Apocalypse, Now.

Punk Rock Bowling 20th Anniversary Show
featuring Rise Against, L7, NoFX, Mighty Mighty Bosstones, Turbonegro, X, Crass, Angelic Upstarts and others

Las Vegas Nevada, May 26-28

A guiding rule to live by is, you have to make your own fun. Going by that credo, as one of the editors of the Oxford Handbook of Punk Rock, I felt it behooved me to go Punk Rock Bowling, the punk rock extravaganza held in Vegas over Memorial Day, which is now on its 20^th year.

Honestly, we live in a world full of pain and terror right now. I am constantly feeling outraged and distraught. The result was a burning desire to do stupid things in Vegas, the way they do in made for TV movies and “The Hangover”: lose a tooth, walk a tiger, wake up with a tattoo on my face. I texted my punk rock friend Lisa, “So ready for Vegas. Let’s smoke and get tattoos!”  

Picture me, then, 24 hours later, on the parking lot roof of the Hard Rock Café, my friends and I surveyed the glowing desert landscape, dotted below with glittering casinos, abandoned skyscrapers, and big old holes in the ground where buildings have recently been imploded, feeling a lot like Harrison Ford in Bladerunner 2049. It was apocalyptic, I swear, and the perfect start to Memorial Day weekend. Next, I drank a giant absinthe at an eatery called Culinary Dropout and attended an almost pathologically stupid performance by Todd Rundgren and Utopia (or Dystopia, as we immediately dubbed them). Prog rock makes me nuts, so pretty soon I was weaving in and out of the purple lobby looking for the Lyft lot, loudly bemoaning the bad taste of the management for having enshrined the relics of Jimi Hendrix the Jackson Five alongside the unhallowed togs of acts like Nickelback, Godsmack, and the Killers.

Clearly, the Hard Rock Café, like Vegas itself, is extremely un-judgmental. In a way, that’s the nicest thing about it.  

But enough has been written about Las Vegas that I don’t need to add to it. Indeed, it only interests me in the way that it is the background for Punk Rock Bowling, a three day festival in its 20^th year that celebrates all things Punk Rock.

In some ways, Vegas and punk rock seem antithetical, since the first is about exploiting working class people’s false consciousness through skanky capitalist endeavors, and the other is about liberating yourself from that mindset. On the other hand, both concepts celebrate the joy of making bad choices. For the rubes that like Vegas on its own terms, that means getting shitty tattoos and getting shitfaced, and well, the same is true of punk rockers. Voila! A Festival is born.

Punk Rock Bowling takes place in downtown Vegas, rather than on The Strip – where the expensive places like the Bellagio, SLS, the Wynn and so on are. The Fremont area is different, but only by a thin and unmerited veneer of ‘class,’ like the difference between buying a Bratz Doll and and American Girl one. During PRB, that part of Vegas fills up with punk rockers of all ages, all clad in in black Misfits T shirts and sporting arm sleeves and leg tattoos. Many of them have manic panic hair color and even Mohawks. The women wear combat boots and fishnet tights and sailor hats and/or have Bettie Page haircuts. The men have beer guts and big arms and creased red faces. Neither set gives a damn about Vegas’s ersatz, tacky version of sexy ladies and hot men. Neither one gives a damn about money.

The Festival grounds are on an empty block near the Golden Nugget and the Double D, and when you’re standing in that enclosure, you kind of have to stop yourself from looking up at the windows of the surrounding hotels and thinking about snipers. But that’s just life in These United States today, and there is something plain about Punk Rock Bowling that makes me happy, something unpretentious, and safe, and likeminded. This year’s featured punk rock bands – Crass, Angelic Upstarts, Turbonegro, L7, Boston’s Mighty Mighty Bosstones, NOFX, the Svetlanas, the Briefs, Slaves, X, and both Against Me!, to name just a few – are a motley bunch of old and new, but there is a spirit that ignites all of them that I feel really tender about.

