Can't Be the Only One
Turnstile in Las Vegas
I love Las Vegas. I love casino culture. I love shitty casinos. I love fancy casinos. I love having steak dinners comped. I love $2.99 White Castle egg and cheese. I love pissing in bathrooms made of marble. I love the sleaze.
I love the little round abuelitas playing enormous video slot machines featuring Conan the Barbarian. I love getting the wheel to spin on Wheel of Fortune. I love laying 25.5 points and having UCLA win by 26. I never feel smarter than when I’m cashing in a betting slip after some ridiculous long-shot, like picking the back-up tight end for the Baltimore Ravens to score the first touchdown on Monday Night Football.
I love walking the Strip at dawn. You’ll see the weirdest shit not in the casinos but in between them. I watched two women smoke a blunt and do a little dance routine on camera, presumably for TikTok. I saw a guy with a pair of albino snakes trying to lure tourists into taking photos with them but low-key trying to scare people too. I love ducking in and out of casinos, scoring free coffee for my voyage out and something cooler for the way back. You get some strange looks walking the Strip early in the morning with an O’Doul’s in your hand, but there’s only so much casino coffee one can take.
I don’t love the cigarette smoke. For whatever reason it doesn’t bother me as much as it does in other settings but it’s everywhere. I don’t love how expensive basic shit is like coffee and water. I don’t love the lack of coffee makers in the rooms. I don’t love the lines. No one loves these things.
Most of all I love the lore of the big score, the bad beats, the fumbled last chance, the buzzer beater, the reversal of fortune. This is what Vegas excels at and never fails to deliver. I love how every big bet, win or lose, has a narrative peopled with actors that will never know the role they played in the story.
But Jim, you say, how is any of this good for your sobriety? Well, it isn’t but it isn’t bad for it either. I got sober in a casino. I worked at a casino for over six years. I am intimate with the desperation baked into the concept. Where others see the façade, I notice the doors to back-of-house spaces and the positioning of the cameras. In the casino, my curiosity is on hight alert.
There’s a part of me that thinks that if this writing thing doesn’t work out I can always go back to the casino. Whether I’m writing copy for digital signage (ALL U CAN EAT 12.99) or even dealing blackjack I will be something like content. Incidentally, thanks to California voters absolutely crushing Proposition 27, the online sports wagering proposal, which would have crippled tribal casinos, I won’t even have to leave California to go back to the biz.
In the 30 years I have been going to Vegas I have been in riots, hugged dozens of strangers on New Year’s Eve, and damn near won a bowling tournament. I have felt the glass from shattering neon lights raining down on me like confetti. I have been showered with hundred dollar bills and left town hungover and broke with barely enough gas to get home. I have been rendered speechless at the Double Down Saloon and signed books with punk rock legends. I have drunk rum out of ice buckets and done things I will not speak of with people who are no longer with us, but after thirteen years of sobriety, what keeps bringing me back to this city is punk rock.
Last night I saw Turnstile play in Las Vegas. The show was held at Brooklyn Bowl, which is just off the Strip on the Linq Promenade. I’ve been trying to see Turnstile all year but this desire has been thwarted by my travel schedule. It finally happened last night. Part of the appeal of this particular gig was being able to leave the show, walk a few hundred steps, take an elevator up to my room, and go to bed. Pleasing to me was this.
The show was held at the Brooklyn Bowl Las Vegas, which is like a bigger, nicer House of Blues. Very similar structure and design. One thing I hate about the House of Blues is the how the actual dance floor is compromised by a horseshoe-shaped ring around the stage that really limits movement. The show was sold out and a local couple told me they’d never seen so many people at the Brooklyn Bowl. They also said that when they go to shows they see the same people, but not this time. Most of people were from out of town. Improbably, I bumped into Ben from Neptoon Records who came all the way from Vancouver to see Turnstile. I don’t know how he recognized me because I was wearing a mask.
I wasn’t the oldest person in the crowd, which was older than I expected it to be, but it was close. It definitely wasn’t a SoCal punk show. Women were wearing cute hats and shoes with thick heels. Shirts and blouses in loud patterns and colors. Floofy pants. Turnstile’s walk-on music was Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance Somebody (Who Loves Me).” Bands choose goofy walk-on music on purpose. I still crack up at Greg Gurewitz’s reaction when he learned that Bad Religion had used an eight-bit version of “My Sharona” throughout its world tour in 2018. “I wouldn’t have been okay with that!” he told me.
The Whitney Houston number wasn’t an ironic selection. So many people were earnestly singing along, especially couples. For this reason, I started the show in the back, grumbling with the other old punks. When Turnstile opened with “Holiday” it became immediately obvious I was too far away from the stage. The sound was tinny and muted so I moved closer, which took a while.
There was a bottleneck in the crowd and when I got closer I saw that two security guys were bringing someone out of the pit. At first I thought they had the guy in a headlock but realized he was hurt and they were carrying him. The crowd parted and didn’t quite close up again because the guy was in bad shape and left a trail of blood behind him. He was pale and his boots were splattered with blood. I don’t think he was stabbed. I think he fell on some glass. The security formed a wall around him and held him up while they waited for a wheelchair. For a while I was part of this wall. Part of the advantage of being 6’3” and goon-shaped.
