Summer has come and passed

Bouchercon, Linda Lindas, Rancid, Smashing Pumpkins & Green Day

Greetings from Tennessee!

Last week I went to Nashville for Bouchercon, the annual traveling crime and mystery writers conference, and it was kind of lame, kind of strange, kind of inspiring. It was so spread out that sometimes it felt like hardly anyone was at the conference but then I’d duck into a ballroom to hear Mick Herron talk about writing spy novels and there’d be 700 people in the audience. Odd.

There were problems with the conference. Books written by the conference attendees never arrived, which was kind of a problem. Also, the judge for the annual anthology was arrested for possession of child pornography a few months ago, and the conference organizers didn’t release a statement about it even though the editor had already made his selections and rejection letters had been sent out. Some people withdrew their stories and a new judge was appointed. Did the new judge make their own selections? I don’t know. The whole thing was a shit show from start to finish, which means it will probably win an Anthony Award for Best Anthology next year and I’m not even kidding.

I’m not here to drag the conference, but it has plenty of problems that need to get addressed. The highlight of the conference was my panel, which featured a number of sharp, thoughtful writers whose work I look forward to getting to know. Sadly, it was scheduled at the same time as Dennis Lehane’s event so only a handful of people were there. So it goes.

The venue was… interesting. Imagine a Las Vegas hotel like the Mirage circa 2005 stuck under a giant glass dome with steel supports and that’s the Gaylord Opryland. It was vast and sprawling and challenging to navigate and lacked a main bar where everyone could congregate, which sometimes feels like the best part of the conference.

When I wasn’t at the con, Nuvia and I spent time with her godson Andrew, who is an executive chef at a steakhouse with locations in Brentwood and Franklin, and we had some amazing meals together. I could make this entire edition of MFTU about Andrew and all the obstacles he’s overcome to get to where he is today.

Short version: he moved from LA to Nashville to work in the kitchen of a corporate restaurant and when COVID hit they laid him off. He lived in his car for several weeks, spending most of his time at a lakefront park where many others in a similar predicament had gathered. Andrew landed another job, saved up for an apartment, and was just getting back on his feet when his current employer brought him into his latest endeavor, took him under his wing, and taught him everything there is to know about running a restaurant. We couldn’t be more proud of him.

Green Day Saviors Tour

The highlight of the trip to Nashville was seeing Green Day on the Saviors Tour with Smashing Pumpkins, Rancid and the Linda Lindas. Thanks to a longtime reader who also happens to be Eloise Wong’s dad (Hi Martin!) we were able to score a pair of passes to the show.

Whenever I get put on the guest list one of three things happens:

1) There’s some kind of snafu and my name’s not on the list. The bigger the venue or festival the harder this is to resolve, and sometimes it doesn’t get resolved at all, like when I went to Mexico City last year and was assed out of seeing OFF!

2) My name is on a list and tickets are secured.

3) Surprise! You get all access passes!

The thing is you never really know what you’re getting into. You get what you get and if it works out it works out. If it doesn’t, that’s rock and roll for you. I feel like getting a pass is karma for all the times I was prevented from entering a venue to interview a band by some dickhead at the door—like the time I couldn’t get into the Masque reunion show, which I’m still upset about.

We arrived at Geodis Park, a relatively new soccer stadium that seats 30,000 people, just as doors opened at 4pm. We met up with Martin and Wendy and were guided through the byzantine back-of-house set-up to visit with the Linda Lindas in their dressing room. Martin flew out to Nashville with his dad the previous day and it was cool to see three generations of the Wong family at the punk rock show.

The Linda Lindas have a Bad Religion connection (the first person who figures it out gets a free book of their choice or a paid subscription) and it was nice to see familiar faces in a strange place. The Linda Lindas were the opening support and went on at 5:30pm for a 20-minute set, which we watched from the pit at the foot of the stage.

There’s a lot to love about the Linda Lindas. They’re such an interesting amalgamation of styles. They all sing and they all write songs that range from sweet and tender pop punk to ferocious hardcore—sometimes in the same song. What I especially love about their live show is how they go for it. Some performers, especially young musicians, play like they’re just trying to get through the song without making too many mistakes. Not the Linda Lindas. They cut loose and rip it up. There’s no stage too big for the Linda Lindas.

