A time when music meant everything
New musical ‘Verboten’ explores how punk changed the lives of 4 Evanston kids
The new musical “Verboten” is named after a punk band formed by a bunch of kids in Evanston, circa 1982-83.
That may not seem like a big deal, but then there’s the subtitle, which promises a lot more: “A Story About How Punk Saves Lives.”
“It’s a corny phrase, but when we were kids, this band, this music, meant everything to us,” says Jason Narducy, Verboten’s co-founder and songwriter, who now records and tours with Bob Mould and Superchunk, among others, in between sessions with his band Split Single. As corny or melodramatic as that subtitle might be, for four kids from a Chicago suburb it continues to ring true.
Narducy comes from a troubled home where he and his father were constantly at odds, each week a never-ending series of emotional cul de sacs. Picking up a guitar and playing fast, hardedged music with his friends in a basement felt liberating.
“When anyone feels scared or lost, you’re just grasping for anything to hold on to,” Narducy says. “When you’re a kid, you feel even more desperate. You need things to feel good about.
“No one else was playing gigs at rock clubs at age 11. Playing in the band was important to all of us, a way to propel us through the turmoil of middle school and high school.”
The play, which opens Jan. 16 at the Chopin Theatre, was directly inspired by a Verboten testimonial from Dave Grohl, founder of Foo Fighters and a former member of Nirvana, in his 2013 HBO documentary miniseries “Foo Fighters: Sonic Highways.” Grohl saw Verboten when he was a kid, and if it didn’t exactly save his life, it certainly transformed it.
Not that any of that was apparent in 1982 when Narducy and his friends in the band — singer
Tracey Bradford, bassist Chris Kean and drummer Zack Kantor, ranging in age from 11 to 13 — bonded over their shared love of punk. When the band members went their separate ways after a mere 15 months, Verboten’s story seemed destined to occupy an obscure corner in Chicago punk lore. But the quartet’s impact loomed larger than anyone could have ever expected.
As punk rockers, the band members were misfits not just in their school but at local clubs unwilling to give a shot to untested bands who played a not particularly popular style of music. Yet the band wrote and recorded its own songs and even played a few gigs, including one at Cubby Bear opening for future Chicago punk icons Naked Raygun and Articles of Faith.
“We were definitely nervous,” Narducy says. “But everyone there that night – the band, the audience — we all felt like outsiders. It was hard to get an original band gig let alone a punk rock one at that point. You had to be a cover band or play country, reggae, anything but punk rock.
“But Tracey gave us an air of confidence because she knew so many people. The other bands (on the bill) embraced us because we were so precocious, and they were impressed not just that we knew this style of music but could write original songs. There was a lot of love in that room that night.”
Among those who became enamored with the band of adolescent punk rockers was a 13-year-old Grohl. He had no idea about punk rock or that his cousin Tracey was in a band when he arrived from Virginia with his family to visit her in Evanston during the summer of 1982.
“I came to Evanston every summer to visit relatives, only this particular time Tracey had turned into a punk rocker, which just blew me away,” Grohl told the Tribune in a 1996 interview, on the eve of Foo Fighters’ first tour. “I mean the only punk rock I’d been exposed to was either on (TV shows) ‘Quincy’ or ‘C.H.I.P.S.’ And here comes Tracey down the stairs in bondage pants, her hair cut short and black. She took me to my first punk rock show ever, with Naked Raygun and Rights of the Accused, and it was the best time I’d ever had doing anything.
“Then I find out she’s actually in a band, so she brings me to a Verboten rehearsal in their basement. I couldn’t believe these kids my age were playing this style of music and writing their own songs. Jason was playing this guitar that looked bigger than he was. It was a huge revelation: ‘I can do this too!’ From then on, I was a changed man.”
Narducy didn’t connect the kid he briefly met in 1982 with the front man in Foo Fighters until he read the 1996 Tribune article. But Verboten left a deeper imprint on Grohl, who got teary-eyed when discussing the band of young punks on “Sonic Highways.”
Brett Neveu, a senior lecturer at Northwestern University and a veteran playwright and scriptwriter for TV and film, happened to be watching and realized Grohl was talking about his neighbor in Evanston, where their daughters were both attending the same school.
“I’d been in bands for 20 years and had wanted to do a rock musical for a while,” Neveu says. “I loved Jason’s music, the pop quality of it, and felt it would translate well to the stage. I had a vague idea for a story about the music that stayed with us from that age, this universal truth about how a play or a concert or a movie can connect with us at a certain point in our lives and inspire us.”
It wasn’t a straight path to the stage. The script underwent numerous revisions over five years as
Neveu increasingly focused on the complex relationships of the band members with each other and their families. All the band members have found stability in adulthood — Bradford in Florida, Kantor and Kean in Evanston — and were supportive of the musical but wary of digging too deep into decades-old family conflicts.
“It died a number of times,” Narducy says of the play. “At one point I said to one of the band members that I don’t care about this musical as much as I care about us being friends. Our story as people was more important than our music.
“So I had to have a talk with my dad, and I’m sure others had discussions with their families. We finally found a comfortable space by making it a fictional story based on true events. In the interim, I remember losing momentum myself, but Brett just kept rewriting. His focus and dedication really propelled this forward.”
The play found a home at the House Theater of Chicago, where artistic director Nathan Allen signed on as director. Narducy wrote 20 new songs for the musical that reflected the viewpoints of both the band members and their parents, and they play a pivotal role by laying bare the personal turmoil that underpinned Verboten.
The process of writing the songs and excavating some of those adolescent emotions gave Narducy, who is married and has three children, a new perspective on the band and his life since then.
“It makes me very thankful that my own kids aren’t desperately trying to form another family like I was,” Narducy says. “Hopefully I’ve learned some things from the past. That is something that crosses my mind: forgiveness.
“I think of meeting my wife when I was 21, the ups and downs of the music business keeping me grounded, a recognition of how I ended up being OK. And I am OK.”
For Neveu, those truths became central to the play. For him, the “A Story About How Punk Saves Lives” tagline isn’t just hyperbole, though he might tweak it a bit.
“As a person who loves punk, I think it saves lives and also gives life,” the playwright says. “As an art form, as a mode of expression, it gives life to those who hang on to it or discover it. People think punk is about tearing things down, but in reality it’s about examination and a rally cry … These kids you know are in pain are, like you, regular kids from the suburbs. What about them is so inspiring?
“I found out in talking to all of them about that experience. Their story has this genuine heart.”
“Verboten: A Story About How Punk Saves Lives,” opens 8 p.m. Jan. 16 (through March 8) at the Chopin Theatre, 1543 W. Division, $25; 773-278-1500.