R.I.P. John Kezdy, 1959-2023: Farewell to a Fine Friend and Frontman Supreme

Ouch, is this sad. No getting around it.

Having penned a eulogy here less than three years ago for his younger brother Pierre, (bassist for Chicago’s Naked Raygun, Pegboy, Strike Under, Trial by Fire, and Arsenal), now it’s sadly time to say goodbye to John Kezdy as well—someone I knew even better for even longer.

He was a loyal and deep, enduring close friend for 40+ years, and those are the hardest to lose. He was also one of the best frontmen of our era, an imposing singer/stage-commander for Chicago’s immortal Effigies (1980-now, with long periods of dormancy), the rock-of-granite, taciturn, all business, harsh-sounding, gruff speaking leader of a band whose music I and thousands of others found so thrilling. He was further a respected prosecutor in his rather weighty job in the Illinois Attorney General’s Office for decades, rising to Chief of the Bureau; a committed husband and father of two; a first rate recommender of books to read; a sharp as a tack yet drolly funny correspondent and conversationalist and prime storyteller; and among the people I admired most in this sometimes cruel and senseless world.

That last bit sounds like cliché, but the manner of his death August 26, age 64, is the proof of the shocking precariousness of existence—everything just changes in an eyeblink. He crashed his bicycle into a stopped delivery truck blocking his dedicated bike lane in Glencoe, Illinois, near his home, and was thereafter unresponsive—which is just plain sorrowful for him, his family, his other friends, fans, and colleagues. The accident apparently occurred in broad daylight on a clear stretch; John must have had his head down, not expecting anything in his path. Of course, had he died of cancer like Pierre, his funeral this coming October 14th would still be a profoundly sad one, because of all the qualities I described and the music he’s given us forever. But it sure leaves those who valued him more dazed.

(It feels even stranger, because John had survived a huge brush with sudden death just a year ago in a national news story that he made very little of himself.) He and his wife of 24 years, Erica were among the 48 unfortunate souls wounded by bullets and shrapnel in that horrific mass shooting, July 4, 2022 in their his town Highland Park, IL’s annual Independence Day Parade. (Seven tragically perished. The 21-year-old gunman I won’t name that carried out that senseless slaughter with an assault weapon, is still awaiting trial on 117 felony counts.) The usual John: he just went back to work even as he headed to semi-retirement. He just went about his business.

Sadly, John couldn’t cheat the grim reaper a second time in 12 months. And it’s indeed a giant loss.

That said, there’s this, I guess: I don’t know if it’s much solace, but the thought occurs that John was a guy who greatly believed in action over talk (without boasting about it; conversely he had the least amount of time for do-nothing blowhards that he often made hilarious fun of), who at least died doing something that brought him great satisfaction. That’s what he always seemed to be doing, in all the decades I knew him. I remember him years ago taking multi-day drives on his down time, even when not on tour, just for the experiences of other places—some of which, fortunately, included a stop at my apartment at Eldridge Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan or a bar nearby, where we’d sip for hours without getting drunk until closing time. These days he was more likely to embark on two wheels. He was an avid and committed cyclist. He’d in fact competed in 14 races in just the last two years, according to road-results.com, the last being Chicago’s Intelligentsia Cup William Blair Grand Prix at Goose Island Beer Co. on July 30.

It’s taken me a month to come to terms with him not being with us anymore, given the manner of his demise, but this is what I now think: I can easily imagine the determined look on his face during those races, challenging his body into his mid 60s, with the same force that I saw him take over stages at myriad Effigies shows in Chicago, New Jersey and New York, 1983-2008—the strong, no nonsense, taciturn, committed, un-fakeable embodiment of a visceral, incredible band. You could tell all that from his interviews and the band’s records, too. He had a code, and he lived it.

If it pleases the court—since John tried so many cases—may I quickly round up some of the many, personal experiences I had with him, before I talk about the Effigies and their monumental importance to the history of Chicago’s independent music scene?

