Found Writings, Part 3

What follows is a blog post that I wrote back when I thought that this was all going to be about punk rock.  It is more about my early initiations into punk and the music that I liked.  It is a bit more personal take on the music than some of the things that I have written, but I stand by pretty much all of it.  Here it is, without any edits:

Post 2 – The introduction

Green Day/Bad Religion (1993-4)

My first punk rock show was Bad Religion in Cleveland in the early/mid-nineties.  I don't remember which tour.  It was either the Recipe for Hate or Stranger than Fiction tour.  At this point I had already been listening to punk for a while after my older brother had gone to some shows with his friends.  We mainly listened to early Bad Religion and the first couple of Green Day albums.  We had to listen to dubs of Kerplunk because the album was nearly impossible to find at the time.  Within the year, their catalog was widely available.  

It was about a year later when I did get to see Bad Religion at the Agora in Cleveland and they would return every year just before Thanks giving for many years.  Each show, they would play a mix of their classic material and songs from their newest album.  This band has been important to me because of the people who they are.  Not only were they around from my very first awakening to punk rock, but the band – and lead singer Greg Graffin, in particular – showed me that there was a place for intelligence and that smarts, properly applied, are revolutionary.  Punk rock is a criticism and an outlet for anger.  I was angry because I never felt that I fit in with my peers.  I was a smart kid and didn't know how to express this.  Graffin's witty lyrics and political engagement stamped me and set a standard for the way that I still listen to music.  As a dude I worked with in a pizza shop once told me, “we can't all be politicians.”  True, but what we can all do is mean something.  This new standard for music that I came into had no patience for self-indulgence and trifling.  I wanted serious and I wanted meaningful.

These new desires for serious and meaningful might seem to be at odds with my love of Green Day, and particularly in conjunction with Bad Religion.  But I have come to associate the two bands so closely because I came to them at roughly the same time and because these two bands were so different from the Def Leppard, Guns 'n' Roses, and Slaughter that I had been listening to before (I still love G 'n' R, but for different reasons now).  What I saw in Green Day was engagement with emotion.  I don't know if I realized this at the time, but when I look back what I think I identified was unironic investment in emotion.   At the same time that I needed the intellectual stimulation of Bad Religion, I needed my stupid teenage hormones legitimized.  The world is full of platitudes about how a kid will understand things when he grows up and people telling kids they don't understand.  This is bullshit because every teen knows that their emotions are 100% real.  An adult can look back and recognize that these emotions are fleeting but in the moment they are the most real thing.  Green Day's emotion was a perfect counter to Bad Religion's logic.  I now fully recognize that what I saw as originality in Green Day was heavily influenced by the emotional engagement of the Descendents and the witty banter with boredom of the Ramones but at that time, this is what I knew and I have a strong nostalgic draw to these two bands.  

I don't remember the date, but I did get to see Green Day not all that long after the show I mentioned earlier.  This would have been after Dookie hit big and Green Day put on a show at Blossom music center outside of Cleveland.  The big draw was that Green Day would play a show that anyone could go to and to prove this they charged $3 a ticket.  This concert happened after a free show at the same venue had been cancelled.  I went with a group of my friends and my brother's friends and nearly everyone I knew was there.  I don't remember much of the show aside from it being a huge event and a couple of my friends and I spent a lot of time pulling up pieces of sod to hurl into the crowd (I also found $5).  I wasn't as interested in this show because by then I had already been to a number of club shows in Cleveland in much smaller venues.  Outdoor venues like Blossom could house in the tens of thousands and removed the personal connection that had been so important to me.  I have only been to a few big venue concerts and festival shows since then because of this.  I always felt more connection to the bands than to the people seeing the bands with me.