Shortly after 11 PM on Saturday, December 29, about 5,000 fans started leaving the Public Enemy and Sonic Youth concert held at the Aragon Ballroom. As they hit the street, they found themselves walking into a horrible scene–police were shouting at and beating up on the crowd in the street. As far as most observers could tell, the police were arresting people for being upset that the police were arresting people. None of it made sense–there was just arrests, shouts, violence.
“And then I looked into the middle of the street, and there was a guy there wearing a sort of green, three-quarter-sleeve jersey thing. I thought he was a Michigan State student–it was that shade of green. He was on his back–he had his face all scrunched up and his hands up in the air. And a cop was standing over him just hitting him on the head with a police stick thing.
To add some spice, the bands share a similar militancy, both politically and socially, and display a similar fondness for noise as a cathartic and manipulatable commodity–while Public Enemy now sells millions of albums and Sonic Youth inches toward AOR respectability, each still traffics in some of the loudest and harshest music made anywhere.
Surprisingly, the show was not an instant sellout. It sold steadily in the weeks before the 29th and did an OK walk-up business the day of the show. The hall reached capacity about the time Sonic Youth hit the stage.
After Sonic Youth’s set, at least an hour went by before Public Enemy appeared; while the crowd never became restless, it was a long, drawn-out wait. Rapper Flavor Flav–the cartoonish clown who generally wears a big clock around his neck–had had to change flights. He ended up flying into Midway, only to discover that the bag carrying his stage clothes and, it was said, his clock was at O’Hare. A Jam runner was dispatched to take him out to the airport to get it. He came back to the Aragon, changed, and immediately went onstage.
The show was beyond orderly–“It was one of the quietest shows we’ve ever had at the Aragon,” says Jam’s Cirzan.
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The people Kimmel and Zaphiriou saw on the ground outside the Aragon were Kurt Gottschalk and his sister Kristin. Kurt is a 24-year-old political activist; Kristin is a schoolteacher. The pair had bought tickets to the concert the day they went on sale.
