i went to see bad brains at cbgb’s last night.
it was good, and it made me feel old, as the last time that i saw bad brains was in 1982 at pogo’s in bridgeport.
the new singer was definitely full of heart and enthusiasm, but i couldn’t help but miss the wild-eyed mania of h.r.
h.r, the original singer, is apparently living in los angeles and dealing with mental illness.
i hope that he gets better.
i hadn’t been to a punk rock show at cb’s in years, and i’d never in all my years seen cb’s so crowded.
and i have to say that although the crowd looked incredibly aggro(lots of old-school nyc skinheads), it didn’t end up being too violent.
which is good.
i remember some of the hardcore shows in nyc in the early 80’s that were disturbingly violent.
it almost seemed as if the nyc hardcore scene went from ‘sort of violent’ to ‘so violent you never want to leave your house again’ in about 10 minutes in the early 80’s, maybe around 1984.
it went from people picking each other up when they fell to people jumping off of balconies while wearing engineer boots and spurs and landing on people’s heads and sending them to the hospital.
that was around the time that i left the scene, as the violence just got to be too much for me.
eh, maybe i’m a woosie, but watching people leave cro-mags and agnostic front shows covered in blood and on stretchers made me think that it was time to move on.
kind of like my days dj’ing at hip-hop clubs in the late 80’s, but people weren’t hitting each other then, they were shooting each other with automatic weapons, which also made me think that it was time to move on to different pastures. going out to nightclubs shouldn’t involve regular exchanges, like:
‘did you hear about _______?’
‘no, what?’
‘he got shot/is in the hospital/got a skull fracture/o.d’ed/etc’.
again, not sound like a woosie, but it’s nice that nyc has become a less-violent place in which to go out and listen to music…
-moby
