Al Scorch runs by with a pitcher of Blatz raised in the air, yelling, “Look what we did! Look what the punks did for this place!”

With this exclamation, he sounds diabolical and magnanimous, but also completely full of pride and completely full of love. His band is about to play a raucous acoustic set (which, no, is not a contradiction in terms) to a drunken crowd of bike punks that know every word to every song. The bar is Relax. Not to be confused with the Relax Lounge on Chicago avenue, with it’s sleek interior and designer martinis, Logan Square’s Relax is a dive, a Polish sports bar, that really did seem to be floundering before the punks took to it.

This isn’t where I was supposed to spend the evening. I was supposed to be throwing a pajama party at the sadly, suddenly, shuttered Myour House to celebrate GlitterGuts’ second anniversary (don’t worry, the pajama jam will still be happening this month…I’m just not quite sure where and when), but when that got shut down, I decided to go see my friends DJ Demchuk and Moneypenny play a huge show at the Congress Theater opening for MSTRKRFT and Basement Jaxx. Congress has been throwing these huge dance parties for a couple of years now, with big ticket acts like Justice, Boys Noize, and Chromeo paired up with some of the Chicago’s biggest up-and-coming acts. For some time now, I’ve had my own personal beef with these shows (stemming from a mix of sour grapes over not having been asked to shoot one, jaded professional-partier posturing, and legitimate professional concerns, none of which I’m going to get into here), but I tried to put all that aside and have a good time. I kept telling myself things like you’re in room packed full of high energy party people with loud noises, lazers, and girls in shiny pants, you like these things! or you’re watching Modeselektor play from the projection room of one of the last remaining turn-of-the-century art deco theaters in Chicago, and from any standpoint that is awesome! but I just wasn’t feeling it.

I sent out ten texts asking what people were up to and five of them told me to go to Relax. It didn’t take much prodding. I love that bar. They usually have cheap Polish beer and free bowls of bar popcorn, weird neighborhood heads to talk to, and beautiful punk girls to crush on. Al Scorch‘s cowpunk band was playing with Prizzy Prizzy Please, a saxophone heavy punk band that recently relocated here from Bloomington, Indiana and scared me with a teaser soundcheck that sounded way too much like G.E. Smith and the Saturday Night Live band.

Tall bikes and choppers were piled high against posts up and down the block. Awkward moments and interesting smells abounded, and you couldn’t have a conversation without having someone accidentally spill beer on you. What I found most interesting was how many people were tripping balls, several more than I saw at the rave-ier event, and how it wasn’t reflected in the music. Al’s set was louder and faster than any time I’d seen him before, but it never got trippy, just a mix of country, punk, and folk music in the vein of Defiance, OH, and while Prizzy Prizzy Please was way better than almost any of the bands I’ve seen from the scene they grew out of, they never got as out there as, say, Essential Logic (who I’ll use for example here for their prominent use of saxophone).

It was not a rave, and it was not a happening. It was more like a backyard party, thrown in someone else’s backyard, while acid was floating around, especially as 2am rolled around and everybody had to be kicked out.