Bad Religion

 My life is a song, a short melody Harmonizing with reality.

-Bad Religion, My Sanity

It's been a while since I used this space. I'm not apologizing, the pandemic made my life far too electronic to spend extra time pontificating on a blog.  But life is happening again, and this is a good place to appreciate something sacred that happened in a crowded, loud and sweaty mass of humanity.  Over the weekend Michele, Jack, CJ and I went to see Bad Religion at the Soundstage in Baltimore.  I had gotten us tickets way back in the summer when I saw that they were touring, that their dates were very limited and that Baltimore, a little more than an hour away was on the list.

The background is this, when I was maybe 16, I actually forget exactly when, I had gone to see Bad Religion play at the Trenton City Gardens.  The show was amazing, but terrifying.  The City Gardens was a legendary Punk Rock venue, sort of like the Jersey equivalent of CBGB, but it was in actuality, an absolute wreck of a place.  Stuck in the middle of a very sketchy part of Trenton NJ, you pulled up and you had a hard time imagining this was an actual concert venue.  There was a crude stencil that said City Gardens and there were all sorts of skinheads and punks milling around in a parking lot that was nothing short of a paving catastrophe.  The show was a solid three hours with 2.5 Children and The Vandals opening up for Bad Religion.  As you might imagine a band that calls themselves Bad Religion has certain opinions about religion, but I was far away from being the person that would eventually decide to become a professional religious person.  They were, and still are, right up there with The Ramones at the top of my punk rock favorites.  I am a musical omnivore, and I was even at 16. Before I had graduated from High School I had seen Eric Clapton, Metallica, Bad Religion and a handful of other punk bands most of you have probably never heard of, and probably never will. I had a friend who was a punk rock carnivore, meaning he only did punk, he looked the part and lived the part and he was the main reason I found myself in a bad part of Trenton at a run down, but legendary club with a big black X on my hand indicating that I was not allowed to drink beer.

I was allowed to risk my life in the mosh pit though, which I almost, sort of did.  I got close to it, I got to the edge, and I felt the crowd surging around me and I saw people getting punched, kicked and shoved, both deliberately and accidentally, and I decided to back off and enjoy the show from a safe distance, if there was such a thing.  Probably a safe distance would have been across the Delaware River.  Later in life, when I was full grown, and after I had been around the scene a bit, I got in some mosh pits, some big ones, some little ones, a few good ones and a few bad ones.  Enough to know the difference between good and bad when it comes to a mosh pit, which what you call the area where punks "dance" if you want to call it that.  I would not classify it so much as dancing as it is just moving like you mean it. Everyone's got their own style; mine, when I was young and my knees and heart could take it was sort of hopping around and letting the motion of the pit sort of pinball me around, some people sort of get low and almost crawl like the Xenomorph in Alien.  Some people aren't there to dance though, their style is violence, they want to push, they want to shove, they want to make the pit into their own personal little fight club. Two or three people like that can ruin a pit, make it a bad pit, more than that makes it a place you just stay away from.

A good pit is one where the violence of the movement is tempered by the sense of community of the crowd.  In a good pit, if you get knocked down, people will stop and help you up and then return to slamming into you and everyone else.  You very well might come out of a good pit bruised and feeling a little beat up, but none of it was because of malice, it was because of... well it's hard to say.  Moshing doesn't make a lot of sense outside of punk and heavy metal.  These are musical genres that are essentially founded upon discontent, anger, alienation and sometimes even outright rage.  Punk rock sounds like yelling a lot of the time and the lyrics, if you can understand them, are things that pretty much sound like things that should be yelled.  The music is loud and fast, and while it requires a certain skill is not exactly what you would call complex musically, three chords and big amplifier stack make punk happen.

I spent a lot of my young adulthood search for good mosh pits, like surfers looking for good waves.  I found some. The best one was an outdoor show for a punk band called Helmet, it was in State College in the fall and it had just rained and the ground was just mud.  The crowd was quite large and the ground was quite soft and the pit was enormous and no one could really get much traction so we were all just sort of crushed together in front of the stage and it felt like being part of an amoeba.  I came out of that pit caked in mud up to my waist and feeling like I had just survived battle.  Fear is an important element of what makes a pit so exhilarating.  It's the same reason people jump out of perfectly good airplanes and slide down mountains with sticks strapped to their feet, but there's music playing so loud you can feel it in your guts.  You know that everyone else in that blob of humanity feels the same music in their guts, and that's where there sacred feeling starts.

