There was nothing very unusual about the circumstances that led to the unfortunate meeting of Scott Gravatt, who’d drifted in from Atlanta that day, and Dwayne Thomas and his four friends. Graham Burbank, one of Dwayne’s pals, considers it a credo that the scene takes care of its own. “If a guy comes in from out of town and needs a place to stay, you find him one,” he says. Graham wears round spectacles and has close-cropped, light brown hair. He looks like an intellectual Steve McQueen. During the day he’s a carpenter; at night he goes to the School of the Art Institute, which is what brought him to Chicago two and a half years ago. He studies painting and sculpture at the school, but his primary interest in art is tattooing. He has tattoos up each arm and he applies tattoos to other people as well. Graham’s classmate and roommate at the time, Chris Garver, does tattoos too; indeed, one of the reasons the kid from Atlanta ended up at Graham and Chris’s apartment that evening was that Dwayne was getting work done on a new tattoo on his right arm, an extravagant dragon, to which Chris was adding some color. Today the dragon remains unfinished; in the wake of the evening’s events, Chris went home to Pittsburgh.
But tensions were brewing, and they came to a head more than once. A skin named Clark Martell–an older skin, really, for he was over 25 then–was the acknowledged leader of a bunch of skins from the south suburbs who called themselves the Chicago Area Skinheads, or CASH; they are also sometimes called Romantic Violence, after a small mail-order business through which they purvey tapes and other paraphernalia. They occasionally hung out with the guys Dwayne hung out with, who called themselves the Bomber Boys. One afternoon the Bomber Boys and the Romantic Violence crowd got into a little set-to in Aetna Park. Martell used a certain word to describe Dwayne, and a friend of Dwayne’s took offense and beat Martell up real bad. The word was “nigger.” The fight turned into a general brawl of 20 or so skins, and after that the Romantic Violence people didn’t come around too much. Since then the Bomber Boys have disbanded, but a few of them are still around, and Dwayne is often thought of as the unofficial leader of a dozen or so skins who still hang out on the north side. Many of these north-side skins refer to Martell and his associates as the Nazis. On the rare occasions when a Nazi is seen up north–say some unknowing kid shows up at a club in a white power T-shirt–there’s often a confrontation with one of Dwayne’s pals, or, more likely, with a member of a politically minded, explicitly antiracist group called SHOC (Skinheads of Chicago). As often as not the interloper gets “booted” and left to lick his wounds in an alley.
Dwayne is charismatic and mercurial; he’s not really the leader of anything, since he and his friends don’t feel the need for any sort of organization. But he’s flamboyant and outspoken and he gets into the biggest scrapes. He gets arrested the way other 22-year-olds go to movies. One night a bunch of south-suburban Nazis tried to run him down with a car; he broke their windshield with a chain and ended up in jail; later that night, he says, after he was released, they caught him again and beat him with an ax handle in the walkway beneath his apartment. Then they broke into his room and tossed his stereo out the window for good measure.
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Hearing these stories in the one-bedroom apartment where Dwayne lived until recently–with his girlfriend Alice, another Art Institute student, and their roommate David–one couldn’t help being struck by a hint of the incongruous. The apartment–in lower Uptown, just west of Truman College–was carpeted and refurbished; once-weekly maid service was included in the rent. The building used to be a hotel, and the lobby is outlandishly large, with wide expanses of rugs and polished floors. The apartment wasn’t large, but it was hardly a subculture den. It was filled by a large overstuffed couch and David’s huge stereo system and VCR. A few old punk posters and a piece of neon sculpture adorned the walls.
The Observer article called David the group’s “token fat boy,” an unfair shot. He’s not lean, but he’s mostly stocky. He was born in Evanston but grew up in Savanna, Illinois, population 4,500, due west of Chicago on the Mississippi River. His parents were quite religious and quite conservative, but young David found a “hippie family” who introduced him to the counterculture. (“They dosed me [with LSD] when I was ten.”) His relationship with his parents deteriorated steadily, he says, and he first ran away at 15, ending up in Denver. Soon after, he met the only skinhead in Savanna, a guy who’d actually been to England. David shaved his head, grew it out, wore a mohawk for a while, finally committed to skinheadism. He’d been making frequent journeys to Chicago, hanging out with the local skins; in 1981, he came for good.
It is generally acknowledged that modern skinheadism has some roots in the punk movement; but the skins’ more abiding and important heritage was the product, ironically enough, of a crucial crosscultural and cross-racial leap made by a group of late-blooming English mods in the late 60s. Though grounded in working-class values and politics, these first white skinheads reached far past the relatively evenhanded racial attitudes of their mod predecessors (primarily an affection for American soul music) and embraced the hairstyles and music of East Indian blacks in London. Lost in the hullabaloo over the Nazi antics on last fall’s Oprah Winfrey show on skinheads was the fact that Chicago’s anti-Nazi skins were there in force; Dwayne himself spoke on the show and denounced the Nazis on the dais. “The first skinheads were black,” he said, and he was right.
In America, the situation was less straightforward. Confused by the class implications of the musical culture in England, American kids of the new counterculture gamely flashed fascist imagery in the first few years of punk, only gradually dropping it as the skinheads, once just ten-for-a-penny punks, found themselves with their own music, a particularly bruising form of punk called hardcore. In LA especially, a tough club and concert scene (headed by groups like Black Flag, Fear, and the Circle Jerks) specialized in slam-dancing that sometimes spilled over into general internecine bashing. The jump from there to Nazism, however, isn’t straightforward, and the lines of evolution aren’t clear. Part of the trend must have had its roots in the English experience; a scene that produces fascists in London could just as well produce fascists in New York, if only by the power of example. Another element, however, could be the dual appeal of punk rock, and its special importance in music history. Punk’s seemingly blindered minimalism and deliberate harshness were just that: deliberate. Punk was at least partly a joke, a refutation of flaccid musicians. and wimpy songs. Follow this logic a step further, and slam-dancing–a peculiarly American dance variant practiced in front of the stage at most punk concerts–is a wry comment on the frug, the twist, and the druggy dance of the Dead Heads, the ultimate 60s throwbacks.
