Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Chicago hardcore" in English language version.
Pat Kelley: In the 1980s, I know Sean Duffy from Last Rites, he put together a lot a lot a lot of the big shows.
Jeff Jelen: That was when Jam Security started working a lot of the shows, the Medusa shows, a lot of those were Jam productions. Anyone gets out of control dancing, they're okay to just start grabbing kids and beating them up and throwing them out.
Clint Billington: There was a flight of stairs you had to walk up to get into the club, and as I'm walking in, a bouncer's literally throwing a kid down the stairs.
Martin Sorrondeguy: Sean Duffy was the guy booking all the shows, and I just got fed up of all the prices getting kind of high for shows...
Jim Grimes: At that time, the promoters were still thinking of it as like "I'm rock and roll. I'm making money. I'm doing this." It wasn't a community thing it was like "show up to my show, I'm taking your money, get out when you're done." The Revelation [Records] bands would not play here anymore because they were ripped off that summer.
Brian Quarles: It spread like wildfire, they were like "don't play Chicago, you'll get ripped off."
Pat Kelley: We wanted a place where local bands could play and it wasn't the hierarchy of who was friends with the promoter to do the shows, we wanted more openess...
Martin Sorrondeguy: Ben Weasel started booking all the shows at Dirty Nelly's and that was the new scene.
Erik Funk: Then after Durty Nelly's, there was Mcgregor's, you'd go see Slapshot there, you'd go see Green Day there.
I definitely think Only the Strong was kinda a breakout point for Chicago, it felt like we had a band that kinda rivaled some of the stuff that was happening in New York. They instantly became Chicago's answer to straight edge, they were the straight edge band, they were the only band doing it. They used the name Only the Strong for a while, after that dissolved they started Even Score... Tony [Brummel] was a hardcore singer, you know, he was micing up the crowd and he was stage diving. He was the catalyst that made stuff kinda happen. You know, starting his house and Club Blitz and doing shows there and that became the real focal point, we have our own club... Club Blitz was basically Tony's house in the western suburbs of Chicago. There wasn't really a network of small time promoters that would do smaller shows so he was one of the first that did that. He made quite a name for himself just doing that, it's where he started his record label Victory Records
All of us, every single band who were used to playing fast, punk rock hardcore like cut those time signatures in half and everyone went slow. We definitely had more the metal influence starting to coming and a lot of kids worshipped the ground that Integrity walked on. That band in general really changed the way a lot of people saw the sound of hardcore... Now, Bloodthirst ripped them off to a T... by probably '91 it had already grown so much, there were already so many hardcore and straight edge kids all of a sudden that they had already started, sort of, eating their own. When I [Neeraj Kane] first started going to shows I felt like people in the scene were very Aryan, not really accepting of new people coming in, it was really cliquey. Just a lot of petty gossip I feel like in the straight edge scene especially. A lot of people filtered of those cliques and those people stayed bandied together to all become friends with each other. All the kids that were my [Chris Gutierrez] age started bands, that were of course looked down upon by Tony and his crew, but we wanted our own thing... A lot of those bands from that time [like Icepick], you play a couple shows and that was it or maybe you had a demo... Couple of the guys from Weedeater went and started Silence, they took what they were doing in Weedeater and made it a little more heavier, kind of what hardcore was turning into... Silence would play, there was another and I remember from that sort of moment was Restraint... My [Neeraj Kane] first band was called Cornerstone. It was generic straight edge friendship.
Everlast would be sort of the flagship band at that point for the Chicago straight edge scene. You would find about twenty people at an Everlast show and that was the Chicago straight edge scene and that was it, that would be considered a good show... There was a huge low where there was nothing going on here. We travelled to go see shows because there was a drought in Chicago. I would literally have a four, five, six month stretch with nothing... That's where Jim [Grimes] picked up the torch and started doing his own shows. I mean he was responsible with booking a lot of the shows that weren't involved with Victory and big promoters, you know. Carey Housen helped us a lot with that as well.
A lot of the bands on the south side, I [Bill Smiles] was friends with lots of them, it was a little bit scarier, it was a little bit more real. Los Crudos was around, and Mob Action and Critical Beatdown, who later became Insult to Injury. The scenes were really separate. It seemed ridiculous to me that someone twenty miles away from someone else wouldn't know what the entire scene was, it would be completely different scene there. We had subscenes, in Chicago, you had like this Charles Bronson, Los Crudos scene, you had the vegan straight edge or hardcore scene and they never came together.
Frank Hanney: Martin and Los Crudos were like a key that opened up a whole new world for me.
Kirk Syrek: All of these things that I thought I was really into, like, doesn't even matter that much, because this band [Los Crudos] is the real thing.
Jeff Jelen: The whole silence thing, and the whole early MK-Ultra thing, I just think that it wasn't being our true selves.
Frank Hanney: There was absolutely no substance to any of this bull shit, and I was like "We don't want to be a part of any of that anymore" and it just become more about, they play slow, so we're gonna play fast, as fast as we can.
