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.

Bad Religion & Lawrence Arms

 Last weekend I went to see Bad Religion play with the Lawrence Arms at the Agora in Cleveland.  This is the first punk show that I have been to in a couple of years, having attended more metal shows recently.
This is also the first time I have seen Bad Religion play in maybe 15 years.  As I may have written about elsewhere (I write a lot of these in advance and bank them for some reason) I have a long history with this band.  To recap quickly: this was one of the very first punk bands that I ever heard and it was definitely the first that hit me really hard.  I won't get too far into that now, but it hit the right combination of speed, aggression, and thoughtful/witty lyrics for me at the right time.  I have seen this band more times than I can remember.
I think the first time I saw them was in 1995 or '96 at the same venue in Cleveland.  I would have gone with my brother and his friends.  This was also one of my first concerts ever.  Back then they used to play at the Agora pretty much every year around Thanksgiving.  I have also seen them play in Columbus at least twice and then at a couple of Warped Tours in the late '90s and early '00s.

The Lawrence Arms opened the show with a pretty good set.  I first discovered this band back in 2006 listening to their album Oh! Calcutta!.  I had this CD in pretty heavy rotation in my car for a lot

of 2006 and 2007.  I dropped off listening to them a bit after that but have always like returning to them.  Surprisingly, I knew a good number of the songs that they played for having only listened much to one album more than 10 years ago.

The 3-piece uses a lot out of call-and-response singing, making the band sound a lot fuller than most bands this size.  The drummer, Neil Hennessy also plays with an aggressive style, similar to Coady Willis of the Murder City Devils and a bunch of other bands.  A few highlights of the set: Chris McCaughan, the guitarist sang but never spoke and never looked at the bass player; Brendan Kelly, the aforementioned bassist drunkenly told the audience that they were going to play a song that only true fans would know because it was so new before launching into "The Devil's Takin' Names," a song from their 2006 album.

Bad Religion put on a great show.  Their sound was good and they played a good mix of early, mid-, and late career material.  Their style has changed some over the years, so it was good to see this mix. They put on a good show full of energy and Greg Graffin using the same corny dance moves and song intros that I remember him using 20 years ago.  I didn't recognize all of their songs, but I didn't really care because they fit into the show well and were still fun to hear.
One thing that I have realized about their music is that even though I started listening to their earlier works (I played Suffer (1988) and Against the Grain (1990) constantly when I was in high school), I have grown to enjoy their work from the early/mid-2000s a bit more.
There were a few albums I never bothered to pick up when founding guitarist Brett Gurewitz left the band for a time in the late 1990s.  But when Process of Belief came out in 2002, I was back on board. Gurewitz had rejoined the band by that time and he bad brought some new sensibilities with him.  The lyrics and much of the delivery was still the same but there was a bit more complexity to the composition of the songs.  This combination held true for their next two studio albums, The Empire Strikes First (2004), and New Maps of Hell (2007).  After that I lost track again so I don't have much to say about that.  Funny things is that I still think of these three albums as BR's "new" work even though some of it is approaching 20 years old.

When the spotlight hit Gurewitz as he ripped into the opening riff of the night, my first thought was how old he looked.  It was uncharitable but it was a first impression.  After listening to him play all night, though, I have to say that he does not seem old.  The music, some of it, still seemed current to me.  I guess I have gotten old, too.  They are just a few years ahead of me.
Highlights of the set: the blistering renditions of songs that I have known for years (including: "Anesthesia," "Supersonic," "Overture/Sinister Rouge," and "I Want to Conquer the World"); scouting out all of the 40-somethings kitted out in their punk rock gear (yeah, I was one of these), some towing along their own kids; watching a very dogged security guard try to keep people out of the area behind the sound booth with a flashlight.

 2 dudes enjoying the show