It’s not as though he did so badly during the 1990s heyday of Screeching Weasel and the Riverdales, and he also netted a big cash payout from the sale of his Panic Button record label, but since that time things had dried up.  With both of his bands inactive or broken up, depending on how you look at it (Screeching Weasel, for example, spent nearly half of its 25 year history “broken up” without ever showing signs of actually going away), Ben’s solo releases and appearances attracted attention and critical approval, but little in the way of profits.

Not unlike The Queers, with whom they share a long interlinked history, Screeching Weasel has always consisted of Ben accompanied by whichever set of musicians he happened to be playing with at the time.  Both bands have a “classic” lineup (Joe, B-Face and Hugh O’Neill for the Queers; Ben, John Jughead, Dan Vapid and Danny Panic for the Weasels) and era (early to mid-90s), but no serious fan would deny thatBoogada Boogada Boogada, recorded and released before Vapid and Panic were on the scene was a “genuine” Screeching Weasel record, which makes a mockery of some contemporary critics carping that the latest Weasel incarnation is somehow less real because Jughead is no longer in the fold.  (Vapid is, however, and one could argue that his trademark harmonies and guitar lines have become nearly as definitive of the Screeching Weasel sound as Ben’s gravelly, impassioned vocals.)

As fans of the genre will know, I have quite a bit of history with both Ben and Screeching Weasel, and not all of it is pretty.  I met Ben in 1988, when the Boogada-era version of the band came to Berkeley to play Gilman Street with Operation Ivy, but his reputation and charisma had already preceded him.  At the time I was working at and writing for Maximum Rocknroll, the then-crucial fanzine none too subtly lampooned asPunk Bible in Ben’s thinly veiled roman à clef Like Hell (2001).

Ben would eventually become one of MRR’s most popular columnists, but prior to that he was sending in Chicago scene reports that were not only refreshingly irreverent and hilarious, but possessed the added fillip of absolutely infuriating the Windy City’s older and more established scenesters.  Scarcely an issue passed without one or more letters demanding to know who “this kid” thought he was and why we were letting him  speak for the Chicago scene when they’d never even heard of his stupid band from  somewhere out in the suburbs.

The reason we did was, of course, that Ben’s scene reports embodied the punk rock ethos and aesthetic: the irreverence was more than balanced out by his almost palpable idealism and excitement for not just the music, but the whole community that was then growing up around punk rock.  His smart-assed, confrontational personality was only one facet of the real Ben Weasel, I realized within minutes of our first encounter, when he greeted me with a stock putdown of the California granola-head lifestyle that, rather than getting the rise out of me he was clearly hoping for, merely reawakened my inner Detroiter (very much like a Chicagoan, only with a bigger inferiority complex), and we were off to the races, talking shit and shinola about everything and everybody.

That conversation continued by phone and letters through the next couple years, during which Screeching Weasel underwent its first “breakup” and Ben spent a couple years growing disillusioned and embittered over the fact that while Boogada had sold something in the neighborhood of 5,000 copies (a stunning achievement for a relatively unknown band at that time), he and the band had almost no money to show for it.  I shared Ben’s shock and amazement; if Screeching Weasel had sold the same number of records on Lookout, they would have been raking in the money.  This wasn’t idle speculation; although Lookout was still a fledgling label, we had two bands who were in the 5,000-records-sold ballpark, so I needed only look at my quarterly statements to know whereof I was speaking.

That evolved into a discussion of Ben coming to record for Lookout.  I’d made an offer to him in 1988, butBoogada was already committed to another label (the one that would ultimately stiff him).  There was a sticking point, however: Ben wanted to put “Screeching Weasel” to bed and start a new band under a new name, the Gore Gore Girls.  I listened to the tapes and said, “Sounds like Screeching Weasel.  Why don’t you just be Screeching Weasel?  Why throw away all the publicity and credibility you’ve already built up?”

The crux of it was that Ben wanted to be on Lookout; I wanted him to be on Lookout, but as Screeching Weasel.  He ultimately assented, and came out to California to make what for my money remains, hasty and haphazard production and all, the greatest Screeching Weasel record ever, My Brain Hurts.  It sold like gangbusters – deservedly so – and for the first time in his life, Ben was deriving a significant amount of income from playing punk rock, something that until that time he had never quite believed possible.

It’s no secret that while the relationship between Screeching Weasel and Lookout Records went very well for a while – probably for longer than with any of the numerous labels the band has since been associated with – it eventually turned very sour indeed.  Bitter, even: despite all evidence to the contrary, Ben became convinced that I was ripping him off, and I maintained just as steadfastly that I had treated him with the same honesty, openness and yes, even generosity, that I had shown to every band on Lookout.

The dispute has been bandied about endlessly in public and private, so there’s no sense in rehashing it here; it’s long since passed the point where a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.  For nearly 10 years Ben and I had no contact apart from the occasional barb exchanged in the media, but in 2007 we began communicating again, at least in part because Ben’s interest had been piqued by the Pop Punk Message Board (PPMB), an online community that for me represented some of the best aspects of the old MRR and Gilman Street scenes minus the political and intellectual rigidity and proscriptiveness.

Among the PPMB’s recurring tropes is a constant reworking of “What’s your favorite Screeching Weasel record?” and the classic Weasel lineup was beyond question the ur-band by which all “board bands” were measured.  Ben’s participation in the PPMB led to a highly acclaimed appearance at that summer’s annual Insubordination Fest, the high holy days of modern pop punk.

Nearly everyone there recalls a New Ben, a happy, smiling Ben, who readily, enthusiastically interacted with fans and showed every sign of enjoying being back on stage again. (I should note that one of Screeching Weasel’s recurring difficulties – the Riverdales’ as well – had been Ben’s growing antipathy for nearly every aspect of touring and performing in public.)  This led to a series of shows, beginning in his former home town of Chicago, then in a few other towns around the country – as long as he could fly in and out in a weekend, it didn’t count as “touring” – in which, billed as Ben Weasel, he and a newly put together band performed a medley of Screeching Weasel, Riverdales, and Ben Weasel songs.

At first the shows were instant sellouts, with people (yours truly included) flying in from other states and even other countries, but gradually the excitement died down, and Ben grew perturbed once more about his future.  Worse, he’d fallen out with the PPMB, home of his most impassioned and influential fans, for what I can understand would be upsetting but still seemed trivial reasons.  A handful of self-appointed loudmouths had been taking him to task for allegedly making too much money at the Insub Fest (he didn’t; in fact he was very modestly paid) and otherwise not pandering to their particular and peculiar notions of what constituted “punk rock.”

