Built To Last were a decent Madballish band from California. We interviewed them for a friend’s fanzine, but the zine never happened. At some point we were going to publish it in Parade Brigade as well,but that never happened either.
These “Alive & Well” shows were a huge deal at the time. I did a three show weekend starting with the Ink & Dagger/Bluetip show the night before in Philadelphia. I was really running my car all around the tri-state area. I cannot believe it lasted almost all the way into 2004! Day two was better than day one for sure, but more on that in a minute… So two big rumors that summer: Judge was rumored to be playing this, but the story went that Mike eventually said no. That actually seems reasonable. The other big rumor was Rest…
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Mercifully, this show got moved to Casino Skate Park. The openers were Full Speed Ahead, OS101, and Kid Dynamite, who were still fairly new and I had not yet heard before this show. I was not impressed. The bottomline is every band got their normal excellent reactions, but especially Vision and Floorpunch. Burn were really good. There were a couple of scuffles during their set because people were going off hard. I remember being told to avoid someone because “you don’t want to fuck with him.” Whatever.
What a week! I had car issues earlier in this week that nearly led me to wrecking my car, so there was a lot of nonsense about getting it fixed, paying for that, etc. I was really glad this show was right across town (literally down the street from the high school we all attended and that I would later work at for years). The big draw was True Blue, but Count Me Out and Time Flies had become two of the bigger bands in hardcore during this time. I don’t remember much about Desperate Measures. Isn’t someone from that…
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I have no idea who else played this show, but I remember doing a bunch of dives during “Chelsea Girls” and it bumming out the punks. My other memory is a woman doing a fellatio motion at the singer’s penis during a song. That’s about it for this one.
I spent a lot of my time at this show catching up with friends, so not a lot to report about bands. Murphy’s Law were good. I had not seen Slapshot in 20+ years, and Choke looked and sounded great. They played a good mix of old and new plus Last Rites covers. Leeway tore the house down yet again. The next few bands were not…great, so I got out of there before Shelter. I had an early morning meeting on campus the next day, so I wanted to get home and get a good night of sleep.
So this was a Halloween show, which became a bit of a tradition in NJ around this time, I don’t remember a ton from it, but I think this was the show where FSA covered 7 Seconds. Degenerics played this show too and opened their set with a cover of “South of Heaven.” I don’t remember much else about this one.
My only show of 2018 took me back to Asbury Park to see Full Speed Ahead. It’s about an hour from where I am living now back to the shore, but my GPS brought me in a different way that had me a little confused. The venue, which is actually a brewery, had a small lot for cars, so I had to drive around town a little bit before noticing the city office center had paid parking on the week. Huh. So I paid my $7 or whatever it was, checked with a cop walking by to make sure it…
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One of our friends put this show on. Vision had never played Manahawkin before, but Neurotic Impulse did in 1987. Ash Monday and Test of Courage were local bands. If I recall correctly, ToC covered an Underdog song? I don’t think Charge played this show. Triple Threat were good. I liked their 7″, which tried to blend speedy youth crew hardcore with something like Bl’ast! or Pressure Release. Generally it is pretty good. The Fire Sill Burns had members of Ensign and some others. Oh and Ensign played too. We packed it up front for Vision. Some of my students…
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I have too big memories of this show: Hanging out at a variety of band tables as the night went on and being very social with people is one. Second is Three Against One covering War Zone, which got a big crowd reaction as you can see on the video. ADD was another cool band that did a good demo at this time. I saw them a few times right around this era.
