We’re hemmed in by the crowd, our backs against a white cinder block wall, when a big, shirtless skinhead crashes at our feet.
“It’s not usually like this,” I assure my friend, Brent.
It’s a weeknight and none of our other friends have made the trip from south Orange County to LA, but it’s also Brent’s first show. He’s on edge, and I wonder what I’ve gotten him into. We’re an odd pairing; I’ve recently dropped out of college and he’s barely fourteen.
Apart from the bands, we’re the only non-skinheads in the room. Neo-Nazis and SHARPs make up the rest of the crowd — rivals who look alike, but have very different ideologies, and are eager to fight for them.
Caught in the middle is the big guy at our feet — the swastika-shaped scar on his arm and the remnant of an “SS” on his neck tell one group he’s abandoned them and the other that he can never belong. The scars look less like professional tattoo removal, more like cigarette burns.
As Old Nick and Game Face play their sets, skirmishes break out continuously, but no one takes such a string of beatings as the skinhead without a tribe. Whether by sheer force of will or whatever drugs he’s on, he never stays down for long. He keeps antagonizing the crowd, no matter how many times he gets punched in the face, thrown to the concrete floor, or kicked in the ribs.
Tonight’s music is decidedly un-skinhead, but ritual takes precedence over esoterica. It’s hard and fast and loud enough to keep the crowd energized. Brent and I might be the only actual fans in the room, but we’re not asserting ourselves; we’re just taking it all in.
We met at church as little kids, and became friends in our teens. Neither of us is especially hard core; we’re just goofy, suburban kids who like punk rock. My tattoos are images from the Bible, and Brent doesn’t have any of his yet. We don't drink or smoke; we don’t have girlfriends, or any idea how to get them.
I’ve been in some fights, but not tonight. These are our bands, but we feel like tourists. If you saw us two years earlier you’d have found me riding the bench at a prep school basketball game, and he’d have been practicing his magic act or making videos with his action figures.
The show tonight is almost certainly illegal, in a burned out restaurant with a growling, smoking generator outside for power, and bands playing at floor-level in the corner of the room. It’s volatile, but something holds the evening together, keeps it from deteriorating into complete chaos.
Despite the two warring factions, no knives or guns are drawn, and no scuffle ever escalates into a brawl. The bands and their equipment are mostly untouched. It seems that some unwritten social contract informs the collective behavior of the crowd — they know that if they take the fighting past a sustainable threshold, the music will stop.
And so as Jeff Caudill sweetly sings, “Fill your shoes with summer; untie the laces of your soul,” bald heads, clenched fists, and Doc Martens thump and swirl around the concrete room.
When the music is over, it’s late, and Brent and I walk back to my green minivan, parked on a nearby residential street. It feels eerily quiet, given what we’ve just taken part in, but that doesn’t last. We are soon accosted by a street dog — a scrawny border collie mix, barking and lunging at us in the way that herding dogs sometimes do.
Almost immediately I notice a smaller dog, something fluffy and white, dirty, with a slight limp, making larger circles around the two of us. Then I look to my right, and on the lawn in front of one of the old houses lining that street, there sit three more dogs: a German shepherd, a Rottweiler, and one of the biggest pit bull terriers I’ve ever seen. These three are silent. Stoic. They watch us calmly, to see what we will do.
This new situation unfolds in mere seconds, but I know we’re in trouble. I may live in the suburbs, but I come from the farm. I practically lived in the doghouse as a kid, and not much has changed.
By my twenties I’ve had my share of dog bites. I haven’t been in this exact situation before, but it’s not entirely unfamiliar.
I tell Brent to keep walking normally, as I remove my favorite green sweatshirt and begin to challenge the border collie, swinging the garment like a weapon, stomping my feet, and doing whatever I can to appear the aggressor.
A few more seconds pass, though they feel like minutes; the three dogs on the lawn stand, nearly in unison, and trot off in different directions. At the same time, the border collie and the fluffy white dog also leave us.
Moments later, down the lamplit street, we see all five dogs converge back into a single unit, and head off around the corner and out of sight.
____
Nolan had the best parties. It seemed like his parents were always out of town; to be honest I never saw any evidence that he even had parents. Most people called him Norm, but I never knew why, so I only called him by his given name.
He gave me my own erstwhile nickname, Minivan Steve, to distinguish me from the other Steve in our circle, Steve-O (no, not that one), and because I drove my mom’s forest green Dodge Caravan. I hated the nickname, but it stuck, and eventually I opted to lean into it.