Considering the abuse that had been heaped on Ben over the years by “da punx,” it was pretty mild stuff, especially when you considered that most PPMBers still loved him.  But though I urged him to overlook and/or laugh at these attacks, he ultimately concluded that, contrary to his initial impression, the PPMB was a “cesspool” of bottom feeders, and that he’d be better served by starting his own message board where he’d be free to ban anyone with disagreeable opinions or (one of his favorite tactics) edit posts to make them say something quite different from what the poster had originally intended.

While the Riverdales Discussion Board attracted its share of witty and personable members, several of whom permanently defected from the PPMB (your motives and character were called into question if you visited “that board” unless on a specific mission to obtain information or make mischief), but also drew a group of sycophants so thrilled at the opportunity to interact with “the” Ben Weasel that they would say or do virtually anything he asked.

It began to resemble an online amalgam of Orwell’s 1984 and Enver Hoxha’s Albania, with a side order ofLord Of the Flies.  Those who took the business seriously – primarily the sycophants – lived in fear of uttering a wrong word or opinion – and what was considered “wrong” changed with dizzying rapidity – which would result in a temporary or permanent banning; in Orwellian terms, becoming an unperson.  As if that weren’t enough, there was a secret board-within-a-board invisible to most members, where the inner circle, what would have been called the Central Committee in commie days, could gather to ridicule and gossip about everyone else.  I suspect there might even have been a secret board-within-a-board-within-a-board that I wasn’t privy to, but I’ll probably never know now.

Because, sadly, I’m no longer a member of the inner circle, nor the outer circle, nor any circle at all.  I’m even banned from following Ben on Twitter.  And how, you ask, did this sorry state of affairs come to pass?

Before I delve into that, let me bring you up to speed on the Screeching Weasel front.  As you’ll recall, the Ben Weasel solo shows were beginning to run out of steam, and Ben, in unguarded moments, was expressing some concern at what he was to do next.  I urged him, just as I had in 1990 and 1991, to resume using the name Screeching Weasel.  It’s your “brand,” I told him.  It’s got an indefinable and invaluable cachet that you created and that you deserve to benefit from.

A rose by any other name might smell as sweet, but a piece of music clearly identified as Screeching Weasel will sell more sweetly.  I’d found that out back in the Lookout days when the clearly superior My Brain Hurtslagged noticeably behind the also excellent but inconsistent Boogada when it came to sales.  The explanation, when it finally hit me, was blatantly obvious: the Boogada cover featured the classic Weasel head that has launched a thousand punk rock tattoos; My Brain Hurts had some weird artsy crap that barely let you know it had anything to do with Screeching Weasel.

I don’t claim sole responsibility for Ben’s decision to re-christen his music-making endeavors as Screeching Weasel.  It could be that many people were telling him the same thing, or that he himself had been leaning in that direction.  But however it came about, my prediction came true: a simple name change produced a stunning uptick in demand, to the point where he was not only able to pack out larger venues than he’d been able to play before, but was also able to demand – and get – five-figure performance fees he could have only dreamed of a couple years earlier.

It helps, of course, that he’s put together a band that, while perhaps lacking the je ne sais quoi of the “classic” lineup, is easily the most technically gifted and adept group of musicians he’s ever played with, and married that with top-flight production values on both the new Weasel record and efforts by the similarly revived Riverdales (almost but not quite the same personnel).

So, it looks like it can only be onward and upward from here, and while I hesitate to make predictions, let me say that if Ben/Screeching Weasel are ever going to break through to the mainstream, this will be their time to do it, and I’d say the chances of that happening are better than average.  But what, you might still be wondering, about that bustup between Ben and myself?

Well, it’s about that old bugbear, politics.  Ben and I have, over the years, argued politics from a variety of different standpoints.  We’ve both changed positions numerous times, enough so that there’ve been times when I’ve been to the right of him and other times to the left.  My own shifts have been more dramatic than his; when we first met I was a firebrand, garden variety leftist with overtones of both hippie and punk rock extremism, whereas he’s generally gravitated between slightly left and slightly right of center.

But that changed when he acquired a fondness or at least a sympathy for Sarah Palin and then for the whole Tea Party movement.  I suspect his devotion to either cause was not as wholehearted as it seemed, and flowed at least partially out of the old Weaselian desire to provoke and disturb those who think in slogans rather than ideas.  But as these things often do – I’ve caught myself pulling the exact same stunt in dealing with lockstep leftists – the provocative statements begin to take on a life and reality of their own.

I was one of the few people on the Riverdales board allowed to passionately and defiantly dispute Ben’s take on government spending (he’s against it) and government health care (ditto).  But I finally ran afoul of him when, in his words, I made things “personal” (this from the man who suggested that my own ideas must stem from being “on drugs” and who erased a carefully reasoned and written argument I’d posted and replaced it with the Simpsons internet meme “old man yells at clouds.”

What had I said that was so offensively “personal?”  Merely pointed out that by opposing Obama’s “bailouts” and health care plans as unaffordable, he was being kind of hypocritical, considering that his own family derived much of its income and all of its health insurance from the State of Wisconsin (his wife’s employer), which in turn was staying in business only through the grace of – wait for it – those damned Obama stimulus funds.

“That’s different,” he retorted in various ways, refusing to engage with my contention that, as the old 60s slogan had it, all politics is personal.  You want to cut spending, you want to cut health care?  Great.  Now tell me whose benefits, whose health care you’re cutting.  Because it always comes down to that.  “Government spending” is not some abstract pie-in-the-sky concept that you can slash without consequences, and I demanded repeatedly that Ben explain exactly who was going to have to go without a government job and government health care so that Ben and his family could continue to enjoy theirs.

Well, that’s where it ended.  My next visit to the Riverdales Board found me confronted with a ban notice charging that “You can’t argue politics without making it personal,” to which I can only answer, “Neither can anybody else.”  And now, with what some might call delicious irony, Ben is up in arms over a whole new cause: the Tea Party-affiliated governor of Wisconsin has had the unmitigated gall to do what the Tea Party and Sarah Palin were saying all along they would do: cut government spending and benefits, and suddenly Ben’s own family is in line for the chop.

We’re talking, most likely, about a few hundred bucks at most here, but it’s the principle, damn it (i.e., it’s the money), and overnight Ben is practically singing the International and Solidarity Forever over the perfidiousness of those damned Republicans (don’t worry, he hasn’t come around to supporting Obama, who he still reviles as a tax-grabbing liberal, or those “dumb ass left wingers” who, through organizing unions, won that pay and those benefits for the Weasel family in the first place).

