Since 2005 Plastic Crimewave (aka Steve Krakow) has used the Secret History of Chicago Music to shine a light on worthy artists with Chicago ties who’ve been forgotten, underrated, or never noticed in the first place.
Secret History readers often ask about my criteria for including an artist. Sometimes they want me to cover an early-90s band, but I’m still reluctant—that’s when I started going to shows myself, so it seems too recent. I definitely felt that way when I launched this series in 2005, but I guess we’ll see.
I’m willing to bend on the “Chicago” question, though—I don’t like crossing state lines into Indiana or Wisconsin, but I’ll consider an act from 300 miles downstate if they’re interesting enough. That brings me to Belleville, Illinois, and the band Max Load.
Belleville is where Jeff Tweedy and Jay Farrar started their first group, the Plebes, which later became Uncle Tupelo (which eventually split into Wilco and Son Volt). Belleville also claims current “newgrass” band Old Salt Union and the late Buddy Ebsen, star of The Beverly Hillbillies, Barnaby Jones, and countless musicals. But the town’s board of tourism might prefer to forget the punk-influenced antics of Max Load.
I’m not about to forget Max Load, though: to my eyes, they embody the spirit of rock ’n’ roll, and their story is a fascinating illustration of how punk and DIY culture changed the midwestern musical landscape, even in cities far from Chicago.
I first heard Max Load on volume 17 of the Killed by Death bootleg punk compilations, released in 1997. It includes the 1979 scum-punk anthem “X-Rod,” from Max Load’s lone single. Luckily, more material by the band has surfaced via the 2013 archival release of Max Load from Saint Louis imprint BDR Records, which compiles 24 tracks recorded between 1979 and 1983 and includes a DVD of a 20-song live set broadcast on cable access television in 1981. In the liner notes, front man Terry Jones told the band’s tumultuous tale.
Jones wrote that while shopping at Union Clothing in downtown Belleville, he spotted a free magazine with an article on “New York Street Bands.”
“It mentioned the Ramones and a band called the Marbles who looked like a Rubber Soul era Beatles,” he recalled. “I dug that, because I sensed a teenage vibe missing in rock since the late ’60s. . . . These were kids like me, and they were making a noise. It inspired me.”
Jones was already playing rhythm guitar (“It seemed that’s what you should do if you also wanted to write songs”) and hanging out with future Max Load member Tony Mayr. He was also experimenting with drugs and “causing a general ruckus around town,” in his own words. During what he described as a “month-long acid binge,” Jones was involuntarily committed by the police after abusing a piano in a music shop. At Alton State Mental Hospital, the staff pumped him full of Thorazine, but when he came down from his trip, they realized he wasn’t mentally ill and sent him to a drug rehab program at Hill House in Carbondale in summer 1976.
Jones actually seemed to enjoy his stay at the facility. “I was happy to find most of the other house residents’ outlook very liberal, if not almost avant-garde. I stopped doing drugs all together and decided to soak it all up.”
That abstemious attitude proved short-lived, though, and Jones was soon kicked out for smoking weed and having sex with a fellow resident. He returned to Belleville with a changed outlook, feeling inspired to create. For a year he pursued training in graphic and commercial art at a local community college, some of which he put to use writing and illustrating a short sci-fi book called Dark Mass. He dedicated it to a fictional character named Max Load—“words I had noticed on the side of a tire, meaning how much air pressure it could hold,” Jones wrote. “I liked the sound of it.”
By then it was early 1978, and Jones wanted to start a band. He called Mayr, who was doing just that with a few friends and had already started auditioning singers. They had Jones sing “Tower” by bombastic prog rockers Angel, and it didn’t go well.
“I kept thinking back to those New York street bands, magazines like Creem and Rock Scene were starting to cover these types of bands more and more,” Jones remembered. “It was kids turning their back on things like ‘The Tower’ and writing about subjects based closer to reality. It was in this mind frame I started writing my first good songs.”
Punk rock cemented its hold on Jones on March 6, 1978, when he saw the Ramones with openers the Runaways at a Belleville club called Ricco’s. “I went to the gig with my girlfriend, and we were just about the only people there who were actually from Belleville,” Jones wrote. “I heard Iggy for the first time that night. They were playing ‘Gimme Some Skin’ over the P.A. It was so good, it really freaked me out!”
