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.

Spongebob Squarepants

When I was really young and started going to shows I literally liked anything. I loved bands like the Partisans, Cocksparrer, Exploited and tons of other horrible street punk. I was really into bands like You and I, Joshua Fit For Battle and a bunch of other scream bands. Bands like From Autumn To Ashes, Poison the well and Thursday all appealed to me and Alkaline Trio was one of my favorite bands. Literally I was one big confusing sponge of music. What else could you do but be confused if you saw a kid x'd up with liberty spikes, a poison the well tshirt in fucking army boots and a vest covered in studs and horrifyingly bad street punk patches.I know what else you could do...call me retarded. For the most part a lot of the first shows I went to were in Philadelphia, for whatever reason that’s where I ended up and that’s where our parents were willing to drive us. Another one of the first shows I went to, which I will never forget was at The Rotunda in Philly on 4/06/01. Breaking Pangaea opened the show, the singer now sings for Taking back Sunday. I still think this bands name rules because Pangaea was what the landmass was called when all of the continents were connected to each other before they broke off….but anyway, The Ivory Coast played and so did Sweep the Leg Johnny. Sweep the leg Johnny had a saxophone player (no they weren’t a ska band) and to this day he was one of the most intense, awkward, uncomfortable front men I have ever seen in a band. Me and my friend Jeff got to the show real early and stood up front the entire show because we wanted to be there for Alkaline Trio, the show was sold out, and when Sweep the Leg Johnny played I literally had so much of the singers sweat on me I was soaked, it was disgusting. If you’ve never been to the Rotunda it’s a really small place, probably only fit like 250 people in it and this place was packed from wall to wall. Alkaline Trio had just come out with From Here to Infirmity and when they played Private Eye I’m pretty sure I peed my pants a little bit. I wish I was into stealing setlists back when I was younger because they played some shit you wouldn’t hear in a million years these days at an Alkaline Trio show. I remember they played I Lied my Face off which is one of my favorite Alkaline Trio Songs, I’m pretty positive they played Maybe I’ll Catch Fire (the song) too. Overall the show was fucking amazing, I got the Hell Yes 7” which is apparently worth a ton of money these days, too bad I sold it for like a buck to someone. My legs were so cut up from being pushed against the stage, it was one of the more painful things I’ve experience from going to shows. Jeff’s dad had pizza in the car waiting for us when he picked us up for the ride home…FUCKING AMAZING. It’s so weird how you remember the little things like that. Actually, never mind…I could never forget good pizza.

The Moon

The awesome thing about going to a show, esp when you are young and still in school is the feeling you get awaiting the next one. I was young so it was hard to get rides to every show I wanted to get to but if I knew one was coming up all I could think about that week or so was going to it. I used to sit in school a lot and think about all of the kids around me. I was straightedge at the time, I claimed when I was 14 years old in 8^th grade and it was because I saw what drugs did first hand to members of my extended family and it was something that I had zero interest in. All of the kids in High School were getting into drinking, drugs and whatever the fuck else they were doing and I really felt special about myself from abstaining from those things. It made me feel important and positive in a time where I needed it the most. Growing up in today’s day and age can be hard, even when you are a privileged suburban white kid. Trust me, everyone has problems no matter their social economic status, race, religion or what have you. Being straightedge and going to shows made me feel different from everyone else and I loved it because they had noooooooooo idea what I did outside of school. I knew what they did, and I know what they still do. The other day I was talking to my friend Jonathan about going to shows in New Brunswick NJ. NB is the home of Rutgers University where thousands upon thousands of kids go every year, and on top of that there’s thousands of kids who just live in NB because its’ cheap and affordable. On any given night there can be a show going on somewhere in a basement, maybe 50 kids will come. All 50 of those kids have a pretty good idea of what every other college / non college kid is doing in town at that time. Drinking, smoking, partying, video games, homework, working…there’s a million things you can think of that everyone else is doing. Take all of those kids and tell them to make a list of what they think other people are doing in New Brunswick at that time…I’m sure all of them will mention the things that I just mentioned plus more…but how many of them are going to write down “Watching a hardcore punk bands in a basement with touring bands from all over the country / world” How many of them are even going to come up with “watching live music in a basement with a bunch of friends and / or people you don’t know.” Very few…if any at all...the point I’m trying to get at, is that when I was younger, I thrived off this feeling. When Friday night rolled around, I knew what all the kids that sat next to me in class were doing but when I walked out those doors and got in a car to go to a show…for all they know, I could be on the moon. They had no idea that I’d be going to a place where hundreds of kids from ALL over the state and even others were coming for one common reason. They had no idea that I was going to be in a room with people twice my age, who have been going to shows longer than I’ve been alive smashing me and everyone else around me. They had no clue that I might see someone get beat up with a barstool at Club Krome, or some white power kids get the shit kicked out of them at Birch Hill. They had no idea that I had a whole network of friends outside of school from towns in New Jersey and Philadelphia that I would never even know existed if it wasn’t for them. I’d end up in the sketchiest areas of Philly going to shows that my parents would kill me if they knew I went with my friends… shows for me were an escape from the world I hated. My school, my classmates, teachers….everyone that I was around bothered me and going to shows every couple of weeks when I could find rides was just what I needed to release all the energy I had that I couldn’t elsewhere. When kids in high school asked me what I did that weekend on Monday morning I never really gave them an answer, a few kids I would, but I didn’t want them to know…. That all was my secret and as far as I was concerned it wasn't any of their business because they just would not have understood even if i explained it 100 times.

