Asbury Punk at HITS

In music festival terms, 1500 is not a huge crowd. When you're talking about nearly 2000 hardcore punks, however?the spiky, tattooed, ratty, religiously underground types?descending on a ghost town like Asbury Park, it's a more significant number.

The event was the single U.S. date of the "Holidays in the Sun" punk festival, which took place the weekend of Sept. 6-8. Cooked up by UK promoters during the first wave of punk "revival" in the mid-90s, HITS has been an international showcase for new and old bands, as well as a focal point for the enduring hardcore punk scene. Of course, HITS is a profit venture, like much of punk rock these days. They don't have corporate sponsors like the Warped Tour, but one of the organizers mentioned to me that their ticket sales had been disappointing. Considering most of the crowd ranged 17-24, just right to be tearing up with a mohawk (though barely even born when some headlining bands were doing their best work), the game is not just "cash from chaos" but "cash from nostalgia."

Friday was a blur of noise and substance abuse as punks piled into the beat, beachfront neighborhood and filed into the Stone Pony. An absurd number of bands performed on two stages, one inside, the larger fenced in by the outdoor parking lot. Let me say this about Asbury Park: a friend from Newark described it to me as a "bad area." Christ. Asbury Park Press printed an indignant article about property damage following the festival. My take is when you attract a bunch of teenage hellcats to a deserted, nowheresville town where nothing works, they're naturally going to take it as license. Obviously, neither the city nor the venue realized what it was in for, but don't blame visitors, even obnoxious ones, for the fact that your town had already gone to hell more than a decade ago. What does some streetpunk kid from Seattle know about redevelopment? All they see is abandoned buildings screaming to be tagged. The promoters and organizers might have been a little more forthright and promoted responsibility among concertgoers, but another part of the problem was that local hotels evidently jacked up their prices for the weekend ($170 a night? In Asbury Park?), probably expecting the more orderly, disposable-income crowd Warped Tour dates attracted. Then they booked solid, ensuring that a lot of attendees without the means to rent a room would be wandering the beach at night.

That criticism aside, the Pony's sound system was great, and the bands, for the most part, were on point, so far as louder-faster rules allow. Friday headliners the Business and the Exploited, neither particularly the thinking punk's band, nonetheless delivered the goods. That night I crashed with some old friends in the Berkeley Carteret down the street. The Berkeley got trashed on a biblical scale (firehoses turned on in the lobby, couches out windows, delivery guys mugged for cash and pizza). I passed out to the sound of kids tearing hell out of the fifth-floor hallways, and awoke at 9 a.m. to the sound of the walls being stapled back in. Anarchy only works with responsibility, as one spike-haired concertgoer commented. "Trashing a hotel room doesn't make you an anarchist," he told me, "it just means you know how to break stuff."

Saturday came on like a bad hangover (partially because it was). By now the local authorities, sensing chaos, had dropped on us. The Pony staff tensed up, and getting back in for the second day packed more hassles than the first (no spikes, no tape recorders, open the bag, where's your press pass?). Trying to enforce order on this crowd made them more indignant; you could feel it in the way people scowled and shoved each other around inside. That night, English pranksters the Adicts stole the whole festival, painting up GBH's kids in their lead singer's trademark harlequin makeup and taking the two little girls onstage with them in a flurry of glitter and streamers. Everybody needed the laugh, and the Adicts, goofy-smart as a UK answer to the Ramones ought to be, deserve acknowledgement as not just underrated English punks but as a great rock band as well.

Earlier I'd caught up with Dave Dictor of MDC, one of those old-school bands that take a couple years off but never seem to hit a full stop, and Matt Van Cura, MDC's latest bassist. Surveying the crowd, Dictor sighed, "Man, 20 years ago I never thought it would be like this." How does generation after generation of disaffected kids plug right into this music as if it started yesterday? Obviously shock value; the punks in Asbury Park were no less an alien invasion than their predecessors. But the furious simplicity of the music is in my opinion why (Reagan and Thatcher lyrics aside) Dead Kennedys and Subhumans LPs can ring a bell in ways "nü-metal," the Strokes or the Vines never will. Lars Fredrikson observed, "All punk needs is a kid with a guitar and some problems." Kids (and young adults) today have problems galore; who in '77 thought the Apocalypse would take its sweet time?

I also got in a couple words with Wattie of the Exploited (disarmingly nice guy, by the way), after hearing they'd caught flak from skinheads for playing "Fuck the U.S.A." the night before.

"Fuck it, we just push them off. It's normal," he observed through his thick Scots burr. "Half the rest of our songs are 'I hate the UK.' Bush, Blair, it's bullshit." Considering current international affairs, the crowd didn't get half as ugly as it did in the 80s, when, as one story goes, the Exploited had their van set on fire at City Gardens over the same song.

"It's good to see that people can come together and unite for something like this," Van Cura had commented earlier. And he's got a point: despite left-leaning punk bands singing "Fuck the system" and right-leaning Oi! bands serving up proto-militant marching anthems, nothing heinous enough to shut down the festival happened all weekend. In punk terms, that's progress.

I can't say I was fired up for many Sunday bands, though the Partisans rock much tighter than their one LP would indicate (they've had 20 years to practice). Following headliners Anti-Nowhere League operated in the same territory as the Exploited, but with a sense of irony. Then the final act, the (Jello Biafra-less) Dead Kennedys, who once again brought the question of "punk scene as vital, enduring subculture" vs. "punk scene as insincere, elitist retro trip." I can say two things for the DKs: one, regardless of questioning their "relevance" or integrity, they were technically awesome. Two, they managed to recreate at least one element of their heyday, the hostility. The crowd seemed split about 60-40 between loving them and hating them. One song in, the chants of "Sellouts!" and "Jello! Jello! Jello!" started, and the hecklers pelted them with spit, cups, cans, rolls of toilet paper, water bottles and even one glass bottle over the parking lot fence, all thrown like they meant it. Due respect for persevering in front of a tough crowd, for Brandon Cruz's Biafra-esque vocals and for playing gray-area material like "Chemical Warfare" (though "Potshot Heard Round the World," "Anarchy for Sale" and "When Ya Get Drafted" would have been more impressive).

On the other hand, don't lay on the rage over cops and bouncers when you're playing a big festival protected by huge bouncers and undercovers dressed up as punks. Despite the musicianship, the DKs reminded me of the Pistols, a must-miss reminder for fans under 35 that you weren't around when the band mattered.

What mattered were the new bands who dared to push the mold. Rather than clone off GBH, bands like the Riffs (from Portland) fused the Heartbreakers with UK hardcore for a raw sound you don't need a mohawk to enjoy. New York punks Leftover Crack and NY Rel-X move toward uncharted territory with (respectively) highly political ska-core and a melodic, New York rock-influenced take on Vice Squad/Avengers female punk. A sign that some young bands can abandon the protracted idol worship of the "punk for punks" sound and start finding ways to put their own stamp on the scene. Jello put it best in his '86 elegy to punk, "Chickenshit Conformist": "music scenes ain't real life/don't get rid of the bomb." But the modern scene's cooled on beating the shit out of one another and still shows a flash of creativity, so it may not be too late for the punk "movement."

That afternoon as I'd walked along the freshly grafittied boardwalk, clusters of kids sitting in the shade of shuttered, dilapidated buildings surreptitiously sipping bottles of vodka and Cisco, mohawked and pink-haired girls stripping down to bikinis or underwear and frolicking in the surf, right then someone cranked "Holidays in the Sun" over the Stone Pony p.a., and I realized the festival was everything and nothing I wanted at the same time. I'm no apologist for the scene, but like any dysfunctional family it will always be where I come from.