Punk Rock Saves Lives
Multiple day music festivals are more common than crop tops on pre-teens these days, but when I was a young music fan, there was no such thing. The first time I went to a show with more than three bands and one stage was Lollapalooza in 1991. My memories are limited, but include being among the 100 people actually stoked to see Henry Rollins before breakfast and a girl getting hit in the head with a lime and barfing next to me on a blanket. I do remember that Butthole Surfers and Jane’s Addiction both played and had stellar sets. From there, I went on to many more Lollapaloozas, Warped Tours and Tibetan Freedom Concerts (thanks Aunt Sue). Multiple Day music festivals became one of the highlights of my summers and sometimes whole years. Somewhere along the line I got too old or too lame to spend three days in the sun trying to soak up boob sweat while keeping my hair from gluing itself to my face. I’m going to blame this on my husband since the last festival I attended was Milwaukee Metalfest a few years before we got married where a guy in my party stole King Diamond’s hat and wore it in the van on the way home. Granted, I was working at that show manning a merch booth and babysitting a bunch of drunk musicians, so that could have been why I quit going to festivals, but it took until my daughter was 5 to get back to one. My little punk rock girl went to her first true festival to see one band play – The Interrupters at Warped Tour 2016.
I had been trying to get my husband to take me to Punk Rock Bowling since my kiddo’s first punk show, but his idea of a good vacation does not include standing in the sun with sweaty dudes, while avoiding drunk 20 year old girls spilling beer on our shoes for three days. Sometimes I have to ask – who did I marry?!? When I saw the lineup for 2023 and knew we weren’t going to see the Interrupters in Detroit this year I talked him into getting tickets since I knew it was the one band that would get him to go. So we jumped on a plane with a suitcase full of band Ts and Chuck Taylors to stay in the most degenerate buttcrack of the US in Downtown Las Vegas. You heard me, not the strip, the old, lawless, anything goes, Freemont Street, Las Vegas.
We arrived at the Golden Nugget just in time to see some showgirls try to get a skinny kid with a pink mohawk to take some photos with them and a man who looked like he just crawled out of a sewer get dragged out of the casino across the street. My daughter had her first viewing of a homeless man on PCP getting talked down by the police on the street, roving bachelorette party girls with glowing dick highball glasses and boas, and the entire cast of Chippendales dancers all in one evening. We had a lot of nice chats that night about how the police were doing good work at handling hard situations, how people make money dancing half naked, how bad choices and bad luck sometimes come together in a perfect storm and people end up asking for money in the streets, and how half our country is worried about something so innocent as drag queens reading books to their kids. We also got to see an old punk smoking weed outside of our hotel and being a dick to a nice family walking by, and I had to point out that even old punks can be assholes. We’re not all perfect.
But on to the music… Day one highlights were seeing the Interrupters and Bad Religion. I also got to see Fishbone whom I have not seen in 25 years and Me First & the Gimme Gimmes who are both hilarious and talented. Although we didn’t get as close to the stage as I would normally get, we were able to get up close and personal with Greg Gaffin earlier in the day while he was doing book signings and we were picking up merch that I pre-ordered. I have to say, for me watching the Interrupters is always amazing but watching my kid see them from her first time as a five year old with only about 20 people watching to now with a huge crowd singing all of their songs along with them is one of my favorite things to watch. She no longer lets me film her singing along like she did at five years old, but I did manage to get a stealthy little clip which I promised not to share with anyone publicly ever. My kid has grown up with this band as they have grown, so they will always be something special for me.
Day two was a later start for us since we didn’t care about seeing most of the early line up, so we swam with sharks at the hotel pool for a bit before doing some damage at the vendor booths and food trucks. I’m pretty sure my husband ate his body weight in dumplings and my kid drank about 400 watermelon slushies while I bought a few more band Ts and punk rock crew socks. We did manage to catch Face to Face, GBH, the Damned and of course Rancid. I’m pretty sure my kid has a crush on Tim Armstrong and she never even saw him in his prime. The girl has good taste though. He is a talented musician, artist and all around good human for doing all he does to help young bands grow and keep punk rock alive. The kids got so excited up front that they caved in the barricade and Rancid had to take a break while security got it fixed. The good thing about this is we got to do a little single along acoustic with Tim and make friends with our neighbors in the crowd, who were all fun and respectful of each other. My daughter and an intoxicated 30 year old made fast friends singing and dancing all night. There was even a little mini punk rocker in the pit with his dad having fun. This was also the night that we stopped by the Punk Rock Saves Lives booth to chat about their organization. They were swabbing people to donate bone marrow, which I am already on the list for, but it was great to learn more about their organization and how they help in their community. Mental health is one of their platforms and as a mental health professional, working with adolescents struggling with self-esteem, peer pressure, drug and alcohol exposure, social media and hormones, I wanted to hear how they are helping. They are a great organization, making positive changes in communities, and I couldn’t agree more with the statement that punk rock saves lives. It saved mine for sure.
Day three was a lot of me dragging my family around to see bands they didn’t care about seeing, like L7 and Agnostic Front until Dropkick Murphys played and brought the house down. I did get to show my daughter the difference between a punk rock pit that’s fun and safe and a hardcore pit full of dudes with anger issues that she should avoid getting close to during Agnostic Front’s set. I had not seen Dropkick Murphys live, and they blew me away. Ken Casey is a force to be reconned with and the band is full of talent from bagpipes to strings. Ken does a lot of talking between songs which I love and we learned that he was going to be a special ed teacher before punk rock sucked him in full time. We were lucky enough to get a view of some of the artwork being auctioned off by their Claddagh Fund earlier in the day and he shared that over $14,000 was raised to help addicts make their way to treatment centers that weekend. You gotta love that a bunch of people passed up the beer tent to buy art and help someone in need. Another great example of punk rock saving lives.