In fact, he claims, he’s now “getting it from both ends,” Republican and Democrat, which he takes, with a certain morbid sanguinity, as a sign that he has “finally” arrived in the middle class.  And so he has; between his wife’s government job, his family’s government health care, and his greatly increased income from playing and recording punk rock, he’s in a position that most Americans – and nearly all aspiring musicians – can only dream of.  All tatty little political disagreements aside, I wish him well, hope he enjoys the ride, and wonder if perhaps next time he’ll be a little more careful about what he wishes for.
—
Larry Livermore is a writer currently living in Brooklyn, New York. He penned a column for Maximum Rock ‘n Roll for seven years, followed by a 14-year stint at the now-defunct Punk Planet. Check out his blog at www.larrylivermore.com, or email him at llivermore@gmail.com. This column was originally published on larrylivermore.com.

The Bob-Lo boat (there were actually two of them, the Ste. Claire and the Columbia) was a magical, wondrous craft that ferried people from downtown Detroit to the magical, wondrous place known as Bob-Lo Island. Well, as magical and wondrous a place as you were likely to encounter at the mouth of the virulently polluted Detroit River where it dumped its waste into the similarly polluted Lake Erie, anyway.

The ride downriver lasted about half an hour, taking us past a dreary succession of chemical plants and steel mills that freely spewed their effluent into the water and the skies. But in those days that seemed perfectly normal.  Sure, it stunk, and sometimes it even hurt a little to breathe, but the thick air cast a hazy glow over everything, especially when the blood red sun was disappearing into the miasma and the Bob-Lo boat was making its languid way back upriver, carrying a load of weary but happy Detroiters home from their day of merry-go-rounds, picnics, and roller coaster rides. The band played, the teenagers and young adults danced, and the dwarflike Captain Bob-Lo made his way through the crowds, sometimes amusing, sometimes terrorizing the children who caromed around the deck like so many pinballs on a Force Ten sugar rush.

There were four decks, and I used to migrate from the top, with its glorious open-air views of the Ontario and Michigan riverfront, to the bottom, where I could peer right down into the deafeningly loud and stiflingly hot engine room, savoring the smells of the superheated oil coating the enormous piston as it thrust in and out with an almost alarming clank and thump.  But the true heartbeat of the ship was on and around the dance floor, and it was there that the serpent of sorrow crept for the first time into my Bob-Lo childhood Eden.

Most families, at least most families of modest means like my own, got at best one trip a year to Bob-Lo.  If you were lucky, you might get an extra visit or two by being invited along with a friend’s family, or maybe if your dad was in the Knights of Columbus or the Lions Club (mine wasn’t), there’d be a group outing in addition to your annual family trip.  In my case, I was used to going once a year and making the most of it.

But when you got to sixth grade, everything changed.  Beginning that year, and continuing in seventh and eighth, you got to go on a end-of-school Bob-Lo excursion, with, apart from a few token chaperones, no annoying parents to interfere with your fun.  As much as I was looking forward to this, I dreaded the other part of the tradition: the sixth grade trip was the first time boys were not only allowed, but actually expected to ask girls to be their date for the day.

Naturally, there was no end of talk and excitement over this prospect, to the point where schoolwork became little more than an afterthought during the last couple weeks before B-Day.  Having in the past always had a perfectly good time at Bob-Lo without dragging a girl along, I saw no reason to change things now, but the peer pressure was terrific, to the point where I was being asked a dozen times a day who I was going with, and being warned that I’d better choose someone soon “before all the cool girls are taken.”

My trouble was twofold: not only did I not particularly want to go with a girl, but worse, I couldn’t even imagine why some girl would want to go with me.  Finally, though, not wanting to be left even further out of the social mainstream than I already was, I made a list of three girls I didn’t actively dislike and who seemed nice enough that they might not want to hurt my feelings by rejecting me.  Having had no experience in asking girls for dates, and not much, for that matter, in talking to them at all, I approached the first girl on my list with the enthusiasm of a condemned man mounting the gallows and mumbled, “Um, you probably don’t want to go to Bob-Lo with me, do you?”

To their credit, none of the girls laughed in my face; they were, in fact, very polite with their prettied-up versions of “Thanks but no thanks.” But at the end of the day, I was left to accept what I’d expected all along: nobody in her right mind would want to go on a date with me, probably ever.  I still had a pretty good time, riding the usual rides, stuffing myself to the point of near-nausea on cupcakes, green grapes, and Vernor’s Ginger Ale.  As twilight neared I boarded the boat for home with the satisfied sense that when it came to enjoying the sublime pleasures of boat rides and amusement parks, girls were entirely dispensable.

But that comfortable bubble abruptly burst when I discovered that nearly all of my classmates were on or around the dance floor, and that some of them were actually dancing.  With girls, no less, with the girls they’d asked to come to Bob-Lo with them, and who, for reasons that continued to elude me, had said yes, they’d love to.

The band — I can’t see them in my mind’s eye, can’t tell you how many musicians there were or what instruments they played, but I can still hear them, even today — played slightly jazzed-up versions of the current Top 40 hits.  The only one I can remember — and it seemed as though they played it all the way home — was Bobby Darin’s “Dream Lover,” with its plaintive refrain:

Because I want (yeah yeah)
A girl (yeah yeah)
To call my own
I want a dream lover
So I won’t have to dream alone

And in that moment a thick fog of hopelessness settled over me.  The song was telling my story: all my life I would dream alone, never even knowing for sure who or what it was I wanted, let alone having a prayer of getting it.  Hadn’t my failure with the three girls I’d asked been proof enough?  Why would I want to humiliate myself further?  I was 11 years old, and doomed.

The rest of my Detroit years would rush away in a wave of adolescent sturm und drang.  I didn’t bother asking any girls on the Bob-Lo trips in seventh and eighth grade, and then there were no more trips, because we were in high school.  I guess some of the kids went on their own — with dates, of course — but the school was no longer involved, and of course I was too old to go with my parents.  So sometime in the early 1960s Bob-Lo became little more than a bittersweet memory, and why I still think and dream about it all these years later, I don’t know.

I’ve always been quick to leave places — and to some extent people as well — and slow to let them go.  Even now, 45 years after officially moving away from Detroit, I still haven’t completely shaken its dust from my heels, and though I know it will almost certainly never happen, I sometimes catch myself speculating about what it would be like to move back there.  It would be so much cheaper than New York, I argue; I could live like a king.  I already know the accent; people there would be less pretentious and status-conscious (I don’t know where I got the latter idea; everywhere I’ve lived, from rural wilderness to great metropolis, people have been status-conscious, and as for pretentious? Well, they all pretended that they weren’t).

