Bag People were Chicagoans who outgrew their home in the maelstrom of the early 80s NYC post-punk/no-wave scene. They weren’t around long, but their compulsive noise-rock sound looms large and stands tall next to the efforts of better-known contemporaries like Sonic Youth and Swans. Their adopted NYC scene thrived within a notoriously devastated inner city shambles; it was a zone of lawlessness and neglect that’s honestly unimaginable today. “Dead Meat”, the lead single out today, projects Bag People’s righteous culture shock amidst the urban decay. The amorphous horror of this scene echoes distortedly through these recordings — an onslaught converging Carolyn Master and Gaylene Goudreau’s scabrous guitar interplay, bassist Algis Kizys (Swans) and drummer Pete Elwyn’s free-roaming rhythm, and Diane’s nihilistic gutter-siren vocal projections.
Diane and Carolyn first met in 1977, high school classmates in the western suburbs of Chicago. Sharing an interest in English rock (and drugs!), they put out an ad for a guitarist and met Gaylene Goudreau — then they spent a year or so trying to make it in LA as a Runaways-like girl group called Lois Lain before returning to Chicago, disillusioned. Back home, Gaylene joined DA! and, after a life-changing show opening for DNA, saw the noise-powered path forward for her old band. The three regrouped as Bag People in 1981 and soon enlisted Algis and Pete, performing in Chicago with bands like The Cadavers and The Functionally Illiterate before decamping to Brooklyn’s Bed-Stuy neighborhood in late 1982. Later relocating to Manhattan, sharing time at Swans’ practice space, they evolved a set of songs that stood up well with the varied brutalities of all their neighbors — Sonic Youth, Rat at Rat R, Live Skull, False Prophets — playing around New York at CBGB’s, A7, SIN Club, the Peppermint Lounge, and traveling to Philly, DC, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and Chicago too.
By the end of ‘83, it was apparent that things were falling apart; Pete literally disappeared after Christmas, taking a large part of their recordings with him. The band dissolved in July of 1984, and their recordings were seemingly lost to time. Until now! Unpack the Bag People album on March 28, 2025.