The minivan itself bordered on iconic. It saw its share of reckless driving and off-road adventures; I should have lost my license, maybe been arrested, but somehow my friends and I all survived the minivan days mostly unscathed, and the van allowed us, at least seven at a time, to travel all over California.
Nolan’s house was on a deathly quiet suburban street, inside a gated community. For those who didn’t have the gate code, it was still easy to get into the neighborhood by parking on a side street and hopping the wall. I never once saw any of Nolan’s neighbors, and somehow no matter how many kids were crammed into his house, or how loud our bands played, no one ever called the cops.
And it’s not like we were well-behaved. We were teenagers. We were loud. There was alcohol, cigarettes, drugs. There was nudity. Things were peed on. Sometimes people were also peed on. And the neighbors stayed sealed up in their cookie cutter houses, behind well-maintained lawns, inside a gated compound that we all entered and exited whenever we pleased.
We were a heterogeneous assortment of punks, rude boys, ravers, goths, and hippies; skaters, stoners, straight edgers; freaks who defied labels, and normal kids who didn’t feel very normal.
Nolan’s house was a place to experiment without fear of judgment. We formed impromptu bands, sometimes only hours before we were to play. Minivan Steve and the Plymouth Voyagers was a duo with my friend AJ; we asked Ben to sit in on banjo so we could play a bluegrass version of Crass’s Bloody Revolutions, in which I cut my lip with a Jew’s harp. (At the time I thought it was called a juice harp, in reference to saliva, or in my case, saliva mixed with blood.)
The Winnebagos were thrown together at the last possible minute; I appeared as a seven-foot-tall, 500-pound clown with a massive, cone-shaped head I’d made from papier-mâché and chicken wire. A Shakespearean ruffle topped a red and blue polka dotted fat suit, sewn for me by my grandmother. He began as a cartoon I’d been drawing of a smiling, suicidal clown, happily finding increasingly elaborate ways to off himself; now he existed in real life, in Nolan’s living room.
I do not recall what songs we played.
A spare bedroom had been designated as a backstage area for that evening’s entertainment, and to get backstage you needed a pass — a photocopy of Joel’s penis, which he’d smashed against the glass of a Xerox machine. The pass was to be hung around the neck with a length of yarn; I did not relish the adornment, but I did need to go backstage to get into costume.
Mike from Blasphemous Penis was there that night; he said he’d enjoyed my performance, and I felt gratified, as he was one of the weirdos who’d first inspired me to do something avant-garde.
Nolan introduced me to Denny’s as a late night hangout, as opposed to the family diner it had always been during more civilized hours. He could often be found there at two AM, drinking coffee and drawing in a notebook. The servers all liked him, which wasn’t surprising; he was always kind and gentle, and I never heard anyone speak ill of him.
On the way home from shows in LA, north Orange County, San Diego, or Riverside, Denny’s became a mainstay of our routine, although we occasionally changed things up and went to IHOP or Norm’s.
Large meals were consumed, along with milkshakes and countless coffees and Cokes. Voices were raised, and messes were made. There were pranks, and general indecency. Sometimes we stayed until the sun came up.
Our favorite waiter was Dave, a mischievous imp who delighted in bringing us free milkshakes, with the caveat that he got to choose their custom ingredients, ranging from exquisite to ghastly. The apple pie milkshake was divine; cream of broccoli, demonic — for days I was stricken with sickening, fart-mouthed belches.
One night Dave made us sundaes with butter instead of ice cream. Another night, a pair of miniature milkshakes that appeared to be chocolate chip, eagerly consumed by two novitiates, until they began to sense something was off, and one scooped half a sausage link from his cup.
We learned that Dave had a girlfriend and a young daughter at home; at the time we didn’t know anyone that young who had kids, so we were surprised, but failed to grasp the gravity of the revelation.
We were chaos agents. We had nowhere to direct our energy, and no idea when to stop. I can’t say we were responsible for getting Dave fired, but we certainly didn’t help his cause.
Thankfully there was always another Denny’s a mile or two down I-5, so he got to have the same job, and we got to keep our favorite waiter. As Dave was fired again, and again, he moved a little farther down the freeway, and we followed him.
When he reached San Clemente, there was effectively nowhere else to go. Camp Pendleton broke up the suburban sprawl and cut off the string of Denny’s locations that ran the length of the county.
