Hard to believe that as I sit down to write this its already been a week ago! Yes, dear readers, it is I, your humble blogger, returned from the troubled land of my birth with stories to tell! As the “Out of the Slot” heading indicates, this blog post will not be about the principal topic of this blog, HO slot cars and 1:64-scale die-casts. Nope, not this time; this is another post about two of your HB’s other favorite topics: MUSIC and HISTORY! Both came together in a wall of squalling noise at “NO VALUES,” one of the greatest replays ever of the living history of PUNK ROCK!
Your humble blogger is both a “Greaser” and a “Punk,” and believe me: there’s no contradiction in being both! Virtually every man and woman I know in my personal life who loves one of those genres, loves them both. I think that’s significant, because it has always been my assertion that you can draw a mostly straight (albeit not entirely straight) line between the raucous birth of rock n’ roll and one of its most extreme offshoots less than 20 years later. There’s enough conversation to be had about that topic to fill volumes, so instead of going there, let me put you in the picture of what it was like to return to California to reconnect with a handful of my best friends from my formative years, and for us to co-mingle with a few tens-of-thousands of our fellow punk rockers, of ages raging from pre-teens to mid ‘60s, to witness dozens of some of the greatest bands of the genre going back to the very beginning! It was an amazing show; one of the greatest I’ve seen in my lifetime!
The venue featured a total of 4 stages; two smaller ones closer to the gates were in asphalt covered areas, while the two main stages, which had better sound systems and jumbotrons on either side, were in the cooler grass areas. It was all GA-style standing only (who wants to sit down at a punk show??) but my friends and I had opted for the pricey “VIP” tickets, so we got access to areas much closer to the main stages than others had.
These big day-long music festivals have gotten to be a thing these days, and it is inevitable that a show like this will try to pack too many bands into one day than any one person can see. As a result, you have to be prepared to choose, and I admit that although I did get to see my favorites, there were a couple I would liked to have seen that I missed, and I also had to arrive a little late or leave a little early to some sets in order to catch the next one. I find that quite annoying, as would anyone, but it is what it is: there is only so much time and space available.
The venue itself was nostalgic for me: the Pomona Fairplex, an old standby for all kinds of events in the vast suburban wasteland known as “The Inland Empire.” Since I was raised in Upland-just 2 towns over-the Pomona fairgrounds is a place where I used to go as a pre-teen for swapmeets looking for Matchbox and Hot Wheels cars and then, later, as a teen, looking for parts for real cars! I hadn’t been there since I was probably 17 years old, and I was surprised at how little it seemed to have changed!
One thing that hasn’t changed is the traffic! That resulted the in the day beginning with a misfire; although we were sure we had left for the event with plenty of time, an inbound traffic snarl cost us over an hour, and so I missed the first band of the day that I wanted to see, The Adolescents. I got to hear the haunting strains of their classic “Amoeba” while we were standing at the gate to get our tickets punched, but by the time we got in, got our bearings, and navigated through the massive venue, their set was finished. Not a great start to the day. However, things were about to get a lot better!
From the outset we were pretty much all in agreement about which bands we were there to see and which we would forfeit, although, as I said, there was enough overlap that I didn’t get to see everyone I hoped to; one outfit I missed was The Dead Milkmen, a band I’ve referenced before on this here blog in a very appropriate context. We also missed a performance by former Dead Kennedys frontman Jello Biafra, but we did get to hear him perform with two of the other bands!
But I’m getting ahead of myself: what matters are the bands we did see, and once we got to the main stage, the eerie strains of Wendy Carlos’ infamous opening music from “A Clockwork Orange” boomed from the speakers announced the arrival of the first of the classic “heavy hitters” we weren’t going to miss…
Showmen to the end, this is the 4th time I’ve seen the Adicts live, but the first time in nearly 30 years! The last time was in Hollywood back in 1994, so I was elated to see they hadn’t lost a bit of their bite! They played a lot of their best songs, including classics like “Chinese Takeaway” and “(My Baby Got Run Over By A) Steamroller.” An awesome way to pop off this show!
Believe it or not, the first time I’ve ever seen True Sounds Of Liberty live! I have their early classic albums on either vinyl or cassette from back in my teenage years (including the once-elusive “Change Today?”, long since reissued but once upon a time almost impossible to find), but this is the 1st time I ever got to see them perform! They played most of their classics, saving their most infamous song, the nefarious “Code Blue,” for last. They looked and sounded awesome, though I have nothing in the past to compare that to!
