Since 2005 Plastic Crimewave (aka Steve Krakow) has used the Secret History of Chicago Music to shine a light on worthy artists with Chicago ties who’ve been forgotten, underrated, or never noticed in the first place.
While working on last month’s column commemorating the 20th anniversary of the Secret History of Chicago Music, I unearthed some great memories and stirred up some old ghosts. The Puta-Pons, founded by bassist Rebecca Crawford and guitarist Shelly Kurzynski Villaseñor, were a joyously fun rock band, active in the late 90s and early 2000s. But they were also intertwined with a tragedy that struck the local music scene a few years later: Michael Dahlquist of Silkworm, John Glick of the Returnables, and Doug Meis of the Dials were killed in a car crash caused by a suicidal driver on July 14, 2005. Glick was Crawford’s husband, Crawford played in the Dials, and Meis had also drummed in the Puta-Pons. This story is dedicated to all of them.
Crawford and Kurzynski Villaseñor met in the early 90s at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and they’d been playing together for several years when they moved to Chicago in 1998 and renamed their band the Puta-Pons (they styled it “puta-pons”). Kurzynski Villaseñor was born in Milwaukee, in a Polish neighborhood that was quickly becoming a Mexican neighborhood. “Dad was south-side Polish, mom was a south-side first-generation Mexican immigrant—a real West Side Story,” she says.
The family moved to Madison when Kurzynski Villaseñor was four. As she grew up, she absorbed her parents’ favorite sounds: Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, David Bowie, Sonny & Cher, mariachi music. She learned how to read chord charts from her mom, who was teaching herself folk guitar. She dabbled in violin and joined a school choir and barbershop quartet. (“What a dork!” she jokes.) She sang solo for the first time in high school, performing Berlin’s “The Metro” with a band of classmates.
Crawford was born and raised in DeKalb, Illinois. “Famous for corn and Cindy Crawford,” she says. “No relation.” She grew up obsessed with pop music on the radio, and she remembers wanting to write her own songs from an early age. She didn’t take to piano lessons, and she didn’t fare well playing clarinet and flute in school either. Her heart was with 60s girl groups, Blondie, the Psychedelic Furs, Kraftwerk, the Ramones, and the Cure. “I also dug a bit of schmaltz and cried tears of joy when I was gifted the Xanadu soundtrack for my tenth birthday—so I have a special place in my heart for Olivia Newton-John,” she confesses.
In college, Crawford picked up her first electric instrument. “I started playing bass around age 19 or 20 with future husband then roommate [John Glick] and his ex-girlfriend, because they were starting a band,” she says. “So I bought a bass. I think we called ourselves Sandbox or something. It lasted about a month.” That summer, Crawford’s other roommate was Kurzynski Villaseñor’s boyfriend at the time.
“I came over to their place for drinks before a concert or outing of some sort,” Kurzynski Villaseñor remembers. “I complimented [Becky] on the enviable rack of vintage clothing in her room, and we almost immediately started talking about forming a band. Thus began a lifelong friendship filled with music, competitive thrifting and vintage-clothes collecting, and all sorts of high jinks.”
“I wanted to do more of my own thing, away from the then boyfriend,” Crawford adds. “She played guitar and we had ideas!”
The duo named their first band Hello Kitty, and they went through drummers as quickly as Spinal Tap. (Thankfully, nobody exploded—one left to focus on her PhD studies in materials engineering.) “Hello Kitty’s first show was supposed to be with Liz Phair and the Scissor Girls in Madison, at an all-ages teen center,” Kurzynski Villaseñor says. “However, Phair had just started to blow up with Exile in Guyville, so she canceled on us. It was still a great first show!”
As Crawford and Kurzynski Villaseñor searched for their musical voice—and followed up on hot tips from fans—they developed a mutual love of postpunk by women (the Raincoats, Kleenex/Liliput), 70s glam and funk (Roxy Music, Funkadelic, Betty Davis), goth rock (Siouxsie & the Banshees, Bauhaus), 80s new wave (the B-52s, the Go-Go’s), and early-90s riot grrrl (Babes in Toyland, Bikini Kill). Crawford also worked at B-Side Records in Madison, which put plenty of new sounds in her ear.
Hello Kitty changed their name to Rhoda and recruited their third drummer, Travis Nelsen. “He had an adorable mop of hair and always smelled deliciously of pizza when he came to practice after his delivery shifts at a local pizza parlor,” Kurzynski Villaseñor says. Crawford remembers him delivering doughnuts—he probably just switched jobs, but I like to imagine he was doing both at once and might show up to rehearsals smelling like either.
Nelsen played on a Rhoda session at Simple Studios in Green Bay, owned by engineer Eric James Thielen (aka bassist Eric #2 from geek-punk heroes Boris the Sprinkler). Those tunes came out only on a four-song cassette that isn’t even on Discogs, and Nelsen left after a year or two to play in his brother’s band. He eventually moved to Austin, Texas, where he joined Okkervil River. He drummed for them till 2010, and he passed away in 2020.
Dave Wade, who replaced Nelsen, found the band via an ad placed in Madison alt-weekly Isthmus. Wade plays on Rhoda’s lone single, the 1996 release “Revolting” b/w “Siren Song.” The band was short-lived, but they opened for the likes of Sleater-Kinney, Tribe 8, Demolition Doll Rods, and Pansy Division before Kurzynski Villaseñor and Crawford moved to Chicago.
