Hello!
I’m writing this from Chicago where I’ve been dragging my reactivated corpse around for the last three days at Riot Fest. As expected, I didn’t get to see a lot of music because I was running around trying to do interviews for MY BOOK, but I squeezed a few sets in and I have some rambling thoughts on them contained forthwith. But first! Here’s a fun story that doesn’t really go anywhere but that I’ve been thinking about a lot. It’s something of a moral conundrum.
I spent a lot of time in the lil press area they had at Riot Fest, which may sound glamorous but essentially it’s just a roped off petting zoo for media dingi. But they do have free Red Bull and a masseuse which, when combined, is a cool way to confuse the shit out of your nervous system. One afternoon I was using the urinal in this section’s lone Porta Potty and was staring at the hand sanitizer dispenser in front of me. I could kind of make out something strange through its little window, so after I was done peeing out three Red Bulls I pulled its cover off and found this:
OK. This is less impressive than it seems since these were all singles. Probably 50 bucks. 60, tops. But still, a peculiar thing to stumble upon. Alright, readers, be honest with yourselves—what would you do in this situation? Leave the money there or pocket it? I went back and forth myself. But in the end I’ve seen enough movies about taking cash that doesn’t belong to you (No Country for Old Men, Millions, and to a lesser though much more Tone Loc-heavy extent Blank Check) to know that nothing good ever comes from this. I figured this was probably a drug swap, and it wasn’t worth worrying that Anton Chigurh was gonna track me down and cattle press my skull in. So I left it there. Later that night the entire case had been torn off and the money was gone. Easy come, easy go.
I got to see and meet a bunch of Very Famous People who are in Cool Rock Bands. I took photos of them and would love to post them all here but the problem is that many of these people are in MY BOOK and I’m saving the photos for when it’s eventually released. And since my book is aiming to be wildly comprehensive, there aren’t a lot of people who aren’t in it.
Oh, but I did run into Chris Cresswell from the Flatliners and Hot Water Music who I’d interacted with but never actually met. He’s extremely nice and not in my book so here’s a photo of him. And Kayleigh Goldsworthy, who both rocks and is also not in my book:
I asked the guy from GWAR who wears the dildo, who is not in my book, for a photo and he didn’t say anything but stood still so I’m assuming that was a yes? And Mike Wiebe from Drakulas who looks like he was just shown the GWAR dildo:
And Mike Kinsella, who I was supposed to meet for lunch this week but did not. And Jen Pop, who I was not supposed to meet for lunch but did:
And here’s Chuck Ragan, Brendan Kelly, and Dave Hause. I’m sure at least one of them will be mentioned in my book but fuck it here’s some photos of them anyway:
OK, now let’s talk about some LIVE MUSIC.
As someone who hates festivals and large gatherings of people, I have to admit that Riot Fest is far and away the most tolerable. They really do a great job overall. (Except for their insistence on naming their stages Riot, Roots, Rise, Radicals, and Rebel. Honestly I’m borderline dyslexic and they might as well name these after serial numbers or barcodes. I think I’d have an easier time differentiating if the stages were just called shit like A-00928190281-1x.) Anyway, you can never really see everything you want at a festival and need to learn to take what you can get. That said, Friday night’s lineup was a real scheduling clusterfuck. Here’s a blurry photo of the lineup:
There was a lot of overlap among similarly vibed bands, forcing some real Sophie’s Choices. Pennywise and H20 went head to head and those two probably have a lot of overlap among the board short crowd. Rancid and Descendents were next and certainly have overlapping fanbases. And then choosing between seeing Blink 182 and Jawbreaker was a tough way to end a night. I understand that bands have limited time in Chicago and sets have to clash, but man, this block could’ve been stretched out by another three hours, easily.
On the Blink/Jawbreaker split, I chose Jawbreaker. I was hesitant to do so because the last time I saw them was their Riot Fest reunion two years ago and I’ve avoided seeing them since because my experience was so special and I kinda want to let it exist in my mind as such. I watched that 2017 set with friends from high school, friends who flew in from the UK, local friends, and Mikey Erg, who is probably the best person to watch a band with if you wanna get hyped. But two years later, the experience was a bit different.
