PREVIEW: INTERVIEW WITH JOHN KEZDY FROM 2006

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In 2006, I conducted an interview with Effigies vocalist John Kezdy that was supposed to be used in an oral history of Midwest Hardcore that I was putting together for the long-gone Swindle magazine. As the piece began to concentrate more on Detroit and Touch & Go Records, the interview became unneeded. This 5,000-word interview has not seen the light of day until now. Here’s an excerpt:

John Kezdy: The first punk band I ever saw was The Ramones. They played at a club in Madison called Bunkys in 1978. It was a high-end jazz club, small, clean, and well-wired. Anyway, I got there a little early and noticed some people mingling outside. They weren't going in but seemed to be handing out flyers.  "Boycott Fascist Culture" they read. We're talking about The Ramones. 

Goobers from INCAR were boycotting the gig, marching in circles outside Bunkys.  "Hey ho, fascist culture has to go" - blah, blah, the nursery rhymes. The situation became emblematic. They were utterly clueless about music. The flyer was so ridiculous on its face that we reproduced it and inserted it in the  Body Bag singles without comment. 

Each one of those singles was hand-packed at one of our record parties. We'd get beers and sit in Steve's basement gluing record sleeves and inserting vinyl and ephemera. The longer we worked, the more carried away we got with the inserts and the graffiti inside the sleeves. Word got back to us later that some people were, uh, offended by the sleeves.

A few years later, every idiot was in a band that had a blueprint for world revolution. Hearing kids bitch about high school and surfers scream about turf never amounted to much, so bands then tried to sound deep by talking politics, and the formula was born. Reagan was the devil in those years, so everything became Reagan this, Reagan that. Loud, fast, and mechanical songs. 

Hardcore became simply a sub-culture of complaint with a language of simple political-sounding terms that everyone could parrot - A slave morality for kids that knew just enough about trying to sound political. The thing snowballed because by that time anyone who sang political slogans had a ready-made audience, just the same way some Christian bands play up a religious angle these days. By the time the political zealots had injected themselves into the music scene, just about anything that was interesting was taken out of it. Punk was dead by the time Maximum Rock and Roll became its mouthpiece. The Effigies weren't a part of that, I'm happy to say. Our differences were more than musical.

If this kinda punk rock nerdery excites you, please consider becoming a paid subscriber to the newsletter. If you need a sob story, I cannot work due to health concerns and freelance gigs are getting harder and harder to come by (If you have any leads, please let me know) The treatments I have to go through for these health issues leave me foggy, tired and overall pretty darn crappy. If that’s not enough for ya, maybe I can try to blind myself or something…