On a trip here from New York, Steve Maas was so smitten by a chance visit to La Mere that he was inspired to create something similar back home, cofounding the famous Mudd Club in October 1978. It nurtured a local scene whose influence is still being felt: among the regulars were punk pioneer Jim Skafish and confrontational pranksters Tutu & the Pirates (one of a few plausible candidates for Chicago’s first punk band), and several members of the glammy, R&B-inflected B.B. But its brief run has reverberated for decades, in Chicago and beyond. La Mere would only last as a punk disco for a little more than 11 months-it closed after a mysterious fire in April 1978. Because it was already a welcoming space for people cut off from the mainstream, it made a natural home for a fringe subculture with queer roots. Central to the success of the club’s new identity was its old identity: La Mere Vipere had opened in Februrary 1976 as a gay bar. At the end of June, La Mere threw a three-night party called “Punk-o-Rama,” completing its transition. The night quickly became a weekly happening, and La Mere began to attract a hodgepodge of newcomers eager to dance to the Pistols, the Ramones, and Blondie. Its first punk night, “Anarchy at La Mere,” was on May 8, 1977. Halsted, La Mere Vipere had only just gone punk when Fox stumbled across it. Difficult, but not impossible: you could hear them at La Mere Vipere, Chicago’s first punk disco. The circumstances made it hard to hear the Pistols in the States, never mind Chicago. EMI had issued “Anarchy in the U.K.” in the UK in November 1976, but the label dissolved their contract with the band less than two months later. version of their first and only proper album, Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols. In August 1977, the Sex Pistols had already been signed and then dropped by a couple major labels in the UK, but they were yet to close their deal with Warner Brothers, which that November would release the U.S. It’s cool.'” And though it might seem too on the nose to be true, Fox swears the song that brought him into La Mere was the Sex Pistols’ debut single, “Anarchy in the U.K.” “I said, ‘What is this place?’ And he goes, ‘La Mere Vipere-it’s the mother of the snake.’ And I go, ‘What kind of music is this?’ He said, ‘Punk rock, man.
“I opened the door, and Kenny Ellis-who was the doorman-was standing there,” Fox says. Distributing Company in Morton Grove-he’d never heard anything like that sound. Though he was surrounded by music at the time-he had a warehouse job with the M.S. “It sounded like TNT going off, there was flashing neon lights-and then the door closed,” Fox says.
On a Sunday night in August 1977, Fox and a couple friends were walking north on Halsted Street in Lincoln Park when someone opened the front door of a squat A-frame nearby and a burst of noise rushed out.
The Sex Pistols rewired lots of young minds in 1976, when they began their scorched-earth climb to infamy in London-and within little more than a year, their music had also changed the life of a 24-year-old in Chicago named Terry Fox.
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