Throughout the past forty or so years, Doug Ward has been a fixture in the Chicago punk and hardcore scene, and whose imprints can be seen with his contributions to Underdog Records or through 8-Bark, V-Reverse, Fourth Rotor, or his old newsletter, Chicago Alternative Bulletin. A few weeks ago,
I talked to Doug about his trajectory, focusing on the period he existed in that came after Chicago punk and hardcore’s first wave in 1984 before the scene would change drastically in the next decade.
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We lived out in Hinsdale [Illinois]. I was born in Boston, but I moved out here when I was a few weeks old. I grew up in the southwest suburbs. My old man was a scientist, and he worked for a physics lab. He did nerdy science stuff. They bought a house out in Hinsdale. Hinsdale is now rich and foofy and crazy. I always joked that we were the poor people because we were middle class. We had a house with one bathroom, which is like a shack by today's standards.
The high school I went to was full of rich kids. I hated them all; I had that punk angst. I say that is what drove me into the arms of punk rock. It is kind of stupid to complain because it was a nice place to live. My parents weren’t musical. My dad liked classical music. They were a generation before people whose parents were into rock n roll. It was the early ‘60s when they were out of college.
It was probably around freshman year of high school, and there was a kid who was a senior. He was like this punk kid who got kicked out of school for wearing a Dead Kennedys “Nazi Punks Fuck Off” shirt. I just started talking to him, and later, he went down to a Black Flag Halloween show at The Metro and got stabbed in the leg. I was like, “This kid is cool and into all this weird punk shit.” It just captured my imagination. It was him and two other people that were into punk. Everyone else was preppy, rich kids. He gave me the cassette tape of Naked Raygun’s Basement Screams. It hadn’t been released yet.
It is 1983; I’m 14 or 15. I want to play guitar. I was a little too young to go to the city, but I knew shows were happening. I started taking guitar lessons at this little music shop, and the guy who was teaching me guitar was like, “Give me recordings of stuff.” I started to find The Minutemen, The Jam. He showed me how to play these songs. I started hearing about shows going on at Cubby Bear and The Metro.
I would do the “I’m sleeping over at my friend's place” shit, and my older brother had a car, and we would drive down to the city. That was my thing. We would go to Wax Trax! Records. I remember thinking, “I’m going to buy two records.” There was a punk bin at Wax Trax. I probably flipped through the bin six times, just flipping through all the covers. I didn’t know any of the bands. I got Minor Threat’s Out of Step and a Dead Kennedys record.
I remember seeing Articles of Faith, Strike Under, and those types of bands at The Cubby Bear. And then, through that, I ended up meeting one or two other kids from the western suburbs at this high school or that high school who were also weird, and those became my friends.
It was your typical suburban way of trying to find the weirdos. There was a generation of kids that were older than me. Back then, four years older might have well been 100 years. It was kind of the tail end of those bands from You Weren't There: A History of Chicago Punk 1977 to 1984 that were a generation older than me.
It was very generational. I would maybe run into them at a show. When my friends and I started bands, it was almost like there was no crossover. Club Foot Garage was a goofy band that some friends did. They never played with Rights of The Accused. Part of it was that we were [in the] very western and northern suburbs, and most of those bands gravitated towards the city. Out of Order started in Downers Grove, but then they went downtown. That was enough of a gap. Most of us were still in high school.
Listening to The Clash, The Jam, or whatever, I just wanted to be in a punk band. There were a couple of other guys in my high school who wanted to do band, a drummer and a bass player, and I got the guitar and went, “Okay, we're going to start a band.” We didn’t know anybody. I’m probably 15 or 16. I barely went to any shows at this point. We just practiced in this guy's garage and tried to learn some covers. When I couldn't figure them out, I'd take him to my guitar teacher and ask, “How do I play this song?” And then, I would teach my bandmates even though I did not know what I was doing.
