The band talks Fire Aim Ready, out October 23 on Pravda Records

Transmission 428: Interview with The Effigies

Fire Aim Ready, the sixth album from Chicago punk institution The Effigies, arrives via Pravda Records on October 23rd, and it lands as both a reckoning and a continuation. It’s the band’s first record to feature new vocalist Geoff Sabin, stepping in following the death of founding frontman John Kezdy in 2023; a loss that, by the band’s own account, left them uncertain whether The Effigies would carry on at all.

They did, and the results, tracked quickly at Million Yen Studios with guitarist Andy Gerber behind the desk, carry the urgency of songs written between tour dates rather than labored over for a year in the rehearsal room. The title itself inverts the old military cadence “ready, aim, fire” into something closer to the times: a band reading the present moment as one where the shooting comes first and the questions, if they come at all, come later.

There’s a Stranglers cover buried in the tracklist, a nod to the dark, dry humor that shaped the band since 1980, and a first single, Hallucinations, already out into the world. What follows is our conversation with the band about horns, punk’s Chicago origins, mourning, and writing a political record for a country they see sliding toward something considerably worse than steady.

Featured image: © Karl Spiekerm

What kind of music influenced you when you were growing up and what made you want to start creating your own?

Well, when I was growing up, my family, we had music in the family. My parents listened pretty much to jazz and classical music. So I played instruments at a young age.

I played trumpet for many years. I was in the jazz band and the orchestra at school and all that growing up. The first kinds of music that really influenced me were the music that had horns in it, because I played a horn.

I played trumpet, so I liked jazz. I liked the big band music that my parents were playing.

Then, when I was about 14, 15 years old, we went to these competitions. The school went to these competitions to have all the bands play and see what the best bands in the region were. That’s when I first saw that they mixed in rock and roll with these jazz competitions as well.

That’s when I got the bug to listen to rock and roll. My aunt lived with us. She was a few years older than me, maybe five years older. She started buying records, rock and roll records. So that’s how I first got into it, from listening to horn based music to getting into more rock and roll.

And of course, listening to the radio too. I was influenced by her and her taste of music, which was the 60s kind of music, the Hendrix, the Buddy Miles, those kind of bands, the British blues, R&B oriented rock bands, Cream, that kind of thing.

What was the music environment in Chicago like in the 80s when you start and where do you fit into it?

Well, you have to understand, Chicago was a very conservative town. I would call it a Catholic conservative town. It was politically dominated by the Irish Catholics.

There’s a very large Polish community here too, so it was a very Catholic, conservative town. Now, we had blues, of course. The Black people came up from the South and we had a huge blues scene here. We also have a great orchestra, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, with a world renowned horn and brass section. So some of the popular music coming up in Chicago was horn based; even a lot of the pop songs had horns behind them. You had the band Chicago, you had all these other groups. So in the 80s, it was very conservative.

When the punk scene hit in the late 70s, it was huge in America, on both coasts, the West Coast and New York. In Chicago it was a very small music scene. What would happen is that when the bands came to America to play, or even some of the New York bands, they would pass through Chicago. A couple of bigger bands like the Clash or the Ramones would play Chicago, but some of the smaller bands would pass it up.

So we were maybe three, four years behind the rest of the country, or the rest of the scene. But there was a small group of people who really liked the music, and the Chicago punk scene really started within the gay community, within the gay clubs, because one or two of the gay clubs had punk night or new wave night, where they would spin records and have DJs, and people would meet at those clubs. Those initial groups of people formed the first core bands of the Chicago punk rock scene, in the 1980s.

I’d say ’79, 1980 is really when the Chicago punk scene started.

What do you remember about your first shows?

The first actual live show we had was at Oz. It was a rock club, a punk bar called Oz. It was actually a gay bar during the week, and on the weekends it turned into a punk hangout. We played there with Naked Raygun, and I forget who else. That was in 1980, our first show. There were maybe 100 people there, if that many, and that was a visceral show for us. It was very close, wasn’t violent, but it was very energetic. It was an exciting time to play live. The first live show for me was a very electric feeling, a very powerful experience.

This is the first album without John on vocals. How did you start writing, knowing how heavy that would be?

We were in a mourning period of about a year after John died, and we didn’t even think we would continue the band at that point.

Then we said, well, we have to play, and we talked to Andy Gerber, our current guitar player. He’s the engineer and producer of the record, and he said, no, we have to keep going, you guys owe it to John to keep going. We said yes, we have to do that, but we didn’t know who to find.

He was instrumental in finding Geoff Sabin, who plays guitar as well and had actually worked with us on the album before Burned, on Reside, which was done in the mid 2000s. He did some studio work, and he was also working at the studio with Andy as a secondary engineer. So he fit right in because we knew who he was, we’d met him before, and it’s worked out very well since then.

The writing process was actually very different from previous projects. In our previous recording projects we would work on these songs for a good year before we went into the studio. This time was very quick. Geoff has a studio at his home, a small studio, and Paul and I would go there and create riffs and songs. Then Geoff came up with lyrics for them and we’d piece them together. When we went back into the main studio, Million Yen, with Andy, the recording process was very fast this time, a different process than we were used to. It’s worked out very well, and I think we’re very happy with this latest record, which is coming out on Pravda Records in October, or at the beginning of November. We have a single out now, Hallucinations, with a video.

