Naked Raygun
Jettison
My first Naked Raygun show, at Tuts in Lakeview in 1983, was an oasis in a long summer of faceless hardcore. Metal influences and thrash were beginning to dominate punk rock, and most of the other bands I’d seen lately–the Exploited, Jodie Foster’s Army, local boys Rights of the Accused–were graceless, pimply shouters in flannel shirts, all about velocity and volume with “politics” that rarely went deeper than “Fuck Reagan.” But Naked Raygun looked positively sharp, with their close-cropped hair and carefully chosen thrift-store duds. They were equal opportunity cynics (“If you cared about the world / You wouldn’t be here hanging on a girl,” Jeff Pezzati sang), and their songs actually had hooks.
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At the time I didn’t yet understand that bands like Naked Raygun–in attitude if not sound–were cropping up all over the U.S., but it became apparent soon enough. The hardcore underground was too rigid to expand with the best bands it produced, and within the next year or so, independent labels like SST, Homestead, and Touch and Go exploded with remarkably diverse records by the Minutemen, the Meat Puppets, Dinosaur, Husker Du, Black Flag, Sonic Youth, the Volcano Suns, Big Black, Die Kreuzen, the Butthole Surfers, and Killdozer–bands that, ironically, would set the stage for the profoundly homogenizing “alternative rock” explosion of the 90s. Some of them, like the Minutemen and Big Black, split up before the end of the decade. Others, like Dinosaur and Killdozer, backed themselves into stylistic corners; still others, like Die Kreuzen and the Buttholes, simply went to shit. But in the mid-80s they were all remaking rock in their own image.
Durango’s departure would have been a huge loss to a lesser band–nobody played like him, and he wrote half the material on Basement Screams–but Haggerty proved himself in the first seconds of the band’s Homestead debut, Throb Throb, with the tense, menacing three-note intro to “Rat Patrol.” His distorted, steely guitar sound was a machete that could split hairs as easily as it could lop off heads.
