. I think the separation will finally come down. I just read that Killing Joke article; I think half the people who buy these records don't know what the lyrics are. What they do is take an image when they see a band live; the way they wear their hair, the type of shirt they wear, they form a punk image
(cuts off there)