Of course, the Detroit I knew — and didn’t particularly like in the first place — is no longer there, vanished with the Bob-Lo boats, the steel mills and auto plants, the Motown hit factory, and over a million of its people.  Oh, how we used to complain about what a lousy home town we’d been stuck with — dirty, smelly, ugly, with nowhere to go and nothing to do — and of course in the rear view mirror of history that sounds crazy.  Who wouldn’t trade the post-apocalyptic ruin of today’s Detroit for the brash, brawling, cocky, thriving, and sprawling Motor City of yesteryear?

Well, quite a few people, possibly; while Detroit of the 1950s and ’60s was rolling in money and rich with opportunity, it was also rigidly segregated and un-self-consciously racist.  Its prosperity was also founded on a grand delusion: that America and the world could continue to consume ever greater volumes of fossil fuels and dump the detritus willy-nilly into the environment without ever suffering any consequences.

We learned otherwise, and I imagine we’ve still got more to learn.  The riots, the gas lines, the crime wave, the collapse of the city’s infrastructure, the exodus of more than half its citizens, all left their painful imprint on this staggering, punch-drunk shell of a city.

Then what should pop on my iPod this morning but the Marvelettes, letting girls everywhere know they’d better watch out for that playboy, and for a moment it was 1963 again, baking in the summer sun as we gunned the engines on our 8 MPG Chevy hotrods and rolled down the Dix-Toledo Highway en route to a dip in the old stone quarry and maybe a lightning run across the state line for some firecrackers and 3.2 beer.

That was Detroit, too: the cars, the music, the exhilarating sense of freedom and possibility that, to be sure, mostly revolved around the idea that some day we’d make enough money or discover some kind of angle that would enable us to move away.  Crossing the Fort Street Bridge past the smudgepot forest of natural gas flares whose overpowering stink let you know you well and truly in the heart of the city, cruising up Jefferson past the abandon all hope, ye who enter here gates of Zug Island, or Fort Wayne, where newly minted 18-year-olds with scarcely a clue about what awaited them were processed and packed off to Vietnam.

In the midst of the haze and the smoke and the random brutality there’d be oases like Bob-Lo or Belle Isle, or the Detroit Institute of the Arts, its cathedral-like entrance hall covered by a Diego Rivera mural that I one day dubbed the Sistine Chapel of the working classes, the Detroit Historical Museum, with its haunting re-creations of city streets and storefronts from the mid-19^th century, the free summer concerts by the world-class Detroit Symphony Orchestra or our real hometown heroes, the Supremes.  Ted Williams bouncing a home run off but not over the roof of Briggs Stadium, Mickey Mantle lashing one off the face of the upper deck (but the Tigers still came from behind to win it), the lights of the Ambassador Bridge twinkling in the night as though they lit the path to Oz rather than the pleasantly mundane town of Windsor, Ontario.

Downtown was a phantasmagoria of commerce, industry and vice: three vast department stores that rivaled, some dared to whisper, even Macy’s or Gimbel’s in faraway New York.  Why, a fellow could get just about anything he needed somewhere in the vicinity of Woodward Avenue and its environs, be it a perfectly respectable suit of clothes set of furniture, or a thoroughly shady visit to a burlesque show or dirty book store.  It’s all gone now, some of it replaced or rebuilt elsewhere, much of it vanished forever like so many of 20^th century America’s certitudes and certainties.  Gone, and as my generation fades away, most likely forgotten as well, but all this was Detroit, and I dream of it still.

Oh, there’s one other catch as well: those who can’t keep up the payments for their new body part are hunted down by the film’s eponymous repo men and knocked out by a tranquilizer dart, after which the organ or joint in question is reclaimed.  ”I’m required by law to ask you if you would like an ambulance to be called or to wait on standby,” Jude Law tells an unconscious patient before slicing open his chest and repossessing his artificial heart.

I wouldn’t say I’m over the moon about Obama’s “government takeover of health care.”  I’d be considerably happier if it actually were a government takeover, because while I’m not fully convinced a single payer system is the best way to go, it’s got to be a vast improvement over letting the private insurance cartel run things.  But at the same time I’m inclined to think a public-private hybrid like the one that exists in Australia and a number of European countries might do the best job of providing universal care and keeping costs down.

Be that as it may, while I wasn’t enthusiastic about the watered down, attenuated version of health care that finally emerged from the House of Representatives, many if not most of my doubts were assuaged by the spectacle of Republicans railing against it like so many Kang and Kodos doppelgängers.  To suggest that John Boehner’s body had been inhabited by a malevolent space alien would be generous, since any terrestrial explanation for the dazzling array of illogic and untruth he and his colleagues have unleashed on the public these past weeks would reflect far less favorably on him.

Although I vote for Democrats most of the time, I wouldn’t consider myself an especially partisan person.  I never cared much for Nancy Pelosi, and my affection for Barack Obama has more to do with his ideals (at least as expressed by him) and his rhetoric than his political affiliation.  But Pelosi has certainly grown in my estimation as a result of her ability to steer this bill through Congress, and just when I was starting to lose faith in Obama’s willingness or even ability to stand up for principles and knock a few heads together if necessary, he’s come through just as I always hoped he could.

Yes, of course I’d like a robust (as they say) public option, and I’d like even more a federal rate commission empowered to put the kibosh on extortionate insurance prices (I just got hit with a 20 percent increase this year, which apparently is “moderate” compared to what some have been asked to pay), but let’s be realistic: the bill that got through the House yesterday is the most that we can expect at this time.  My guess is that Congress will have to revisit it when problems start cropping up and insurance rates keep rising, but at least we have (finally!) established that the government has a legitimate role in guaranteeing what private industry has manifestly failed to do: provide all Americans with reasonably priced and effective health care.

“Health care is a privilege, not a right” seems to be the latest talking point of Republican legislators and talk show hosts, which seems to fly in the face of the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” it reads, “that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with inherent and inalienable rights; that among these, are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”  Note: it says “rights,” not privileges, and how could you argue that life itself, not to mention liberty and the pursuit of happiness, are not threatened — if not made downright impossible — by the lack of access to medical care?

The Declaration goes on to say: “…that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.”

