I accompanied Montreal's TOTAL NADA on their recent US tour as roadie/designated driver. Rather than a tedious "tour journal" what follows is a compendium of brief scene reports from everywhere we went, to the best of my recollection as well as some overall impressions from this slice of American punk in it's current state.

Philly

Does Philly really need a report? The show was at the speakeasy/dive bar Cousin Danny's next to the elevated train line, and I was delighted to learn that Cousin Danny was a real person, the guy who runs the place and was there the whole show. The locals were squeaky-vocals Z-PAK (11pm) and vocal-effects-board hardcore ICD10. Everyone in Philly is really nice and really cool but I will say there was less energetic dancing/crowd movement at this show than elsewhere. Can't deny it!

Moshing

So speaker of moshing, people moshed everywhere we went, without exception, and moshed well. There was no negative posturing crowd-killing, and I don't think a single town had a crowd that stood still the entire show. Maybe this is due to TOTAL NADA's infectious energy, but I do think there is a very healthy mosh culture across the US right now. I was delighted to see young goth mall fur accessory zoomers two-stepping every time an appropriate drum beat appeared. In fact, there was two-stepping everywhere, all the time. Side-to-side was also popular, either with everyone demonstrating their own particular style/gait/lean, or the entire room going back and forth in unison. Overall, positive, energy moshing everywhere.

New Brunswick, New Jersey

This was the only new city for me on the tour. Right now a lot of shows there happen in the parking lot of a Mexican restaurant, where the space and atmosphere are great. Like a generator show but with amenities. The parking lot is taped off, so there's a big crowd gathered in the lot itself, and the passerbys and looky-loos gathering on the sidewalk. Show-goers ate at the restaurant, which I heard has experienced a business-saving boost in sales thanks to the shows, and their walls are now covered in band shirts of bands that have played there. New Brunswick is close to New York City, so many people drove in from the city to see the show, which seemed to be regular occurrence. I got the feeling that some NYC people preferred going to shows like this in Jersey over the same bands playing in New York because of the great vibes of the venue (and maybe the shows ending a little earlier). PHANTOM where the hometown headliners, I don't think I need to introduce them but they are proof of one of my rules of hardcore: The drummer makes the band.

Pittsburgh and Cleveland

I'm lumping these together because both shows ended up being that sort of "combined show" that happens in a smaller city, in the middle of the week, where a band like TOTAL NADA will end up playing a dive bar with the same weird stoner band from West Virginia who's members are having a fight/breaking up two nights in a row. Pittsburgh and Cleveland are both those kinds of places, small and tough cities with relatively small scenes where this happens (Pittsburgh's annual Skull Fest being the exception). But that is not a slight, the punks in these towns both put in the extra effort to build a scene with an outsized impact and to make sure it's always a place worth stopping on tour.

In Pittsburgh we saw "the dumbest band in hardcore" ILLITERATES (LP on Sorry State) who sound like those other Pittsburgh hardcore bands but with the speed turned up to the maximum possible, zero sense of pretention, and I assume dumber lyrics. Excellent band. Cleveland's local band was BIGG EGG and normally I am not really into the whole "egg thing" but in this case it seems like the band is completely egg-themed, with every song being an egg pun or joke (yolk). I have to respect the commitment to the bit. Only in Cleveland.

St. Louis

The St. Louis show was at a spot called Sinkhole, which is funny if you know me personally, but anyways it felt like a DIY show space but I think is actually just run by an individual, who maybe used to/also runs a small label by the same name. So it felt like a DIY space, it was a nice room, with a practice space in the back and decorated by several old Taco Bell signs. The show was small, since raw punk-ish locals KATO (demo on Roachleg Records) had to drop, leaving only JERKING CLASS as the other band. Even if the scene is a little small though, St. Louis is always worth a stop because of the City Museum, which is an attraction that is impossible to describe if you've never been there. A massive former shoelace factory transformed into a low-safety standards scrap metal playground/art gallery/everything space. Every city should stop investing in stupid gimmick tourist attractions and just found their own City Museums and turn it over to the local community of artists and freaks. Imagine what a Montreal City Museum would be like given our high population of francophone circus punk scrap metal welders.

Texas Teenagers

We saw a lot of youth coming out to the All Ages shows on the tour, but Dallas and Houston were the peak of seeing under 20-year-olds in the crowd and in the opening bands. I think Dallas and Houston are both sort of off the beaten path for bands, if they even go to Texas they are likely focused on the gig in Austin. And the show in Austin was good, with excellent new local bands like BLOODRITE and AUTOMATED EXECUTION. But Austin is a night-life city, where the whole district is crammed full of music-bars, each with a show or band of some kind every night. The streets are full of young to middle-aged affluent-ish people (tech workers? tourists?) who just bar hop from show to show. So instead of teenagers, the crowd in Austin was a good chunk just normies who walked in off the street "oo look, weirdos playing loud music!" Austin also had less moshing (although props for having not one but TWO radical zine distros tabling the show). All to say that all of Texas rules, and if you go there check out at least two cities besides Austin and you won't be disappointed.

