Text and Photos: Charles Nickles
Shortly after I moved to NYC, I saw Anthrax and White Zombie play a sold-out show at Roseland. Quicksand was supposed to play too but they were sick or broke up or Walter was embroiled in a particularly electric game of GO and couldnโt be pried from his stones.
I donโt know.
It didnโt matter, though. I didnโt know fuck all about Quicksand except that their music didnโt speak at all to a thirteen-year-old SoCal transplant who wanted nothing more than to take some names his first time in the pit.
That didnโt happen, though.
I got fucking crushed.
I left the show with a swollen eye, a bloody nose and one perfect bootprint on my back. Iโm pretty sure that one dude died.
My mother was mortified.
I tried to explain to her that violence was a crucial component in any young manโs developmental process and โ besides โ when youโre caught in a mosh, there were ethics at play:
โYeah, you push and shove. It looks like fighting, but it isnโt. Everyone there is in the pit together. Weโre all on the same side for the same reason. If someone falls down, you help them up. If someone gets hurt, you get them out. Itโs a brotherhood, mom. Something I need to be a part of.โ
She believed me and I did too until I started going to hardcore shows where I learned about skinheads and boot crews and the alpha male tomfuckery that pays tribute to the breakdown.
Since then, Iโve been more selective with my violence.
Krimewatch
Had Krimewatch existed just a few years earlier, I totally wouldโve dragged my little cousin Olivia out to see them kick the shit out of an all ages matinee, because Iโll never have kids of my own and she used to strike me as someone who could use a punk singer. I might still, just because we donโt hang out enough and itโs always a pleasure to share in a band that presents femme and comes correct with the graphite carnage shit once almost wholly relegated to dicks.
Concealed Blade
I hear Pittsburgh is a pretty cool place. I only went, but I enjoyed the hell out of it. Drank a ton of beer, helped source a palette for a terrifying gasoline fire, saw some punk bands play at Helter Shelter, waved my Terrible Towel until I fell down and woke up in the van spooning a bag of Cheetos.
Brunch was excellent, if shaky.
Concealed Blade are fucking unhinged.
Iron Reagan
When many folks I know think about metal, they think leather and terror and goblins and ghouls and Satan and fire and dead singers and pig heads and blood and crime and unlistenable garbage and GGGRRROOOOUUUUGGGGHHHH!!! and Norway and suicide and drug abuse โ and yeah, thatโs all true. But what about thrash, people?
Thrash is the coolest.
The great beer can passed magnanimously between Black Flag and Venom and Discharge and ST, thrash unites all the battle vest nations into one gloriously stuporific circle pit, and NO ONE incites that eddy these days quite like Iron Reagan.
Youโd best flip your cap to them.
Power Trip
Yeah, you canโt fuck with Power Trip.
I tried, and I almost got my neck snapped twice for coming too close to the holy space between the unfuckwithable fire and the army of frothing acolytes hellbent on touching the heat before hurling themselves back to earth like apoplectic revenants, and some part of me wants to go off about the unspoken rules of stagediving as I once understood them, but the protocols Iโd known are garbage now that Power Trip are force.
I mean, HOLY SHIT, dude.
Iโve never felt so righteous kissing the fucking floor.
