It’s been nearly twenty years since I’ve heard the word “cornchip” snarled at me epithetically. In fact, the slur is so associatively tied up with high school in my memory that I think in many ways I’ve conflated the two. So it’s extremely fitting that we’re having a reunion of after twenty years—the same time most people go to their high school reunions—because many cornchippers and punkrockers won’t be going to their 20-year high school reunions. After all, why would you really want to see the people who assailed you with the incomprehensible name-calling “Cornchip!!! Hey cornchip!!!” for four miserable years of your life?
The curious (and uniquely Peorian) term is generally agreed upon to have its roots at East Peoria high school, somewhere in the Stepe brother era (early 80s). I don’t know exactly how the absurdist term caught on with the jocks and stoners, but I do know that by 1987 it was being jockeyed around the playground at Calvin Coolidge, where I spent one miserable year. All of a sudden, if you listened to New Wave (or in my case the Stray Cats) and wore a lot of black (or in my case huge Herman Munster-like Creepers that I saved all summer to mail order from London), people followed you home from school screaming “CORN CHIP!!!! CORN CHIP!!!!” It was as perplexing as it was irritating. I mean, I could’ve understood “FREAK” or “HEY WEIRDO,” etc., but cornchip???? Suffice it to say, if you were in any way different, or weird—and you didn’t care for the garbage being churned out by KZ-93 at the time—you were most definitely a cornchip. And, relentlessly, the school bullies made sure you paid dearly for your difference.
All nostalgia aside, the 1980s were lame. Maybe they seem cool now—because the project of nostalgia is to distract you from the greatness of the present moment—but at the time they sucked. Reagan wouldn’t leave the White House, and his wife had launched the laughable “War on Drugs,” which, if anything, only seemed to fuel the ever-ballooning crack epidemic. Until at least 1985, I lived in daily fear that the U.S.S.R. (remember that acronym???) would nuke the U.S. to smithereens, that The Day After (whoever made that TV movie has it coming) was sure to happen any moment that Khrushchev or Andropov got a bad bowl of borscht. I admit I was excited when Thriller came out, even more so by Madonna’s first two records, but they were quickly eclipsed by Bon Jovi’s overthrow of the radio waves. Bon Jovi was solely responsible for my deepening immersion in the Clash. Spandex and hair metal??? I thought that had all gone the way of Thin Lizzy. As it turned out, I couldn’t have been more wrong. (Hair metal never really went away, and it never will, I’m sure).
Peoria, unexpectedly, was rife for a youth revolution. Working-class, perched on an industrialized river and suffering from a bad case of identity crisis due to its seedy, whiskey-producing history, in retrospect it was the perfect town for a punk rising. Although in the mid to late 80s it seemed anything but to us. If only we could Get Out!!! If only we could Make Them See!!! (because there’s always a “they” in adolescence, isn’t there?) We were too young and unwise to appreciate the goldmine we had on our hands. Part of that had to do with the fact that it was always difficult to see “our” music live.
To see live music at that point in Peoria you basically had to be willing to put it on yourself. If you weren’t going to be solely responsible, you were going to have to go to every stinkin VFW show (even if you didn’t like the bands playing), because without the 3 or 4 bucks they were charging at the door, the next show wouldn’t happen. This sucked at the time, but it made us more creative people than we would’ve been if we would’ve grown up in Chicago and been able to see a great band at the Metro every night of the week. Despite the fact there were a lot of fights at Peoria shows—there were almost always fights, a phenomenon which if you weren’t actively being attacked made the whole scene take on a carnivalesque demeanor—we had a lot going for us, us cornchips. If there wasn’t a show happening, we called up a VFW or American Legion hall, pooled our resources from our crappy part time jobs, hired the hall & made it happen. Things were harder to get, yet easier to achieve, since if you didn’t do it nobody was going to do it for you. I saw Leviathan play once in a barn in utter darkness, in the pouring rain. That do-it-yourself spirit was the most significant, and most enduring, facet of the cornchips and punkrockers of Peoria. There’s no time in life to wait around for something to happen. That “stick together” philosophy also explains why we had shows were there would be a folk band, a goth band, a metal band, and a Jim Morrison impersonator all on the same bill. We couldn’t afford to be picky about genre.
The teenage years create a kind of hyper-reality, a heightened state of existence where everything in your life seems to hang on one night seeing Dollface or Sub 13 or on one phone call (which, in the pre-cell phone era, you might hang around all night at your house waiting for), or if your parents might be kind and decide to let you go to Thrills. Tomorrow? Tomorrow be damned. What mattered was TONIGHT, tonight and your new Descendents of Joy Division or Bauhuas t-shirt and the pocketful of rush you picked up from Playmate Video (which, coincidentally, had the area’s only copies of Suburbia and Decline of Western Civilization and Thrashin’, not to mention all the John Waters’ films). You were on your way to break bottles at the Flumes, to a party at The Barn, exorcise a soul at the Witches’ Circle in Springdale Cemetery, to see Naked Raygun at ICC or G.G. Allin in the piss stained basement of Co-Op Records. There were cigs to be smoked, houses to be TP’d, children to scare at Northwoods Mall, curbs to grind at Fulton Plaza. Possibility hung in the air like so many molecules of youth, each one split and dispersed in every passing moment. Tomorrow be damned, but in a way, it was already happening. If only we’d known that at the time.