While Jawbreaker was still a headliner, they got demoted to the smaller stage. They played a different set too, throwing in “Condition Oakland” and “Chesterfield King.” Blink 182 could be heard in the background and Blake said something to the effect of “Who is that playing in the distance? Who dares challenge us?” So this year’s set wasn’t the epic experience I had in 2017, but I guess nothing can really maintain that level. Oh, and I gotta give a shoutout to Blake’s drip: a sleeveless black t-shirt and gold chain with bleached hair. Tight.
As a native Staten Islander, I was legally obligated to watch Wu Tang, who performed Enter the 36 Chambers in its entirety on Saturday. Two weird things about this performance: After running 12 minutes late (it is Wu Tang Clan, after all), they started their set by showing a long commercial for their upcoming TV show on HBO or whatever. Thousands of people watching an ad on a huge screen was the lamest shit I’ve ever seen. My brain wanted to click the little Skip Ad button but that doesn’t exist IRL so we all just had to fuckin deal with it for two minutes. The other weird thing was, even though their crowd was massive, no one really knew the material. There are tons of call-and-response parts where they would turn the mics to the crowd for help and the place just fell silent. Even something as simple as “dolla dolla bills y’aaaall” fell flat. Oh, and they also played some weird rendition of a Nirvana song, which, yikes. But also, the greatest rap group of all time, for the children, throw up ya dubbyas, C.R.E.A.M., RIP ODB, etc.
I watched Bloc Party play Silent Alarm. The whole time I kept wondering, “Why are they standing so close together?” and then once I saw this pic of the guitarist’s pedal setup I got it. This is not photoshopped:
My friend Leor wrote in the Chicago Reader that their performance was lackluster. “Static and largely unmoved” was his description. Not to discount Leor’s opinion since he lives in Chicago and covers the 400 festivals the city hosts each year, but I thought they were great. It was fun and simple. I smoked a cigarette and felt like it was 2005 and Bush was still president and I was wearing Diesel jeans. Music is funny in that two people can have entirely different perceptions of the same thing and neither is technically “wrong”? Except for Leor. He was wrong and I was right.
I saw Against Me! twice—once at The Metro at 1 in the fucking morning and once at the festival. The Metro set was them playing Eternal Cowboy and New Wave in full. They blew through Eternal Cowboy in what felt like five minutes. It’s a short album and they confessed on stage that in recording it they subtly stretched out the silence between tracks to bump it up to 25 minutes. I loved that record when it came out and still do. New Wave, on the other hand, I hated when it came out and still do. The band joked that it’s home to the worst Against Me! song (“Animal”) but I really think a case could be made for “Stop” as their worst song.
Enough time has passed that my opinion of New Wave can be separated from the major label/punk politics around it and I can judge on its own merits. And I just don’t like it. “Borne on the FM Waves of the Heart” is a decent song, but overall, not for me. I’ve told Laura as much and I think she could probly care less. When you’re around long enough, you amass a catalog of records—some that your fans love, some that they don’t. What the fuck ever. Win some/lose some. The band has still written two of my favorite punk albums of all time, Reinventing Axl Rose and Transgender Dysphoria Blues, and they played both at their Riot Fest set.
I was put in a rare position of having to defend Reinventing to a friend who didn’t like it this weekend and I honestly don’t even know how to explain my affinity for it anymore. At this point I feel like it’s not even its undeniable place cemented in the modern punk canon that makes it important to me, it’s that it’s so deeply embedded in the person I am that I can’t even extricate it. I am it. Imperfections and all.
I finally saw Turnstile after several months of being a snob about them for reasons I’m not quite sure about anymore. They were fine. They lived up to the persona I have created for them in my head: Funky Snapcase. The singer has the stage presence of one of those inflatable car dealership guys if it were set up outside a Pac Sun. (Intern! Check to see if Pac Sun still exists. If not, swap this for Journey’s.) I will say, though, that the most memorable part of the set was seeing the dude in front of me crowdsurf up to the front with his walker. Twice. I kept watching this dude fully go for it, looking down at my functional legs, and thinking, maaaan, this dude is actually punk, I’m not punk at all. So that guy is my new hero and I think he made me like Turnstile a little bit more.