The San Clemente Denny’s had a stone accent wall that was hard to resist; it only took us literally climbing the walls, and my friend Ryan showing his penis piercings to another group of diners, to get Dave fired from his last Denny’s. We felt guilty, but probably not guilty enough.
Months later some friends and I walked into a Marie Calendar’s for a Sunday lunch, and there was Dave. He was not happy to see us. We quickly assured him that we would behave, and asked to be seated with a different server. That was the last time I saw him. If he was fired from that job, it wasn’t our fault.
Saturday afternoons were a good time to go to Vinyl Solution in Huntington Beach to buy records and pick up flyers for upcoming shows. If they liked you at Vinyl, they’d let you use their legendary David Lee Roth-themed bathroom. If they didn’t like you they’d play Throbbing Gristle’s Hamburger Lady on a loop until you left the store.
Huntington was a weird town. It had the to-be-expected surfer dudes and burnouts, and plastic people spilling over from next door in Newport Beach, but you might also run into early-day UFC fighters like Tank Abbott. I once saw Tito Ortiz take a verbal lashing from a Denny’s waitress over skipping out on his bill the night before; I recognized him from a VHS tape I’d just seen of him pounding some guy’s face in.
Huntington and Newport were also a hub of militant white nationalism, where wealthy men in their mansions held the reins of skinhead groups in the streets.
An underlying threat of violence was ever present in the punk rock scene all over the state, occasionally breaching the surface in terrifying and very personal ways. South Orange County’s beach cities were certainly not immune, and we sometimes went to great lengths to find respite from that tension.
But safety from one set of threats often meant exposure to others. Most suburban neighborhoods weren’t like the one where Nolan lived — calling the police was practically a reflex for some residents, and even white kids from the suburbs knew to be afraid of the cops.
Our county lockup was as dangerous as any state prison. I managed to stay out of jail, at least in those years, but I never felt entirely safe. But if no place was safe, that also meant no place was off limits; my friends and I could go anywhere.
We went to punk and ska shows nearly every Friday and Saturday night, and sometimes on weeknights or Sunday afternoons; I have no idea how many times we saw some of the local bands, like the now-almost-mythical Suburban Rhythm, but it was enough that we knew all their songs before we ever got hold of a single recording.
One night at 8-1/2 in Fullerton, Frank from Voodoo Glow Skulls changed the lyrics to their song, Mr. Bossman, in tribute to the little person who had been running around punching us in the balls all night. “Fuck you, Mr. Wee Man!” (Yes, that one.) Nicknames have a way of sticking, whether you want them to or not.
Smalltime local bands were our staple fare, but the bigger acts were always around, and sometimes smaller acts got big right before our eyes. The first time I saw Green Day, they were opening for Bad Religion. The second time, Bad Religion opened for them, and Billie Joe spent their entire set spitting on the audience, who in turn spat back onto him. AJ and I left before they finished their set, feeling a little sick, and a little sad.
Things were changing; an underground music scene that was once a refuge for us had been discovered by bros and meatheads. During a Game Face set at The Ice House, I was jumped, not entirely unprovoked, by four Sublime fans. They pulled me onto my back, and two of them restrained my arms while a third one choked me from behind. The fourth one straddled me and punched me a few times in the face before my friends had time to react. My attackers quickly disappeared into the crowd. Game Face was one of our bands. It was still our scene, for now.
It certainly wasn’t its first, but punk rock was having a moment. Most of the bands we liked had already broken up, or were simply eclipsed by more radio and MTV-friendly acts like Blink-182 and The Offspring. We increasingly found ourselves going to see opening bands and leaving early, or skipping local punk shows altogether in favor of something newer.
Emo had made its way to California from the east coast, and Sage was booking bands at the Huntington Beach Library — a smart move, because if you’re looking for a meathead-free scene, a library is about the best location you can choose.
The performances were intense. The band members didn’t look like punks; they wore sweaters and skin-tight pants, and their music was heavy, more technical, lacking a lot of the familiar punk rock slop we’d come to know. And the vocals hit hard. Those shows were more about expression than performance — no one was putting on a giant clown suit there.
Alongside the emo bands came a new wave of indie rock acts; most came out of the punk tradition, usually looking to expand their musical horizons. Some had an obvious ‘punk with a softer side’ sound while others were throwbacks to bands like The Stones and The Velvet Underground. Our tastes expanded, and diverged.
