The Chicago punk band who even John Wayne Gacy branded as “sick”
Despite being born in California, Steve Albini was an adopted son of Chicago. However, if you think for a second that his links to the Windy City made him a fan of any of the music being released there, then clearly you don’t know anything about the man himself, who wasn’t really a fan of anything.
At least, that was the vibe that he put out in the world. Whether it was legit, doesn’t really matter. Albini wanted to shock and offend people and didn’t care whose feathers he ruffled. At the very least, he was consistent. It didn’t matter whether it was an average Joe he was offending or the most popular, respected members of the Chicago punk crowd; he wanted all of them to hate his guts. Perhaps that’s why he was so convinced, not to mention so loud, about his belief that the Chicago punk scene would never amount to anything compared to its Los Angeles and New York counterparts.
Nevertheless, for all of his posturing, Albini wasn’t exactly alone in being a provocateur in this scene. After all, punk-rock has always been about punching upwards, downwards, side-to-side, every which way you can hit, someone in a mohawk and a ratty old Crass T-shirt has tried to hit it already. The Chicago scene that Albini was chronicling from his position as a journalist, a one-man Statler and Waldorf but without the jokes, was no different. Several bands also tried to make a name for themselves with transgressive moves.
Now, let’s call a spade a spade here: Pete Townshend wasn’t smashing guitars on stage in the name of auto-destructive art; he did it because it looked cool. End Result, an infamous band of the 1970s Chicago scene, didn’t have a horn section instead of a drummer to actually impress the more experimental jazz-minded members of their community; they did it to look cool. The bands in question might call these “transgressive statements” about “individuality” that “force society to look itself in the mirror”. But, let’s be real, they are nothing more than publicity stunts.
The most egregious of these was a stunt pulled by Deerfield’s The Mentally Ill. Forming in the late 1970s, the band recorded their first seven-inch, ‘Gacy’s Place’, long before they’d even played a show. The band’s members were, in true punk style, caught up in so many different bands that they could never be in one place long enough to actually rehearse or book a gig, yet they had their single. And yes, of course, it was named after that Gacy, who else would it be?
Unable to tour or perform to support the record, the band seemed stuck for ways to promote the record until they thought about the subject of the record. What if they just sent it to him? You want to talk about shocking, transgressive stunts, how about getting a seal of approval from ‘The Killer Clown’ himself…
The band duly sent a copy of the single along with a handwritten letter asking for his thoughts on the record. He called the song, fittingly enough, “Sick”.
Suddenly, The Mentally Ill didn’t need to perform live; they’d secured a notoriety that no amount of gigs descending into riots could match. Albini himself became a fan, which is a mixed blessing if there ever was one. However, despite making a second single, ‘Sex Cells’ in 1982, the band fell into obscurity soon afterwards. In fact, they wouldn’t perform live until long after they’d split up, reuniting in 2007 for their first ever gigs.
Not bad for a band whose reputation was built on a publicity stunt, but then, is that not every punk band ever, when you really think about it?