Bag People 'Bag People' LP

Bag People were Chicagoans who outgrew their home in the maelstrom of the early 1980s NYC post-punk / no-wave scene. They weren’t around long, but their compulsive noise rock sound, unearthed from tapes lost for 40 years, looms large and stands tall next to the efforts of better-known contemporaries like Sonic Youth and Swans. A righteous puke of art punk from a time of incredible brokenness in the world - in other words, savage sounds for today.

In 1977, Carolyn Master and Diane Wlezien were juniors at Proviso West High and rock & rollers, with a particular taste for English rock - The Who, The Stones, The Kinks, Bowie, T. Rex - they were wild for it.

They put an ad out for a guitarist, Gaylene Goudreau answered, and they clicked right away - but after a year or so trying to make it in LA as the Runaways-like girl group Lois Lain, they were back in Chicago, disillusioned. Gaylene joined DA! when, opening for DNA at Tut’s one night, her life was changed. DNA’s noise rock energy was clearly the way forward. She got back with Carolyn and Diane and they started over again, this time as Bag People. 

Algis Kizys saw them one night in early 1982 at Chicago’s infamous Space Place, then beat some kid named Albini in a try-out for the bass spot. Pete Elwyn, working for the weekend at Poppin’ Fresh Pies while drumming in a two-piece band called The Pedestrians, saw DA! and Bag People shows before joining. 

Their line-up set, the band played on the Chicago scene for a while, with bands like The Cadavers and The Functionally Illiterate. In late 1982, they decamped to Brooklyn’s Bed-Stuy neighbourhood, deep within NYC’s atomized urban interior, with deserted and destroyed shit everywhere, dudes selling drugs on every corner - it was a zone of lawlessness and neglect that’s honestly unimaginable today. 

The amorphous horror of this scene echoes distortedly through these recordings, an onslaught converging Carolyn and Gaylene’s scabrous guitar interplay, Algis and Pete’s free-roaming rhythm and Diane’s nihilistic gutter- siren vocal projections. 

A few songs were recorded at Hi Five Studio in the Gramercy Park neighbourhood. They taped more at the practice space, and a set at CB’s but, constantly fucked up on booze and the drugs being hawked around the Lower East Side, the chaos of the times was wearing them thin. By the end of 1983, it was apparent that things were falling apart. Pete literally disappeared after Christmas, taking a large part of their recordings with him. They got other drummers, but in July of 1984, they dissolved. 

It would be nearly forty years before their lost recordings were heard again. After Carolyn finally found Pete (on social media, no less), Algis drove up to Massachusetts to get them so they could be heard at last. “Holy crap!” Diane thought - the stuff sounded really powerful. As we can now hear, it was a glorious noise. The Bag People had their own insane way of doing things that wasn’t like anybody else - not for very long, anyway.