Ephemeral Venues

The aforementioned show in New Brunswick, NJ was the first such show of the tour at one of these emphemeral DIY venues – a space carved out or put together in a pretty temporary way just to have a show. Chicago was meant to be a generator show at a new, untested location but had to be moved at the last minute due to an extreme thunderstorm warning (turned out to the right call, and we were treated to some amazing lightning and electrical anomalies after the show). Even though we got stuck in a tiny dive bar, people still moshed and went off.

The Kansas City show was set up in the middle of a huge, abandoned reservoir in the middle of a park. We heard people had been cracking the spot for shows regularly all summer, each time coming up against a bigger lock to cut... This show may have been the last, since the cops/park rangers showed up at the end, but people already had another location selected for future generator shows. There were some guys making and selling tacos (and flinging tortillas into the crowd), an anarchist zine distro, and someone just dropped off a huge box of "FREE FIREWORKS" which were lit off continuously whenever a band was playing. No other show on the tour had the chaotic and autonomous vibe of Kansas City and the crew there seemed pretty dedicated to making that the standard for every show there.

New Orleans brought this vibe to the urban core with a proper squat show at a location in the downtown "Central Business District" cracked and prepared well in advance. The show was extremely well organized and well attended, enough so that they were raising money for a local cause alongside paying the bands plenty in gas money. Even the organizers seems surprised at how many people came out, including teenagers who had to leave early to catch their train home.

The tour was book-ended with time in NYC where we heard about the current scene of squat shows there (although sadly didn't get to attend one). See the recently published scene report from the Logout crew for more info on that. It requires a bit of work, planning, and a shift in how people think about and treat attending a show but maybe it's something you can try in your town too! It was really inspiring and exciting to see people in so many different places experimenting and pushing the boundaries to create spaces for punk shows.

Continuing along this "ephemeral venues" section, Charlotte was in a shed, which I gathered might be planning to host more shows. North Carolina is one of my favourite places to go. Amazing local bands, friendly people, shows are always at a house/shed/warehouse/something and there's a higher proportion of cool straight edge punks than anywhere else.

Hattiesburg

Hattiesburg is down at the bottom of Mississippi, only two hours from New Orleans, so there is come cross-pollination between cities. BAD ANXIETY from Hattiesburg came down and play the New Orleans show, and some friends in New Orleans drove up to catch the Hattiesburg show the next day.

Hattiesburg is a special place, like so many other smaller, overlooked cities in America you can find a extremely dedicated and cool punk scene. We drove to Hattiesburg a bit early so Hampton of BAD ANXIETY could tape a live TOTAL NADA "Dog City Sessions" set in his VHS-wired-up basement. Dog City Sessions seems to be ramping up in activity on Hampton's YouTube channel, with DEFLUO CERVUS and FUERA DE SEKTOR also recently stopping by, alongside a steady stream and archive of VHS-recorded live shows.

The show in Hattiesburg was at The Spectrum Center, which is a house-turned-LGBT-outreach center. All ages house show vibes. CITRUS played their first set alongside DRAFT DODGER who are definitely in high school and have two guitars and no bass. No notes.

Birmingham

Birmingham, Alabama is like Hattiesburg, another small and overlooked but extremely powerful scene. The show was at The Firehouse which is a community space dedicated to DIY and teaching music. It's been around for at least 10 years and is an actual old firehouse with a big show space in the back. TOTAL NADA played sandwiched in between locals BORN and ACUTE EFFECT (I think their first show), both in the top of the bands I saw on this trip. Being a middle-of-the-week show, the turnout wasn't great, but we were treated to an entire room of side-to-side.

Richmond

Richmond was sadly at a boring bar, and suffered due to numerous other shows the same night. Patrick from DESTRUCT is booking a lot of the shows there right now, and usually shows happen at a cool warehouse space with much better vibes. However, all this working against the show could not stop it from being a success because of the sheer quality of bands playing.. GUERRA FINAL, ULTIMATE DISASTER and CASCARA

New York City

NYC had an outsized presence on this tour, being at both ends of the tour, with some days off for me there on either end. Similar to the city's outsized presence on punk in general? But the squat-energy happening there right now is truly inspiring, alongside new bands like LOVE AND COMPASSION and many others I have yet to see. The end of the tour was Latino Punk Fest, which deserves and entire report back all to itself. I can't do it justice, but I will mention ABISM who's set I really enjoyed.

Links

Here's some links if you want to check out the bands mentioned:

TOTAL NADA
Z-PAK
ICD10
LOVE AND COMPASSION
PHANTOM
ILLITERATES
BIGG EGG
KATO
JERKING CLASS
BLOOD RITE
BAD ANXIETY
DEFLUO CERVUS
FUERA DE SEKTOR
DRAFT DODGER
BORN
GUERRA FINAL
ULTIMATE DISASTER
ABISM