I was surprised at how well my kid held up over the four days in Vegas. She didn’t complain much or get herself worked into a little anxious ball like she tends to do with new things. She rolled with the punches and had a good time. She met new weirdos who accepted her with open arms, with all her awkward tweeness, and she danced and sang along with abandon. I expect in a few years I’ll have to drag her out of the pit when it’s time to leave, but I was happy she wanted to hang out with us and that she still stole my shoes to wear herself instead of being embarrassed by them. She even asked if we could come back next year. I told her as long as the Interrupters are playing….
**It took me over a month to write this because in that month we lost a cat, gained a cat and sold our house. It’s been a month, but I’ve been listening to a lot of punk rock to keep me sane – mostly this:
Theme parks really bring out the worst in people. Half the people are wandering around clueless and lost and the other half are running you over to get to the front of the line. For those of us in the middle of these two groups, it’s a bit of a war zone. We spent Easter week at Disney and most of that week we spent either dodging people staring at their phones while running through the park, or tripping over people as they stopped to figure out where they were. I was almost flattened by multiple scooters as Grandma let little Bobby try to steer his way through a crowd at 12 miles per hour while eating an ice cream cone. I love Disney, but that week was a little traumatizing.
The rides with younger kids were the most problematic. We watched a little girl dressed as a princess with a birthday sash force her family to change seats on three separate rides. She was climbing over seats and attempting to get her 300 pound grandfather to do the same. One of the cast members finally told her to pick a seat and stay in it after she had a tantrum about not being close enough to the front. I had to laugh a few minutes later when she got soaked, unaware that the front of that ride was probably not the best seat in the house. Two little boys followed my daughter and me on the Seven Dwarfs Mine Train and tried to get on the ride with us in a two seat car. When they realized they didn’t fit, they tried to turn around and one got squished in the door. I watched as their parents stood on the other side completely oblivious that one of their kids almost just lost an arm. That was probably my favorite episode of Kids Gone Wild at Disney.
My child has taken up roller skating. This is an unexpected turn of events since she went to a roller skating party once in the second grade and hated every second of it. She had not tried it again until a few weeks ago when a friend asked her to go skating. Apparently she loved it because since then that’s all she has wanted to do. So much that we had to run all over town finding her a pair of skates so she would be ready next time.
I would be lying if I said I wasn’t nervous to be on wheels again. It had been a long time and lets be honest, breaking a hip after a fall would not be all that unlikely for me. I have made it through 5 years without a stupidity-inflicted injury, but it’s only a matter of time before I trip, slip or fall. But apparently skating is a lot like riding a bike because once I was on the rink, it was like I had never taken off skates. Within a few minutes I was skating backwards and spinning in circles. I even got a little gutsy and sped around the rink a few times only wobbling a bit while trying to do a crossover on a turn.
When I was little, my dad and I were part of a dad/daughter group called “Indian Princesses”. I’m not sure what the organization’s purpose was, but our group was under the impression the goal was for young girls to get into trouble while their dads drank heavily and played cards. It’s the place where I learned that too much of anything will make you barf and peeing on the side of the road is only illegal if you get caught. I’m pretty sure I was supposed to be learning survival skills and how to be a proper young lady, but our entire group was asked to leave a camping event before I learned any of those skills. This may explain why I can’t start a fire or engage in cocktail party chatter today.
About a month ago my dad soaked the inside of his car when he left the windows open in the rain. My parents had left the house and when they returned, my dad saw his car window open and immediately thought someone had broken his window. I love that his first reaction was that someone else must have damaged his car, not that he left his own windows down. What is most comical about this is that my dad never has the windows up while driving, so him leaving the windows down while parked is not all that unusual. It can be sweater weather and he has at least the moonroof open. Once he saw the open window, he walked out to his car to find all of his windows down and the moonroof wide open. It had been pouring rain for an hour, so needless to say, his seats were a little waterlogged. I’m not going to lie, that car needed a good detailing anyway.
As we headed back to the boat launch, the rain started to come down a little harder, and by the time we got to the dock it was the kind of rain that required an umbrella. I would like to say we turned around and headed to a garage until the rain subsided, but we are no quitters. And we are not all that bright either. I got on the wave runner and started it up right about the time a full on monsoon started. But by that time, there was no turning back. I took off and was halfway around the bend before my dad even left the boat launch, where he probably immediately opened the moon roof. I wanted to make sure everything was in working order but I couldn’t bring myself to drive more than 33 mph since the rain felt like pins going into my face. Although I usually like being the only vehicle on the lake, it was not an ideal time since I was not wearing a life jacket, it felt like pebbles were being thrown at me from the sky and a few neighbors were actually pointing and laughing. I managed to make it back to the dock in about 10 minutes. After getting the wave runner up on the lift, covering it and returning the key to the house, I finally grabbed a towel and headed to the garage as the rain completely stopped. I found my dad holding a leaf blower, cleaning the garage floor before backing in the trailer. Although he didn’t mention I looked like a drowned rat my mom later told me she saw me on the doorbell cam and that was exactly what I looked like. We moved the trailer into the garage and when I jumped back into the car I was shocked to see that all of the windows were actually closed for once, and the only sopping wet thing in the car was me.
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