Hello, teabaggers!  Organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. All this blather about government having “no business” getting involved in health care flies right out the window when looked at in this light.  Sick people are not safe and happy; sick people are not at liberty to live their lives to the best of their abilities; in many cases, sick people lose even the right to life itself.  Organizing governmental powers so as to address this very real problem is as American as it gets; letting private corporations maintain a stranglehold over who does and does not receive medical care and allowing people to be bankrupted by illness is, on the other hand, downright unpatriotic.  It’s the sort of thing you would expect in a feudal or caste-ridden system, not the shining city on a hill that confused teabaggers make America out to be, all the while contradicting and undermining everything that was ever admirable about this land.
—
Larry Livermore is a writer currently living in Brooklyn, New York. He penned a column for Maximum Rock ‘n Roll for seven years, followed by a 14-year stint at the now-defunct Punk Planet. Check out his blog at www.larrylivermore.com, or email him at llivermore@gmail.com. This column was originally published on larrylivermore.com.

That’s not completely true. In fact, I’d sensed an oncoming catastrophe at least as far back as October of 1967, which, as I remember, was when we stopped paying rent on our cozy little apartment on North Hamilton Street. If nothing else, I was at least vaguely aware that we were ultimately going to be homeless, and probably right about when the full, sullen force of a Michigan winter was about to kick in.

That wasn’t our intention, of course; the apartment, on the ground floor of one of the many 19th century houses that made wandering the streets of Ypsilanti a bit like time travel, was the nicest place we had ever lived. Oh, sure, it was a dump in many regards, and lacked most of the niceties – but also the sterility – of our parents’ suburban homes, but it had character. Had it been in our power, we might have stayed there for years, but we knew we had no such power, that life was inexorably spinning out of control, and that it was only a matter of time before our little world was relentlessly torn apart.

If pressed I could trace the origins of that foreboding to the day in mid-September, 1967 when we took LSD for the first time. I remember lying on a bare mattress on the living room floor listening to side one of Are You Experienced? and thinking that life would never be the same again. It wasn’t, either, and though the trajectory was not always straight downhill, the general trend was in that direction.

Until LSD entered the picture, things seemed reasonably innocent. A bit mischievous, perhaps, and certainly bereft of taste – I mean, we actually went around town wearing hippie love beads and with tinkly bells dangling from our belts – but essentially harmless. At least that’s what we told ourselves, even as evidence piled up to the contrary.

I’d met Darrell the previous spring when, through another set of unfortunate circumstances that mostly involved me being a jerk, I’d found myself living on the streets, and he let me move into his dorm room at EMU. I was nominally a student myself, though I hadn’t attended class since February (this was sometime in May). Between us we’d resolved that come autumn we’d turn over a new leaf, get an apartment together, get serious about our studies and, simultaneously become full-fledged hippies.

During the intervening summer we discovered marijuana – or rather, discovered where we could buy it on a regular basis – and that, without our noticing at first, began to change our perspective. We were still intending to go to class and study, but other things began to take priority, smoking pot as much and as often as possible being foremost among them.

Subtle and not so subtle changes ensued. Furniture gradually disappeared from the apartment to make room for the mattresses that made for easier lounging. Paranoid about the neighbors, we covered the windows with heavy curtains and lived in a timeless sort of twilight. The only decoration I recall was a giant poster of Allen Ginsberg wearing a sign that read “Pot Is Fun.”

And it was fun, at least for a while, or we wouldn’t have kept doing it. By now we’d made contact with a couple dozen other budding hippies, and if we weren’t hanging out at our place smoking pot and listening to music, we were at one of their houses doing the same. Still, we seemed able to cope – just about – with the demands of everyday life, even if our plans to attend school and get part-time jobs had been jettisoned when September was barely underway.

But once LSD entered the picture, everything else went out the door, including what was left of the furniture. The idea of paying rent became a meaningless abstraction, something that the bourgeoisie might be hung up on, but wasn’t going to trouble us.

By the time our landlady realized what a couple of deadbeats she was stuck with, October and part of November had slipped away. When she tacked an eviction notice to the front door on the first of December, you might think we’d use the month’s notice it gave us to make some plans or come up with some money, but instead we decided we needed a holiday and I bounced a check to buy us tickets to New York.

Christmas dinner was a can of corned beef hash and a store-bought pound cake, financed by pulling a wagon up and down the block collecting pop bottles, and then came New Year’s Eve, our last night before homelessness. Darrell’s parents had sent him a few bucks. What were we going to spend it on? More LSD, of course.

At midnight we went our separate ways, our plan being to find sympathetic and/or gullible college girls to crash with. Darrell, being a smooth talker and (at least prior to his hippie incarnation) dresser, had no trouble charming his way into a house one street over, but I, not so gifted in that department, was at a loss. Then I remembered two girls I knew who’d just moved into an old (c. 1845) stone house just off North Huron Street. They had what was nominally a one-bedroom apartment, but it had a lot of odd corners and cubbyholes and I could see it had potential. Better yet, they didn’t seem inclined to throw me out.

What had begun as two girls sharing a student apartment morphed within days into a full-on hippie commune known around town as Insanity House (a nickname given us by the other local hippies; it would be years later before I realized they hadn’t meant it as a compliment). Each night more people would come over to hang out and drop acid with us, and most of them seemed to end up living there. By late January I counted 34 people as more or less permanent residents.

I also counted the number of consecutive days that I’d taken LSD: 30. In one of those inexplicable bits of drug-fueled logic, I decided it was important that I continue taking LSD until my day count matched the number of people in our “family” (yes, we actually referred to it as such). Which I did, hitting 34 days on the 2nd of February. That night’s trip wasn’t too pleasant; we’d run out of both money and the good stuff, and whatever it was I managed to scrounge left me thinking that everything had become a photographic negative of itself. Worse, I had a sickening feeling that this time I’d crossed a line, that something in my brain chemistry had been permanently altered, and that things were always going to look this way.

Late that night I found myself raving like a lunatic to a bunch of strangers in an apartment near campus. Desperate to impress them, I told them how Insanity House was actually a revolutionary organization, and that though we financed ourselves by a combination of stealing and selling drugs (true), our real work involved sabotaging government and corporate institutions to oppose the Vietnam War and bring down the government (a complete and utter lie). I bragged that we were making bombs and were going to take out the local draft board (also a complete lie), and when somebody asked how I was going to avoid getting arrested, I breezily assured him that I had a “system” that made it impossible for the police to pin anything on me.

“Sounds like you’ve got it pretty well figured out,” said a mustachioed character who’d been introduced to me as Maurice. “Can you get me two kilos of weed?”

“No problem,” I lied. In fact, I’d done almost no drug dealing on my own, not least because it was impossible for me to hang on to any amount of drugs without using them and/or giving them away. Most of the dealing that supported Insanity House was handled by a hard-boiled but soft-hearted (maybe a bit soft-headed as well) woman named Winnie, who’d somehow inveigled some local drug barons to advance us 300 hits of LSD. Unfortunately, we’d ended up eating almost all of it, and the money from the little bit that was sold mostly went to finance late-night pizza parties and the like.

