Nanny will you give me and my friends a ride to a show? …..What’s a show?

Between my freshmen and sophomore year I was only able to really get to a show or two a month, if I was lucky… None of my other friends had cars, both my parents worked and during the week the only way for me to get around was through my Grandma. She had no idea what was going on, for all she knew she would have been dropping me off at a Klan meeting. A lot of the first real local hardcore shows I went to that weren’t at Krome or Birch Hill…Places I will write about soon enough, were at the Kendall Park VFW hall on Route 27 in Kendall Park. It was a small, intimate hall that was short lived during 2001. They had some amazing shows though and it exposed a style of hardcore to me that would become one of my favorites. On 6/3/01 97a, Shark Attack, Think I care, Tear it Up, and Last in Line played….I had never heard of any of these bands but we went because it was a show and I could get a ride to it. I had loved street punk up to this point, but these bands were faster, louder and defiantly angrier.

Tear it up blew me away, their set was so awesome… it was my first time seeing them and they soon became one of my favorite bands. Shark Attack was great and its pretty wild to think about how big they got… Last in line didn’t really play many shows in NJ after this, and I just recently a few weeks ago was able to get a hold of their 7 inch. They had homemade label stickers they printed off a computer that just said last in line and they had hammers and power tools on them…wild. This show got me into the whole “thrashy” hardcore scene, so you can blame whoever booked that show because it’s their fault I’m still going to those types of shows. Kendall park was awesome, there was a dunkin donuts down the street and an awesome sub place down the other way. Going there was a completely different world, as soon as I got dropped off I always felt an intense feeling of freedom. I could walk around and do things in a town I was unfamiliar with, me and my friends could do whatever we wanted and it was cool. This is still to date, one of my favorite venues and there was only about 5 shows there total I’d say. I saw fucking GRADE at this place in 2001….FUCKING GRADE. That show was off the wall, Adam and his Package played, so did the Impossibles…one of the few Ska bands I ever tolerated. I can’t really remember who else opened that show but I just remember it being one of the cooler shows I’d ever been to. Stolen Bikes Ride faster and Seemless are two of my all time favorite songs and if you don’t listen to Grade you might be retarded.

The Death by Stereo show at The Kendall Park VFW was so fucking awesome, I can’t remember the date, and I know it’s on a flier in my binder but I’m too lazy to look for it right now. I remember getting a call from my friend Ian saying “hey man want to go see this band called En-Sing” and we went because we had heard cool things about them and we wanted to check them out. Revolution Summer also played, they fucking blow and The Low End Theory opened…sweet 4 band show, I was really into the low end theory and still wear the shirt I bought at that show to this day. I remember having the flier for this show Prior to it and thinking about how weird it was that people who I’ve never met before in my life could hand me a piece of paper with a bunch of bands scribbled on it and a place/time to be and people would trust it enough to go and have the show happen. This was still before people used the internet as their main source of finding out about shows and I thought it was the coolest thing in the world. My Parents and friends parents didn’t get it, they didn’t understand why I would go to a place just because someone handed me a piece of paper saying something was going to happen there. Maybe they thought it was just a weird joke or scam but I thought it ruled and I’m so happy I kept all those old fliers it’s a great time looking back on them. Death by Stereo took trophies off the wall at this show and gave them to kids who danced the hardest during their set…Ensign blew
away, I think this is was around when Price of Progression came out…so good.

My most memorable show at this venue was not because of how awesome the bands played but because of the silliness that erupted at the end of the show. On 8/19/01 Strike Anywhere played at the VFW with The Break (2nd show), De La Hoya, Revolution Summer, Trial by Fire and The Disaster. The Break was cool…I got their “cut the shit, hit the pit” demo and all of the other bands were eh….I liked de la Hoya though. So any who, me and my friends got bored and decided to go exploring. We found a dumpster behind a bagel place and they had just thrown out hundreds of bagels…so we decided to take them out of the dumpster and have bagel fights. This basically just meant throwing bagels as hard as we could at each other until someone got hurt. So anyway, we’re having fun blah blah blah and this old dude walks up to us. It was the singer of Revolution Summer, who might be the worst band I’ve ever heard… he comes up to us all high and mighty telling us how we’re wasting food and that we could be donating it to food not bombs and by throwing these bagels around at each other we’re hurting starving kids in Africa. Really cool dude, making little kids feel bad about having fun with bagels that were no longer good anymore and were sitting in a dumpster… we didn’t really give a shit because his band sounded like a horrible pennywise rip off anyway and they were laughably bad. So he left and went inside to see Strike Anywhere….we shortly went in after because I really liked this band.

There were kids at the show with no shoes on and it made me uneasy because its fucking gross not to wear shoes at a show… Strike Anywhere got through about half their set before one of the war vets came in and shut the show down. Everyone at the show… in some sort of “protest” or something lame, decided to take all the chairs in the room and put them out on the floor so they had to be cleaned up at a later time….pretty badass ya know. No one really knows why the show got shut down, some speculate that it was because of Strike Anywhere’s political views on America and War….some also say it was because a bunch of moron kids were making a mess outside with a bunch of bagels…people who were there will remember this show for years to come, Doug Katz and I have spoken about it numerous times… to this day I still don’t know why it got shut down, but if it was because of me and my friends….LOL.