Rancid was due up in 20 minutes for a 30 minute set so we stayed in the pit, which was less than halfway full as people made their way into the arena. Rancid was Rancid. Lars and the gang held it down while Tim, the godfather of mumble rap, brought the energy. I found myself next to big guy in a customized Lakers jersey who sang background vocals the entire set.

David Hasselhoff once said the most important thing to bring to the beach is a chair. You can swim, walk around, run shirtless in the sand, but without a chair you’re just a guy at the beach. With a chair you have a place to be. That’s how I feel about all-access passes at big punk shows and festivals. You have a way to get out of the sun, use the bathroom, and sit down. While Smashing Pumpkins’ road crew set up their gear, we went backstage to the catering room and had dinner compliments of Green Day.

After being reenergized with a hearty vegetarian meal and some coffee, we were ready for Smashing Pumpkins. I forget who but someone who’d been on the tour for a while told me they thought Smashing Pumpkins was the loudest band on the bill. The guitar sound, bolstered by mega-shredder Kiki Wongo, was rocking, and they sounded great. I’d never seen Smashing Pumpkins before, my fandom peaked in 1991 when their debut album Gish was in heavy rotation. I’m also a sucker for the song “1979,” but who isn’t? Everyone loves that song.

We went backstage again and met Green Day’s touring members Jason White and Kevin Preston, who were exceptionally nice. Martin seemingly knows everybody and was very kind and generous in his introductions. And then it was time to go back to the pit, which I want to say a few words about.

The pit was not like the pits that most of you are familiar with, but a corporate pit, an elitist pit, segregated from the rest of the crowd. Live Nation’s contract employees who protected the pit had these little color-coded printouts indicating which badges got you in and from what I could tell there were six of them. (Ours were marked “SUPPORT.”) Apparently you could buy a VIP pass and one of the perks was access to this pit. From what I can gather, these packages initially sold for $300 per person. If you want to buy one now for the San Diego show at the end of September it will cost you $1,000.

This will either come as a shock or you already know that this is how things are in the corporate rock resale market. Most of us have been to punk festivals and been overwhelmed by the masses of people gathered there. How did this dirty little thing called punk get so big?

The flipside of that coin is the sobering reality that none of the acts who headline these shows could tour at the scale of today’s major pop artists. If they want to play in front of big crowds, a festival is the only way.

Except Green Day.

Green Day is one of the biggest touring rock bands on the planet. They aren’t the Rolling Stones, but they put on a better show. They aren’t the Beatles, but their streaming numbers are higher. They aren’t Pearl Jam, and thank goodness for that. In the world of punk they are in a class by themselves. (Except for maybe Blink 182 and if some of you are thinking: Same thing while I don’t necessarily agree, I can’t say I blame you.)

Thirty years ago, when Dookie was released in February 1994, I was living in a house in Flagstaff with future Razorcake co-founder Todd Taylor and Skinny Dan who built the zine’s first website and does his part to keep the operation going today. 1994 was the year punk went mainstream with records by Green Day, The Offspring, Rancid, Bad Religion, NOFX, and Pennywise saturating the airwaves.

Todd was not a fan of Green Day. (If memory serves, we listened to a lot of GWAR that year.) I was more agnostic. Being broke and moving around every year had whittled my music collection down to a few dinky boxes of tapes and CDs. At the time I was enamored with surf music, GZA’s Liquid Swords, Irish drinking songs, and the Judgement Night soundtrack. I was just another victim of a capitalist society, kid.

That year Dookie won a Grammy for “Best Alternative Rock Performance” despite being released on major label and selling millions of copies. The Grammy website tells me Green Day didn’t play at the awards show until 2005 so maybe the performance was patched in from somewhere else or perhaps we’d simply changed the channel, but I remember watching Green Day play “Welcome to Paradise” and thinking, This is pretty fucking catchy. I get it now.

For the next 30 years I didn’t think about Green Day a whole lot. Is Green Day punk? Is pop punk punk? Is pop punk new new wave? Is all punk that isn’t hardcore pop punk? How much pop is too much pop in the pop-punk sonic continuum?

