by Matt Sorrento Williams

I set up my last punk show ten years ago [1] . I was twenty years old. I remember that quite a few people came—something like a hundred and twenty-five, a hundred and fifty. I charged five dollars a person and that covered paying bands and paying myself back the fee for the hall (somewhere around 350 dollars with a hundred of that being a refundable security deposit).  So, for this show ten years ago, by keeping 250 of the door for myself and paying the remaining 400 or so to the bands, I would break even—assuming that I got the security deposit back.

But someone stood on one of the folding tables and it collapsed. Someone else managed to make the urinal in the men’s room a continuous-flow model. And someone else (but maybe the same urinal bandit) tagged the white-painted cinder-block walls of the men’s room with black permanent marker.

And so, I was pretty upset about the whole thing. Any damage to the hall at all meant the loss of the security deposit. A hundred dollars was a lot of money to twenty-year-old me (it would still be a lot of money to thirty-year-old me today, even). Beyond that, how many bingo halls would rent themselves out again for punk shows after these sorts of shenanigans? Not this one, I was sure.

I did my best to repair the damage: sending friends to WalMart for paint thinner and rubber gloves and scrubbing sponges, asking around for plumber’s tools to get that urinal to shut off. But I didn’t realize then that the table had been broken. I was running around, doing my best impression of crisis management and managing more to convince my friends that a crisis wasn’t something I should be pressed into at all.

And but so, I ended up at the microphone between sets. I’m not sure exactly what I said, but my goal was to deliver something a little more severe than a reprimand. I think I made the point that if we weren’t respectful of places that let us have shows, then we wouldn’t be having shows much longer. But it wasn’t as eloquent as that. There was a lot of swearing.

Of course, I lost that security deposit. Of course, no one took responsibility for any of the damage they had incurred. And, of course, that was my last show. I had had enough.

I stopped going to local punk shows within two years of that. Within five, I stopped hearing that any were even being set up any more. By 2010, as far as I could tell, I was as uninvolved in the local punk-rock scene as I possibly could be. There might have been shows going on. I’m pretty sure my friend’s little brother is in a metal band. But, still. Good riddance to all that.

Until Facebook intervened.

I need to tell you up-front that when it comes to Facebook and other internet social media I am a Luddite. I don’t have an account. Shit, I don’t have a cell phone. Even with as generic a name as I have (I am one of three Matt Williamses that live in my small town), I don’t want people I don’t like contacting me or learning through friends of friends of friends anything about me. It may seem quixotic to resist a website, but I have my reasons, the efficacy of keeping in contact with my ninth-grade geometry class be damned.

That said, many people I know and love have Facebook accounts. My father-in-law, for example, has one so that he can farm with his co-workers at two in the morning. My mother doesn’t have one yet, though she has been given a cell phone by my brother so he can call her when she isn’t home. My next-best friend has one (I consider my wife to be my number-one best friend: she doesn’t have one, and doesn’t want one either). So, despite my misgivings, I accept that it is part of the world and that it’s not going anywhere, not until someone comes up with something better (remember MySpace?).

The above-mentioned next-best friend with a Facebook account— Scott—has fallen into the Facebook game pretty hard. I don’t think he farms, but I am pretty sure he was at war with the mafia there for a while. He does the normal thing on Facebook, which I think is to add friends you know and then go find their friends and add them, until somewhere along the way most of the people that you’ve met in real life are in your Facebook group.  What I find disconcerting is that using Facebook this way relegates everyone to “friend” status, when most of these people aren’t and never were actually friends with you. Many, many of Scott’s Facebook friends are people who used to go to local punk shows.

So Facebook decided to intervene in my own Luddite life. It said to Scott, “Hey, remember punk shows? Those were awesome. It would be so cool if someone did a show again, like back in the day. I’d totally go.” And a hundred people heard Facebook talking  to Scott and they clicked that they Liked This and Scott decided that Facebook and a hundred people couldn’t be wrong, and so he decided to set up a punk show. In 2010.

I’m going to skip the logistics and just say that Scott asked my wife and I to help.

