Sound & Fury
In which we discuss going to hardcore festivals in your 40's.
I haven’t been to a music festival in about 20 years.
Kilby Block Party doesn’t really count, since it’s in Salt Lake, and ten minutes from my house. I can drive there easily, watch a few bands at my leisure, and leave if I’m not feeling it—which is exactly what happened when Vampire Weekend played back in May.
Festivals aren’t really my thing, but I’ve always been curious about Sound & Fury. It’s a hardcore fest that’s held in L.A. every summer, and a bunch of friends have been going to it for years. I always had a little bit of FOMO when I saw them post about it, even if there were never any bands I was dying to see.
My friend Casey and his girlfriend Shannon have been going since they started dating a few years ago, and that’s when I started getting even more jealous. The whole time the show was happening, Casey would be texting me. He would almost NEVER talk about the actual bands, and always the little asides that he noticed being around a younger generation of HC kids. This year, I decided to tag along with them so that he and I could have these conversations in real time.
I’ve been to three hardcore fests in my life.
The first one was Hellfest in 2001. I flew to Syracuse, NY with 25 of my friends for a wild three day event with every hardcore/metal band of the era. It was supposed to be the last time Earth Crisis ever played1, and we couldn’t risk missing it.
A few years later, when I was playing in Cherem, we got invited to play something called Total Liberation Fest in Erie, PA. It was supposed to be a big event centered around a bunch of vegan bands with political/environmental activists speaking, and we were so stoked to get an invite. It was a nightmare from start to finish. Touring through the midwest in January is awful, and things get even worse when the heater in the van breaks 45 minutes into the trip. Worse yet when the transmission went out 13 hours later, and we were stuck in Grand Island, Nebraska for two days, thinking that we had definitely hit rock bottom. Things looked a lot brighter when our drummer’s mom (we were all like 23 and broke) agreed to loan us $2500 to fix it, then had our optimism crushed again when we got to the actual festival only to find out that the first three venues had fallen through, and the only thing left was a condemned warehouse with no heat. The high temperature in Erie that day was 11 degrees.
Later that summer, the Total Liberation crew decided to take that nightmare scenario on the road, and invited us along. We played the SLC date—which was the best of the tour—and the LA date. Everything before and after those two fell apart in spectacular fashion, but I wasn’t there to witness it. After that, I’d pretty much had enough of fests.
All three of these events make for great stories now, but as they were happening, I was stressed out beyond belief.
A quick aside: I still have my old Cherem tour diary entries in a Google Drive document. A few years ago I went back through everything, cleaned them up, and fleshed them out when the office job(s) I had sort of fell apart. I was still going to work every day, but no one knew who I was supposed to be reporting to, or what I was supposed to be doing. This happened two different times, at two different companies. As long as it looked like I was working, no one asked questions, so I spent most of the days with long form news articles on one monitor and a Google Doc on the other. Anyone that came by my office/desk area to ask what I was doing was met with the George Costanza approach of looking annoyed all the time so people thought I was busy. I also took A LOT of long lunches, but reminiscing about being in a touring band was fun, too.
I’ve always promised that eventually I would put those stories out in some form or another, and I stand by that. A print version is my dream, and I think it might actually be attainable now. Profitable? Not in the slightest. But attainable, for sure. I’ll find someone to read through all of them, flag the best ones and start working on it. Maybe that can be my winter project.
Okay, now back to Sound & Fury.
I bought a weekend pass the day they announced the first wave of bands. There weren’t any that I was dying to see, but there were just enough that I knew it would be worth going. Most of them had either come through Salt Lake already this year, or would be later on. The only crazy reunion was for a band called Have Heart, who, to get real esoteric here, are kind of like the new Bane. By that I mean that they are one of the most influential straight edge bands of the past decade, they’re incredibly popular, people go absolutely nuts for them, and I don’t care about them in the slightest.
One of my favorite things about committing to this fest were the two (well, three, really) types of reactions I got when I told people why I would be out of town that weekend. Like most people I know, I sort of straddle two different worlds. The first is the underground, punk/hardcore scene full of people that are following the mantra of the great 7 Seconds - Young Till I Die!
The first group is also split into two subgroups. One is younger people that were jealous that I was going to see all these bands. The other is people my age, whose reaction was “Do we care about Have Heart? I can’t decide.”
The second group is people my age, who are mostly work friends (and many more casual acquaintances) with real jobs, pretty normal family life, and no connection whatsoever to the counterculture. Their reaction was that of genuine confusion. Almost none of them could comprehend that I, a 43-year-old man, would choose to spend a weekend watching 30 bands at a park in Los Angeles. “That sounds like so much standing!” they would say. “I’ve never heard of a single one of these bands? What kind of music is it? Are there going to be a lot of people?”
The truth is that I surprised myself with how excited I was for Sound & Fury. Granted, I think I was more excited to be out of SLC, and in Los Angeles for a few days, than for the actual show. Even still, I was really looking forward to a full weekend of people-watching. Our hotel was on the USC campus, and literally across the street from Exposition Park. The is huge, and not only had space for Sound & Fury, but is also home to the Los Angeles Natural History Museum, and both the LA Memorial Coliseum, and the LAFC stadium.
