Dem Hopkins didn’t just run Oz, the former gay bar that helped birth the local scene. He’d lived on the streets himself, and he devoted the same passion he had for punk to the cause of housing justice. | ✍️ imLeor
. Petryshyn has since facilitated some of the biggest reunions in punk history—among them the Replacements, Jawbreaker, and the original Misfits—but thereunion still stands out to him. “It had a far different feel of any show I’ve ever done,” he says.
When Hopkins came out to his parents in his teens, they kicked him out of the house. His close friend Laura Hadley says he lived on the streets of New York City for a spell. She’s 17 years younger than Hopkins, and she met him through her father, Charles, while she was still an infant. Hopkins got to know Charles Hadley by working with him on political campaigns in Chicago, and depending on the day’s childcare arrangements, Laura was sometimes around too.
provided the only home away from home for punk and punk-curious Chicagoans, but in April 1978, a mysterious fire closed it for good. La Mere co-owner Noah “Noe” Boudreau eulogized the bar in the debut issue of Chicago new-wave zine. “Our friendships, our varied musical tastes, and our senses of humor were not torched,” he wrote. “If anything we all have a sharper edge about us.”
Hopkins was in the crowd. He left the show with designs to turn the Greenleaf into a punk bar. Oz was about to be born. Harry Smail, who became close friends with Hopkins, first went to Oz at the behest of his new girlfriend Patti Sullivan. “The dance floor was dangerous,” Smail says. “They had the speakers mounted way out off the wall, so you could run into them very easily. After you ran into it once or twice, you got to be a little more careful. I think the DJ booth was in a closet off the dance floor. It seemed like it had been an apartment before they made it into a club.
Dem Hopkins, with CCH director of development Michael Nameche at right, shows off the prize he won in the CCH Riot Fest raffle in 2016: a guitar signed by Naked Raygun.The River North location of Oz, amid a phalanx of gay bars on Hubbard, had three times as much space. A neighboring gay bar had an interior doorway that led into Oz, allowing people to pass back and forth without going outside.
Naked Raygun played the second incarnation of Oz a few times. Founding Effigies guitarist Earl “Oil” Letiecq says his band made their Oz debut at the Hubbard location. Hopkins “was such a nice, very gracious guy,” he recalls. “He was so thrilled to have us playing there and just happy to get the whole thing rolling.”
Nelson remembers being blown away by Strike Under’s performance. “Chris and Steve [Bjorklund] didn’t get along sometimes, but man, that was an electrifying set,” he says. “There were sparks flying in the air between the two of them.”when Autumn Records released it later in 1981. “I was surprised when it came out,” he says. “I said [to Dem], ‘When did you do this?’ ‘Oh, we did it here and there.’ I was like, ‘OK, that would’ve been nice to know—I would’ve come over.
One of Irey’s closest friends at Different Strokes was a sixtysomething woman who went by Melody. “You’d walk in and she’d say, ‘Hey, come put your dick on the bar, I’ll buy you a shot,’” Irey says. “I don’t know if too many people took her up on it.” The bar’s owner outfitted the place with religious fixtures—prayer benches, stained glass windows, crucifixes—and Hopkins kept them when he became owner in the late 80s.
Hopkins attracted a lot of his old regulars to Different Strokes, but most of its patrons were necessarily from outside his circle. Smail recalls Richard M. Daley making a campaign stop there on his first run for mayor in 1988. And Hopkins got to be friendly with people he first met at Different Strokes—he and Irey initially bonded over music. “He loved pinball,” Irey says. “I don’t think the bar originally had pinball, but they got two pinball machines, and nobody could beat him.
Hopkins was still running Different Strokes too. “The AIDS crisis took its toll around that time,” Irey says. “Suddenly people’s barstools were empty. They were gone.” “He showed up one day with all these bootlegs—I don’t know where he got them,” Petryshyn says. “It was stuff I’d never heard before. There was a Raygun show from San Francisco ’89, I think, and it was fucking brilliant. I don’t know how he got it—I didn’t even ask how he got it. But it was something he probably had for a long time and was like, ‘I think Mike would like this.’ And he was absolutely right.”reunion for Riot Fest in 2010—Hopkins helped with some of the behind-the-scenes work.
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