Jones reconnected with Mayr, who was using a rehearsal space in an old Sunday-school classroom above an abandoned church near Bellevue Park but still hadn’t put together a functioning band. Jones wrote “Max Load” on the blackboard, along with the titles of his first two tunes: “My Homework” and “Mom Really Hates Me.” Jones proposed that they play original material, and Mayr and his friends liked his songs. They got on board, and Max Load was born.
At first Max Load went through members at a rapid clip (not unusual for a teenage band trying to get its shit together), but the punk explosion had reached Saint Louis and inspired them to keep going. “It didn’t matter, it was nothing but fun,” Jones wrote. Max Load played their first proper gig in late 1978 at a Belleville teen club called Starts Here, charging 50 cents at the door.
The band played anywhere they could: blue-collar bars, parties, even in a driveway. Their first stable lineup consisted of Jones on rhythm guitar and vocals, Mayr on bass, Mike Yaffe on drums, and Todd Schifferdecker on lead guitar. They practiced upstairs at Schifferdecker’s grandma’s house, because she’d recently died and his parents were gutting the ground floor. Schifferdecker and Jones even moved in.
In those days it was unusual for a local rock band to play their own material, so Max Load began to attract a following. Jones supported himself by dealing weed in the park while he wrote songs, and he saved up enough to buy a ’66 Pontiac GTO to haul his gear.
Max Load’s commitment to punk soon precipitated another lineup change, though. Their lead guitarist wasn’t into it—when Jones played Wire’s Pink Flag at the house, Schifferdecker would retaliate by playing the first Van Halen album, which he knew Jones couldn’t stand. After an allegedly mutual parting of ways, Yaffe moved to bass, Mayr switched to lead guitar, and Greg Latinette joined on drums.
At the Ramones concert, Jones had heard about a promoter named Bob Moore, who booked new-wave concerts in Saint Louis. Jones reached out, and Moore got Max Load their first gig in the big city at Kiel Assembly Hall No. 4 (above the much larger Kiel Auditorium), supporting the Camaros and the Welders. This earned the band mentions in a couple early issues of long-running Saint Louis music mag Jet Lag, which led to more and better shows.
Max Load figured it was time to release a record, but Belleville had only one recording studio, which mostly worked with gospel acts. Luckily, studio owner Jack Poole was a rocker (he still plays with a band called the Saloonatics), so he helped the band commit to tape the jagged “X-Rod” (which recalls Wire) and the scuzzy, glammy “Magazine Sex” (with a bizarre guitar solo run through a Leslie speaker). Max Load paid to press 500 copies in Dallas, Texas, and released the single in June 1979.
The band called their label 198X Records, to reflect their belief that they would explode in the 80s, but reality didn’t live up to that hope. Jones took a copy to Saint Louis album-rock station KSHE, with modest results. “In those days, there was a walk up window that had the DJ sitting behind it,” he wrote. “You could talk to him and make requests in person. I asked him to play the Max Load 45, and I have to hand it to him; he did, but just once.”
Max Load’s efforts at self-promotion weren’t a total bust, though. In the July 1980 issue, Rock Scene magazine ran a photo of the band that Jones had submitted, and because his dad’s address was listed below the pic, they got loads of mail from around the country. It included a letter from Bruce Harris, head of A&R at Epic Records and former press guy at Elektra. “He wanted to hear a demo. This really charged us up,” Jones wrote. “My dad was so impressed he kicked in the 250 dollars to book more studio time.”
Poole recorded Max Load again, and the band added keyboard parts, having found an organ in the studio. (They never used one live, but Jones loved old garage rock.) The sessions included the supercharged “Mini Fad” and a song about Jones’s main squeeze, “Va-Va-Va Vicky,” which they recorded twice because they thought it had hit potential. Harris didn’t care for the tapes they mailed him, but he asked them to send more. They never did.
Jones had also mailed a copy of the Max Load single to Greg Shaw of Bomp! Records in Burbank, California, and that effort got better results. Shaw was a tastemaker par excellence in the punk, garage, and power-pop world, and Jones had been a fan since encountering his writing in Creem in 1973. Shaw asked for 30 more copies to sell through his mail-order service, and the band made picture sleeves for them (you don’t even want to know what those copies sell for among collectors now). In his catalog, Shaw wrote that the single was “what punk should be.”
Max Load still had to work hard to get gigs in Saint Louis, since they were one of very few bands from “the other side of the Mississippi” making punk music. But they nonetheless landed several shows in the city, including one at the Casa Loma Ballroom—a benefit to buy a bigger transmitter for KWMU at Washington University in Saint Louis, which had been playing the Max Load single.