We were indeed good friends. I went to his wedding, and he went to mine, both with our eventual spouses. (My wife and I even got to sit with Pierre at John’s, which made such a happy, great day even better! And like me, he was not afraid to wed a smart and talented woman in Erica, a talented architect in her own right.) And if you thought of him as just a really serious, tough singer, there was a contrasting big kid side I saw only from time to time. Much of our conversations since 2000 centered around our respective children, and the last time I stayed with him at his house up north, we stopped to pick up his toddler son at daycare… and here was one doting dad, calling his boy “Luke-y Boo” over and over. That would be unremarkable in most people of course; but I remember being struck by the contrast from his usual demeanor, and thinking it funny. (Later he would tell me that of all the things in life he did, the best was having kids.)

So many of my memories of him are from all the times I stayed with him and Pierre in the house they shared in Evanston before all three of us got married—every time I came to Chicago: twice for Buzzcocks shows, once for a Chameleons’ Mark Burgess show, three times on tour with my own Springhouse, and the half dozen Effigies reunion shows I attended there, every time they’d come out of mothballs, starting in 1988. The two of them were great hosts and were kind of a low-grade comedy act, keeping me in stiches.

My friendship with John started as so many of mine did, because of music. He must have seen my xeroxed fanzine The Big Takeover in 1981 listed in Flipside or something—I’m still its editor and publisher, though it’s been a magazine instead since 1991—because he mailed a copy of The Effigies’ debut EP Haunted Town to me looking for a review. We exchanged letters after I flipped over his record, and our missives came with surprising regularity in those pre-email days; me penning mine, him typing his, even the addresses on the envelopes—to “idiot-proof them,” he said, just the first time he made me laugh. Finally, The Effigies came to New York in 1982 and we hung out that week and went on from there. I interviewed him a couple of times, and put The Effigies on the cover of our issue 24 in 1988. Eventually, he even sang The Ruts’ “In a Rut” with our band Springhouse at our tour stops at Reptile House in Grand Rapids in 1991 and Chicago’s Avalon Club in 1992, and he eventually sang the Effigies’ incredible “Yes” with our later band Last Burning Embers here in New York about 10 years later. It felt pretty amazing each time to be backing him, actually!

Apart from talking about music, recommending lesser known bands to each other in those days before even really college radio was much of a thing, we soon added books,  as we were both in and out of college. Boy did he recommend some doozies for me in my 20s. I spent decades thanking him for suggesting Maugham’s Of Human Bondage, Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, etc.! I in turn got him interested in Steinbeck’s East of Eden, especially its two-page chapter on the real point of our lives being to make people sad instead of happy when we die. Needless to say, I’ve been thinking of that a lot in connection with his untimely demise.

And then, there was a truly bizarre thing that bound us together like glue for good: John and I ended up seriously dating the same girl some three years apart, even though he lived 800 miles from me. I had mentioned my six-month romance to him, both during it, and especially after we’d broken up in 1984 just after she’d moved to Chicago to attend the same college he eventually did. So I was plenty surprised when John called me and asked my permission to date her himself. And I’m certain that if I had any issue with it, he’d have backed off—it’s how he was. Instead, I liked his totally typical manners/courtesy/propriety, and almost laughed, saying, “Sure! But be clear-eyed though!”—since unlike most people, he knew the basic details of my breakup! I myself was two years into a new seven-year relationship, so it wasn’t hard or anything, but what a standup guy! (She and he ended up with a much longer, more fruitful, multi-year relationship, and I even got to sit down and chat amiably with her one last time at an Effigies reunion at Dreamerz in 1988, which John arranged, and it was nice and a better way to leave things. Wonders never cease). After their own split, John and I often talked about her, since we had that unusual past in common.

Another keen interest we shared—far less personal!—was politics, as he was a keen analyst of Chicago’s/Illinois’ history of corruption and not so aboveboard dealings—as was clear to anyone who’s read his lyrics to “Quota,” “Haunted Town,” “We’re Da Machine,” and “The Guv’ner.” His insights even got sharper in the years he served “at the pleasure of” whomever was governor. To be clear, it could have been a fraught area of discussion for he and I, as I was much to the left of him. But that was fine, because neither of us were knee-jerk, and respected the other, so we’d always end up in points of agreement or greater understanding or laugh about the nutters on both sides of all legislative isles. That too, is a rare quality these days.

