Taking a break for a week from the ongoing series on artists that became famous outside of their home countries, to bring you the story of a band that’s been on my mind a lot lately.
I live in Chicago and everybody is buzzing this week because the Democratic National Convention is in town. The last time the DNC was here was in 1996 with Bill Clinton and Al Gore. Nothing too terrible happened then other than a bunch of politicians dancing the Macarena. But the last time before that a political convention was in town was the 1968 Democratic National Convention.
That convention was notorious for a lot of reasons. Mayor Richard Daley’s lockdown of the city (which prompted Walter Cronkite to say that the DNC was taking place in a police state), thousands of protestors against the Vietnam War pouring into the city, clashes between the demonstrators and the police and the national guard that led to hundreds of injuries, the debacle possibly costing Hubert Humphrey the election, and then the prosecution of several of the organizers of the protests by the Nixon administration.
But in the middle of all the chaos - there was one band. One significant musical moment by a band that was in the process of helping to create a whole new genre of rock that would be called punk. (No one band invented punk rock but this band is definitely one of the forefathers. As if to solidify that status in a review of their first album the critic Lester Bangs would write they sounded like a bunch of “16 year old punks on a meth power trip”).
It’s a historical event and a musical event that has always lived large in my consciousness, and what better time to tell the story than this week as history in a lot of ways looks like it is repeating itself. Let’s hope lessons have been learned this time around.
The band that showed up