The band’s new headquarters and practice space in Belleville was a room beneath a furniture warehouse, where Jones once lived through a winter with nothing but a couple space heaters to keep warm. Fortunately, local artist and promoter David Reeves opened a record shop called Record Works, where Max Load hung out and sometimes rehearsed after hours. Reeves also convinced local disco Mr. A’s to host a new-wave and punk DJ night.
Max Load began gigging frequently at the club (which had a lighted dance floor, a la Saturday Night Fever), though they sometimes shared bills with much poppier acts, including future Star Search contenders the Newsboys. The band enjoyed having an audience that knew their songs, and Jones even took over Reeves’s DJ slot.
Alas, punk bands aren’t well-known for their ability to let a good thing ride. Latinette had come to dislike Yaffe, and around this time he hassled the bassist till he left the band. Yaffe’s replacement was Scott Morris, from nearby Millstadt (hometown of Miles Davis’s father, Miles Dewey Davis Jr.). Latinette and Mayr began writing tunes along with Jones.
Max Load heard about a cable access TV show called Street Beat, produced at nearby Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. The band talked their way onto the show in 1981, and their joyously rockin’ set appears on the aforementioned BDR Records DVD.
In the meantime, Yaffe had bought a synthesizer, and he returned to the band to try it out. Around then, Mayr got a keyboard too. Jones liked the idea of electronic punk—he’d been turned on to it by hearing the Normal’s “Warm Leatherette” at a party where Max Load played.
Now a five-piece, Max Load moved their practice space to a room above Mr. A’s, covering rent by agreeing to play some of their gigs at the club for free. They recorded tons of demos and synthesizer-cranking experiments, and many of those that weren’t lost to time and the elements appear on the BDR compilation.
Latinette seemed to want to do more than just contribute songs, though, and when Jones wouldn’t relinquish the role of bandleader, the drummer quit. But Jones wanted to explore more electronic sounds anyway, and by the end of 1981 he and Mayr were performing under the Max Load name as a synthesizer duo with backing tapes.
Mayr left in 1982 to join Latinette’s new band, but by then Jones was already playing with Yaffe in an electronic noise project called Un-Film. The two of them also returned to the studio in 1983 to record the last Max Load tracks.
“These have a greater garage/psych influence and hint at where Max Load could have ended up had it held together,” Jones wrote. Bomp! Records, ironically, would’ve been a great home for such material—the label helped lead a garage revival in the 80s, mostly via their Voxx imprint, which released the likes of the Pandoras, the Steppes, and the Crawdaddys.
Jones continued Un-Film for several years, even playing live with the project a couple times (in one case “very much to the displeasure of a local coffeehouse’s patrons,” he joked). Un-Film also released a few DIY cassettes, which still sound startlingly fresh—they’d fit in with any experimental industrial music made in the past two decades, and the recordings are as harsh and lo-fi as early black metal. Even before the end of Un-Film, Jones started a grungy rock band, 3-D Monster, which lasted till the early 90s.
Later in life, Jones started going by Terry X. He painted and made other visual art, and he started a longhair band called Captain Groovy. Much of his output expressed his love of 60s trash culture—the hot-rodding art of Ed “Big Daddy” Roth, low-grade B movies, fuzzy psychedelia.
My reliance on Jones’s liner notes (rather than on a present-day interview) may have tipped you off already, but in early 2022 he passed away. On his Facebook page, Jones got a tribute from Belleville punk musician Josh Jenkins, who fronts the band Trauma Harness.
“I can’t tell you how shocked I was the first time I heard ‘X-Rod’ b/w ‘Magazine Sex,’ to find out this gnarly punk came straight out of the home turf of Belleville in the late 70s!” Jenkins wrote. “There would be no Lumpy & the Dumpers or Trauma Harness without Max Load, and when we did a cover set years back, it was an honor to see Terry be a big fan of the set and be a fan of our bands. I’ve had alotta bad interactions with people [who] inspired me to play music, but that was definitely not the case that night.”
Here’s hoping that Jones’s pioneering punk spirit keeps inspiring people long into the future.
The radio version of the Secret History of Chicago Music airs on Outside the Loop on WGN Radio 720 AM, Saturdays at 5 AM with host Mike Stephen. Past shows are archived here.
