By Judy Pak and Barbara McGuire
Daily Bruin Contributors
Most of the people who turned up at the Great Western Forum
filling the capacity on Friday night weren’t even born when
Bad Religion formed in 1980. Try that with any other rock band
that’s been around 20 years.
Somehow, it felt wrong for Bad Religion to be opening for a band
that’s two generations removed from them. The Blink-182
members are like their grandkids.
So it says a lot for the credibility of Bad Religion that the
band is popular with teenagers because teens determine what’s
cool and what’s not in the world of music. Now in his
thirties, Greg Graffin remembered that he too was once an angry
teenager and unmasked his adolescent red-faced rage through the
perfect outlet ““ punk rock.
Instead of a horde of wrinkled old punks sporting neon blue and
bubble- gum pink mohawks, the Forum was packed with thousands of
high school fans, moshing frantically by the set’s end as the
seasoned punkers rammed through nearly an hour of politically
charged, energetic music.
In the beginning, however, Bad Religion got off to a slow start
and lost the groove. Blocks of people split to get drinks,
T-shirts, or to elongate the snaking lines to the restrooms.
For those who stayed, it seemed like a throwback to the old days
with lead singer Graffin and guitarist Jay Bentley squeezing around
one mic to offer any kind of backup vocals.
But, there were a few moments where it all seemed to solidify.
The remaining crowd was not full of energetic, mental punks. These
people were more the bobbing and dancing type; female fans were
actually shimmying and smiling.
This is the result of not one song being what record industry
people refer to as a “hit.” Bad Religion doesn’t
know the meaning of the word. Not having massive commercial success
is in fact part of the punk mythology (that, and ignoring the many
water bottles and random objects thrown on stage).
The strongest songs were the ones in recent memory and those
brought the crowd back to life. “Infected,” “Them
and Us” and “Stranger Than Fiction” were
thunderous, intelligent, and an extremely vigorous exercise in
sound. That’s when the rammed floor morphed in to a
body-surfing mosh pit and even the seats started to bounce.
But Bad Religion has always been more about the message than
music. Graffin delivered one long sermon about self-ruling thought,
the justice of questioning authority and the inherent corruption of
government through songs including “Against the Grain,”
“Faith Alone,” “No Control” and the song
that started it all, “We’re Only Gonna Die for Our Own
Arrogance.”
Bad Religion also threw in several cuts from its latest album,
“The New America.” “You’ve got a
Chance,” revealed creative, bold sonic statements and
“Believe It” was a blast from the past, co-written by
Graffin and former guitarist Brett Gurewitz.
The set concluded with “New America” and its
thought-provoking words, “I’m just a voice among the
throng who want a brighter destiny/ They say with me/We are the new
America.”
As a unit, the band was ultra tight and displayed an impressive
ability to extract the most out of three chords in three minutes.
Its tales of the world’s social ills seemed strangely upbeat
and begged for audience participation.
One wonders if the youthful crowd-surfers absorbed the deep
social-political implications of Bad Religion’s music, but
maybe it’s just the spirit that counts.
This highly charged opening set the stage for what was yet to
come with Blink-182. The energy manifested itself in a radically
different form.
Many of the parents who accompanied their pre-adolescent
daughters and sons to the show probably wished the tickets had come
with some kind of rating, preferably R, so as they would have been
prepared for the sexual content of the concert.
For many of the “teeny-bopper” female fans present,
however, this night may have been somewhat like an initiation
ritual. They get to see what it looks like when bassist Mark Hoppus
and guitarist Tom DeLonge have sex, as the bandmembers mugged for
cameras and had their contorted faces projected up on screen. The
fun didn’t stop there ““ female fans also got
compliments on the size of their breasts.
The Forum was not entirely packed with youngsters, however. The
show definitely had its share of the older traditional rock crowd
demonstrated by the mile-long beer lines (which was surprising, at
$8.25 per beer) and whiffs of marijuana filtering throughout the
arena.
With random, sometimes profane comments in between songs, which
had the audience in tears except for a few of the shocked parents,
Blink-182 rocked a full house all the way up to the nosebleed
seats. Though members of the audience unfortunately remained in
their seats throughout the entire show, with no flooding onto the
floor, everyone grooved to the beat of the music and got especially
excited when the band would play one of their hits.
Things were different down in the floor seats. A pseudo
“ring around the rosie” mosh pit formed on the floor
resembling a good-sized pool and was non-stop throughout the entire
show.
The stage was especially attractive, reminiscent of a ’50s
drive-in theater, complete with a marquee inviting everyone to the
“Mark, Tom and Travis show.” Travis Barker’s drum
set was atop the rear-end of an oldie vehicle, on which DeLonge and
Hoppus would sometimes sit and jump on.
The entire show was comical, as Blink-182 always is. They even
dedicated a number to Elian Gonzalez, in which the entire song
consisted of them repeating the line, “A blowjob would be
nice now,” which is potentially inappropriate, but had the
crowd screaming their heads off anyway.
The show concluded with no nudity and a pop hits remake of
“Small Things.” It started out with Hoppus singing the
opening lines to Christina Aguilera’s “Genie in a
Bottle” and had intermixed in the middle Eminem’s
chorus from Dr. Dre’s “Forgot About DRE.” It was
an ending representation of the lightheartedness Blink-182 embodied
throughout the show.