Saturday, July 17th, 2010 @ the Seneca Fire Hall:

Scott has set up the show to start at noon and run until late in the evening. He has eight plus bands scheduled to play. He is charging ten dollars at the door and selling concessions. My wife (Melissa) and I are nominally going to be in charge of said concessions — we are going to sell drinks and cook hot dogs. For the sake of context, in my experience, local punk shows start at night, have at most five bands, and cost around five dollars. Every time I tried to have a show I set up start before 1900h I ended up waiting until at least 1930h for enough bands and people to show up to justify actually starting.

Anticipating a long day, we pack the following supplies:

1 20oz bottle Mountain Dew

1 black Axiz messenger-style bag

1 blue Norcom Composition notebook (100s. 200p.WR) 9 ¾ x 7 ½ in. (24.7 x 19.0 cm) (mine)

1 flower-and-butterfly motif notebook (15 x 12 cm) (Melissa’s)

1 Parker Brothers Scrabble Slam! Card Game

1 Hasbro Trivial Pursuit “Know-It-All” Edition

1 The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (PUB List 7.99 YOUR PRICE 5.99)

1 Ulysses

1 Dell Summer 2010 Original Extreme Sudoku puzzle book (Easy to Challenger Puzzles…No Math Skills Needed!)

1 NBA Activity Book (Includes: Over 50 Stickers, 1 Pull-Out Poster and 1 Growth Chart)

1 Hasbro Yahtzee Hands Down Card Game

1 box of 16 Crayola Non-Toxic Washable Crayons

1 individually wrapped Twizzlers stick

6 pens

2 markers

1 Hero Decks Baseball Heroes Playing Cards (Cleveland Edition)

1 Brica DigiArt i95 digital camera (9.0 Mega Max), plus battery charger

1 2GB iPod Nano

1 set headphones

4 pills Methylphenidate (prescribed legally)

1 bottle containing approximately 40 pills Lorazepam (prescribed legally)

1 bag crochet supplies (hooks, patterns, balls of yarn)

1 frozen Sugardale ham

1 refrigerated tote bag for said ham

1055h. The Fire Hall is a few hundred feet off the main road and behind a restaurant. A sign at the end of the driveway says something about how the Seneca Fire Hall is available for daily rentals if you call 814-6XX-XXXX.  I wonder if anyone realizes that it has been rented out today.

Our Ford Escort is the only car in the gravel parking lot. Scott’s truck, which should be there, is conspicuously absent. It is god-awful warm already. I have been promised that the Hall itself is air-conditioned, but a walk around the building yields no unlocked doors. I can see that the space has been set up: there are lights on and I can make out some unfolded tables after staring past the sun’s glare through the doors. A corn-hole board is set up in the back of the lot with a few bean bags stacked on it. The sun-to-shade ratio is skewed heavily towards skin cancer. Melissa and I find a little bit of shade out front and we set ourselves up as best we can.

1059h. No sign of Scott, but a silver truck has circled around the building. We walk down to the parking lot and wave. It pulls up beside me and a window rolls down.

“Hello, Scott?” from what looks to be a sixteen or seventeen year-old boy. He has  straight shoulder-length brown hair. And a smile.

“No, Scott’s not here yet,” I say. “I’m Matt, I’m supposed to help out today.”

“But this is the right place, right? We weren’t sure.”

“Yep. This is it, Scott should be here soon. It looks like he’s set up inside, but all the doors are locked.”

“Oh, okay.” He turns next to him and talks to the driver about what is going on. Judging from a very apparent gap in ages, I am guessing that the driver is Dad.

He leans out of the window and shakes my hand.

“We’re the Bi-Polar Monkey Puppets. I’m Collin. This is my dad. This is our drummer. Back there is our guitarist.”

I wave at the drummer while my wife introduces herself. The drummer has dyed-blond hair and giant black-and-white-checkered plugs in his ears [2] . Dad looks like he is in his late forties, short dark hair, glasses, and the build and dress of someone who works for a living. He doesn’t say anything to me; he looks busy assessing the situation. Empty parking lot, one smiling but obviously not-in-charge couple, and only an hour before this show he has given up his Saturday for is supposed to start.