Day Two

After that Rancid show for the next couple of weeks all I wanted to do was go to shows, I probably got really annoying talking about how cool it was but I didn’t care all I wanted to do was go to another show. Only problem was I was like 14-15 and had no way to get around so I had to rely on my parents / grandma or my friends parents to bring us to shows. Mostly I was going to shows with Jeff, Andrew, Skodnick and Ian. We all pretty much liked the same things but were still into different stuff. I mostly liked street punk, Skodnick was all about metal, Jeff listened to mostly indie stuff but it was all good we all still went to whatever shows. The second show I went to my Dad brought us to, it was also in Philly at the Trocadero Theatre in Chinatown. The Show was Avail, Anti Flag, Flogging Molly and The Explosion. I was so excited to see Anti Flag and Avail, they were two of my favorite bands at the time… I remember being at the show in line with my friends and Dad, and this was the first time he had ever seen anything like this…. Kids walking by with huge Mohawks, liberty spikes and god knows what else. So many weird people in one place wasn’t something he was very used to but he didn’t mind at all, which ruled. We got inside, he went upstairs to the balcony to watch the show while the rest of us stayed downstairs. I don’t really remember the Explosions set but I do remember Flogging Molly’s set being pretty insane. This was right around the time Swagger first came out and they were amazing. Anti Flag blew the room away, I don’t really give a shit what anyone has to say about that band because they had some awesome early albums. I got beat up during Avails set, that was pretty cool. I was just standing there minding my business when this old guy came up to me, picked me up and started hitting people with me. I thought it was awesome until he put me down and out of nowhere I got kicked from behind and stomped on the ground for a few seconds. I really have no clue why that happened to this day, probably some really cool dudes got some really hard fucking boners and decided to beat up a little kid. None the less, still an awesome set Avail fucking rules. Anyway, we’re walking out and I look pretty battered up and my dad (who hadn’t seen me get stomped out) said I didn’t look too good and asked if I was okay. I told him yeah and he basically told me that if I have fun at these things then he’s 100% cool with it. I was really siked… and when we got into his car he put on a Flogging Molly cd he just bought because he was really into them so that made me happy too. A lot of that night is a blur but I remember the feeling I had when i came out of that show, it was such a good one I had never felt before. I felt a part of something and when I got to school the next day I felt different than everyone else, but this time it was in a good way.

Day One

Hi, This is my new blog and it's going to be the story of the past 8 years that I've gone to shows. When I run out of telling this story I will write about current things happening in my life that will be of interest to no one except probably the 5 friends I have that actually might care about whats going on with me. Hope you enjoy....Ride The Fury...Fuck The World

and so it begins....