The crowd was intense. Everyone was dancing and jumping around. This is part of the Turnstile phenomenon, its ability to make people move and feel things. That’s why I was there. I wanted to feel things too. I just didn’t want that feeling to be major blood loss during a Whitney Houston singalong.
The closer I got to the stage the easier it was to move because people in the front, surprised by the intensity of the crowd, were bugging out. Unfortunately, the closer I got, the more I had to deal with people’s phones. I’m not opposed to recording shows but I believe it interferes with your ability to be present and connect with what’s happening. Either you’re having an experience or your documenting one, which leads to people performing in their own documentation, which is weird. I’m of two minds about all this because I watch of a lot of this footage when it shows up on social media, but during the drum solo I looked around the room and there were at least 100 people recording it. Why? It’s a fucking drum solo. You’re not watching that shit every again. I felt like that woman watching the pope, savoring the moment while everyone else is trying to capture it.
I did take a single burst of photos, for journalistic purposes. I was on the right side of the club, or stage left, which was Greg Cerwonka’s side of the stage. Greg started touring with Turnstile after lead guitarist and founding member Brady Ebert left the band earlier this year. Ebert’s departure was unusual because the rhythm guitar player Pat McCrory has only been in the band since 2016. Who would fill the void?
Turnstile found its answer in Greg from Take Offense from Chula Vista, California. I learned shortly before the show that he’s the significant other of an acquaintance in San Diego journalism. (This is the second time this has happened this year where a friend’s significant other joined a massively popular touring band. The other one I can’t talk about.)
What is Turnstile? That’s what I came to puzzle out. The first time I heard Turnstile I didn't understand what all the fuss was about. I thought “This is a stop-start hardcore band with a few bells and whistles.” Over the years, the band’s vocal styling has become less aggressive, pushing them into post- or melodic hardcore territory. Every hardcore dude who doesn’t like Turnstile has a comp from the early aughts that was “just as good if not better.” Punks of a certain age are very much in their feelings about Turnstile.
The members of Turnstile don’t dress like a punk band and the cynic in me wonders if that’s part of the appeal: the packaging. Or, in this case, the lack of packaging. There’s very little punk posturing in Turnstile, which feels different. Last night front man Brendan Yates wore loose-fitting cargo pants for fuck’s sake. He also went shirtless for much of the show, showing off his chiseled abs.
Now that Turnstile is poised to be become big, or as big as guitar bands get these days, this question about Turnstile’s sound seems more pressing. They were just announced as the openers to the Blink 182 reunion tour and have been added to many major festivals this spring. Then there’s the elephant in the room.
I was in Virginia last week watching Thursday Night Football on my phone when I heard Turnstile playing. More specifically, the bass line that opens “Holiday.” Did I turn on my iTunes somehow? No. The music was coming from the television. Turnstile was in a Taco Bell commercial.
There was a time when that would have been enough to put a stake in my interest in Turnstile, but that ship has sailed. Selling out is over. Just ask Dan Ozzi at
I’m really glad I got to watch the show from Greg’s side of the stage because it clarified some things for me. Turnstile’s vocals may fall in the melodic hardcore spectrum but the guitar sound is pure thrash. This helped me understand why I love Turnstile’s music as much as I do. All those chugging riffs with muted strings brings me back to a time when I didn’t understand what made punk punk and metal metal; I just loved the way it made me feel.
So what is Turnstile? Is the Baltimore band becoming the next Fugazi or is fame going to turn it into something along the lines of, I don’t know, Ugly Kid Joe? (Incidentally, I was astonished to learn the band released a new album last month hilariously called Rad Wings of Destiny and it’s actually not bad in the sense that it sounds like it was recorded and released in 1993.)
I was struck by how many times the sound of the crowd singing along to the lyrics drowned out Brendan’s vocals and how easy it was to get swept up in the big feelings these songs produced. Granted, there’s some sloganeering at work here, which is not my favorite thing about Turnstile, but I was struck by how much it all seemed to matter to the kids around me.
For the last song, Brendan pulled some people on stage and their first impulse wasn’t to goon around but to hug him. Brendan kept repeating the phrase “I want to see you.” Something he’s done repeatedly on tour. Is that what Turnstile means to these not-punk-but-not-not punk fans? Do they feel seen? Did they come to this city seeking pleasure, expecting pain, and find connection and community instead?
I hope Blink 182 makes Turnstile a household name. I hope Greg stays with the band (if that’s what he wants). I hope more old punks like me look past their cynicism and experience the band live. I hope they don’t become the next Ugly Kid Joe.
After the show, as I made my way out of the club, I met Leticia, who had scored a set list. She was so, so happy, a genuine kind of happiness that wasn’t performative in the least, a happiness that causes you to lose your cool. Maybe that’s what Turnstile is all about.
Gonna check this out
Jeez...Turnstile? Really? You need to get out more, Jim! ;>) Glad you had fun though....