No band I’ve ever listened to has had so heavy an impact on me as Jawbreaker, and many of my friends feel the same way. They were there when we first started looking beyond the radio and MTV for new music, and they only got better with time. Bivouac was always my favorite album, but that doesn’t diminish the records that came later. I truly love everything they ever recorded.
When Jawbreaker signed with the David Geffen Company in 1995, there was some concern among our ranks, but it was overshadowed by the feeling that they deserved the recognition. We were happy for the band, for the million dollars they’d been paid, and we eagerly awaited their album with DGC.
Dear You was not a disappointment. Yes, it was very produced. It was clean, and tight. But the band stayed true to themselves. They kept all the dissonance and the thoughtful, challenging lyrics that had always made them great. They gave their rough edges just enough polish to get them on MTV, but not enough to make them palatable to our parents. I would certainly have preferred something more raw, but I still think it was nearly perfect.
In May of ‘96 we headed to LA to see them with Jawbox at Jabberjaw. In a dangerously hot, packed room, our bodies pressed against friends and strangers, we watched our favorite band perform. I have almost no memory of the set itself, but I remember the room — the heat, the sweat, the heaviness of the air and the euphoria that only a great live show can deliver.
Afterward, my friend Mike interviewed singer and guitarist Blake Schwarzenbach for Geek America, a zine he and some other friends had started. It would be the last Jawbreaker interview for quite some time. The band played six more shows on their tour and then broke up.
I remember thinking how perfect their timing had been. They’d done one major label release, taken their money, and quit. No second record — they didn’t need one. Dear You could stand on its own. They didn’t diminish the success of that album by releasing a string of increasingly weaker ones. They didn’t overstay. They quit, perfectly, beautifully.
Blake went on to form Jets To Brazil, in my opinion one of the best indie bands, ever.
The split means even more to me now than it did at the time. It wasn’t the end of a band so much as the end of a stage in our lives, giving way to the next. The parties at Nolan’s house, the late nights at Denny’s, the HB library shows, the trips to Vinyl Solution — it was all ending.
My friends all had cars by then; they didn’t need to be chauffeured around in my minivan. They were moving away, or moving on. I returned to college soon afterward, first in Santa Barbara, then leaving California altogether.
Nolan and I lost touch. I’d always been one of the kids who didn’t quite fit anywhere: a farm kid in the suburbs; a Christian kid in a secular music scene; drug-free but not straight edge; punk-adjacent but never punk rock. Nolan had created a place where I fit. But our paths had diverged. The last few times I’d seen him, he’d been dropping a lot of acid, to the point that even the people taking drugs with him were getting worried.
One night I walked into a Denny’s in Dana Point and found Nolan working there as a waiter. He didn’t recognize me. “It’s me, Minivan Steve.” For a moment he seemed to have a faint recollection, and then it was gone.
____
Sometime in the mid nineties a group of us made a pilgrimage to Berkeley, California. We’d been to San Francisco a few times, but this would be a shorter trip; we’d make the six hour drive to Gilman Street, stay a few hours, and then head back home.
924 Gilman Street is a legendary address in punk rock history; what CBGB was to the East Coast, Gilman is to the West, but unlike my visit to CBGB, I had no trouble getting into Gilman before I was twenty-one.
Gilman is a small warehouse club operated by a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization — an all-ages venue with a culture that values independent music, community action, and a DIY work ethic.
We didn’t know any of the bands playing the night we went; it was some kind of crust punk affair, the room awhirl with gigantic, spiked mohawks and leather jackets adorned with formidable arrays of framing nails protruding from their cuffs and shoulders. These were mostly for show, but not entirely — it was an anti-racist and antifascist institution, and there were always some who didn’t appreciate what the collective was doing.
A group of neo-Nazi skinheads famously attacked the club in the late eighties and were defeated and repelled by the Gilman Street punks, but there was always the chance of a recurrence.
Inside the club, we looked with a bit of reverence at the graffiti on the walls, left by bands we loved, who had played there in the early days. “Sweet Children” was spray-painted prominently across a rafter near the center of the room.
The show that night was more about the crowd and the place than the bands that played; the music was nothing special, but the visual spectacle was unforgettable. After the show was over, people hung around outside the venue. A Black kid with a nearly-two-foot-tall mohawk got into it with a similarly clad white guy; they took turns knocking the shit out of each other while some bystanders looked on, and others seemed not to notice. Minutes later, neither having prevailed, they sat on the curb with their arms around each other’s shoulders and shared a beer.
