Black Tar Heroines
Powerline Sneakers
The Jukebox romantics.
Hello my friends. It is I captain chaos, here to share with you the details of my latest Punkventure. (This was a show that happened a few weeks ago and I apologize for the delay)
Earlier in the day, I had posted the introduction to this blog to a page in a St. Louis punk forum on facebook. I hadn’t really expected to get anything out of this action. I simply thought it might be a nice start to putting my ideas out into the local scene. Surprisingly, a fellow enthusiast commented immediately. The universe had fucking put something in front of me! She sent me a long message asking me to meet her at a show that night and said that she’d like to possibly collaborate on a zine. SUCCESS! If even one person wants to hang out and talk about punk rock it makes me immensely happy.
Later on, I make way to the show. My GPS is yelling directions at me in Siri’s shrieking shitty voice. The fact that I haven’t ever owned a car until recently becomes glaringly apparent to me. My aural landscape was a never ending blast of car horns and Against Me!. I’m beginning to wonder what the hell I’m doing here, a meek wanderer in a wild city landscape, struggling through through oddball alleyways and failed attempts at parallel parking.
As I enter the venue space, a man greets me at the door to take my money. Apparently there’s two shows tonight, they’ve segregated the stage spaces, and you have to pay separately for each. I have no idea which show I was supposed to go to. I tell him: “I’m just here to see the punk show!” He looks at me quizzically, “yeah but WHICH band are you here to see??” I stare at his little desk looking frantically for a band name that I might recognize from the message before. Pointing like a cavewoman, I show him what I vaguely remember. He takes my money, gives me another weird look, and proceeds to band my arm and allow me to enter.
As I walk in, it looks like a total dive. I approve of this as I make my way to the bar. I order a cheap shitty beer and suck it down, trying to forget the torment of the journey I have just made. I look around me and immediately notice that I’m outnumbered immensely by minors. What have I done??? The band that is about to play is a bunch of kids. They play some really garage-quality pop-punk. One of them is sporting a blink182 t-shirt. I can’t tell if I’m imagining that people are trying to avoid eye contact with me or not. I look wildly out of place. Feeling downtrodden, I text an old roommate and former St. Louis punk rocker. I tell him I’m at a show at Fubar and that I haven’t a clue what is going on. I also ask him if he has any good contacts for my punk blog. He’s got NOTHING… completely useless. Now I’m ready for another beer.
As I walk up to the bar again, the bartender looks at me like the goddamn FACE-MOLE that I feel like I am right now and says: “So…. if you don’t mind me asking… which band are you here to see?” I look up sheepishly as I grab a fistful of pisswater. “This is gonna sound so fucking stupid dude. I don’t even fucking know… I just moved here and I’m trying to start a blog about the punk scene in st. louis… I’m feeling kinda lost and confused right now” He looks back and says: “No that actually is awesome… but maybe tonight wasn’t the best show to go to…” (I found out later that he was actually DEAD-wrong) He looks around at the room in disappointment. I am then introduced to his wife, who is sitting at the bar. She asks me if I wanna go stand by the stage with her. This moment marks the first of many where a punk ambassador has entered my life.
As
we go stand by the stage, I'm filled with a new found hope and
excitement for tonights punkventure. Maybe Captain Chaos can
withstand her fears and dive deeply into this exotic culture. The
next band The Black Tar Heroines appears. They begin to smash some
heavy mid-tempo tunes with dangerous energy. The crowd doesn't seem
to be reacting but I've fallen in love. The lead woman ROARS and
POURS her heart out. She begs us to get wild but we don't oblige. I
don't know why no one started thrashing, but I allowed my head to bob
and
my foot to tap, and I lost myself in the beauty of it all. I felt
this crazy lame warm ass fuzzy shit inside of my soul. Tonight is a
good night to punk.
After
the set I go outside and smoke a cigarette with the lovely
ambassador. She guides me through the bar, introducing me to people
along the way. She asks me where I used to live before I left St.
Louis area. I tell her I grew up in O'Fallon. “Okay, Lesson number
one:,” she retorts, “Never admit that to anyone ever again.” I
laugh heartily in agreement. She makes suggestions about movies,
bands, venues, (and most people I talk to do so throughout the night)
I scribble in my star wars notepad like a fucking madwoman. These
people are all fucking mad crazy geniuses and I'm being guided down
the righteous path to punkdom
I
receive a message from the lovely lady who asked me to meet her here.
I go to the bar and introduce myself to my second ambassador of punk
for the night. We talk about the tragedy and slow death of live
shows. We discuss the terrible elitist attitudes toward musical taste
and how our generation is tearing the oral tradition of sharing art
apart. We talk about starting a zine. I break out my notepad again as
she lists off venues and spaces that I need to visit. The
next band pops up onto the stage. At this point there are
approximately 5 members left of the audience. I guess the crowd that
came here for Black Tar Heroines have left the building.
Powerline
Sneakers are fucking crazy masked-adventurer buttered popcorn
gutterpunk. Their songs are short, loud, and to the fucking point.