At a young age I always knew I felt different than everyone else around me. I never really knew why I didn’t feel any connection with kids I went to school with but there was nothing I had in common with them. Maybe I felt different because they made me feel different, I was teased, beat up, made fun of on a constant basis for my weight and the clothes I wore to school. That could be it, or it might be the fact that all the kids I grew up with in Georgia were redneck retards and I wasn’t. I hated school and I hated waking up every morning to go to it. Around 6^th grade I finally started to make a few friends and I got into skating, for once I actually felt like I was a part of something and I made two real friends. Chuck and Travis , both lived a few miles down the road from me and were in most of my classes. Me and them were in the same boat, didn’t really fit in with anyone, def didn’t have girlfriends and just generally weren’t “cool enough” to talk to anyone else in our grade. We would chill at each other’s houses, play video games, find places to skate, go to skater’s extreme the skate park in my town…It was rad. We started getting into “alternative” music I guess you could say, this was about 1996? I think… I was all about bands like 311, No doubt, a lot of 90’s rock which still rules to this day. I was finally starting to get happy and then when everything was going cool, my dad told us we were going to move back to New Jersey. This was completely fine with me though, my dad had been traveling Monday-Friday from Georgia to NJ for years now and I only got to see him on weekends. It was taking too much of a toll on my family and we needed to be together so it was a great thing happening. I was pretty siked because I seriously thought that moving from Georgia to NJ would be a great change. I just assumed all the kids would be nicer and it wouldn’t be the same at all. When we moved back and I went to my first day at West Windsor Plainsboro middle school I was right….it wasn’t the same at all…. The kids were 10 times as awful and unwelcoming. One of the first things my teach asked on the first day of school was “is there anyone new to the district?” I raised my hand and told her and the class I had just moved back to New Jersey from Georgia. Some other kids raised their hand and while that was going on this kid Geoff turned around to me and goes “you’re from Georgia?” I responded with a friendly “yeah” and he looks me dead in the eye and says “why don’t you fucking go back because no one wants you here.” So that was the first thing anyone ever said to me in school when I moved back to New Jersey. So yeah, that was pretty cool. I sat at lunch by myself for a few weeks, didn’t talk to anyone, came home every day and did absolutely nothing. We lived in an apartment while our house was finished being built, I would get in fights with kids around the neighborhood. One kid made fun of my grandma for being overweight one day when we got off the bus; he lived in the building next to us and had seen her a few times so I beat the fucking shit out of him next to a dumpster one day when we got off the bus. Two cars pulled over to the side of the road to break it up… one of the more weird situations I’ve ever gotten to in my life. I came home so mad I seriously just wanted to end my life. I thought New Jersey was going to be a better place for me, but I was so wrong. Around school I started to notice some kids who skated and dressed different (its so corny to say that but when you’re in 6^th grade you really notice that kind of stuff) and I really wanted to be friends with them. So one day I got up the nerve to just approach some of them at lunch, I went up to the table of kids and just asked if I could sit with them. I was really sick of being stuck sitting by myself at lunch, there were only two other kids who sat by themselves…one of them was foreign and smelled really bad and the other ones name was BOONE. So yeah, I really wasn’t trying to be clumped into that category of kids anyone. So anyone, they let me sit with them and it was awkward at first but then everything started falling into place. I met a kid named Jeff Katz, who at the time was really my only friend. He lived in the town over from me and he skated too. Through him I met a few kids I would be friends with other the next few years. Andrew Barone, Jeff Zito and through them I met a few other kids who would become my core group of friends up until about sophomore year of highschool. We would hang, skate at school, tried starting a band (which just didn’t work) and it was pretty awesome. I was still getting picked on by a lot of kids at school but for once I was actually starting to get happy. Up until this point I was only into bigger alternative rock bands and basically nu-metal. Around 7^th or 8^th grade when I had met Jeff, Andrew, I started getting into the hardcore / punk scene. Jeff made me a mix with a lot of bands on it and one of them really struck out to me…they were called Propagandhi and they were something that I never even knew existed. People who were angry over things that were important, things going on in the world that needed to be fixed. I soon became very political (dumb right?) I was in 8^th grade talking about burning flags and not standing for the pledge of allegiance. (pretty cool right?) Here I was… an 8^th grade suburban white kid who had nothing but privilege his whole life….growing up in a nice house, great family, and everything I needed given to me and I was the angriest kid in the world. I hated everyone and everything who was “normal.” I hated the kids who were “jocks” I hated the “preps” and I hated girls. Unless I was in my small group of friends I was miserable and wanted to fight the world. It doesn’t make any sense to me now, and It sure as hell didn’t make any sense to me then, I have no clue what was going through my head… maybe I liked being different? Maybe I acted like that because no one ever gave me the time of day in the first place and I needed attention? I was miserable and you can pretty much blame Propagandhi for me acting like that. Have you ever handed in a paper about how much you hated a country you lived in when you were like 14 years old? I’m surprised my teachers didn’t laugh in my face. At this time I was still into a lot of nu-metal, but I was also getting into a lot of punk bands. I had never been to a show and wouldn’t go to one till I was a freshmen in high school. By this time I was mostly listening to street punk…. Bands like propagandhi, the casualties, the unseen…but another genre of music had also struck my year that Jeff had gotten me into through these mix cds he would give me. I was also getting into bands like You and I, Saetia, page 99, Joshua fit for battle, botch and other “screamo” or heavier melodic hardcore bands. I still had never been to a show and I was really itching to get to one. I went to my first show in January 2000, 2 months after I started high school. I went with Andrew Barone, his little sister and his mother and father. It was at the Electric Factory and the bands that played with the Distillers, AFI and Rancid. Walking up to the place was unreal to me, it was hundreds of kids who looked like they belonged nowhere at all, A bunch of kids who were just lost in the mix of the world that happened to find each other at this sketchy looking place in Philadelphia Pa. I was so taken back by the whole thing, I loved AFI and Rancid at this point and I remember walking into the place and the crazy rush that came over my body during it. The Distillers were playing as we walked in and they were fucking awful, but then AFI came on and it was insane. This was around the point where they were just getting bigger but not like they are today, they still played old songs and the set was just wild. It’s so hard to even remember considering it was 8 years ago but I remember them playing Total immortal and me feeling at home knowing all the words to it. The concept of going to a place with a bunch of people you don’t know, to sing along to a band who you’ve never met, singing along to another person’s lyrics and feelings with a room full of people was so different and new to me. People were smashing each other and it was okay, everything was okay. If you bump into someone at school, you get into a fight or something dumb happens, in this place…at that moment with everyone just going nuts on each other, singing, dancing, dozens of people around you touching you that you’ve never met before, feeling close to these people who were into the same thing I was. It was so surreal… I walked out of that show that night after getting bruised and battered with a smile on my face knowing I was at home.