Video From Punk’s Delivery Room
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Not long after they met, Ivers took Armstrong to CBGB to see Patti Smith. “It was such a relief from Yes and Chicago and all of those awful bands,” says Armstrong, 50. She’d once been a big music fan, catching concerts by the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Jimi Hendrix as a teenager in the 60s, but had been turned off by the excesses of the 70s. Punk recaptured her attention. Videotaping shows gave Ivers and Armstrong a way into the tiny punk rock world, a community of no more than 500 in the early days, according to Armstrong. “We were little punk rock girls that wore microminiskirts and had crazy haircuts. [Videotaping] gave us something to do in the scene, without having to be just hangers-on. We realized right away that it also got us on everybody’s guest list; we didn’t have to pay to go to a club for the next eight years. We got to live our dreams and see like eight bands a night. That was a big part of why we did it.”
Taping concerts was no easy task in the days before the compact digital video camera. “If we were taping we had to carry down four flights of stairs our video deck, our cameras in big metal cases, and our sound equipment, and we would drag [it all] to wherever we were going,” says Armstrong. They’d arrive at clubs like CBGB, Max’s Kansas City, and the Mudd Club early in the evening to set up, and they’d break down in the wee hours after everyone left. Their footage isn’t the work of amateurs. They often got their sound direct from the board, and using two cameras afforded them a nice variety of perspectives, from tight close-ups to chaotic wide-angle shots. This was before MTV, and the performances–aimed at the live audience, not the cameras–exhibit a refreshing lack of self-consciousness.