Dad whispers something to Collin, who asks us if there is a gas station nearby. We give them directions (simple enough, only a quarter mile or so down the road), and they leave.

As we are walking back to our nest in front of the Fire Hall, Melissa says, ”A-dorable.”

I agree. They are so charming and it reminds me so much of how these things used to feel, when I was just starting out, when I didn’t know any better about anything.

1110h. The silver Monkey Puppet truck (Puppetmobile?) has been back for a few minutes when it is joined by a Dolphins-teal pickup. The driver informs me that, no, he is not the sound guy. He is Uncle Jeff [3] and he is just there to watch his nephew’s band.

1115h. I decide to call Scott. I borrow Collin’s phone and when Scott answers, I say, “Hi Scott, this is Matt. I’m here at your show with the Bi-Polar Monkey Puppets.” A little bit of snark there, I admit, but he is fifteen minutes late at this point.

Of course, that snark is dashed when Scott tells me that he has been in a car accident. And the lady that he hit is more than a little bit upset. He says he should be able to get there in a half hour, but could I hold down the fort until then? I tell him it’s no problem.

1130h. I’ve spent the last fifteen minutes greeting each car that comes into the parking lot and explaining the situation. Nobody seems to care much, but I think people should know that staying in an air-conditioned car might be a better option than standing outside in the sun.

Two fourteen or fifteen-ish-looking girls dressed head-to-toe in black make snide comments and giggle to each other as I tell their Mom what is going on. I know I’m not cool, but my Mom only dropped me off at shows. She didn’t stay to make sure that I would be okay.

The Monkey Puppets are keeping themselves amused by trying to say “Irish Wristwatch” three times fast. I can barely say it once, which seems to be the average. More family members have arrived, as has bass player “Mosh”. They don’t know why they call him that except that his last name is Marsh, which sounds a little bit like Mosh, and calling him Stan after the South Park character didn’t catch on for some reason.

1135h. Scott calls Collin’s phone and asks to talk to me. He still has a few things he needs to do before he comes to the show, but in the meantime could I go to the mall and get a red playground ball for Four Square?

Melissa volunteers, leaving me to watch the kids by myself (well, also with at least six parents sitting in cars watching too).

1140h. I ingratiate myself with the youngsters by talking to them about their home town, Mercer, and it being a “pretty boring place, but at least Trent Reznor is from there.” The guitarist (tall kid with a yellow-plaid trucker cap who calls himself Treen) tells me that he taught Reznor’s nephew Damien to play Stairway. I am duly impressed at how awful it is that Reznor didn’t bother teaching him himself. Or maybe I am supposed to be shocked that Damien didn’t come out of the womb knowing how to play guitar. Either way, despite my khaki shorts and Cleveland Indians t-shirt, I have apparently passed their smell test and I am invited to sit with them back in the shade.

Collin has brought his laptop and decides to play some “getting pumped” music. I am very surprised to learn that he listens to stuff that I listened to in high school: H20, Rancid, Reel Big Fish, the Bouncing Souls. I’m not sure he has any songs recorded after 2000. I go into wise-elder mode and tell him that Reel Big Fish are in the movie BASEketball, which somehow he doesn’t know, despite the earlier Stan Marsh/South Park talk. I’m not up-to-date on smaller, or more recent, or independent punk bands these days, and the talk doesn’t devolve into a hipster namedropping contest (I mean, who cares that I didn’t let Planes Mistaken For Stars sleep at my Mom’s house in 1999 because they smelled).

I am introduced to the band again and most of the friends they brought with them. Collin tells me that except for the two girls in black,[4] everyone besides me is a friend or family member of the band. I’m not surprised, but it doesn’t look good for Scott. I know that he has spent a lot of money on this show: renting the hall, paying for flyers, and buying concessions to sell to the presumably thirsty masses that will attend this all-day event. He told me in the lead-up to the show that he thought he could get three hundred people (@10 cash dollars a head). Right now, there might be twenty or thirty people (counting Dads, Moms, uncles, siblings, and cousins), and the show is supposed to start in less than half an hour. The turnout so far does not necessarily mean people won’t show up later, but it doesn’t mean they will, either.  It’s not even my show, and I am feeling very nervous about the whole thing.