Winnie was freaking out, not knowing how she was going to pay back the money, and the rest of us were freaking out, not knowing where we were going to get more acid (food was mostly an afterthought and rent had never been thought about at all). As a result, and also because I was feeling fried from my previous night’s experience (the latest rumor was that the CIA was putting speed in LSD to sabotage the hippie movement, which in my mind explained why I hadn’t been able to sleep well lately), February 3 was the first day since New Year’s Eve that I didn’t take acid. Winnie had disappeared, and the rest of the Insanity House crew sat around disconsolately staring at the walls and wondering what was going to become of us.

She showed up the following morning bursting with good news: she’d managed to talk some Detroit dealers into fronting her another 50 hits of acid. “But this time we really have to sell it all,” she insisted. “Then maybe we can start getting back on our feet again.” She added that the Detroit dealers were not hippies, they were gangsters, and would probably kill us if we stiffed them.

Having conveyed that cheerful bit of information, she pulled me aside and handed me the vial of acid. “Hide this somewhere safe,” she said. “If I hang onto it, everyone will be asking me to give them some, and you know me, I just won’t be able to keep saying no.” Considering my own track record, I thought this was a strange request, but I’d actually come to be viewed as a sort of quasi-leader of Insanity House, no thanks to any merits on my part, but possibly because everyone else seemed even crazier than I was.

I buried the vial under a few inches of snow at the back of the yard before leaving to set up the marijuana deal I’d talked myself into two nights earlier. At the last minute, a fit of paranoia overtook me. What if someone had seen where I’d hid it? I looked around for a better hiding place; not seeing one, I stuffed the vial back into my pocket.

Maurice – what kind of name was that for a hippie pot dealer, I asked myself? – picked me up in his car, and we drove to Ann Arbor. We parked on Forest Street, just off South University, and I told him to wait there while I went to the dealer’s house. Michael, a soft-spoken grad student, hadn’t been expecting me, and looked at me as though I were crazy when I asked for two keys. “I’ve never had that much marijuana here,” he said. “I don’t think I’ve ever even seen that much marijuana.”

“Okay, I’ll take what you have,” I told him, which turned out to be four ounces, and the most marijuana I’d ever seen in my life. I took it back to the car, told Maurice there’d been a misunderstanding and that it would be a day or two before I could get the rest of his order. He didn’t seem perturbed at all, just sat there staring straight ahead. “Well, guess we’d better get back to Ypsilanti, then,” I said, but Maurice still didn’t say a word, nor did he make a move to start the engine. In that same instant I saw two rough-looking men come running toward us from across the street. They were both carrying guns pointed in our direction.

“Maurice, get the hell out of her now!” I yelled, but he continued to sit there as the car door opened and I was dragged onto the sidewalk and handcuffed. They frisked me quickly before hauling me down to the police station; it wasn’t until the second search, conducted just before they locked me in a cell, that they found the vial of LSD. Ironically, that was only a minor detail as far as the police were concerned; at the time Michigan’s laws against marijuana were far more severe than those against LSD. The LSD might have gotten me a year in jail; for sales of marijuana I was looking at 20.

So that was how I spent February 4, 1968. Overall, a bit of a bummer, as the hippies liked to say. However, it was not quite over yet. Sometime a bit before midnight, the police cut me loose, for reasons I couldn’t comprehend at the time, but which I later learned involved them wanting to shadow me and see who I might lead them to. In an all-night planning session with the Insanity House brain trust, fueled by – naturally – still more LSD, it was decided that I’d go underground (it was all the rage in those days) and wait for the revolution.

At dawn I set out for New York City in my friend Jay’s ‘41 Mercury. No headlights, so we couldn’t drive at night, and no heater, which meant that even swathed in blankets we were miserably, miserably cold. We got stopped by cops in Ohio, Pennsylvania and New Jersey, but the warrant hadn’t gone out for me yet. A couple weeks later, the FBI came looking for me at Jay’s parents’ house in Flatbush.

His mother covered for me “as long as I never see you around here again,” and I bounced around the country, to Ohio, back to New York, then to California for the rest of the year before it sunk in that the revolution wasn’t going to happen soon enough to save my ass. Eventually, when all the hubbub had died down, a lawyer was able to broker a deal that left me serving only minimal jail time and a couple years of probation. By 1969 things were more or less back to normal. Insanity House was long gone, of course, busted and trashed by the cops as soon as they realized I’d slipped away, and Jay, the kid who drove me to New York, was dead of a heroin overdose, his body left behind at a rest stop on the Rhode Island Turnpike by his buddies who didn’t want to miss the rock festival they’d been headed for.

Jan, the girl I’d been paired up with at Insanity House – as the alpha-couple, we’d had our own “room,” a closet big enough to accommodate a single mattress – got religion, married a preacher, and, the last I heard, had five kids. A couple years earlier she’d been talking (literally) to trees and insisting she was reincarnated from a cat. I hung around Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor a while longer, but it just wasn’t the same anymore, and as soon as my probation was up, I got the hell out of there. I’ll always have a soft spot in my heart for Ann Arbor, and try to visit from time to time, but Ypsilanti (Ypsi-tucky, as the locals often call it), with its brooding Gothic houses and the dark, baleful cloud that seems to hang over the place on even the brightest of days, still scares the hell out of me. I’ll go there every once in a long while, mostly as a way of reminding myself that I’m still free to leave.
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Larry Livermore is a writer currently living in Brooklyn, New York. He penned a column for Maximum Rock ‘n Roll for seven years, followed by a 14-year stint at the now-defunct Punk Planet. Check out his blog at www.larrylivermore.com, or email him at llivermore@gmail.com. This column was originally published on larrylivermore.com.

But not far behind in the “have they no shame?” department is the cavalcade of Republicans denouncing Obama’s health care proposals (and pretty much anything else the President has tried to do) on the grounds that it will increase the deficit. Particularly odious are the ones who claim, “Well, it would be nice to do something about health care, but we just can’t afford it. The country is broke.”

They do have a point; by conventional standards, we are broke, or very nearly so. But thanks for noticing now, Republicans; a shame it escaped your notice when you — that’s right, you — were busily bankrupting us.

Not everybody has such a short attention as to have forgotten that President Clinton handed the federal government over to George Bush with not just a balanced budget, but a surplus that stretched as far into the future as prognosticators could prognosticate. Within two years Republican policies had turned those surpluses into not just a deficit, but, by the time the Republicans had been turned out of office, the biggest deficit in history.

