Fear

at Axis
by Duke Crevanator

There are not many things that can get Duke Crevanator to leave the confines of his beloved New Hampshire. Naked women, drugs, and a bad ass, old school punk band are the only lures that come to mind right now. Fear playing at Axis on a Saturday night caused me to cancel my usual plans of drinking at the bar and building a fire in the woods and instead brave the trek to the “big city.”

Now, unlike many people (especially certain ones at MaximumRockNRoll), I don’t give any credence to that line about someone being too old to play some face-stomping punk. As far as I’m concerned, all the best punk acts of today are the old ones who refuse to die. Tesco Vee and the Meatmen (who have a new CD out called Pope on a Rope), Ramones, The Queers, and Lee Ving and Fear at the top of my list. How can one even compare these mentors to lame-asses Green Day, NOFX, and the New Bomb Turks? (Although Cocknoose, Rancid, and Riverdales are pretty fucking good.) With this attitude in mind, me and Bernie were pretty excited, even cagey, to go to the scum pit you call a city.

We arrived around 3 pm and preceded to get juiced for the show. This involved about 3 hits of acid apiece and some XTC and then we hit the bars, the whole time wondering if Lee Ving would be as bad-ass as he is in the punk movie classic, The Decline of Western Civilization.

When we finally arrived at the club, I was psyched to see the street overflowing with punks. If there was one thing I dreaded, it was to have a living legend appear in town and to have no one show. We finally got inside and the acid began to kick in hard. The place was fucking packed and it made me a little nervous. After about 3 quick beers, however, my attitude was adjusted and I was prepared to enter the pit. I’d missed most of Butt Trumpet, even though it was only a little after 8pm (I think) but then I saw the form of Lee Ving on stage.

The show itself was fucking great. The band lived up to every standard that I held for them. We got to hear all the classics like “Beef Bologna,” “I Don’t Care About You,” “I Love Living in the City,” and one of the top ten punk songs of all time, “Let’s Have a War.” The pit was fairly good but their really wasn’t enough violence to suit my tastes. It’s strange that it wasn’t crazier cuz the band played so well (much better than they did in the aforementioned movie), but it may have been that Lee Ving didn’t goad the crowd on as much as he used to. I don’t attribute this to age though, I think it’s more a factor that the show started so goddamned early. Who could possibly be fucked up enough to be in the mood to start a riot at 9:30?

Anyways, the next thing I knew I was being hustled to the door by a mass of leather-clad people while I still had way too much energy built up and needed another good two hours in the pit before I’d be fit to reenter society on the “outside.” Well, I didn’t get it so I don’t feel any responsibility for the crimes I committed in the following hours after leaving the club. I do know that I passed out around 6 am and woke up at 10 on the floor of Mara’s living room with the worst hangover I’ve had in about 6 weeks and had a huge lump on my head that, I’ve been told, occurred during a freak skateboarding accident at 4 in the morning. Hence the fact that I have given up drinking gin, even though I love it. I guess I’ll just have to drink more vodka.