Chicago has never been short on locally-produced cult bands, and for a brief moment in the mid-1990s it almost looked like the City by the Lake had finally come into its own as a legitimate musical hotspot.
Local alt-rock radio station Q101 had become the third- (arguably second-) most influential station in the nation, and local acts Smashing Pumpkins, Smoking Popes, Urge Overkill and Liz Phair rose to the top of the alternative rock heap on the strength of near-simultaneous releases of now-classic albums.
But before Siamese Dream and Exile in Guyville, there was power-punk outfit Pegboy, whose brief run at the top yielded nothing more than a handful of occasional EP releases, sporadic reunion shows - and the other, lesser-known best album of 1991.
The group actually emerged from the remnants of hardcore icons Naked Raygun, who had mostly run their creative course following their 1988 masterpiece Jettison. Guitarist John Haggerty left Naked Raygun in 1989 in search of an outlet for a more melody-driven brand of punk; Haggerty and brother/drummer Joe joined up with singer Larry Damore and bassist Steve Saylors of Bhopal Stiffs, and in 1990 formed the first incarnation of Pegboy.
Later that year, the Three Chord Monte EP announced Pegboy's arrival with a quartet of lean, hook-heavy punk tracks. From the opening drive of the chugging "Through My Fingers," the group made no secret of its pop sensibilities, yet the epic distortion and frenetic rhythm section arrangements never strayed from the quartet's punk roots. Countless bands would attempt this formula later in the decade, but Pegboy had the notable advantage over so many left in their wake of not just sounding like a punk band but actually being one.
Strong Reaction, Pegboy's 1991 full-length debut, took the formula one step further. The hooks were bigger, the band played more tightly, and the songs took nothing but the best of both the punk and pop worlds. The intense, focused title track became a battle anthem of personal solidarity, but immediately gave way to the resilient "Still Uneasy" with its fitting chorus of "I don't want to know." The uptempo lamentations of "Superstar" gave the band the closest thing it ever had to a hit single, yet the harmonics-driven "Field of Darkness" and bare-knuckled "Not What I Want" matched that track note-for-note in both sarcastic humor and over-the-top catchiness.
Much of the success of Strong Reaction came from the confrontational nature of the songs, although rather than the overtly political themes of most of their contemporaries, Pegboy focused on the confrontation within the self. Damore's blunt lyrics dealt almost exclusively on themes of self-doubt and personal suffering, and the musical contributions of Saylors and the brothers Haggerty kept in line with these themes through some very lean arrangements, John's riffing at times almost closer to mid-tempo metal than to punk. They were all major key compositions, but never played with the sunniness that defined so many other similar groups, more closely resembling an uptempo Black Sabbath singing downstroke songs about downtrodden times.
The 1992 re-release of Strong Reaction added the contents of Three Chord Monte as the final four tracks, and the compilation very quietly evolved from a bargain purchase to a picture of a band at the height of its powers only three releases into its catalog. The 1993 Fore EP was really just a holding pattern until 1994's Earwig, but both of those releases shared the fatal flaw of sounding too much like Pegboy albums – more specifically, of sounding too much like the Pegboy albums that came just before them without advancing the cause set forth at the band's outset. Earwig never lacked for decent songs, and the group's cover of Mission of Burma's "Revolver" gave fans a new favorite, but Fore and Earwig never quite matched the impossibly high bar set by Three Chord Monte and Strong Reaction.
Pegboy released the Dangermare split EP with Richmond-based Kepone in 1996 and followed up with Cha-Cha DaMore in 1997. Neither recaptured the intangible excellence of the earliest work, although Cha-Cha came close with the hard-hitting "Dog, Dog" and "Dangerwood," not to mention the loving cover of Cheap Trick's classic "Surrender."
The band drifted in and out of existence over the next few years, mostly disbanded but enjoying local hero status strong enough to warrant the occasional one-off shows around Chicago. In the end, their closest neighbors in the pantheon of Chicago bands turned out not to be contemporaries Screeching Weasel or Smoking Popes, but rather folk-poppers Poi Dog Pondering or alt-rock stompers Local H: groups that certainly made it, but never really made it too far out of the city. Pegboy may have been revered as a great band, but at the end of the day they were still a Chicago band.
Their deep and lasting local impact still resonates enough to draw sell out crowds at thousand-seaters around Chicago, a fact made doubly intense considering those tickets sell primarily on the strength of one album, one EP and a pair of outstanding cover songs, all released between twelve and nineteen years ago. Pegboy never exactly became the superstars Damore so eloquently sang of, but by their own double-fisted standards the group did just fine.