Only the 2nd time I’ve seen The Vandals live (the first being sometime in 1992), they sounded better than I remembered them, and the crowd was appropriately rowdy as their tore through many of their classics including everyone’s favorite, “Urban Struggle,” and my personal favorite, “Anarchy Burger.”
Considering that the classic Black Flag track “No Values” may be what inspired the name of this whole shindig, it’s a little ironic that your HB will no doubt draw plenty of ire when I say this was my only disappointment of the show. Of the original band members that I remember from my formative years (Dez Cadena, Keith Morris, Henry Rollins, Ron Reyes), only Greg Ginn was left, who this time fronted the band. I admit he looked good doing it, and maybe its not a fair criticism, since BF always had a “rotating lineup.” I had joked with my friends earlier in the day that you wouldn’t have been considered a real member of the LA hardcore scene unless you were a member of Black Flag for at least a week. They played their classics, but I missed Morris’ trademark snotty snarl; the opener, “Can’t Decide,” and the closer, their classic cover of “Louie Louie,” were the best moments of their set.
As good as I remembered them from back in the diz-ay, Agent Orange opened with their high point, when Jello Biafra joined them on stage to sing a rendition of the Dead Kennedys standard “Police Truck!” AWESOME! Sadly, that was the high-point for me, because although they played well and sounded good, they did not play many of my favorite songs, most of which are from what I consider their best album, This Is The Voice from 1986, although we did get “Living In Darkness.” However, most fans wanted to hear their earliest material, and on that, they delivered!
For over 30 years, I have called The Damned my all time favorite band! Unless I was saying that about The Cramps…or Siouxsie & the Banshees…or Depeche Mode…or Shriekback…well, I guess it depended on my mood at the moment. But, yeah, The Damned: my favorite band EVAR! This time around they were touring with their original drummer Rat Scabies, who hadn’t been with the band since 1996…or at least, I hadn’t seen him with them since then! Of the more than dozen times I’ve seen them live, Rat was only on drums once, so it was a kick in the arse to see him up there again with his old bandmates! In addition, they gave us hardcore fans a couple of rarities, including “Eloise,” a single from the Phantasmagoria era that I’ve only heard live once, and a real “deep cut”, the spooky “These Hands” (aka “Beware of the Clown”) from their awesome 3rd album “Machine Gun Etiquette” from 1979 (they also played the title track from that album which was one of the best moments of their set). It was all over too soon, but they looked and sounded better than ever! No matter how many times I see them, no matter how many times I hear these classic songs, I never tire of them! This band is so timeless that my friend Lisa actually proposed that Dave Vanian might be a real vampire!
Always an underlier for me, Fear is a band that I feel I’ve never given proper credit or attention too, and that was enforced again when I saw them on one of the smaller stages where they tore through a list of their greatest hits of the early 80’s and sounded damn near as good as they did on “The Record.” The finest moments were “I Love Livin’ in the City” and, of course, probably their best known song, “Let’s Have A War.” Unfortunately I had to miss their last couple of tracks in order to rejoin my crew and make our way back across the expansive venue to get ready for one of the biggest names of the event as evening began to fall.
IGGY POP (the greatest performance of the event!)
I am one of the many who believe Iggy Pop is the Godfather of Punk Rock; it’s a title he’s earned more than any other performer living or dead. He didn’t invent the genre (you have to go back even further for that, all the way to the mid 1950’s, in fact), but in the late 1960’s he pushed it farther than anyone had up to that point, and paved the way for the next generation that wouldn’t have existed without him; look no further than The Damned covering one of his signature songs on their first album in 1977 for proof of that!
OK, I admit it, I was a little skeptical: Iggy is now 79 years old! Let that sink in…79!!! Of course I wanted to see him because of who he is, but how good could he be at that age, I wondered? What he gave us was the best performance of the whole event! His band, an assembly of heavy hitters of all ages and from all over the world, backed him up with ease as he went through a set of some of the greatest songs of all time in any genre; when he played “I Got A Right” I pogoed around like crazy even at my age, and when he tore into “I Wanna Be Your Dog,” the crowd went so wild that I felt my head spinning! At one point I was so overcome by the awesomeness of it that I had tears in my eyes, and the teenage girl next to me, who was there with her mom who was around my age, commented that she was on the verge of tears as well. It isn’t enough to say that Iggy “still got it,” its more accurate to say he was the lynchpin of this entire show, the man without whom this entire concert would not have happened because the bands that composed it would not exist! Although we were originally planning to migrate away from his stage a little early in order to see the next awesome band on the stage next door, we couldn’t pull ourselves away, and stayed for every minute of the set.