We lingered at the edge of the crowd and watched these street dramas play out for at least an hour, until most of the crusty punks had dispersed to the various squats and underpasses where many of them slept at night. It wasn’t uncommon for kids to make their way to Berkeley with no money or connections, and assimilate into its community of youth without traditional housing.
As we headed south on Interstate Five, a thick Tule Fog slowed our progress to a crawl; it was daylight before we reached Orange County. We would talk about the show for years to come, though we could not recall the names of any of the bands that played.
Years later in Fort Collins, Colorado, I was hosting a crust punk show in a venue of my own. It was a somewhat tamer event than that night at Gilman — the same fashion aesthetic, but with more women in the crowd, most with tattooed chests and various piercings. I remember wondering where they’d all come from, why I’d never seen them around town or at other shows.
It was one of the better crowds I’d had at Fig Tree, named after a massive ficus I purchased from a local nursery, that was slowly dying due to the lack of appropriate lighting in the room. It was to become a metaphor for the venue itself.
I had tried to recreate the organizational structure of 924 Gilman Street in a warehouse I’d rented in a Fort Collins industrial park, but it was proving to be a challenge. I formed a board of directors, but none of us knew how to run a nonprofit.
And Fort Collins was not Berkeley. The local music scene was surprisingly good for a city of its size, but without closer proximity to a larger population center, it was tough to get enough bands on the stage.
The scene kids were different, too; they hovered around the edges, not confident enough to approach the stage or dance without someone else doing it first. For performers it felt like cold indifference.
The best nights I had weren’t the punk and indie shows, they were a hip hop event and a small rave that weren’t attended by a single one of my volunteers or board members. Crowds packed the place, and spent hundreds of dollars on bottled water, Gatorade, and Red Bull. If I could have held those events every week I would have.
That’s not to say that we didn’t have some good punk and indie shows, or that the kids didn’t like the place. It just wasn’t consistent.
I tried to incorporate things I’d picked up from various all-ages clubs in California: free shows every Wednesday night, cheap admission other nights, and in between bands the only music allowed over the PA was James Brown, Johnny Cash, or Frank Sinatra. A few people complained about that, but they were wrong.
Ultimately what killed Fig Tree wasn’t the local culture or the geography, it was me, and the fire department.
My own band played there too often, and for too long. I maintained too much control, and we never made the transition from something I was personally bankrolling to a real collective. It was a nonprofit in theory only; there was no real governance.
A couple volunteers and I had built out the venue with no permits, and we didn’t have the paperwork we needed to open to the public. It only took one complaint to put me on the Fire Marshall’s radar, and one scorched electrical outlet to shut things down entirely.
When 924 Gilman Street was converted into a music venue, it had widespread community and local government support. I did not have that in Fort Collins, nor did I know how to go about getting it.
I was also living in the building. When the fire department shut it down, they told me I couldn’t continue to sleep there, and the local cops would come by at all hours to make sure I wasn’t inside. I blacked out the windows and hid the best I could, but I couldn’t hide indefinitely.
As the cops and the fire department pushed, I was also being pulled in a different direction. After college I’d gotten involved in animal rescue. I had a locked room in one corner of the warehouse where I kept a 750-gallon turtle pond and some large snakes, including a thirteen-foot reticulated python.
She sent me to the hospital late one night. She bit me on the wrist, tearing skin and grinding fangs against bone, and then constricted me. I escaped and the snake was unharmed, but I had a golf ball-sized hematoma and some mild tendon damage; I got a lot of extra attention in the ER.
A separate cage in the reptile room housed a five-foot canebrake rattlesnake that I’d taken from a defunct wildlife education program back east; when people lingered too long after a show, I’d bring the rattlesnake out and the kids would all run for the door.
Essentially everything happening in the space was illegal, but having never fought City Hall before, I was naive. I never imagined anyone would care what I was doing, but clearly some people did.
With my venue shut down, my band struggling, and a growing desire to work with animals full-time, I packed up my reptiles and my newly adopted puppy and left Colorado, briefly returning to California before moving to the Pacific Northwest.
____
One of my college professors talked about how he’d stopped playing the guitar for many years while he prioritized family and career, and how he’d recently picked it back up for Sunday morning church services. I’d been playing for about ten years at the time, and told myself I would never do what he had done. But by 2013 I hadn’t touched my guitars in about a decade.
