I have no idea what made me look at the metal gate and the linebacker-sized bouncer scowling behind it and think, “I like my odds here.”
The bouncer was guarding the stage at the Birch Hill nightclub. He was one of a line of big, unfriendly giants we in New Jersey used to call “peacekeepers.” Behind the peacekeepers that fateful night in 2003 were the seminal Jersey punk rockers, the Bouncing Souls. I was not a member of the Bouncing Souls, but that night, I felt very strongly that this fact should not exclude me from joining them on stage.
The peacekeepers disagreed.
Birch Hill was so Jersey: a sprawling summer-leisure complex with a bar the size of a corner dorm room. It was where my kid sister went to day camp, where my terrifying math teacher played volleyball, and where I flung my 130-pound, 20-year-old frame at human rock formations.
Near the end of the set, the band began playing “Manthem,” an ode to camaraderie, and I saw a few fellow idiots make a run for the stage. That’s when I noticed I was doing it, too. How to elude Goliath? I decided to jump the barrier and then immediately drop to the floor and roll under his outstretched arms, then bounce to my feet and climb on the stage. Success.
The few of us who made it threw our arms around each other and members of the band and sang along: “He’s my friend, he’s my alibi/ My accessory to the crime/ A bond that will never die/ Till the end of time …”
I’ve been thinking about this moment lately as the Bouncing Souls celebrate their 30th anniversary. Birch Hill is gone. What was once a refuge for bored and restless youth is now an “active adult community,” like everything else in New Jersey that isn’t a bank.
My colleague, Tim Carney, wrote recently about the deleterious effect of the erosion of local community institutions on America’s social health. It’s not just the closure of work spaces, he notes, “but the closure of the local diners, the bowling leagues, and most of all the closure of the churches are the core problem here.”
[Read: Where to place the blame for the suffering of the working class]
To this, I’d add the closure of music spaces. The Asbury Park, N.J., race riots of 1970 “had pretty much cleared what was left of the town out,” E Street Band guitarist Stevie Van Zandt told the New York Times for a retrospective on the legendary Asbury Park club, the Stone Pony. “It was left to us misfits and rogues and renegades and outcasts who moved in.” As it happened, Asbury Park got hollowed out again two decades later, and the Bouncing Souls “were a lifeline,” according to former Stone Pony manager Eileen Chapman, bringing crowds and helping to keep the place going.
Nor was this effect confined to Jersey. After the riots in 1968, parts of Washington, D.C., remained skeletal. Government workers cleared out of the city at night. “And to have the city to yourself at night, you kind of reveled in that,” legendary punker Henry Rollins told filmmakers for the D.C. punk documentary “Salad Days.” He added: “You go, ‘Well, OK, this will be mine. I’ll be the night-shift guy.’ ”
Kenny Inouye, of the band Marginal Man, adds: “The D.C. punk-rock thing could not have happened unless you had that desolation, that decay, and that crime that kept a lot of people out of the city,” which “made it such that the only people that would go into these areas where these venues were, and where the bands were playing, were people who were willing to take risks and people who were in it because they wanted to see something happen. They wanted to see something spring up from nothing.”
And spring up it did. Bands like Fugazi, S.O.A., Bad Brains, and others influenced the contours of rock music for decades — and still do. What the politicians abandoned, the punks salvaged, saving themselves in the process. “It’s weird to me when people talk about punk rock in these kind of evangelical terms, like it saved their life or changed their life. Because it’s not very punk to talk about it in those ways,” says J. Robbins of Government Issue. “But it’s unequivocally true.”
And that has a knock-on effect of saving countless others or preventing them from having to be saved in the first place.
In a 2004 documentary on the Bouncing Souls, friend of the band Johnny X sums up the crew’s worldview: “You’re not alive yesterday. You’re not alive tomorrow. But you’re alive at that moment. If you can grab something for that moment, you have a chance.”
I guess it’s not that hard to figure out why I rushed the stage after all.
Seth Mandel is executive editor of the Washington Examiner Magazine.
