The traffic between Chicago and any given suburb is directly proportional to your desire to make your jouney in the shortest time possible. Before moving to the Pacific northwest I had to make the Chicago-suburban trek to pick up my father's old motorcross bike. As I was pulling back into the city I had almost finished listening to the entire Naked Raygun catalog recently re-releasd on Quarterstick records. If you grew up a midwestern punk in the 80's you eventually made a pilgrimage to see Naked Raygun. Maybe In high school you invited a couple of friends over one night when your parents were out on the town. If you did, you probably skanked to a bootleg of "Basement Screams" distorting through a crappy boom box on the kitchen table. "Basement Screams" was the soundtrack for boot marks on suburban linoleum and multiple indoor fire extinguisher discharges as well as an encounter with Naperville's finest in the wee hours of the morning, while laying in the middle of the road for no apparent reason. "Throb Throb" was an essential catalyst in my life long experiment that started out with the crowd of misfits I sought out in college. The release of "All Rise" was the perfect excuse to drop out of school and start a band. While there certainly were other important bands in the midwest scene like the Effigies and Articles of Faith, Raygun were the most visible. They personified Punk in the city of big shoulders. They looked like they meant business, but they definitely had a sense of humor too. Being in the crowd at a Naked Raygun show made you feel like you were part of some big subversive, sarcastic and dangerous party. At one show my face met a stage diving moron's Judas Priest style wrist guard resulting in in a thin scab that ran from my hairline past my nose to just under my chin. While managing to make it home before curfew, I couldn't get my father to comprehend why I would willingly subject myself to the kind of mayhem I had described. This was before the days of mosh pits on sitcoms. He was in fact quite angry, explaining that I could be scarred for life. While my father is no longer on the face of this earth, on a good day in the right light you can still see that scar on my face.

The years march on and gradually my sphere of influences increased, and unfortunately Naked Raygun put out their first sub-standard record. When cd's started making a go of it, I threw caution and Steve Albini's advice to the wind and started to Sony-fy my record collection. Soon I was the happy recipient of the entire Van Halen catalog, (the real Van Halen) thanks to Columbia House, a college slum house with a rotating roll call, and a fake name on the mailbox. Smaller labels started re-releasing back catalogs in the first rush to cash in on the new format. Being able to get the first 2 Vandals (the real Vandals) releases on one cd was a bonus. Dry fire extinguishers never quite come clean from anything, especially vinyl records. I had good luck finding cd copies of every Naked Raygun album that I actually wanted, except for "Basement Screams". And so it remained for years.

It's 1999 and I'm in the crowd for the remnants of Raygun and Pegboy, and the Didjits in the form of the Gaza Strippers. Mixed memories of Pezzati's new venture "The Bomb" are still fresh in my head. Pegboy launches into "Treason" after announcing the impending new re-release of the Naked Raygun catalog. I'm thinking that the time is ripe, but I am surprised that they had ever gone out of print in the first place. In a perfect world every new generation of high school punks from the greater Chicagoland area would have kept the plants pressing long into the night. I have no idea how popular Chicago bands of the era were outside of the midwest. Glenn E. Friedman's book "Fuck You Heroes" has a shot of the Effigies, but no mention of Raygun. I was stoked to see an ad in a minor national publication for the Raygun re-releases, and even more stoked to find out that "Basement Screams" was finally being made available, and every cd would have previously unreleased tracks. So here it is, the long-winded low down on each cd as well as an overview of the whole set.

Next Page: Basement Screams and Throb Throb

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