I have told Michele and my kids about this kind of thing for years.  Michele was more of a Whitney Houston fan, and as far as I am aware moshing is not really a pop/R&B phenomenon.  When I saw Bad Religion coming to Baltimore, I asked each member of my family if they wanted to go, with a warning that I couldn't be sure what the show might be like, it had, after all been over 30 years since I had seen them, and I wasn't really sure what the Punk scene was like these days, it had really gone pretty sour in the 1990s because of the popularity of Grunge and other punk adjacent type music.  The more people are trying to do something chaotic and violent like moshing, the more likely you are to get a few jerks who want to hit and grope other people.

My kids are 18 and 19 now, grown people, but even so I felt a little nervous about what they would think and what might happen, that was the adrenaline rush for me before we even got there.  I have tracked Bad Religion's music for years, and the fam knows some of the songs.  I have actually come to appreciate the songs that critique religion as a sort of prophetic voice.  I'm not a fan of one of their most common symbols, a cross with a line through it, but I find that the things they find most toxic about religion are, in fact, actually toxic things about religion. So here I was, a middle aged, Presbyterian Minister going to relive one of his formative experiences at a punk rock show with his wife and two kids in tow.  The Baltimore Soundstage is a decidedly nicer venue than the Trenton City Gardens, but it's still basically a big empty room with a stage at one end, bars (the kind that serve drinks) around the edges and LOT of speakers.  The tickets were general admission, there were no seats, the place was sold out and the usual assortment of punk rock people were there.  Except this time there were a lot of people that didn't show up at punk rock shows in the early 1990s.  There were black and brown people, there were trans-people, queer people of all varieties and there were young people and old people, older than me and younger than my kids.  One guy had his son, who looked to be about seven, on his shoulders.  I started to wonder if there would be a mosh pit at all.

Don't worry there was.  It erupted first during the first opener: Me Monster, but it was small, only maybe four or five enthusiastic young men. They sort of startled the crowd and there was a bit of stumbling about, but it seemed pretty good so far.  The pit got a little bigger during the second opnener: Speed of Sound, a young trio of siblings with a female vocalist, who could yell with the best of them.  During their set the pit started to get a bit bigger, and at the end the woman had the guts to actually get in the pit while belting out the end of their last song.  That was a good sign that the pit was going to be good, but you never know, the place wasn't even full yet and the kind of people that skip the opening acts are usually the ones that will mess up the pit when they get there.

By the time the aging Punk Rock legends came on the place was packed and the crowd was ready to go.  During the first eruption of the pit in the opening act, I sort of glanced at Michele to see if she was mad or scared or whatever.  I also sort of looked at my kids to see what they thought, but the power of the music had made an impression.  As BR played through their set, hitting all the right spots in their 300+ song catalogue, the pit started in earnest.  We were together back a bit from the action, but close enough to see what was going on.  Given my recent heart issues and my general level of physical wellness at the moment, I knew I wasn't going in, those days are probably passed for me.  As the set went on though, my daughter, CJ, began to make their way towards the pit.  I started watching her as much as I was watching the stage.  I had a sense of nervousness about her going close to the pit, but I knew she was going on purpose and she seemed to know what she was doing.  I looked for her bright red hair every time the white lights flashed on the pit, and I kept seeing them at the edge of the pit, and a couple of times I could see their face, and they were smiling from ear to ear.

Then the bright red hair was in the pit, and they were bouncing around among the sweaty bodies of the moshing fans, and every time I saw their face they were smiling, and that bright red hair stayed up and bounced and moshed for several complete songs, and then I couldn't see them anymore, until they came up beside me and said, "I am covered in people's sweat."  I said, "You went in! And you survived!  Don't do that again!" But I was seriously proud and happy of my girl, all 5 foot 2 inches of them going in there and moshing in the pit.  The Dad in me had to say don't do that again, but I really didn't mean it.  I hope they do do it again, and I hope that smile happens every time.  I hope that they never run into a "bad" pit, and I kind of think maybe they won't.  See the people who go to punk shows now, after all this time are the people who, like me, were probably searching for a good pit and not always finding them.  We have raised our kids a bit different, with less violence and more acceptance than previous generations. The young people at this show, watching men the age of their fathers and maybe even grandfathers yell/sing, "I'm a twenty-first century digital boy, I don't know how to live, but I got a lot of toys," probably don't realize that was a prescient satire when it was written in the 1980s, but they know it's honest, they know it's real.  Kids these days are good at knowing what's real, because they don't get to see it that much.

So if Bad Religion, and maybe Punk Rock in general is going to be prophetic, maybe that's what it's telling us: be real even if it's raw, be honest, live with a code, reject the posing of popularity.  I would say those are things we need to do as a church if we are going to be good religion.