After Turnstile’s set on Friday, AVAIL played. Like Jawbreaker, I was hesitant to watch. I’d probably seen AVAIL seven or eight times when they were originally around and every time was the most fun I’d ever had. So I didn’t want to risk tainting my memory by seeing this reunited version. Seeing them play a midday festival set was especially not optimal. They were supposed to be playing Over the James for its anniversary but I got the feeling they didn’t care about that and played it pretty loose with their setlist.
This album anniversary set shit is weird, especially for a band like AVAIL. Maybe it makes sense for a band like Bloc Party, who has one clear fan-favorite standout, but AVAIL has a solid catalog of many celebrated records with the exception of—and I don’t think I’m shocking anyone here—Front Porch Stories. So it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense for them to stick to one album just because it’s hitting some arbitrary number of years old. AVAIL is just not built for the modern festival machine, which was especially evidenced by the fact that they were followed by The Story So Far, a band that objectively sucks shit but had a far more substantial crowd.
But then I caught AVAIL’s aftershow the next night at The Bottom Lounge and what a friggin difference. They went the fuck off and it felt like the AVAIL I remember. They went so hard that they wore out the audience. “I think our old asses are wearing your old asses out,” Tim Barry joked with the crowd. Tim has been doing his folk singer thing for a while now—his “kumbaya shit” as he has called it. So I wondered (worried?) how he would handle being a punk singer again, and man, the dude has still got it at 48. Just indefatigable. They closed the way they always have, with Tim saying, “There’s no encore.” But of course, AVAIL playing in 2019 is proof that there’s always room for an encore. They closed with “Simple Song” and “Scuffle Town.” That might be the last time I ever see them, and if that’s how I’ll remember them going out, I’ll be happy with it.
That was going to be the end of my Riot Fest weekend. Pretty standard festival fodder. But then on the way out of the AVAIL show, a thing happened that completely shifted my mood. I was walking around the venue as it was clearing out, looking for my friend David Anthony who was probably off emptying his bank account at the merch table and got approached by a couple of people. As I mentioned, sometimes, if I’m in an appropriate place, people will stop me and give me the occasional compliment and I’m very inept at receiving them. An AVAIL show is a very appropriate place for this since I’ve interviewed Tim before, once about the reunion and once when he let me visit his family in Richmond for a weekend. So I got some of this on my way out.
But then I got approached by a guy who was very nice and also very drunk, which I could tell by the fact that he told me he was very drunk several times. He said, “Your writing got me back into punk,” which I didn’t realize was a compliment at first and felt the urge to apologize. The people who come up and say this kind of stuff are always around the same age as me and dress similarly to me and have the same facial hair as me and are generally exactly like me. In this particular instance, the guy’s name was even Dan. It’s never attractive single women, only reflections of my own decaying image, but I digress.
But then Dan said that he bought a copy of the book I wrote with Laura and was excited to read it. I said that was very nice of him. Then he said he also bought a copy for his 18-year-old niece who is going through “the same thing Laura went through,” which I’m assuming means that his niece is either transitioning genders or getting sued by her former manager for a million dollars, though the former seemed more likely. He told me more about her and I was really struck by the whole conversation. I started to tear up in the middle of the venue if I’m being honest. Generally I think the large majority of the work I put out into the world sucks shit and is a waste of people’s time, often deliberately so. But I am very proud of the work I did with Laura on that book.
I remember the night before the book came out, our publisher took us out to a nice dinner in Manhattan. He asked what I was going to work on next and I told him about an idea I had, which would eventually turn into the book I’m writing now. He said, “I’m sure that’ll be good.” And I said “I’m sure I’ll love it, and I’m sure I’ll love all the books I’ll write, but I’ll never love a book the way I love this one.”
I think the book may have reached the point where it’s truly taken on a life of its own beyond our control. I don’t know how she feels about it all but for me it’s humbling. A person in the pit at Against Me!’s show at the Metro this weekend was holding up their copy of it. What the fuck! But also I firmly believe that everyone who goes to an Against Me! show should do this.
It’s very special to me and interactions like this one with Dan remind me why. Laura obviously has interactions like this much more frequently, as I was but a mere bit player in her story, so she is a lot defter at handling them. I am still not because I don’t feel worthy of hearing these personal stories. I’m trying to get better at it though, so I just told Dan, “Thank you for sharing that with me.” And then I agreed to take a selfie with him in which my eyes are closed and I look like a fucking schmuck.
Later, Chicago.
Dan