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. 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. “It sounded like TNT going off, there was flashing neon lights—and then the door closed,” Fox says. Though he was surrounded by music at the time—he had a warehouse job with the M.S. Distributing Company in Morton Grove—he’d never heard anything like that sound.
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. But its brief run has reverberated for decades, in Chicago and beyond. 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. Spin worked at the bar. 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.
By the time La Mere Vipere owners Noah “Noe” Boudreau and Tom Wroblewski birthed the city’s first punk disco, they had been running a gay bar at 2628 N. Halsted called the Snake Pit for years. “It was a really sleazy little dive bar that basically was decorated for every holiday. They never took the stuff down—they kept adding to it constantly,” says Snake Pit regular Mike “Sparkle” Rivers, who’d moved to Chicago from Detroit in the early 70s with his partner, John “Taco” Morales. Rivers particularly liked the Snake Pit’s eclectic jukebox, whose selections included Barry White, David Bowie, and Roxy Music—Boudreau and Wroblewski even let people bring in their own records to play on it.
Punk remained a fringe concern locally in 1977. By that spring, Boudreau and Wroblewski were already struggling to stay in the black at La Mere Vipere. They’d opened it as a disco with the same nonconformist attitude as the Snake Pit, with a bar on the second floor, neon palm trees and flamingos on the walls, and barstools decked out in leopard print. The dance floor, walled in by exposed brick, took up most of the ground floor, and the DJs’ sets included the Isley Brothers, Donna Summer, and Love Unlimited. But La Mere just wasn’t a big draw. “Because it was Tom and Noe’s bar, a lot of the big gay crowd didn’t go there,” Rivers says. “Because it wasn’t ‘cool.’ It wasn’t a ‘real’ gay bar.”
Though some queer Chicagoans didn’t like the idea of punks taking over gay bars, others didn’t consider the likes of Oz and La Mere proper gay bars in the first place. That schism in the community—along with bar owners’ need to find patrons wherever they could—allowed Chicago punk to thrive.
—Oz owner Dem Hopkins
Lynch had previously worked at the Bistro as the club’s first female go-go dancer. While she slung drinks at La Mere, she also worked as an in-house model for designer Billy Falcon. For the second night of La Mere’s Punk-o-Rama extravaganza in June 1977, she cohosted a punk fashion show with her friend Steve “Spin” Miglio. The scene hadn’t yet developed a “look,” so the models dressed however they pleased; Miglio wore a parachute fitted to his body like a hooded cassock, with scraps of raw meat sewn to the front. “This is Chicago, so it was a little bit tamer, visually, but there were a lot of kids there that were just doing their thing,” Lynch says. “There wasn’t another place for Skafish to do his thing.”
—Ken Ellis, doorman at La Mere Vipere and O’Banion’s
