Pennywise live at Metropolis in Montreal on September 4, 2010

I’m not the hugest Pennywise fan, and admittedly I’m not incredibly familiar with much of their catalogue. I had a copy of 1995′s About Time until I had to sell it during the Great CD Purge of 1998 where I had to unload a bunch of my music to pay my rent. It wasn’t until 2008′s Reason to Believe came out that I paid attention to them again. But having seen them live a couple of times I did remember that they did put on a great show.

But the real reason I went was that I am a big fan of  Zoltán Téglás, their new singer. His vocal work with Ignite is nothing short of electric. While previous singer Jim Lindberg’s voice was okay, I found it a little dry and not always up to the task. I was hoping Téglás would add a whole new dimension to the traditional Pennywise sound.

I missed Fifty Stars Anger and only saw a little of Authority Zero, but the Riverboat Gamblers I was interested in seeing only because I have friends who rave about them but I have found their records unexciting. One thing you can say about them is that they took the stage like headliners, just totally owned the room for their entire 45-minute set. While impressed by their energy it took me a while to get into them. Their last few songs were the definite highlight of their set for me. I will need to give them a closer listen.

Pennywise started up with “Every Single Day” from the aforementioned About Time and while Téglás’ singing is perfectly suited to Pennywise’s quick thrashy HC, what I noticed is that his vocal range is much higher than Lindberg’s was and the band hasn’t re-keyed their music to accommodate their new singer. The result is that they have a singer with a powerful upper range that they weren’t exploiting to its potential. Hopefully, they will develop their new material with this in mind.

After hearing some energetic versions of “Peaceful Day”, “Society”, and “Living for Today”, and watching them enagage in meaningful interaction with the crowd during “Fuck Authority” I realized that the reason I’ve always been so ambivalent about their records and why I love their live show is that they have never come close to capturing the spirit and energy of their music on their records. To truly experience Pennywise you must see them live.

Having said that, I know it was made with the best of intentions, but we must also hold them accountable for the “Bro Hymn“, a tune that was once about friendship and has become the soundtrack for every loud drunken fratboy who ever started a fight on the subway at 2 a.m.

But I guess no one is perfect.

An issue of Flipside from 1989

Flipside’s back!

Read it here!

Hudley from the original Flipside has resurrected the seminal punk rock zine that published from 1977 until 2001 or so.  She has certainly captured the spirit of the old zine and engaged many of the old writers. (I suspect thought that this is likely a bunch of friends having a few beers and deciding to get something going again. You know, like a zine.)

It does seem a bit weird to see a Flipside without Al Flipside but it’s also nice to see that it’s still a zine that shows its writers getting hammered before gigs, although wow some staffers have aged, um, interestingly.

If they manage to keep this going I would love to see some of the old columns come back, and try and get Shane of the infamous Shaneshit column he wrote from jail after multiple convictions of armed robbery.

It might seem quaint now but in the days before Suicide Girls and emo-porn, Flipside was the place for pictures of naked punk chicks. There was another zine that did as well, but it was all it focused on and wasn’t as fun.

Anyway, welcome back!

Don’t be a witness.

John Lydon

It seems like a lifetime ago now but I once saw Public Image Ltd. play a show at the old Exhibition Stadium in Toronto.  It was in the summer of 1989 and they were the middle band between The Sugarcubes and New Order, who were headlining. That was normally not something I would have been interested in except I liked PiL somewhat and, as I put it at the time, I wanted to see Johnny Rotten before he died.

Who could have predicted that less than a decade later he would have resurrected the Sex Pistols and started a whole new career with the Pistols and John Lydon/Johnny Rotten as celebrity. It’s an interesting way to make a living and one that’s perfect for an unconventional personality such as his.

When PiL started playing, Lydon barked into his microphone “We’ve got a half-hour, everyone get off your asses”  and then the band launched into “This is Not A Love Song.”

I don’t remember the whole set but I remember that he played “Flowers of Romance“, “Disappointed” (which was the single from the record he was touring to support at the time) and an awesome extended version of “Rise.”

There was also a point where he instructed one part of the audience to boo another part. Oh Johnny, you so silly.

That show was a real eye-opening growth experience for me in that seeing a punk rock icon being supported by what was obviously professional side-men and back-up singers made me realize that the space between what was considered underground and mainstream was maybe greyer that I originally thought. Even more so than hearing “The Order of Death” in the soundtrack for an episode of Miami Vice, which I thought was weird but exceptionally cool.

My last encounter with Lydon was when I saw him speak at the NXNE conference some years ago. He didn’t have much planned and mostly took questions, and repeatedly mentioned that he was looking for a record label. And he refused to answer a question from one person because he was “too fat.” Oh Johnny, you so silly.

I realize that Lydon and the old-school punk rockers I idolized in my teens owe me nothing, but watching his career unfold the way it did was and continues to be an education in how musicians, well all people actually, make their living, and how it’s never wise to expect things to unfold you think they should based on their persona and your expectations of them.

I am pretty excited to be seeing PiL in a few weeks when they play at L’Olympia here in Montreal. Maybe more so than I was when I saw them 21 years ago.

Sam McPheeters captured all this in a huge article on the man formerly known as Doc Dart.  McPheeters, a veteran of the scene himself, having been the frontman for the highly influential hardcore band Born Against in the early ’90s, and a columnist for Maximum Rock N Roll and the former editor of the fanzine Dear Jesus, is an excellent choice to tell Dart`s story. Having been an important  and controversial voice in the scene himself, McPheeters is one of the few writers from the scene that could relate to Dart, now given himself the unusual name 26, in a perceptive, yet sensitive and unjudgemental way.

He traces 26`s roots from when he was a young bank executive working at his family`s bank, to his dismissal and starting the Crucifux in his late 20s. What it most striking is the juxtaposition between the descriptions of the notoriety of being in a popular punk rock band and the life he subsequently fell into, which, frankly, sounds about two degrees removed from Unabomber territory.

If nothing else, this article made me depressed. This is a story of a man who is clearly unhappy, possibly mentally ill, with an unhealthy need for confrontation for its own sake.