1150h. With Scott due to show up any minute now, the kids are getting restless. They talk about breaking into the Fire Hall, but decide against it because they don’t want Scott to get in trouble or for the Fire Hall people to not rent it out for shows any more. Interestingly, some of them have forgotten his name, and every time a truck drives by they ask, “Is that Steve? Is Steve here?” Which, no. No Steve, yet.

1155h. Melissa returns with two red balls and a box of sidewalk chalk. We’ve now been here an hour. I volunteer to set up the Four Square court.

1159h. As I’m in the process of breaking a nail drawing lines on the asphalt part of the parking  lot with chalk, and one minute before the show is scheduled to start, Scott arrives. His truck looks none the worse for the accident, but he is not smiling. I wouldn’t be either. When I set up shows I would pace nervously around the building until enough people had shown up for all the bands to get paid. This kind of day would have probably killed me, if I had actually been in charge.

1201h. Scott unlocks the doors and the band starts to bring in their equipment. I am just now realizing that the show is supposed to be starting but only one out of the ten bands on the bill has shown up. Fortunately, the PA system had been set up the night before, which I had not expected, and is a pleasant turn of events.

The surprise addition of Scott’s ex-girlfriend to the “Help Scott with the Show” committee leaves Melissa and I without much to do in the way of actually helping with the show, now that Scott is actually here. She will be handling the concessions, apparently.

So, we decide to stay outside and play Four Square. I recruit Mosh and friend-of-the-band Alex to play with us. Melissa has never played, but the nature of the game is so laid-back [5] and the kids so laid-back themselves [6] that she is quickly caught up, and we get in a few rounds before Mosh needs to go inside and, you know, do band things.

1210h. Scott shows us the special “Bands Only” room that he has set up next to the kitchen. He has a cooler full of free ice-cold drinks for the bands (and us). In the kitchen is a refrigerator full of drinks for sale, ranging from Dr. Pepper to iced coffee. I stash the ham [7] in the fridge, vowing to remember to grab it before we leave.

We play Trivial Pursuit. It is a pretty lackluster game. We expected to have more to do, and now that it is apparent that our presence isn’t exactly crucial, we feel a little slighted and very much bored.

1233h. Drum noodling reaches us from the main room.

1236h. Guitar noodling.

1241h. Bass noodling.

1246h. Mic check.

1250h. Melissa and I decide that we will leave after the Bi-Polar Monkey Puppets’ set. It has been a long day already, and we have family obligations of our own that we had put off to help Scott out. Now that he doesn’t need us, we figure that it should be okay if we don’t spend the whole day sitting in a back room playing cards instead of cooking hot dogs.

1255h. Suprisingly, the Bi-Polar Monkey Puppets are a pretty good band. They play a pop-punk style that has been done before, but they do it with a smile. All four members have their own microphone and Collin and the drummer (Ben) take turns singing lead.

Melissa remarks that if she was fifteen and went to their high school, she would be “all about the lead singer and the guitarist”. However, it looks like only the drummer has a girlfriend [8] . She had been sitting in the back, near us, but after Ben dedicates a song to her, and Collin shames her (“Way to support the band, Shannon.”), she stands diffidently up front.

Always the nerd, I air-drum along [9] to their songs and clap loudly after each one. But the best part is watching the rest of the audience. I count roughly ten “punks” among the thirty or so audience members. For the most part they watch the band and talk to each other, seeming to have a good time. It is encouraging that most of them look like what my friends and I looked like when I was their age. No popular kids trend-hopping here, these kids are here because they don’t fit in and they’d rather not-fit-in together than be miserable alone.