We did not know where to play. Nobody was doing house shows or garage shows. This guy that was the bass player, Brian, was a couple of years older than me. He was a new wave guy. There was this all-ages juice bar that played new wave in Glencoe. It was called McGreedys or something. He would go up there and try to pick up girls. And they had an open mic. He talked to the people there and said, “Hey, can we play a show?”
It was like November 8 that we booked the show. He came back to band practice and said, "hey, I got us a show, and they want us to play three sets.” We were so naive. We got to the point where we had an hour and a half worth of stuff. There was no checking in with the booking guy. That band, we called ourselves the X-Tones.
I had a taste of playing a show. Way out in Palatine, a strip club was doing Sunday night all-ages metal and punk night. And who was out there but Russ Forster and his band Fudge Tunnel. He later became the guy who started Underdog Records. He was about four years older than me. He was a student at The University of Chicago. Somehow, he had found this place and booked a show there. We met, and we clicked. I was like, “I have this band I’m starting.”
I started to put together I.D. Under. He ended up being the go-between. He ended up booking some of our shows. Through The University of Chicago, we met other bands and people doing shows at different venues. We would play house shows, parties, and a few clubs. We played in the city and the suburbs, and that scene would develop. But we still weren’t playing with Naked Raygun.
Russ had this idea to capture what was going on, so he decided to start Underdog Records. This was back in 1986. He wasn’t trying to make it; he was just trying to break even. Russ even bought a van for the label. He wanted to help the band's tour. I.D. Under used it to go on our first tour in 1987. That was the first taste of DIY that we really got.
There was no internet. It was all word of mouth and giving each other phone numbers. I give a lot of credit to Eric from Life Sentence. Life Sentence were a few years older than us. Life Sentence in ‘83 and ‘84 toured like mofos. They had been touring and knew a lot of people. When it was time, I called Eric and asked, "Can you help us out? He said, “Sure, where do you want to go?”
We probably had a three-hour conversation. When we got off this phone call, I probably had 50 phone numbers. It was priceless. If Eric from Life Sentence gave me the number, everyone had a context. Those handwritten lists and little address books were vital. Sharing them, trading them, and updating them was key to the scene.
Knowing how valuable the information was, I wanted to figure out a way to keep it updated and keep it fresh. If you help someone put on a show, hopefully, they’ll take care of you. So, the idea of (the newsletter) was to put the contacts in there. It was kind of like a little scene report. I wrote a few for MRR [Maximumrocknroll] back in the day. I would meet the band from wherever, and there'd be more contacts for me, so hopefully my band could go there.
It was nerdy, but we had a sign-up sheet at our merch table: put your name and address, and you’ll get on this newsletter. Looking back, it was obvious that I just wanted to exchange this DIY scene information.
Russ put out maybe 6-8 records. Going into 1989, he was burning out; he wanted help. And that’s when the idea of echoing Maximumrocknroll and making it a collective started. The original lineup of people doing it was me, Russ, Ben Weasel, and Marc Ruvolo. The first project was the Achtung Chicago compilation. We booked a bunch of time in a recording studio because, back then, it was more difficult, especially for newer bands, to even know where to go. We set up slots for each band to record their song comp and then submit stuff, and we voted on it. But really quickly, it got weird.
Marc Ruvalo didn’t like what was happening, so later on, he went and did his own thing, Johann’s Face Records. There was no bad blood; we were all still friends. Russ got involved in other things. Later, it became an open collective where there were anywhere from 5 to 25 people involved. We’d meet every week. We’d do shit work; we’d answer letters, silkscreen stuff.
A few years into it, we decided we wanted to do the Underdog zine. By ‘92 or ‘93, we were also doing distribution. We were trying to help other labels around and would list other labels' records in our catalog.
We did Victory Records back in the day when Tony was still sane. Basically, we would buy it wholesale and buy it for retail. We would bring them around to merch tables and we would have the Underdog bin.
Eventually, there was a little bit of a period when the distro stopped, the record part stopped, and the zine continued. I was burned out on it and had been doing it pretty intensely.
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