I’m sorry to say that we arrived late and left early for Social Distortion’s set, and that turned out to be the biggest bummer of the tight scheduling, because SD has long been one of my favorite bands, and they were fantastic! We came in on “I Was Wrong,” the best song from their 5th album White Light White Heat White Trash from 1996, but after that we were treated to some of the band’s oldest songs; I felt gooseflesh rise when I realized they were launching from “Mommy’s Little Monster” into that debut album’s opening track, the awesome “The Creeps (I Just Wanna Give You),” which has always been one of my all-time favorite songs by SD, and then, keeping the old skool vibe going, they followed that with “1945,” their first-ever single, and a rarity, “Lude Boy,” an obscure track from a rare 1983 vinyl compilation called Hell Comes To Your House that many fans have never heard. Its hard to say, but the best moment of their set might have been the fan-favorite sing-along classic “Ball & Chain,” the song that had become SD’s “standby;” it was awesome listening to the entire crowd sing along in unison, since we all knew every word by heart!
My only wish is that they had chosen to play at least one song from what I feel may be their best album, Somewhere Between Heaven And Hell from 1992, but none of those classics were in sight. Even so, what we got was awesome, and it was painful to walk away from them before they began their final track, their cover of the Johnny Cash classic “Ring OF Fire” which I think is the best version of the song ever recorded. We did so, though, because we had to make our way back across the venue to join the biggest crowd of the entire event to see the band that many will say was the show’s headliner: The Misfits, playing with the original members including Glenn Danzig!
If there was one band at this show that can to be said to have been the biggest “draw,” this was it, which is no doubt why they were the last band of the night. Fortunately, this was the 2nd time your HB has had the privilege of seeing the original Misfits, as I was there at Fiddler’s Green in Denver back in 2019 when they played in September with none other than The Damned! As good as that show was, however, this was a much more “atmospheric” event than that one! By the time we made it back to the stage it was dark and getting surprisingly cold, but the energy of the crowd kept me warm when shirts were peeled off and the moshing began!
They put on one hell of a show and played for well over an hour, sawing through 26 classics and, mercifully, many of those were some of their old material, my favorites; there was some of that thrash “Earth AD” stuff in there, but the anthemic melodies of their early years that invited beer bottle-waving sing-alongs from the crowd were there, including “Vampira,” “Skulls,” “Horror Business,” “Teenagers From Mars,” “Violent World,” and one of my all-time favorties, “Where Eagles Dare.” They even gave us a 2 track encore, something no other band was able to do, consisting of 2 more awesome classics, “20 Eyes” and “Die, Die, My Darling!”
THE AFTERGLOW
The traffic leaving the venue was as savage as it was going in, but we had had so much fun that it almost didn’t matter! This was a show to remember and talk about for the rest of our lives. My own footage, some of which you see here, is poor because I am a believer that a show should be watched rather than filmed, and I wanted to see the concert through my eyes rather than through my phone. Fortunately, there were plenty of people on-hand with better audio and video equipment than I, and many of these performances were already uploaded to YouTube in their entirety the very next day. Me and my friends, though, we were raised in the era when everyone didn’t have a camera on them at all times, and we experienced these shows with our own senses, in many cases bearing away nothing more than the memories of what we saw and heard.
By the time I returned to Colorado from California 3 days later I was still jamming down to the music in my head, and you can bet that almost as soon as I walked into the house I was digging into the record collection, because as much as its about the bands, its about the music, and I get just as much enjoyment out of the recordings, if not more!
There is a lot more I’d like to say about my trip back to California…and I probably will. It wasn’t a cheap trip, I can tell you that; between the hotel, the concert tickets, the plane tickets, and the keepsakes, it cost me a mint to see this show! It was worth it, though! And I’m happy to say that my friends took good care of me while I was there!
While I realize this isn’t the real topic of this blog, there are a few events I in my life that aren’t about cars that are important enough to me to want to share them, and this is just such a share. For now, I’ll leave you with this: if, like me, you are a fan of any of these bands, don’t wait to much longer to see them if another show like this comes around! Its worth the effort, and the money, to grab hold of a piece of a time when people were more wild and free than they are now; the spirit of those crazy times is still alive and well if you want to go out there and experience it!
Wow, this must have been an amazing experience! The bands and songs you listed is a veritable who’s who of great music and bands. Some I’m familiar with from my own youth while others were ones you had introduced me to. What a great blow by blow account of this event. Good times, good tunes, and good friends!