I wasn’t interested in these debates. (Well, I’m not interested in them now.) The Grammy Awards had spoken: Green Day was BARP. (In 1994 the people at the Grammy Awards also deemed Soundman’s “Spoonman” Best Metal Performance, but let’s move on.

In the weeks leading up to the show, I thought about Green Day a lot, and by thinking I mean grousing, especially after I heard their set was two-and-a-half hours long because they were performing Dookie and American Idiot in their entirety, along with some other hits. That’s a lot of Green Day. Surely we wouldn’t stay for the whole show, would we?

Yep, we sure did. Green Day was phenomenal. I wasn’t prepared for how big of a show it would be. I definitely wasn’t ready for all the pyro—and not just once or twice at the beginning and the end but throughout the show. Fireballs, rockets of flame, explosions that startled me if I was looking anywhere but on stage. The flames were so big and we were so close we could feel the heat. I can’t imagine what It felt like for the performers a humid, late-summer Nashville night.

Billy Joe is the ultimate rock and roll hype man. He knows if you’re going to play an arena, you have to get everyone involved. He was constantly ramping up the energy, calling out “Hey-yo!” at least a dozen times, getting people to raise their arms or clap their hands. “Everybody make some noise!” Billy Joe knows you can’t just play for the poseurs in the VIP pit. You have to get the die-hard fans in the back fired up, and he did it. The energy was incredible.

The benefit of all this is it brings people together. “There are no enemies” here he called out. He’s famously changed the words to “American Idiot” to say “I’m not part of the MAGA agenda,” But Green Day took it further than that. Before the show, Register to Vote signage was part of the video rotation, which you could do at the Register to Vote booth on the main concourse.

All this positive energy was contagious. In the pit, there was a circle pit behind us that went on throughout the show. This was where we’d find Martin and Wendy and Eloise dancing, and if you got to close to them they’d shoulder you into the groove. During the show I saw other punkers in the pit: Rancid’s drummer, Dani from Surfbort, but Eloise was in it the entire time. (I thought it was super cool that she wore a Rollins Band Search and Destroy T-shirt. Rollins lives in Nashville now and Eloise wore the shirt as a kind of bat signal in case he made an appearance at the show.) Then I saw something I didn’t expect to see: a man in a wheelchair in the center of the pit. The crowd divided, splitting down the middle, as if to come together in a wall of death, but this morphed into a circle as everyone linked arms liked in a rugby huddle, until everyone collapsed on the man in the middle in a joyous dogpile of bodies. Everybody means everybody.

I’ve been to a lot of big shows this summer. Too many to be honest. I’m not going to lie, nine times out of ten, I’d rather be at the Tower Bar seeing a band I’ve never heard of before, playing their guts out for a couple dozen people, but Green Day was the best alternative rock performance I’ve seen all year.

Make It Stop in the New York Times (Sort of)

Something weird happened over the weekend. I woke up on Sunday to messages from friends sending me links to this story in the New York Times about a psychiatric hospital that was holding patients until their insurance ran out.

If that sounds eerily similar to the plot of my novel Make It Stop, that’s because it is. Even the photo the Times used in the piece echoes the book cover.

I don’t know what to say other than 1) Make It Stop is supposed to be a dystopian novel for fuck’s sake and 2) you can order it from your local independent bookstore or your public library or buy it at Amazon or Bookshop.org, which will give me a small cut if you use this link. (By the way, this is true of all the Bookshop.org links I post in MFTU.)

If you feel like sharing this odd coincidence with your famous friend who is a TV producer, podcaster, or content creator, I’d love to talk to them.

Now back to our regularly scheduled dystopian nightmare…

Thanks for reading! I’ll be back next week with a few announcements. If you liked this newsletter you might also like my latest novel Make It Stop, or the paperback edition of Corporate Rock Sucks: The Rise & Fall of SST Records, or my book with Bad Religion, or my book with Keith Morris. I have more books and zines for sale here. And if you’ve read all of those, consider preordering my latest collaboration The Witch’s Door and the anthology Eight Very Bad Nights.

Message from the Underworld comes out every Wednesday and is always available for free, but paid subscribers also get my deepest gratitude and Orca Alert! on most Sundays. It’s a weekly round-up of links about art, culture, crime, and killer whales.