One of the guys is wearing this weird ski mask looking thing with
panda bear ears on top, and sporting no shirt. The drummer loses his
shirt shortly thereafter. As he does so the singer comments about
having naked boys on stage and at this point Captain Chaos the
Chanting Lunatic Beast comes out.
“NAKED
BOYS NAKED BOYS NAKED BOYS!!!!” I shout with a giddy sense of
immaturity.
A
dude across the room steps over and fist bumps me. The
sense of camaraderie that I have already begun to feel from being
here this night increases ten fold in this moment. The band continues
playing fast and loud.
“FUCK
YEAH FASTER FASTER!” I scream, completely caught up in the insanity
of it all.
I
can't remember whether it was the guitar player or the bass player,
but they kept making shitty jokes between sets. Something about
leaving popcorn in your seat at the movies instead of going and
throwing it away.
“JUST
PLAY THE FUCKING TUNES BOYS!” I scream. Ambassador of Punk DT looks
over at me with a look of amusement and surprise. “Sorry, I like to
shout a lot sometimes,” I say. She nods and replies: “I've
noticed.
After
the set I go up to the lead singer and try to express that in spite
of my heckling, I enjoyed their show. Somehow in my weird insane PBR
buzzed stupor “heckling” comes out as “haggling.” He corrects
me and continues to seem disinterested in our conversation so I step
outside for another round of smokes with DT and CM. DT
asks if I'd like to walk down the street and see one of the venues
that died a while back. We make our pilgrimage a couple blocks down
the street. She shows me the window that she sat and stuck her feet
out of and was told very politely but sternly to go back inside. I
touched my hand to the brick and mourned the loss of dear Plush. “Oh
Plush, I'm sorry I never knew you... rest in piss.”
As
we walk back towards Fubar we come across the guy who fist bumped me
from earlier and the band he played with on the other stage. We
stop and chat for a minute. I can feel still
feel the PBR coating my brain.
I find my speech to
continue to be
belligerent. The
guys we meet
are not a punk band and I didn't get to hear them because of the
segregation of shows, but they're called Holiday at Sea if any of you
guys are interested. They
have some pretty cool instrumental tunes and
I'm always willing to push local music onto others. Somewhere
in the midst of the conversation I'm yelling this dudes name.
“Are
we already getting a divorce!?!?”
I
yell some more. (yelling helps me remember names.)
“Calm
down I'll be inside in a minute”
CM
pokes her head out the door and beckons me to come inside.
“DUDE
YOU GOT TO SEE THIS BAND!”
I
oblige and follow her in.
As
I enter, the music I hear is making love to my ears. It's got a
pop-punk vibe but with a sense of revealing cold hard truths about
life and expressing a love of music and artistic expression for its
own sake. Smiling like an idiot I bang my head around laughing.
Before one of their next tunes, the front man asks the audience to
crouch down. He requests that we start jumping with him and continue
jumping until we run out of energy. As he kicks off the tune, the
whole floor is bouncing around in conjunction with the moving feet.
In a very short amount of time this turns into a full on mosh. Before
I know it I'm bouncing around running into mass entanglement of
bodies, being tossed around like carrots in your garden salad. Most
of the crowd starts dying down and they return to their places. I'm
still jumping and so are a couple other dudes. Fist-bump guy rams
straight into me, and I ram back. We go back and forth like this for
a while until we're both out of breath. He gives me a pat on the
back. The band kicks off an alkaline trio cover. I begin to
completely lose my shit. Shouting the words to the song from the
audience I let the wildness take over. This moment is fucking
perfect. I am in shock and disbelief at the fact that I had never
heard this band.
The
after the show part has a lot of fun unnecessary details. I could
elaborate more on speaking to random people that I met, taking more
notes, and enjoying the hell out of myself, but I digress. Arm
wrestling matches, shouting matches, and sexually
inappropriate comments
were tossed around. I spoke to the guys from the Jukebox Romantics
for
a
couple hours after the show. All I can say is that these guys are
punk
as fuck. They shared more notes with me and seemed to take just as
much of an interest in me as I did with them. Real people are fucking
hard to come by these days and those dudes embodied the essence of
love and worldly respect. They
have a willingness
to express their
love of art no
matter what types of adversity are thrown their way. The Jukebox
Romantics deserve your fucking time so you better just give them a
fucking listen right now.
In
all of my time going to smaller live shows I have never met
so many people
who
share with me their experiences and conversation. No
one judges me when I admit that I haven't heard of certain bands,
read up on certain philosophies, or seen certain films. They simply
express an excitement at the opportunity to introduce me to
something.
Everybody was welcoming and warm, and they took me under their wings
allowing me to immerse myself. An alien on a foreign planet. Captain
Chaos was no super hero, nor villain tonight. She allowed the heroes
of the scene to emerge and show her the way. She was the one who
called out for help and she was rescued. It became clear in an
instant. Punk is not dead. Punk is never dead.