Relatedly, his work in the field of law was not only endlessly fascinating to me, but it was often an unlikely source of much real life comedy when I’d ask him about it. Oh the stories! And unlike his more kidding sibling Pierre — a big guy with a big time, sometimes convulsive laugh — John was more serious, more stern and more professorial like their Hungarian immigrant dad Ferenc, a biochemistry professor at the University of Chicago (whose own 2019 obituary photo looked so much like John I did a double take when he sent me the link), and their other brother Andre, a math professor at The University of Illinois and The University of Louisville. (With John’s law degree, there was a load of academic credential/serious brilliance in that one family.) Yet John was an expert at the slowly side-splitting storyteller, a master of recreating unintentionally absurd courtroom scenes. John would do all the voices, of the judge, the defendants involved, and even some exasperated court-provided defense attorneys tasked with defending some oddly strange characters, and have an entire dinner table roaring. There was one I particularly recall, laced with absurdity, of one defendant changing his story about three times, before a judge who had to keep telling him he needed to save all of that for the trial—he was just there to plead guilty or not guilty, nothing more, and his attorney couldn’t stop him. If you heard John tell stories like these, it was like a Monty Python episode.

So yes, that, and more, was the John I knew. But I’d still be among his biggest fans even if we had never met, because the world lost one heck of a musician, too. It wasn’t all just past glories, either. Although it wasn’t common knowledge, The Effigies had reunited yet another time (they could never stay apart forever, they knew what they had together), with the lineup that produced their only album after 1986, 2007’s fantastic fourth, Reside. As well, they had nearly completed recording a brand new fifth one, which excited me greatly. I was sure another Chicago Effigies gig was in my cards for the first time since 2004 (having seen their final gigs in New York in 2008), and moreover, John had promised to play these new recordings for me and my LBE bandmate David Burokas, as he was heading our way this fall. Now it will have to be a posthumous release, but I bet it will be a fitting epitaph. They never did make a duff record so I doubt they’d start now.

For those who don’t know the music he/they made, The Effigies catalog will indeed form his more public legacy apart from his work in the courts. They were frankly one of the best bands in United States punk history, even coming as they did in the second wave (starting in 1980), and one of the best post-punk bands we ever produced, too. We live in an age where all their stuff can finally be heard for free any time you like—a luxury their music was never afforded upon release, or perhaps they’d be more widely acknowledged. But for starters, they were the first group to really put Chicago underground indie punk/rock on the map, long before the many that have come since and achieved greater acclaim.

Before The Effigies first hit O’Banions on Clark Street and The Oz Club on Hubbard St. circa 1980—John once showed me where both legendary clubs had been—there’d been some remarkable but obscure 7” singles from the Windy City, from similarly valiant, raspy ’n’ ripe bands such as The Swingers, Special Affects, Cunts, Immune System, Buzzards, The Exit, and the Mentally Ill of the twisted “Gacy’s Place” 45 (all of which can today can easily be encountered on YouTube, when they were next to impossible to find or hear back then!), but The Effigies were a harder, harrier, rougher, more uncompromising beast.

AUDIO: The Effigies “Haunted Town”

Their reputation spread first by their groundbreaking first release, 1981’s five-song Haunted Town EP. It was fairly standard punk rock at first blush, but what hit me when it came in the mail that day was the tough as nails sound of the band that was also embedded in John’s voice. Anyone could sing a seemingly throwaway campaign slogan like “We’ll be here tomorrow/With what we say today,” but he voiced it with equal parts conviction and quiet disgust for those who didn’t live up to their creeds, coming up in the bile in his harsh midwestern throat. As important, there were already elements in their style, especially from drummer Steve Economou and bassist Paul Zamost, that were anything but standard punk in that more hardcore epoch, reaching its peak on the incredible “Mob Clash”—closer to Johnny Rotten’s new Public Image Ltd. (offbeat/step beat) than the Sex Pistols LP that had been John’s catalyst in his teenage years. Likewise, you could hear that in the band’s tracks on 1981’s eye-opening Chicago scene compilation, Busted at Oz (with the nascent original lineup Naked Raygun, Pierre’s Strike Under, the underrated Banshees-esque Da, etc.), especially “Quota,” as well as the b-side of their 1982 single “Bodybag,” called “Security.” That song had more in common with The Gang of Four and angular new U.K. post-punk bands with a neo-industrial guitar edge, too, plus a bobbing bassline borrowed wholesale from The Stranglers’ “Down in the Sewer!! In the years to come, The Effigies would cover the pre-Joy Division band Warsaw, cementing their more open-ended approach to punk from the start. And John’s lyrics! In one of my earliest letters, I told him “Mob Clash” was my favorite on the EP, and asked what inspired it. He said it was partially inspired by the vomit-inducing, Holocaust-denying National Socialist Party of America’s neo-Nazi rally in Chicago’s Marquette Park on July 9, 1978 (instead of theeir infamous plans for a march through the Jewish North Chicago enclave, Skokie) that resulted in 72 arrests. Not the fodder of most bands, then!

