#2: TO NOFX, WITH LOVE…

A snob to my own peo­ple, a pariah among broth­ers, a born out­sider lost in the haze amidst other out­siders. Such were the feel­ings that over­came me as I watched Fat Mike, El Hefe, Melvin and Smelly take the Palace stage for their third and final Mel­bourne show.

I couldn’t put my fin­ger on it. I’d been excited about this tour for months, Bad Reli­gion had just blitzed the stage as the “warm up” act and now I was get­ting good NOFX, not drunk, sloppy NOFX. Even Fat Mike’s jokes were funny.

NOFX had been the first punk I’d ever lis­tened to as a clue­less, chubby 16 year old. I still fondly remem­ber the day when one of my friends (who was one of those damnable cool kids yet for some unknown rea­son he still chose to hang out with me) shoved Pump up the Val­uum into my Sony Dis­c­man and said “Lis­ten to this.” It was a water­shed moment that changed the course of my life.

So here I was at the Palace see­ing these punk stal­warts deliver some great tunes in between their com­edy stylings. I should’ve been lap­ping it up, instead I felt like a black man at a KKK meet­ing. I felt at odds with my own nature and I didn’t know why.

I car­ried out a flight check.

The bill? A NOFX/Bad Reli­gion dou­ble header is the aver­age punk’s wet dream so it couldn’t be that.

The per­for­mances? Bad Reli­gion was strong as expected. “Gen­er­a­tor,” “Let Them Eat War” and “Infected” were deliv­ered with vigour. At the same time it’s well known that NOFX can be a mixed bag live. Great one night, sloppy, lazy and stand off­ish the next but tonight they’d brought their A-game which meant there were no prob­lems with the performances.

I felt lost and as I looked around me, the answer for my con­fu­sion slowly dawned on me. It wasn’t what was hap­pen­ing on the stage that had me at sixes and sev­ens; it was the audi­ence. I was sur­rounded not by peo­ple but by a mass of con­formist sheep, sport­ing per­fectly sculpted mohawks, care­fully ripped jeans with spikes thrown in for that added “I’m hard” effect.

I know you think you’re try­ing to make a state­ment with your mas­sive mohawk, but here’s a news­flash: You look like a cliché, and not just any kind of cliché. You’re the kind of cliché that used to have mean­ing and sub­stance but has now been reduced to a main­stream com­mod­ity. Put the safety pins away and try think for yourself.

Cokie the Clown

These weren’t my peo­ple at all. They looked less like actual punks and more like automa­tons fresh off the Dan­ger­field pro­duc­tion line. Man­u­fac­tured and soul­less, devoid of per­son­al­ity or free thought. It’s sober­ing to see punk rock, the proud bas­tion of inde­pen­dence and non-conformity, trans­formed into an exer­cise in mar­ket­ing and consumerism.

Worse still, NOFX are for many peo­ple the only punk band they’ve ever lis­tened to, by virtue of the fact that they’ve sold six mil­lion records and when these neo­phytes breeze into a show they have no idea what to do or how to act. So their knee­jerk reac­tion is to aggra­vate as many peo­ple as pos­si­ble, because, like, that’s what punk is all about yeah, bro? The aver­age punter needed to be on full alert as these knuckle drag­ging douche bags marauded their way through the venue, knock­ing drinks over and barg­ing into peo­ple while scream­ing “Fuck yeaaaaaaah moth­er­fuck­ers!” two inches from your face.

It was a strange expe­ri­ence. Here was NOFX, a band I’d loved for years, play­ing live right before my eyes yet it was at this exact moment I realised we’d grown apart. I tried in vain to recall the last time I’d lis­tened to a NOFX record in its entirety. I couldn’t even remem­ber the last time I lis­tened to a Fat Wreck band. What was once a main sta­ple of my lis­ten­ing habits had been reduced to the occa­sional play on iTunes and while I was asleep at the wheel a bunch of illit­er­ate apes had taken over.

The Fat Wreck label had come to embody the type of punk rock that I looked down on. Fun for the most part, but ulti­mately unsat­is­fy­ing. Bozo skate punk was some­thing I’d long since moved on from but nos­tal­gia and affec­tion had pre­vented me from pulling the plug once and for all.

I gazed at the crowd. Once I might’ve been one of them; boor­ish, obnox­ious and care­fully dressed to fit in. I looked back at the stage. Fat Mike was still the same snotty six­teen year old with sus­penders and flu­oro hair. But that wasn’t me any­more. It was a bit­ter­sweet moment but I didn’t feel all that sad, instead I felt free.

As Melvin broke out his trusty accor­dion to close the set with “Theme From a NOFX Album” (a long time per­sonal favourite) I was clos­ing a chap­ter that had been writ­ten some time ago. It just took me a lit­tle longer to realise it.

We’ve shared many good times over the years and I’ll always trea­sure those mem­o­ries. I shud­der to think where I might’ve ended up if we’d never met but time is the enemy and our romance has petered out. We’ll always have “The Decline” and “Kill All the White Man” but this is where we say goodbye.

Farewell NOFX.