Where was all this talk of fiscal responsibility when the Bush administration pushed through the tax cuts that overwhelmingly benefited the richest Americans and saddled all Americans with generations of debt? When a lying and/or delusional President led us into a mostly pointless and — even considering the merits of removing Saddam Hussein — an incredibly mismanaged and wasteful war? We can’t afford to provide even the most basic health insurance for all Americans? Oh, but you had no problem passing that colossal unfunded liability masquerading as a prescription drug program for seniors but which in reality functions as a means of funneling hundreds of billions of dollars in corporate welfare to our poor, struggling pharmaceutical companies.

Now we’ve even got the teabaggers, rabble-rousers, and hatemongers attacking Obama for spending or at least lending jaw-dropping amounts of federal money on trying to stabilize the economy, bail out the financial system, and ameliorate the pain of millions of Americans who’ve been thrown out of work. Never mind that at least half the money involved was committed before Obama even took office, and that it was the loony-tunes wackonomics of a couple generations of right-wing “thinkers” that landed us in the soup in the first place.

I’ll be the first to admit that the deficits we’re currently running up are making me nervous, not least because it won’t be that long before I myself will be at least partially dependent on the fiscal soundness of the Medicare and Social Security programs. But the way I see it, we don’t have much of a choice other than to commit the resources, even if they’re only borrowed against years of future earnings, to put the country back on a sound footing. Roosevelt had to do it in the 1930s to combat the Great Depression (which the Republicans, just as now, said we couldn’t “afford” to do anything about). In the 1940s, virtually nobody questioned the necessity of going massively into debt (even greater debt than today when expressed as a percentage of GDP) because they recognized that having a balanced budget wouldn’t do us much good if we lost the Second World War.

We’re in a similar situation today. The economy isn’t quite as bad as it was in the Depression — yet — and the threat posed to global civilization by a total financial collapse isn’t as serious — yet — as that posed by the Nazis, but things could get a whole lot worse in a hurry if those in power miscalculate. I don’t have total faith in Obama, and I have considerably less than that in many Congressional Democrats, but considering what the Republicans have done to our economy and what they continue to do to our body politic — i.e., tear it to bits for short-term political gain — I’m far more inclined to trust a rational and idealistic young President over the jabbering idiots and slavering jackals who were running this place before he took office.

And in answer to your next question: yes, even if my taxes have to go up. It’s a bit galling, no, strike that, it’s very galling indeed to accept that those of us with moderate incomes will almost certainly have to pay more to repair the damage done by those who got incredibly wealthy in the course of looting the American banking and securities systems, but we’re the ones who — whether through apathy or insufficient resistance or, in some cases, voting for Ralph Nader — who let the foxes into the henhouse, and whether it seems fair or not, we’re going to be paying — probably for quite a long time — to clean up their carnage.
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Larry Livermore is a writer currently living in Brooklyn, New York. He penned a column for Maximum Rock ‘n Roll for seven years, followed by a 14-year stint at the now-defunct Punk Planet. Check out his blog at www.larrylivermore.com, or email him at llivermore@gmail.com. This column was originally published on larrylivermore.com.

I’ve never been a big arena rock kind of guy; most of my MSG-type shows were in the ’60s and ’70s and involved the likes of the Rolling Stones, David Bowie, Led Zeppelin, etc., and as I think I’ve noted, I’d only been to Madison Square Garden itself once before: July 28, 1973, the night Led Zeppelin were being filmed for The Song Remains The Same (and, incidentally — though I still maintain I had nothing to do with it — the night they were robbed of their share of the box office receipts, some $300,000, which, believe it or not, was quite a bit of money in those days).

In the ’90s I saw Green Day play at Wembley and Oakland Arena, but both experiences left me, if not cold, at best slightly lukewarm. Maybe it was because on both those occasions I was up in the seats looking down on the arena floor, whereas this time I was on the floor, only a few feet from the stage. But to be fair, the floor itself was a very different affair for these shows; in Green Day’s early arena-rock days, nearly anyone who wanted to be on the floor could get there, and the result was a seething, swirling maelstrom of flying bodies and — sometimes — flailing fists as thousands of people struggled to cram themselves into a space that could comfortably fit no more than a few hundred.

This time, the standing room near the stage was tightly controlled, accommodating, I would guess, about 500 people and leaving plenty of room to wander around or stand quietly if you weren’t among those who simply had to be face-to-face with the band. When I say tightly controlled, put it this way: our way was barred by a snarling MSG security guard even though we were wearing passes that allowed us to go pretty much anywhere backstage. We had to spend the first part of the show a few hundred feet back, until the wonderful Carly intervened. Carly was there to look after the several children who were traveling with the band, and for purposes of getting to where we wanted to be, we became, essentially, three more of her charges. She escorted us up to the front, patiently explained to the security guard that she was responsible for us, and turned us loose into what might have been the ultimate punk rock playpen.

I don’t say that disparagingly, either. Oddly enough, it felt a bit like being at Gilman (which also was described as a playpen or “punk rock Romper Room” by those who felt it wasn’t truly punk if limbs, teeth, and blood weren’t at risk). There were almost none of the boneheads whose idea of a fun show involves beating up those smaller than themselves, and almost everyone right up front knew and loved the band’s entire catalog, from 1988 to the present, well enough to sing along all the way through, and to cheer ecstatically when some of the long-neglected songs from the first two albums were resurrected.

It wasn’t until I got home, till the next day, actually, that it occurred to me that those sitting up in the seats, especially in the upper balconies, would have had a very different experience, and that the almost intimate little concert we enjoyed at the very front was only possible because the vast majority of the audience was barred from being there.

But it really did feel intimate. At times, like when Billie was out at the end of the catwalk that protruded into the crowd, we were actually behind him, looking out at the audience from a very similar perspective to what he was seeing. And I found myself thinking, “This place isn’t that big, in fact it feels almost kind of cozy.” Of course, a great deal of this is probably down to Billie’s ability — whether he’s bellowing AY-O and insisting that people put their hands in the air, or singing a heartfelt ballad accompanied only by an acoustic guitar — to connect with people throughout the amphitheater, those marooned far up in the nosebleed sector as much as those standing awestruck at his feet.

I’ve often spoken and written about how, when I first saw Green Day (then known as Sweet Children) playing for five kids in a candlelit cabin in the Mendocino mountains, Billie performed like “the Beatles at Shea Stadium.” Even though he was just 16, and the band was playing only its third or fourth show ever, I could, I thought, easily envision them displaying the same commanding presence on the biggest stages in the world. It seemed like a crazy idea at the time, and most people I told about it laughed at me and/or told their friends that I was losing my mind.