We got to the park around 1pm to get a feel for the layout, check out the merch2, and to see our friend’s band, Clique, who played at 2:25. The promises of shady areas to relax were greatly exaggerated, and there was a single, giant tent towards the back of the park. All it did was trap the heat inside, and there was nowhere to sit underneath it except on the ground—if you could find a spot. It was packed with sweaty people from side to side. Luckily, we grabbed one of the picnic tables with an umbrella near the food area, and watched the first half of the day from there.
The picnic table on Saturday afternoon is also where we made the most of being there in person. All the texts that Casey would have sent turned into conversations about hardcore. He and I have been driving or flying to other cities to see shows since 2000, when we drove to St. George to watch our friends in a band called Tempered play with Good Clean Fun. We’re well into our 40’s now, and hardcore is still very much a part of our life and friendship, but things are different. We still love it, the bands are good, the shows are fun, and we want to be a part of it all—but we want to do it from a nice bench in the shade at our leisure. For three straight hours, we ate snacks, stayed hydrated (the only place that had cold brew coffee ran out at 4:30pm before we even had any, which was probably for the best), and chatted about the shirts people were wearing, which bands would have been a cool addition to the show, and how many scene points you get for a stage dive at a fest like that.
Casey and I have long joked about starting a podcast where we can have these conversations, even if I don’t think anyone else wants to listen to us. Shannon, Casey’s GF, is about 10 years younger than we are, so she is much more in tune with what’s happening currently, and I’m sure she gets sick of us yapping about shit all the time. We thought one funny bit for the pod would be Casey trying to explain to me scene trends, or band beef, that he hears about from her. Every few minutes throughout the day, she would jump in to clarify something, or we’d ask her to fill us in on the lore of a particular band that we didn’t know about. It helped to have a millennial perspective on things that we didn’t understand or how they’ve changed since we were in our prime.
To be clear, this is a podcast that will never actually happen, but we talked about it a lot that weekend.
Zulu, Anxious, and Full of Hell played in the late afternoon, but the only two bands that I really wanted to see that day were Drug Church and Twitching Tongues. Drug Church is one of my favorite bands to come up in the last few years, and they have such a cool sound. I think the best way to describe them is, what if Black Flag loved Foo Fighters instead of avant garde jazz? The singer still brings that HC energy that I love, but it’s straight guitar rock, and a few songs probably would have been huge radio hits in the 90’s. Twitching Tongues3 is a mix between Life of Agony, Type O Negative, Section 8 and Only Living Witness, which means you either like them a ton, or think they might be the worst band you’ve ever heard. Life of Agony and Type O Negative are bands I fucking love, so they’re speaking my language. I saw them in Salt Lake back in 2012, but missed them every time they came through after that.
Both sets were super fun, but afterwards I was pretty spent, and ready for the day to be over. Sunami and Fiddlehead were the headliners for Day 1, and since both of those bands tour regularly, we were okay calling it a night. I wanted to get back to the hotel to shower, and see what kind of damage had been done because I forgot sunscreen.
The first band of the second day was Desmadre, a band we all wanted to see… but not bad enough to endure another 10 hour day in the sun. We hit the Rose Bowl flea market, grabbed breakfast, and hung out at the hotel pool during the first few hours of Sunday. Every band playing before 4:30 had a tour booked through SLC, so we were okay missing out. We got there just in time for XweaponX at 4:30, and it was a great set. After that, it was a barrage of bands I like, but would never go out of my way to see if they came through town on their own tour. In other words, it was exactly what these kinds of fests are for.
Have Heart was the headliner for the second night, and while I stand by what I said earlier, I was really excited to watch them play. Part of the fun with bands like that is seeing how everyone else reacts. I knew Have Heart was going to put on a great show, and kids were going to go absolutely nuts during their set. I’ve never been a mosh pit guy, because it’s very silly, and I also hate having sweat soaked strangers bumping into me. I like watching the band, seeing how they interact with each other on stage, and how they behave in front of a crowd that is going crazy. I got as close as I could, and stayed there as long as I could handle fending off flying fists, and people trying to spin kick me into oblivion. Eventually I had to make my way to the side and watch from afar.
My only regret from the whole weekend is that I didn’t go to any of the pre-shows. I assumed most of the bands that were playing smaller shows earlier in the week would be “surprise” additions to the actual festival, but none of them were. I missed out on Speed, Mindforce, and God’s Hate most notably, and a bunch of others. The only surprise addition was Touche Amore, who falls into the same category as Have Heart for me.
All in all, it was a fun weekend and I’m glad I went. I doubt I’ll go to another fest though. Maybe in twenty years, I’ll try it again.
When I’m 64.
Jesus. I can already tell you that my life is going to look vastly different than what The Beatles pictured at that age. One thing’s for sure though, Casey and I will still be talking about starting that podcast.
Like most HC bands, they’re playing again. I saw them once after this show, and I never want to see them again.
As a shirt guy, I was pretty disappointed with most of the selections, and the whole setup overall. At Kilby Block Party, you waited in one line that snaked around, so you could see everything each band was offering, and got to buy everything that you wanted at once. If you wanted something from 6 different bands at Sound & Fury, you had to wait in six different lines, some of which took 30/40 minutes to get through. No way I was standing in the direct sunshine for that long.
The singer, Colin Young, also hosts a podcast that basically does what Casey and I want to do, and is way better at it.