Popular books about punk history tend to focus on the best-known bands from scenes in metropolitan centers, including London, New York, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C. But punk also proliferated thanks to outcasts living in towns their big-city peers couldn’t find on a map—they too might hear something about themselves reflected in a strange, confrontational sound.

  • The companion compilation to Punks in Peoria, released by Chicago archival label Alona’s Dream

Across the river and ten miles south of Peoria, the hometown of Bill Love and Jay Goldberg was an unlikely hotbed of musical activity. Despite having a population less than a third the size of its sister city, Pekin had its own record stores, head shops, coffeehouses, folk singers, and rock bands, signaling the inroads of the sixties counterculture in a stronghold of conservativism. An outsized number of area musicians found their roots in Pekin, from the early days of rock and roll to the punk era and beyond. During the 1970s, Pekin hosted performances by the likes of Kiss, Blue Oyster Cult, the Runaways, Rush, and Journey (with a then-unknown Tom Petty opening). Perhaps more significantly, Pekin was home to the Golden Voice Recording Company—the finest recording studio in Illinois outside of Chicago.

The Jetz, however, lasted less than a year. Toward the end of the decade, a revived power-pop incarnation of the Jets (including Walker) released a single on Minneapolis’s Twin/Tone Records, a key independent label of the burgeoning post-punk underground. The band even had a number-one hit in Minneapolis (where a young Prince Rogers Nelson reportedly attended the record release party) and once opened for the Ramones, further tying the group to the emergence of punk rock.

I had been obsessed with skateboarding since around ’72, but had not made any connection to rock n’ roll. When I discovered Devo, I started to notice that [skateboarders] Jay Adams and Tony Alva were no longer wearing Ted Nugent t-shirts in the magazines and their hair was shorter. Interesting development. I was able to eventually figure out that there were a couple of other people in my town who were interested in the same things I was.

We would scour the cutout bins at Co-Op Records in Pekin and Peoria for anything that looked weird, and without any information at all we discovered Television, Pere Ubu, Wire, X, the Cramps, the Stranglers, the Buzzcocks, etc. We got some dud records, too.

We would go to this gay bar in Peoria because they never carded us and they played good records. I learned about Iggy Pop and Lou Reed from there (didn’t know anything about the Stooges or Velvets until later) as well as Wax Trax in Chicago. We would go on buying trips to Chicago for records and skateboard parts.

But beyond a few LPs in the racks at Co-Op, punk rock might well have not existed in Peoria. Aside from that lone MC5 show, the Bowie-isms of the Jetz, and a 1979 visit from British pub rockers Eddie and the Hot Rods, there is little trace of anything remotely “punk” playing Peoria in the seventies. All-ages shows, a staple of the DIY punk scene, were unheard of.