Punk's Naked Raygun blasting away toward local shows

Start looking up articles about veteran punk band Naked Raygun, and you'll see words like "legendary," "influential" and "important" repeated over and over.

Jeff Pezzati, a Naperville native and the band's frontman, said that kind of acclaim is sometimes baffling, but always humbling.

"I'm moved by it, to be honest," Pezzati said during a recent interview. "It's cool because it reminds you how music has meaning way beyond what you intend as the songwriter or the musician behind it. People will tell me, 'Man, your music helped me through high school,' or something like that. It's great, but sometimes it can be hard to grasp, too. We were just trying to make something that sounded real."

This weekend, Pezzati and his bandmates will play three shows, including one at 8 p.m. Sunday at Brauer House in Lombard.

Naked Raygun was a key component of the small but potent Chicago punk scene of the 1980s. The band's first run of albums, which added melody and an angular guitar sound to punk's ferocious roar, earned them a national following and influenced legions of future bands and musicians, including Green Day, Dave Grohl of Nirvana and the Foo Fighters and suburban band Rise Against. Today, Raygun albums like "Throb Throb" are considered punk classics.

Naked Raygun went on indefinite hiatus in 1992, just as the sound it had pioneered exploded onto mainstream radio. But a surprise reunion in 2006 for Riot Fest has given the band a second life. And an album of all-new Naked Raygun songs is slated to come out in the spring.

"We'd originally planned to collect our recent singles on the record, but now we want it to be all new stuff," Pezzati said. "We have about six or seven songs totally mixed, so now I guess we really have to get working on the rest!"

Pezzati grew up in a musical home. His parents, whom he described as "pre-hippies," listened to country and folk-rock such as Johnny Cash, Simon & Garfunkel and Bob Dylan. Outside his home, the musical landscape in Naperville and nearby suburbs consisted mainly of bands playing safe, mainstream rock 'n' roll.

Punk arrived in Pezzati's life through his older brother, Marko, who started turning him on to records by the Buzzcocks and the Dead Boys. Pezzati eventually joined Marko in a band that also included guitarist Santiago Durango.

Naked Raygun was born.

"I'd been playing with bands in basements around Naperville," Pezzati said. "Some of them didn't even have names. But Naked Raygun was a whole different thing. It was really exciting and really honest. We weren't trying to sell ourselves as virtuosos. We just loved to play."

Pezzati, who has been the sole constant in Naked Raygun through numerous lineup changes, said the feeling inside the band's shows today reminds him of the early days.

"It was a tight-knit scene, and the people who came out to see you were really into it," he said. "And it's like that today, too. Even though we're playing songs that are 30 years old or whatever, people are dancing around like crazy, vaulting onto the stage. I don't think I'll ever get tired of that."