I’m struck by a wave of nostalgia, not the false Facebook-generated nostalgia for old friends who were never that great to begin with, but a genuine longing for a feeling that I know I will never have again. I remember what it was like to feel completely socially alone and how revelatory it was for me to realize that there were others who felt the same. And that on Saturday nights, if my Mom would give me a ride, I could be with other people, people who were my peers not by virtue of going to the same school, but by virtue of being outcasts. Punk shows became a second home for me and the people there a surrogate family. I had a support group that helped me transition from awkward nerdy teenager to whatever it is I am today. Many of the friendships I have had and some of the most valuable that I still have originated in punk, at local fire halls, with bands who couldn’t play their instruments somehow playing despite it all.

But, that family fell apart as the years passed and people went away to college, or left the group because of hormonal drama, or simply wanted to listen to something that more closely resembled actual music. For me, as that family dissolved, my bonds with my real family strengthened. I am closer to my mother now than I ever was as a teenager. I am married and I consider my wife’s family my own, to the point that I visit them without my wife even being with me. I think I am lucky. I don’t need Facebook to keep me in touch with my punk family, even though I might miss them every once in a while.

So, watching the Bi-Polar Monkey Puppets play their half-hour set, it strikes me as wonderful that their family has come to support them. There is Uncle Jeff up there, fiddling with the sound system in between songs. A seven-year-old boy and his five-year-old sister “slam dance” in front of the stage, laughing and smiling as they play at being punks. In the back, I count at least three separate men with camcorders taping the entire show. A beautiful infant girl in a pink dress wanders around the emptiest part of the floor, head-bopping and dancing with her Mom at her side. The Monkey-Puppets have found a way to combine their real family into their punk one, something that I never managed to do, and I am a little jealous sitting there, watching them play.

And even though I would never do it myself, and Scott himself would describe turn-out as a “complete disaster” [10] , I can understand why he set up this show. Facebook might have made it seem easier to accomplish than it was, but I can’t blame him for trying. There is something wonderful about punk and something more wonderful about family. And there is something especially wonderful about punk and family coming together like it did at this show.

[1] Always a “show”, never a “concert” or “gig” or whatever. Is this because punk, at its heart, is something to be looked at, something to put upon others? The term “punk show” reminds one of fashion shows and the whole sordid marketing of the Sex Pistols, et al.[back]

[2] Not earplugs, but large earrings. They are called plugs because they look like a plug in a bathtub, only these plugs are stopping up gaged holes in his ears.[back]

[3] It turns out, however, that Uncle Jeff does do sound, professionally, just not for this show.[back]

[4] These two, apparently, did not sleep at all the previous night and before coming to sit in the shade were wandering in circles around the parking lot. Their Mom stayed in the car.[back]

[5] Four Square essentially consists of four players bouncing a ball around a set of four squares drawn on the ground. The basic idea is that if the ball lands in your square you need to hit it to someone else’s before it bounces twice. If you don’t, you’re out, and someone takes your place. Think of it as tennis for the un-athletic.[back]

[6] They were both smoking cigarettes while we played.[back]

[7] Before the show, Melissa and I met her father for breakfast at a local family restaurant. We had a nice meal (I had French toast, sausage, and a hash-brown paddy) and my father-in-law gave me a ham that he won at a ham shoot earlier this spring. The way I understand it, participants at a ham shoot mark a paper target with their name and then someone shoots (with a rifle?) at the target, then whichever name is closest to being hit, that person wins a ham. And so, my father-in-law won the ham, even though he doesn’t really like ham that much. Which is why he gave it to me.[back]

[8] Later research proves me dead wrong about this.[back]

[9] Air-drumming to songs you don’t know and without ever drumming before in real life is more challenging than it looks. The danger is always there for a mis-timed drum-roll to make you look like a complete dweeb.[back]

[10] He says this at 1700h when I come back to the show to pick up the long-forgotten ham. I try to reassure him that more people will show up later in the evening (after all, most punk shows don’t start until 1930h), but it is true that it would take a miracle for him to break even, money-wise.[back]

Matt Sorrento Williams lives in Oil City, PA with his beautiful wife, a lame dog, a half-blind cat, and a hell-raising kitten.