I used to feel so contemptuous about the way old people acted about hippie culture, but now I totally get it: there is something so innately beautiful about punk ideology, and never more so than today. Do It Yourself. Take over the means of production. Small is beautiful. Respect is due. These are mottos that are well worth living by, and at punk rock bowling, they are right up in your face.

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I know that there is a nice part of Vegas. There are some great restaurants and arty things going on, and a whole bunch of hard working people who live there because it’s still inexpensive, and all that is cool. But if you’re just a tourist, like me, and partaking in the city the way it asks you to partake of it, then it’s worth considering its overall meaning. On my way to the airport on Memorial Day, I drove by the MGM casino New York New York and noticed that their giant fake-o Statue of Liberty had been temporarily draped in a Knights jersey sponsored by Budweiser, in order to commemorate that night’s NHL playoff game.

Well, go Knights and all that, but seriously, can you even think of a better visual image to commemorate the way that America – that liberty itself – has been bought by corporations and coopted by greed?  It’s so perfect. Like Vegas itself, the statue’s clothing was tangible evidence of America’s current disgrace. It’s almost as if each individual building is the solidified shape of the Administrations horseshit values and terrible practices. Ancient Rome, Ancient Greece, fake New York, fake Venice and coming very soon, fake Asia, their imaginary naughty pasts rendered into uncanny building materials….each one of them bespeaks the delusions and falsehoods that everyone is living by.

And then…in between each one, all those empty lots between high rises, born of lawlessness and the housing bust, exemplify the gulf between the haves and the have nots, as do the hard working Uber and Lyft drivers from Ethiopia and the Philippines, the topless female bartenders, and the people asleep on the pavement in the morning when it looks like a neutron bomb dropped on Carson street and left only the frailest humans alive.

Meanwhile, the whole city whirls around these fiascos, in a vast attempt – or possibly conspiracy -- to organize vast numbers of humans into having a very rigidly defined kind of fun, the kind based on numbing yourself stupid a la “Brave New World,” “the Matrix,” and the current opioid epidemic. The tourist board would argue otherwise, but in actuality, fun in Vegas seems to be just flat out binge drinking. Everything else is just dross – entertainment that’s sole intention is to make you want to get blotto.  Todd Rundgren’s Utopia, trapeze artists placed above every gaming table, the sad-sack solo guitar player who hollered dirge versions of Buddy Holly songs throughout our lunch at a local pizza joint, you name it. All these things only serve to make people nervous, such that the only way to soothe one’s jangled nerves by downing a cold one. To that end, every place we went provided these 36 ounce or even 64 ounce glasses for margaritas and Bloody Marys. There is a place, I kid you not, called Vince Neil’s Tatuado, which will sell you a miniature toilet bowl that you can hang around your neck, to barf into. It’s at Circus Circus, the kid-friendly casino.

Elsewhere, there are some other nerve-wracking things that grasp desperately at the concept (and at your wallet). You can go shoot a machine gun, or ride a roller coaster or the giant Ferris wheel, or get yourself lap danced on. Or you can go on Slotzilla, the zip line that you can take down the middle of the mall. It costs $25 if you do it sitting and $45 if you do it “Superman” style, with your arms out like your flying. The line for it is tremendously long.  While waiting for your turn, you can drink.

At night the mall fills up. Shapely women with beautiful breasts in teeny tiny bras, teeter-totter heels and fishnets jostle alongside much larger ones with enormous bellies and small eyes, while schlumpy men in cargo shorts and baseball caps lurch around touching their butts “on accident.” There are other kinds of hordes as well, families with small children, couples with strollers, loud brassy hen parties with one girl anointed the bride, and gangs of guys with loud voices and no abs to speak of. All of these are manifestations of old fashioned cultural values, interspersed with the occasional drag queen, like one beefy looking man I saw wearing a t shirt that read “Fiscally Republican/Socially Democrat/Sexually Liberal” a top a lovely, tulle, fairy princess skirt.

