The Effigies Haunted Town Original 1980 Autumn LP Chicago Punk Mob Clash RARE EP

$

176

The Effigies : Haunted Town
12" Vinyl Mini-Album
Description: This is the original 1980 vinyl release. Front cover features the Effigies version of the City Of Chicago flag and on the back cover the ghostly band members stand on a downtown Chicago street. The vinyl record is in glossy clean excellent condition. Plays at 45RPM. The cover is in very good condition, a little ring/corner wear, no seam splits, it's not as yellowed as the picture looks. Price stickers near top right corner of cover and on side two record label from Chicago's legendary Wax Trax Records. No insert. Please see pictures. All records cleaned with Ultrasonic vinyl cleaner. Check out our store listings for a wide variety of vinyl and CDs including many albums from the early 80's punk/new wave era in our punk/new wave store category. We ship worldwide in secure packaging. Any questions, please contact us
Tracklist:
  Side One
1. Below The Drop
2. Strongbox
3. Haunted Town
  Side Two
4. Mob Clash
5. We'll Be Here Tomorrow
The Effigies are an awesome punk band from Chicago. The band played its first show in 1980 and was active initially for approximately a decade, undergoing multiple personnel changes with frontman John Kezdy the only constant, before disbanding in 1990. The band released five albums and several EPs, most on the record label they founded in 1981, Ruthless Records, which was distributed by Enigma. Later albums were on the Fever Records and Roadkill Records labels. They toured the U.S. and Canada and played notable venues, including CBGB, Maxwell's, First Avenue, Mabuhay Gardens, Paycheck's (Detroit), Exit (Chicago) and The Rathskeller, among others. They also received a significant amount of national airplay on college radio at a time when it was the only medium for alternative music. The Effigies' website states that they were one of the first punk bands in Chicago. This might be a complicated claim for a band not formed until 1980, but true in the sense that the Midwest resisted punk and was late to discover or appreciate it to any degree. In the years immediately after Ramones and Sex Pistols first released records in 1977 Chicago remained dominated by classic rock, disco and blues; punk bands were anathema to the Midwest rock establishment and had few places to play and fans had few places to hear live bands.What most punk fans recall as the first "scene" in Chicago did not rise until the very early 1980s, when clubs like Oz and O’Banion’s started to provide venues for live punk. In a 1999 retrospective about the 1985 music year, Chicago Sun-Times music writer Jim Derogatis termed the heyday of The Effigies "the second generation of Midwestern punks," but this is correct only in describing the burgeoning young 1985 Midwest punk scene as it overtook the smaller, older scene which had cloistered itself in punk discos like La Mere Vipere and for all its excesses was musically passive, generating no bands and creating no music. By 1985, The Effigies, Naked Raygun, Strike Under and Big Black had been around for half a decade. There were no active punk bands in Chicago before them. Attempts to characterize The Effigies as post-punk, hardcore and, to the extent it is distinguishable, Chicago hardcore, reveal the difficulty in pigeonholing the band's sound which is more expansive than the punk subgenres both musically and thematically. Even the catch-all "post-hardcore" becomes an inapt anachronism in light of the fact that the band's seminal releases pre-date the arrival of hardcore by several years. Indie rock pundit Steve Albini writes that "The Effigies were absolutely essential to the development of a healthy punk scene in Chicago. Between them and Naked Raygun, in the early 80s they basically kept the scene going until it developed momentum beyond them." "The Effigies were a moving force during a crucial and exhilarating time." The cover of the band's record Haunted Town constitutes the first use of the Chicago flag as a countercultural geo-signifier. Consequently, the flag was adopted as a motif within the nascent Chicago punk scene and later became fashionable outside the milieu of music. John Kezdy is the older brother of Naked Raygun bassist Pierre Kezdy. The Effigies can be seen in You Weren’t There, a 2007 film about the Chicago punk scene from 1977 through 1984. The Effigies are mentioned several times in the television series Shining Girls. John Kezdy was killed in a crash while riding his bicycle on August 26, 2023 at the young age of only 64. )i) 
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