Four albums and tons more touring ensued. The first LP, following 1983’s absolutely ruthless (the accurate name of their label collective with other bands) We’re Da Machine EP, 1984’s For Ever Grounded was a case study in the harshest sounding, but mostly mid-tempo, riff-heavy punk rock imaginable—along with the variety provided by those aforementioned post-punk inclinations, as befit a band greatly inspired by The Ruts, Stranglers, Killing Joke, etc.—all Blighty bands with heavy guitars and similar rough-tough-gruff frontmen. To this day it’s impossible to listen to the ungodly, absolutely pulverizing “Rather See None” from For Ever Grounded without hairs on my spine sticking up, or not thrilling to the auctioneer-spitting that John and band battle towards, with stops and starts and timing flashes to rival both The Ruts and Bad Brains, on the hammering “Silent Burn.”

Key guitarist Earl Letiecq soon left though, and was replaced by Robert O’Connor in time for 1985’s Fly on the Wire. Clearly bored and disdainful with anything to do with mid ’80s hardcore (as was I), The Effigies turned fully post-punk on this and 1986’s even better Ink. The latter also produced “Yes,” to this day my favorite Effigies song, with a vulnerability John rarely showed. (“I’d wait an eternity for a yes” even had romantic hints.) Twenty years later, 2007’s Reside with Robert McNaughton on guitar, was amazingly even better than Fly and Ink; start with the slowly pulverizing “The Full Weight of Failure” and behold the modern incarnation’s (three of four original members) post-punk mastery undiminished. A post-LP single ended things, pending the 2023 recordings the other members are finishing and mixing. All of this bounty is pretty essential, and all of it is quite different.

On my radio shows since John’s death, I’ve played a handful of Effigies records, as I often did when he was still here, and I’ve been once again lashed against the wall by the band’s unique combination of John’s brains and his excellent mates’ punk/post-punk brawn over three unique eras. The beat goes on in those grooves and online.

After the 2008 tour brought them to Southpaw near my house one last time, I only got to see John in person here and there. I’d take the train up to Connecticut when he was up in Stamford, or I had dinner with him in Greektown the last time I hit Chicago with my wife, who was attending a History Conference. It  was the usual merriment and deep bond. Get the life while you can.

In my obituary here in October 2020 for Pierre’s death, I wrote, “My condolences to his wife Heather, his kids, and most of all, his brother John, who lives on in reality and I hope makes it to 100; cause like Pierre while he was ours, the world is a better place if he’s in it.” It thus feels so wrong that John isn’t any more, either. Similar sincere condolences to Erica and their children, now in college or nearing it. We’ll sure miss your uncle/spouse/dad, and I was so very, very glad I knew him for so very long. His life sure touched mine at times, and every time I play one of his/their records, I will think of him and smile. Because we and Steinbeck were right. The point of life is to make people sad when you leave it. He did that for so many of us.

(John Kezdy’s memorial mass is on October 14, in Highland Park, IL. In lieu of flowers contributions can be made to WDCB College of DuPage Public Radio, wdcb.org)

AUDIO: The Effigies Ink (full album)

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Jack Rabid

Jack Rabid is the founder, editor, and publisher of New York music magazine The Big Takeover. His writing has appeared in Interview, Village Voice, Creem, Spin, Paper, Trouser Press Record Guide, and Musichound, and he hosts 'The Big Takeover Show' on realpunkradio.com every Monday at noon. He also plays drums inSpringhouse, now revived and touring with The Chills in early 2019.

Latest posts by Jack Rabid (see all)

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