There are also lots of people on the Fremont Mall who have some kind of weird side hustle – caricaturists, but palm readers, comedians, and people dressed in crazy costumes who stand there for tips. You see that in London and Barcelona and Budapest as well, but the ones in Vegas are more naked. The concept of sex here is very — what’s the word? Not carnal, or erotic, but just based on some incredibly basic, repressive, and socially constructed set of value, celebrating women with big boobs who wear servile costumes (nurse, maid, tart.) Oh, I remember what the word is: sad. It’s sad.

In truth, I don’t think those old caricatures are really going to last much longer. And yet, it is against this background that the punk rock bowlers really stand out. Whatever their drinking or drug-preferences may be or have been in the past, they pale in comparison to the stag boys and the low/high rollers; their tattoos no longer stand out in a world which has proudly inked its own ass with its foibles. By comparison, punks are righteous, and authentic, and sincere and unafraid; the last men and women who DGAF.

When punk began, back in the day, it was radical, and explosive, and seriously necessary, and honestly, it still is. That’s the saddest thing of all, that it still fucking is. But that’s what made me proud. When I planned the trip, I thought PBR might be a rendering of the real thing, the way that New York New York renders Manhattan and the Luxor recreates ancient Egypt. But that was not the case.  Certainly there is some nostalgia mixed up with the fandom at these shows – someone was moshing in a giant dinosaur outfit at L7. But judging by the multi-aged audience that’s not the whole story, not by a long shot.

Over the years punk rock has gone from being ideologically pure to somewhat tainted, positioning itself by turns as anarchic, apocalyptic, apolitical. Times have changed though, and on Sunday evening, one of the Stern Brothers, a member of Youth Brigade and PRB founder, made a short but extremely eloquent speech asking participants to put aside any indifference they might feel towards the mainstream, to help defeat the regime we live under. “Participating in society is a political act,” he said. “We are currently facing a fascist propaganda machine. Punk rock has always been about questioning authority, and now more than ever, we have to step up and fight.”

Time After Time

On my way into San Francisco to see Al Stewart the other night, I heard an expert on the radio talking about that Laurel-Yanni thing. He said that when something was missing from an auditory text, your brain will compensate with what it knows best. So if you are used to hearing lots of low frequency sounds, your mind will fill it in with low frequency sounds (“Laurel.”) If you are used to hearing lots of high frequency sounds, you’ll hear the other word, “Yanni.”

Basically, your brain erases what it doesn’t know, and fills it in with what it does. And since I was on my way to a concert, I wondered if this applies in some emotional way to music as well. Maybe this wisdom accounts for why some people like certain music that other people hate.

This seemed like an especially pertinent thought when it comes to Al Stewart, because he is one of those artists: either you like him or you don’t. I do, which is why I went to the the Great American Music Hall the other night to see him perform his 1975 album The Year of the Cat in entirety.

The Year of the Cat is one of my formative records. It sticks out of my mind along with a few other randomly assorted soft rock 70s shit that I will stand behind, including (but not limited to) Carly Simon’s No Secrets, Art Garfunkel’s Breakaway, and other tracks too numerous to mention.

That kind of music – the kind filled with what a friend tells me Mojo Nixon once dubbed “foo foo chords” — is specific to a time and place, and Stewart’s work epitomizes it. As founding member of the English folk movement, alongside acts like Fairport Convention and the Incredible String Band, he writes musically complicated songs that are chord driven, melody riven, and verbose. The songs are tuneful, but they’re also a bit finicky,  the sonic equivalent of Thomas Mann or Henry James. For those who don’t know what it sounds like already, one can get an idea of the flavor of his work up by mentioning that early in the set, Stewart said, “This song needs a flute. Does anyone here play the flute?”

Those are truly scary words to hear at a rock concert. But you know who plays the flute? I do. In fact, I play the flute really well, or I used to – I was first flute in the band and orchestra at my high school for all four years and this is one reason why I don’t want to hear it in a rock songs.

