. Those local acts still aren’t celebrated as progenitors of punk, though—and the issue isn’t just that they aren’t from New York. Contemporaneous west-coast bands such as the Germs, Black Flag, and X get more props.
While at SAIC in 1976, Bob Cormack participated in basement jams at the school that involved students, staff, and faculty. At those sessions he met a fellow student from Louisville named Jaime Gardiner, who played bass. The two of them joined forces with guitarists Fred Endsley and George Siede, who’d already started playing together on their own.
Immune System continued as a band for several more years—in fact, they outlived Poison Squirrel—and for a few months Cormack was replaced by a very young Al Jourgensen . Immune System played the last show at the Quiet Knight on Belmont before it closed in 1979; the venue had hosted bands as varied as Steeleye Span and the Velvet Underground, and it would soon be reborn as the second location of punk and new-wave club Tuts.
The Illinois drinking age for beer and wine legal had been 19 since 1973, and Cormack suspects that when it was raised to 21 in 1980, it delivered a blow to the punk and new-wave scene—one from which it wouldn’t recover till all-ages hardcore shows became a phenomenon in the mid-80s. But as much as that timing might’ve hurt Poison Squirrel, the band did catch some lucky breaks.