Brace yourselves: The frontman for a long-standing punk band is about to say something kind about Chicago police officers. Franke Nardiello, also known as Groovie Mann of the industrial-turned-’90s-pop band My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult, spent some of his teens at Dugan’s Bistro, the gay River North dance club famous for a drag queen called the Bearded Lady. But in the ’70s, he was underage, so cops regularly hauled him out.
“They wouldn’t arrest you, or call you a f–, or anything like that,” recalls Nardiello, who came out in Chicago at the time. “Whereas I heard stories on the West Coast, from older men, even in Los Angeles, where cops would come into the bar, make them all stand up against the bar, take their driver’s licenses, tear them in half and hit them in the backs of their legs with a billy club. (In Chicago,) they were just like, ‘You shouldn’t be there.’
“That was when my whole world opened up,” Nardiello continues. “It was like mirrors and drag queens and disco fashion and lights and the whole room flashing. I’d never seen something so exciting.”
Nardiello and his musical partner, Buzz McCoy, would eventually go on to make some of the weirdest music of the late ’80s and early ’90s, a pastiche of B-movie dialogue and interview snippets (“I live for drugs — it’s great”), house-music beats, metal guitars, fuzzy synthesizers and lecherous shrieking. This bizarre noise occasionally congealed into something melodic, and at a time when non-commercial bands like Butthole Surfers and Meat Puppets were able to achieve MTV hits, Thrill Kill Kult landed on the pop and alternative-rock charts with 1991’s “Sex On Wheelz” and 1994’s “Above the Night.”
Nardiello, 60, cheerfully brushes off a question, during a half-hour phone interview from a tour bus somewhere between Albuquerque and Amarillo, Texas, about Thrill Kill Kult’s relationship with ’90s nostalgia. This sort of thing is huge today — the I Love the ’90s tour demonstrates the ticket-selling power of old-school hip-hop, and Backstreet Boys, Pokemon and Tamagotchis have recently made pop-cultural comebacks. “We’re not even in sync with anything like that, ever,” Nardiello says. “It’s a show. It’s more of a feeling and a sensibility that’s not showy. I guess it’s emotionally nostalgic. I don’t know.”
Long before Thrill Kill Kult had any hope of selling records, Groovie and Buzz met in Chicago in 1987. Groovie had moved on from glam rock and dance music and, inspired by seeing the Ramones and others in Rockford, sang in bands like the DT’s and Special Affect (which included Chicago’s Al Jourgensen, who played guitar and soon departed to form Ministry); Marston “Buzz” Daley had been studying jazz piano at Berklee College of Music, quit to join arty punk bands in Boston, then relocated to Chicago. Groovie and Buzz aspired, at first, to make a movie, but changed the working title into a band name and collected the craziest musicians and dancers they could find to go on the road. Nardiello had been friends with Dannie Flesher and Jim Nash in the late ’70s; when they opened influential record store and label Wax Trax, Thrill Kill Kult was a perfect fit.
Syncing with an industrial-thrash-disco scene that included noisy misfit bands like Skinny Puppy, KMFDM and Pigface, Thrill Kill Kult became famous for its highly visual shows, starring dominatrixes, strippers, whippings, barely simulated sex and tight, flashy, S&M-inspired costumes. The band regularly performed with a group of dancers known as the Bomb Gang Girlz. “In the beginning, it was like all the girls were waitresses or bartenders, just people that we liked that were cool to be around. It would be just like, ‘Oh, they’d be good for a Bomb Gang Girl,’ ” Nardiello says. “Even once we got into musician types, there was always a certain type that fit in. We’re sort of like the family. We share with things. It’s not like the rock star thing. We sort of make fun of it.”
The band softened its sound with its third album, 1991’s “Sexplosion!,” a cartoonish alternative to harder-edged industrial bands like Ministry and Nine Inch Nails, and its biggest hit “Sex On Wheelz” was charmingly explicit. After that, Thrill Kill Kult became the first band to sign with Interscope Records, the label that would become huge thanks to Dr. Dre, Eminem and No Doubt (and was the subject of HBO’s recent documentary “The Defiant Ones”). “We were like the weird New Kids on the Block,” Nardiello recalls. “Jimmy (Iovine, the label’s co-founder, now heading Apple Music) was very intrigued and interested in what we were doing. But they failed to make that of any importance in their documentary because our name is too long or too scary or whatever.”
The band switched from Interscope to Rykodisc in the mid-’90s, and did more of the same, as more than 40 members cycled through both Thrill Kill Kult and the Bomb Gang Girlz. The band has nearly completed its first studio album since 2014’s “Spooky Tricks” and Nardiello hopes to release it early next year. “I’m excited that I made it this far,” he says. “And I am happy that I look as good as I do for my age.”
When: 9 p.m. Friday
Where: Bottom Lounge, 1375 Lake St.
Tickets: $25; 312-666-6775 or www.bottomlounge.com
Steve Knopper is a freelance writer.
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