The rest of the record is a very eclectic record; there are different time signatures, different feels with each song. I think the one thing about us as a band is that we call ourselves a punk band, we have the punk ethos and the punk ideals, but we’re not really a hardcore band, we try different things within our songs.

What’s the idea behind the title, the title Fire Aim Ready?

Fire Aim Ready is more of a political album for us. We’re in this country, in the midst of a proto-fascist state in my opinion, with Trump and with ICE taking people off the street without due process. So the idea of Fire Aim Ready is kind of a reverse of, you know, ready, aim, fire. It’s kind of like a pun. It’s just the idea that people are shooting first and asking questions later, that idea. It’s just that violence comes first, then we’ll discuss it, which is completely antithetical to what a democracy should be.

You wrote it between live dates in 2025. How did writing on the road shape the songs?

The way we write is we come up with the riffs first, it’s rhythm based, bass and drums. Most of our songs, we put down bass and drums first. Paul and I have a very good connection, we’ve known each other for so many years, we’ve been in this band since the beginning, so we have a very good feel with each other. We come up with the rhythms first, then the bass line, then the guitars are layered on top, and the guitars bring out the feeling of the song, the mood, what we want the song to say. Then the lyrics are written on top of that.

This was a very quick process for us on this record, and I think it worked out very well. I really enjoy this process, I like the spontaneity of it, the fact that things just kind of fall from the sky for you. It’s not planned, it just happens.

How did the cover of the Stranglers song make its way into the track list?

We were always big fans of the Stranglers, even though some of their views were tongue in cheek, or a little controversial in some ways. But they always had a dark sense of humor, and I think we liked that when we were first starting the band.

What Andy was doing is he wanted to try taking some of our old songs and see if they could fit someone else’s song, as far as the rhythm. We found that our song worked to the rhythm of the Stranglers song, and then we morphed and built everything else around it. We’re strong Stranglers fans, we always liked that band, they’re intelligent, funny and dark.

Going back to the political side of the album, what’s the social urgency you feel most right now?

The whole planet is devolving; first of all, we have a major climate crisis, we have major issues with natural resources, and we have constant wars.

So to me, the major thing about this record is the chipping away of perceived freedoms that we’ve probably lost a long time ago, but that’s really in our face now. They’re really pushing it in our face that we will have a breakaway civilization, a high tech civilization for us, but for the rest of humanity you will be chattel, you will be serfs at some point. It’s happening in this country already, where people are living week to week, month to month. It’s unconscionable, what’s going on, especially what I see now.

We’re heading into, I think, a fascist dictatorship with this government, if not an oligarchic kind of dictatorship taking over, at least in the Western world that I see at this point. We have to do something about it. I think bands have to participate politically now. Recently we did a benefit show for the United Steelworkers, who were locked out by British Petroleum in Whiting, Indiana, for their strike fund.

I think it’s important that bands, no matter what genre of music they play, that musicians start to be more political now, more involved in the day to day struggles of the working class. We have to do that, because at this point it’s looking very bad for everybody.

Sure. Beyond music, what kinds of external influences, for example, art, books, life experiences have shaped your writing for these albums?

We’re all different. Geoff and myself, we’re architects, so we like the building arts, we’ve been influenced by modernism and hyper modernist ideas. Paul loves different kinds of music, funk, jazz, that kind of thing. I think we have a lot of different influences.

I look to my wife, she’s constantly turning me on to different designers and different things, showing me different things. I think it’s the experiences of talking to different people all the time, meeting people, seeing what they’re into, and having discussions, that’s the most important thing.

I think one of the highlights of touring these last couple of months, this last year really, is meeting all the young bands now, which are actually more political than they were in my time, and talking about their experiences and their concerns.

How does performing today compare to playing venues in the 80s?

In the 80s, it was very DIY. Within the punk community in Chicago we had a small core group of people, and we would put on shows ourselves, provide the PA system, do all the handbills ourselves, hang up all the flyers, create the fanzines, that kind of thing. Nowadays it’s gotten more corporate.

All the festivals are great to go to, but they’re almost like a corporate event in a lot of ways. And even traveling, you have GPS now; before, we were struggling to find clubs, getting lost on the road. So it’s improved as far as the technology, the sound quality, and you’re playing nicer venues. But sometimes the spirit doesn’t feel as close as it did to me in the early times, when it was very DIY. We’d be on the road, sleeping on people’s floors, you’d know all the bands in the different towns, you’d play with them, and you’d have that kind of community.

Now you’re kind of guaranteed a place to play when you go out of town, as part of these punk festival events, there’s so many bands, it’s well done and we enjoy it, but it’s got a different feel than the early days, to me.

Are there plans for further archival releases or other projects in the pipeline? Are you working on new material?

We’re going to be working on new material shortly. We have two more of the old albums, the third and fourth, that we’re going to be re-releasing and re-mastering at some point.

Recently I came into a treasure trove of cassette tapes of some live recordings of ours that a friend of mine gave me. I’m going to go through those; if not on vinyl, maybe we’ll put some of these old shows out electronically. They might have some other bands on there too, so we’ll have to find out who those other bands are and see if they’d be willing to put out their music as well.

Photos courtesy of The Effigies

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