I’d been working mostly full-time in animal rescue and advocacy. I’d gotten better at fighting City Hall, but there wasn’t much time for anything else. Burnout was looming.
In more than twenty years of living in the Northwest, I went to exactly three music events in Seattle. The first was a Mogwai show during which one of my dogs at home had died; after that night I struggled for years with the idea of doing anything for my own enjoyment, even for one night. Whenever I did leave, the last twenty minutes of my drive home were always dominated by feelings of dread.
Years later I would go to a rowdy party with a bunch of all-girl roller derby teams, where the girls sang karaoke with a live band. Sometime after that I went to see some old friends and their band, The Donkeys. Part of me wished I was still performing, but I still didn’t have much desire to see live music. It no longer felt like my place.
Then I went through a period of personal turmoil, and when that happened, I was compelled to take my guitars out of storage and write songs again. I’ve never been a prolific songwriter, and my pattern of only being able to write when I’m unhappy makes the successful completion of a song a mixed blessing.
It took some time for the callouses to return to the fingertips on my left hand, and my singing voice was shaky from lack of use, but little by little it all came back. I was also happy to discover that I could do things with a phone or an iPad that I’d have needed a home studio for in the early days.
That I could write and record music without anyone else knowing about it was liberating. I shared a few songs with a couple people, but for the most part I told no one what I was doing.
When my personal life stabilized I stopped writing new music, but I continued to play the guitar, and to improve my skills. I even bought some new instruments. And I kept fine tuning the songs I’d already written.
Music was part of my daily life again, and I no longer felt like I had to choose between two passions. I could be more than one thing.
In 2022 my friend Jason bought tickets to see Jawbreaker with Jawbox in San Francisco. The band had been doing reunion tours for several years, but I hadn’t seen them play since ‘96. It was the Dear You twenty-fifth anniversary tour, and I decided to fly to San Francisco for the weekend.
It was the first event of any kind I’d been to post-COVID. I was pleasantly surprised by how cool and well-ventilated the place was.
The opening act was a standup comic with no connection to the Bay Area punk scene. It was a weird choice and he wasn’t very good, but the crowd was rooting for him. He’d have been booed off the stage in the old days, but this was a more grown up, more civilized gathering.
Jason joked that Jawbox’s bassist looked like a soccer mom, and I noted that all the male band members were just as unassuming. There was nothing about any of them to suggest they were in a punk band, but I loved that they could play their music without putting on a fashion show.
Over the years, countless bands and performers have looked the part and failed to deliver. This was the inverse, and the notion that the band had families at home made their performance feel more authentic to me, not less. These were real people, not rock stars.
As Jawbreaker walked onto the stage, the phones all came out. Smartphones weren’t around when I was going to shows every weekend, but now they’re ubiquitous. I found myself inadvertently reading short people’s texts over their shoulders. Jason’s wife was bitching him out for not calling her all day, and he was rightfully apologizing; a woman in front of me was telling her kids to brush their teeth.
We stood in the center of the floor, where the sound quality is usually best. A big-haired woman passed in front of us, her hair blocking our view and tickling my arm for a moment before she moved on. The room was crowded but no one was pushing me, or getting their sweat on me. People moved through our orbit, but there was no jostling for position.
Jawbreaker added a second guitarist to help round out their sound, and it was working. The last time I saw Blake perform was with Jets To Brazil in Denver, and I recognized his white Les Paul. Did I forget that he was left-handed, or had I never noticed?
The band played almost everything from Dear You and some older favorites like Boxcar and Want. I loved it when they played Parabola; it’s a bit of a departure from most of their catalog, but that bassline …
Watching Jawbreaker play again, I was aware that I was having a new experience of the band; the raw exhilaration and hyper-vigilance I used to feel at shows had been replaced by a sensation I’ve only recently learned to recognize — peace.
I also loved being back in San Francisco, even if it had changed a lot since my youth: fewer aggressive panhandlers and more women in yoga pants. I adjusted.
When I’m in a bigger city I look for food I can’t find in small towns, but Jason has a sensitive stomach. We made good compromises, but I wanted to push harder, so I decided to take another trip to the city on my own.
Months later I flew back to San Francisco and took the BART train to Powell Street Station. I stopped for awhile at Powell and Market to watch some street drummers, and a few weirdos dancing to their music. I ate at a Japanese restaurant before walking to the Beresford Arms, the historic old hotel where I was staying. This was more like the San Francisco I remembered from my twenties, with street performers and homeless encampments.