Or so I thought. But…I don’t know. My aversion to wind instruments in bands isn’t at all rational. Consider, for instance, the saxophone. The minute the saxophone began, I thought, god, what an embarrassing instrument! It’s like the fucking “Catcher in the Rye” of instruments, i.e., you loved it when you were young before you realized how emotionally manipulative it was. Also, for some reason, no one can play it on stage without leaning back on the guitarist in a terribly pretentious Clarence Clemons-y manner, and Stewart’s player was no exception.

AND YET. When the saxophone rang out in the song “Time Passages” I just had to shrug and go, all that corny emotion, all that goddamn sincerity, all that gushy stuff that got smashed on the rocks of punk rock and growing up, well, I’m just going to embrace my inner saxophone tonight. And after I did that, everything was all right.

Al Stewart, Great American Music Hall, May 19, 2018

This was the first time I’d been to one of those concerts where the band or artist plays one album in entirety. I always thought that sounded boring, but in this case, it wasn’t, as between each song, Stewart explained the genesis of each song and how he came up with its chords, even singing bits of parts that influenced by Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, and the way that he approached each track. But just as you either hear Laurel or Yanni, I’m not going to  convince you to listen to a record you’ve long since decided about, so I won’t tell you about what “Flying Sorcery” turns out to be about, how “Sand In Your Shoes” is just “Positively 4^th Street” upside down, or how that first chord in “Cat” was evolved from a sound check at a Linda Ronstadt concert.

Suffice to say, live, the record held up well for me and the experience of seeing it performed was pretty profound. Indeed, as the music flowed over me I realized how much it had governed my life. And it’s not that surprising, really, because I always prefer books with plots and characters, rather than ones about emotional turmoil, and the same goes for songs. “The Night The Drove Old Dixie Down,” “Ode To Billie Joe,” “Touch Me In the Morning,” even “The Night The Lights Went Out In Georgia”…these are my secret jams, and that is Al Stewart’s forte. Every song on The Year of the Cat is like a little book, with lyrics that refer to the Basque Separatist movement, the Rhodesian conflict, A 16^th century naval battle off the Azores, and Casablanca, and when I was a child I listened to it over and over again. (Needless to say, I did not understand the lyric, “she comes in incense and patchouli.”)

The Year of the Cat was Al Stewart’s 7^th record and it was a smash hit, as was the follow up, Time Passages, the only other one of his works I own. At the Hall, he played the title cut to that record before beginning the Cat sequence, and for personal reasons it struck me harder than the rest of the set altogether, because “Time Passages’ is a song about the way that time, on occasion, exists on a parallel plane rather than on a continuum, like when a veil lifts and you find yourself in two eras at once. Like when, earlier in the day, my father, who has dementia, had asked me who the middle aged man in the living room following him around all day had been. Of course, there was no middle aged man in his living room, and the question made me incredibly sad. But when I was listening to Al Stewart, and he sang, “I know you’re in there, you’re just out of sight,” I thought, maybe the middle aged man did actually exist, and only my father could see him. Or maybe the middle aged man was himself, earlier in the century, when he was a whole person.

And then the saxophone came in, and time slipped for me as well as my father, and as I listened, I heard both Al Stewart playing at the GAMH, and myself standing by the piano, in the same sun room we’ve now converted to a bedroom for my Dad, practicing the flute, the music wafting out the window past the long gone wisteria. And then I had this sudden revelation. I play flute because of this record. Not in spite of it. Not alongside of it. No: this is the origin of that impulse, as are so many other things that wend in and out of my life, all because of music, and all of those things to the good.

Yes, just as my best friend Isabelle’s dream, born of a Marianne Faithfull song, has always been to drive around Paris in a sports car with the top down in the rain, mine is to wake up in a foreign city in a country where they turned back time. The cat experience is a part of who I am, and hearing it again was like a key turning in a lock. I might shut it again in a little while, but from now on, I'll always remember how to get back in. 

The year of my cat.