Punks in Peoria

This is my perfect book - I love books about music, and if it's a music subject as niche and well-researched as Punks in Peoria?! Sign me up. So informative and written beautifully. I would love a companion of more photos and scans of flyers!

At first glance, Punks in Peoria is a familiar chronicle of a small town scene. Anyone who grew up outside a big city will resonate with the disparate, slightly desperate way the Peoria punks ransacked their hometown in search of like-minded fans. This is a book to read if you grew up travelling miles to stand in a dark, loud room and watch your favourite band with the same people each week. It’s also a book about how we build our communities, and how outsiders connected before social media made all of our lives much, much easier and also much, much harder.

Punks tells the story of Peoria’s punk rock music scene, from the mid-80s to the mid-00s. As a religiously conservative blue-collar town, Peoria wasn’t a natural fit for young punk rockers and a lot of the book is about the lengths local promoters and bands went to in order to build a scene. Despite the lack of venues (some of the more memorable gigs were played in gymnasiums, veterans bars and even a laundromat), Peoria attracted big name bands like Jesus Lizard and Fugazi, while also producing homegrown legends like Dollface and Plans Mistaken for Stars. Anecdotes abound as Wright and Barrett recreate the atmosphere of those early gigs and the sense of optimism as big record labels started scouting small towns for ‘the next Nirvana’.

Unfortunately Punks suffers from the usual set of issues faced by music and scene historians. Maybe due to a surfeit of local loyalty, Wright and Barret seem set on naming every single gig-attendee in Peoria. No band is ever “bad”, no gig boring, and all are afforded a similar amount of time on the page. The result can feel a bit monotonous and there are certain chapters which read more like a list of names then the story of a scene. While the actual words are never used, the book is haunted by the ghost of “you had to be there”. Descriptions of Peoria itself are relegated to section intros, leaving the reader to flounder around on Wikipedia in order to understand the relevance of certain towns, tours and labels.

That said, the connections Wright and Barrett draw between happenings in Peoria and the changing life of U.S. politics and music are genuinely fascinating. If you’ve ever been part of a small, DIY scene this book will take you on a screaming nostalgia trip. And if you haven’t, you’ll still have a better understanding of how independent music developed in the U.S. and an epic playlist of Peoria punk rock anthems.

I have never been to Peoria, nor do I plan on visiting, and “punk” isn’t my favourite genre of music, yet I found this book entertaining and informative.

“Some people saw Peoria as little more than a dull, backwater farm town: a place to get a factory job, raise a family, and precious little else. But for those who were coming of age and bursting to leave their own even smaller towns, Peoria was the big city — and punk shows got them out of the cornfields.”

Punks in Peoria will be familiar to anyone who grew up in or near a post-industrial city in the 80s & 90s. While this book dives heavily into the specifics of Peoria’s punk scene, its bands, and the individuals who helped create the scene. While the people and bands were different, the stories and the DIY nature of the small local shows and zines are familiar to anyone who grew up in a similar environment during this time.

Because of the Peoria-centric details, the book was a bit slow for an “outsider” like me but I enjoyed seeing the parallels to the experiences I had growing up during this time. Overall it was a decent read that brought back a lot of memories of similar bands and shows growing up.

When I first saw this book I knew I needed to read it and I am so happy to say that it did not disappoint. A comprehensive history of the punk music scene out of Peoria, IL, Punks in Peoria kept a smile on my face the entire read as I reminisced about the music scene I grew up in. Although I didn't grow up in Peoria, lucky for me much of the spill-over made it to Chicago (duh!). If you're a fan of punk music you will love this book.

5./5 Stars

Thank you to NetGalley and University of Illinois Press for providing me with an e-arc of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Entertaining and well-researched, Punks in Peoria tells the story of punk music in Peoria (with mentions of overlap into the rest of Central Illinois) from the mid-80s to the mid-00s.

I really appreciated the way the authors connected the punk scene in Peoria to the wider happenings in politics and loved the message of DIY community that was at the heart of the punk scene. That being said, at times the book seemed to revert to a laundry list of names, bands, and venues, which might have been more interesting to me if I had more familiarity with the people.

I would definitely recommend this to fans of punk music, especially those who have the nostalgia factor of garage shows and will likely be sending copies to family members who live in the Peoria area.