My first night I saw Hatebreed; I hadn’t been to a hardcore show in over twenty years. The crowd was a mix of older and younger people; I was familiar with their music, but not enough to know the songs by heart.
Hardcore crowds are a special kind of community; the music may be angry, but the atmosphere is all unity and positivity, and that hasn’t changed in the last two decades. Seeing gray-haired men dispense with any sense of middle-aged decorum to shout along with the lyrics was oddly touching.
The next day I walked around the city and ate spicy food. That night I saw The Flaming Lips — a very different animal from the night before. For The Lips I had a balcony seat, which gave me a good vantage point to take in the spectacle. You don’t so much watch their show as you let it wash over you.
I left the theater feeling grateful that this thing I had given up years ago to focus on other passions was available to me again.
Today, in my fifties, I go to punk shows, hardcore shows, psychedelic rock shows. Tickets cost ten times what they used to, so I’m not going every weekend. The green Dodge Caravan is long gone, and I no longer live near any close friends, so I’m often going alone or planning travel strategically to coincide with tour dates.
I’m a lifetime removed from the tiny, crowded venues, the illegal shows, the fights, the antics, being unfettered and unconcerned. I have to remind myself that I was never as happy in those days as I remember being. Or maybe I was happy, but I hadn’t yet learned to appreciate it.
I remember the chaos of empty parking lots, the run-ins with police and security guards, late nights at Denny’s and all the places where we were banned from returning. I remember Nolan’s house, those bright, brief moments that hang like framed photos on the walls of my mind.
____
It’s the Fall of 2025 and I’m at the House of Blues, on Disney Way, in Anaheim, California. This is decidedly not my kind of place, with its overpriced pseudo-Cajun restaurant-bar, and a second, more exclusive lounge with a more confusingly cosmopolitan menu.
But it’s the first night of Jawbreaker’s new tour, and I’m there with some old friends. Brent picked me up from my motel up the street, with Greg, who I haven’t seen in more than twenty years. We meet Kevin, who worked on my band’s album in the late nineties and has gone on to do much bigger things with much bigger artists.
Inside we run into Justin; he used to play drums in a hardcore band, and now he’s a suburban soccer dad; he looks good, less intense than I remember him. His own kid wasn’t interested so he brought his neighbor’s son with him. There are a lot of kids here.
Steve-O didn’t want to come. He was at the Jabberjaw show in ‘96 and is happy for that to be his last memory of the band. I can respect that, but I’ve now seen Jawbreaker more times in my late forties and early fifties than I did in the nineties.
The Get Up Kids are opening. We’re calling them ‘The I’ve Fallen and I Can’t Get Up Kids,’ but we’re laughing as much about our own age as theirs. They sound just like they used to, but they’re playing all the songs from an album they released after I lost track of them.
In between bands we’re talking about what kids today are into, and wondering if they’re having experiences like we used to, and like our parents had growing up. What are the events shaping them now? What stories will they tell in thirty years? We hope they’re getting into some trouble, but we’re struggling to imagine how.
Jawbreaker takes the stage and they’re still a bit rusty, but it’s the first night of the tour and they don’t all live in the same state anymore, so some rust is to be expected. Brent and Kevin tell me the mix sounds like shit, but I suggest they loosen their ear plugs slightly, and that seems to help.
I never used to wear ear plugs, but I adopted the habit out of necessity when I started working with industrial power tools and shooting guns; I’m happy to be protecting my hearing, and I wish I started doing it sooner.
The band plays The Boat Dreams From the Hill; they play Fine Day for the first time in thirty years, and follow it up with Boxcar. They play Parabola; Brent loves that one as much as I do. In a surprise twist, they play a song we’ve never heard, called Invisible, and close with the sweetly sentimental Kiss the Bottle. It’s a short set, twelve songs, no encore.
It’s a weeknight, and Brent and Greg have work in the morning, so as much as I’d like to find some diner to hang out in, it’s not happening. They drop me off at my motel, but I’m restless. I have a rental car, but I decide to walk instead.
As I wander I think about the events in our lives, specific dates or moments, that change us, often abruptly. Our perspectives shift; trajectories change. We wake up.
It’s September 4. On this date in 1997, a Thursday like today, I witnessed a terrorist attack in West Jerusalem. Eight people died and hundreds more were injured. Its anniversary nearly escaped me this year, but as I walk the wide, weirdly sterile streets around Disneyland, I remember.
Today was better.