“[We] were a bit bored of Madison at the time and wanted to move to Chicago for more culture, fun, and rock ’n’ roll,” Kurzynski Villaseñor says. “For the first few years, I lived on Haddon right around the corner from the Rainbo. Wicker Park and the surrounding area was in its heyday.” A few months later, on July 4, 1998, Crawford settled in Logan Square.
Upon arriving here, Crawford and Kurzynski Villaseñor again renamed their band. They took “the Puta-Pons” from the title of a Crawford song, “Put Upon,” which Kurzynski Villaseñor had turned into a Spanish-language pun. They placed an ad in the Chicago Reader to find a new drummer. The two front women rehearsed for a bit with Lisa Hill, who’d answered the ad, but they’d parted ways by the time the band gigged at the Hideout as the Stinky-Pons, backed by a rotating lineup of friends. “We also wrote an impromptu song performed only once for the occasion, and Shelly impressively remembers the lyrics,” Crawford says.
Via another Reader ad, the two women found Doug Meis, who’d become the Puta-Pons’ longest-serving drummer. Meis was a military brat, so he’d moved all over with his family, but he spent some of his formative years where I did, in suburban Hoffman Estates. “Doug was an incredibly talented drummer, adorably charismatic, and was the most bombastic drummer we had ever played with,” Kurzynski Villaseñor recalls. The lineup with Meis is the one I remember, with his over-the-top energy locking into Crawford’s punky but melodic bass, Kurzynski Villaseñor’s less-is-more guitar lines, and the front women’s yelpy vocals intertwining into delirious hooks.
That jagged, giddy sound leaps off their lone album, Return to Zero, which they issued via their own Vinahyde Records and celebrated with a release party in March 2001. The Puta-Pons recorded it at Engine Studios (which Brad Wood helped design after the closure of Idful) with engineer Jason Ward, who’d later cofound Chicago Mastering Service with Bob Weston. The album caught the ear of famous rock critic Greil Marcus, author of Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century. In 2002, Marcus gave Return to Zero a nod at Salon, singling out “the stunningly fast ride of Shelly Kurzynski Villaseñor’s guitar solo in ‘(You Need a) Shot in the Arm,’ which delivers it.”
The Puta-Pons played some amazing gigs, including an August 2001 show at the Congress Theater with no-wave dance-punk party starters ESG and riot-grrrl legends Bratmobile. (I was there!) That concert was part of Ladyfest Midwest, which Crawford and Kurzynski Villaseñor helped organize. The Puta-Pons also opened for the likes of El Vez, the Make-Up, and Enon.
Kurzynski Villaseñor says there was “mutual admiration” between the band and local drag troupe the Chicago Kings. In 1999 they played a memorable Prince tribute show (dressed in lingerie in homage to Apollonia and Vanity) that also included Kelly Hogan, Cynthia Plaster Caster, and the Goblins (for whom Meis also sometimes drummed). At a similar show devoted to Michael Jackson, they tried to perform on roller skates.
The Puta-Pons appeared on Chic-a-Go-Go in ’99, played around the midwest with the Butchies, and took an east-coast tour that they think happened in early 2002. Sadly, that tour indirectly broke up the band: Crawford and Kurzynski Villaseñor got into a major row on the way back. “I remember there being an argument over my map-reading skills and her driving skills, as the final straw from some pent-up band tension,” Crawford says.
“It was really the culmination of a lot of lack of boundaries and poor communication over the years, which many successful bands go to therapy to resolve these days,” Kurzynski Villaseñor adds. “It was seriously way more sad than any breakup I’ve had with a boyfriend, by far.”
Shortly after the Puta-Pons split up, I briefly played in a synth-punk project with Crawford called Black Hole. We recorded a few tracks (produced by my departed friend Joe Cassidy), but we never released them. I do remember we played some fun gigs, though, including with Métal Urbain and Glass Candy.
Crawford and Meis continued to play together in the Dials, who in 2005 released the excellent Flex Time with Patti Gran on guitar and Emily Dennison on keys. They continued to play after Meis’s death, with Chad Romanski (a childhood friend of Crawford’s brother) filling in on drums and later joining the band. The tragedy also pushed Crawford and Kurzynski Villaseñor to put their band-ending blowout in perspective and rekindle their connection. “We will continue our friendship and shenanigans to the grave,” Kurzynski Villaseñor says.
The Dials put out a second record, Amoeba Amore, in 2008, and called it quits a few years later. Kurzynski Villaseñor made two albums with Telenovela, who became Swiss Dots and released a third in 2010. Crawford has also played with the Pamphleteers, who evolved into her current band, the Wet Look. Unsurprisingly, they need a new drummer!
After spending five years in Los Angeles, Kurzynski Villaseñor is back in the Chicago area (“because I missed Becky, naturally”). She and Ward, the engineer on Return to Zero, are married and have a child. “I’m not playing in a band at all currently, though I do rock out in my basement in Oak Park whenever I can,” she says. “I’ve got a growing backlog of songs in my head that need to get out.”
To me, that sounds like a Puta-Pons reunion is entirely possible—provided they can find a drummer. I’ll sorely miss Meis, but I’d love to see the Puta-Pons play some of their catchy, freaky classics live again—who else wants to hear “Blank Xerox” and “I Am a Jelly Donut”?
The radio version of the Secret History of Chicago Music airs on Outside the Loop on WGN Radio 720 AM, Saturdays at 5 AM with host Mike Stephen. Past shows are archived here.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