Well, I may not have been right about many things in my life, but I think I nailed this one. I’ve seen Green Day in bigger venues — headlining the 2004 Reading Festival, for example — but I’ve never seen them or any other band so thoroughly command a stage and an audience. The Rolling Stones at the LA Forum in 1973 might have come close, and Alice Cooper at Cobo Arena in 1971 made a good stab at it, but…ah, I can think of one performance that might have given Green Day a run for their money: the Who at Woodstock in 1969. But while that performance might have contained moments of grandeur and majesty that surpassed what Green Day produced at the Garden this week, it was also diminished by lulls, longeurs, and the simultaneously satisfying and upsetting spectacle of Abbie Hoffman getting knocked cold by Pete Townshend’s guitar.

There have been times in my life when I was enough of an unbearably punk purist to turn my nose up at the elaborately produced and tightly choreographed sort of rock show that Green Day have now honed to a fine art, but that’s just one of many ways in which I’ve succumbed to the prevailing idiocy rather than think and judge for myself. When I went to see La Traviata at the Sydney Opera House, I didn’t complain that the production was too ornate or expensive, or that the sound was too slick and clean; instead I marveled at how the talents of the set and costume designers combined with those of the composer, the performers, the sound and lighting engineers, even the ushers and ticket takers, to create a living monument to what was bright and glorious about not just art and civilization, but to the very essence of what it is to be a human being: the desire — no, the need — to constantly transcend oneself.

Okay, before I risk climbing any further into the heights of grandiloquence, let me point out that, yeah, dude, this show also totally rocked and they played (almost) all my favorite songs, etc. I was especially ecstatic to, early on, hear the opening chords of “Holiday”, which was noticeably missing from their New York shows in May. In fact, that’s exactly when the feeling kicked in, the one that let me know I was in for one of those shows that I would remember and treasure all my life. What more could I have asked for? Well, “Christie Road” would have been a thrill (he did sing a couple bars of it during his “Shout” breakdown near the end, and on Monday night Nate Doyle and I were screaming like crazy for “Dry Ice”, a song I’ve been (mostly unsuccessfully begging them to play ever since they dropped it from their repertoire sometime in the early ’90s).

Someone also threw an outsized pair of men’s briefs at Billie, on the back of which was emblazoned “No One Knows.” It was going to happen, of course, but it was a sentiment I heartily endorsed; for many years I cited it as my favorite Green Day song ever.

But between the two nights we did get to hear “Going To Pasalacqua” (aka “Here We Go Again”), “Who Wrote Holden Caulfield,” “2000 Light Years Away,” “Welcome To Paradise,” “Disappearing Boy,” and a not nearly so old, but equally unexpected treat, “Macy’s Day Parade,” enough to satisfy all the most curmudgeonly old school Green Day fans (there are still some who bristle any time the band plays anything newer than Dookie, but since American Idiot and 21st Century Breakdown are my favorite Green Day albums of all, I had no problem at all with hearing much of the former and most of the latter).

The band played two hours and 45 minutes on Monday, which cost them quite a bit of money, since they were heavily fined for going past the Garden’s curfew. So I halfway expected them to cut things a bit short on Tuesday. Instead, they played almost three full hours. There are not many bands — in fact, of the bands active today, I can’t think of any — who could pull this off. I usually get impatient when a band goes over 30 minutes, unless it’s one with a lot of history and hits behind it, in which case I can stretch to 45 or 50 minutes. But not since my days of watching the Grateful Dead on seven hits of acid have I voluntarily subjected myself to multiple hours of of one band’s music, and yet I could easily have watched at least another half hour of Green Day — more that that if they’d dug up some of the more obscure gems from 39/Smooth, Slappy, 1,000 Hours, and Kerplunk.

I’ve already commented on the inspiration provided by Stephanie’s guitar playing on “Jesus Of Suburbia” (and was totally stoked when she responded to my blog entry!), but her star turn shouldn’t obscure the fact that nearly a dozen other kids were invited up on stage over the course of the two nights, and all — all but one, I should say — acquitted themselves magnificently. So much so that many people have expressed suspicion that these little guest spots are planned in advance, but it’s just not true: Billie indeed does pick people right out of the audience. His wife was telling me how he’s developed a real sense for who is up to the task and won’t succumb to crippling stage fright. The boy who looked to be about 12 or so and played bass on “Longview” showed no such tendencies; before he was halfway through the song he was tearing around the stage as if he’d been born on one, and at the end jumped up to the mike and shouted, “Thanks, Madison Square!” He also walked off stage with a brand new bass, courtesy of Mr. Dirnt.

On Tuesday night, my friend Jim Kim was standing more or less behind me for the entire show, and he’s posted this portfolio of photos that should give you an idea of what things looked like from where we were. However, the photo above was taken by my 13-year-old nephew, Jackson, who, despite it being his first attempt ever at photographing a big rock concert (and using my new camera for the first time ever), produced a number of pictures that totally eclipsed any of my efforts. To be fair, on Monday night, when I had the camera, I wasn’t quite close enough to get any really good shots, and on Tuesday night, when I was, Jackson had the camera, but was farther back engaging in kid-type shenanigans with the Armstrong boys and other members of Emily’s Army. I never saw any kind of show until I was 16, so I can’t even imagine what it was like for him, but as far I was concerned, if there was anything greater than seeing Green Day at the height of their glory, it was being able to share that experience with my completely awesome nephew.

And, late-breaking development: almost as if he’d been reading my blog, Billie busts out his acoustic guitar and delivers a partial (all but the final majestic bridge and chorus) rendition of one of the greatest Green Day songs ever, “Christie Road.” It’s got to be only a matter of time before the full electric version once again becomes a concert staple. To all of you out there in lands where this Green Day tour hasn’t yet arrived, I beseech you: put aside any prejudices you may have against “big” or “commercial” or “arena” type rock shows and do whatever is necessary to witness this one. Miss this and I can virtually guarantee that a couple decades from now your kids will be hitting you with the mid-21st century equivalent of, “Mom/Dad, how could you have been so unbelievably lame?”
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Larry Livermore is a writer currently living in Brooklyn, New York. He penned a column for Maximum Rock ‘n Roll for seven years, followed by a 14-year stint at the now-defunct Punk Planet. Check out his blog at www.larrylivermore.com, or email him at llivermore@gmail.com. This column was originally published on larrylivermore.com