Domestic Left #107: Hearts beat

Punk rock saves

There is a moment after I have arrived at a venue for a rock and roll show, but before the show has started, when I almost always have buyer’s regret, especially if I am there by myself. I start thinking about how this show is going to keep me up past my bedtime. (I usually go to bed around 9pm.) If it’s not within walking distance, I stress about getting home. (If taking public transportation: will the bus be late? If taking Lyft or Uber: will there be one available? If driving: I mean, driving is just inherently stressful.) And I think: will I actually enjoy this show, will it be worth the cost and the hassle and not getting enough sleep?

This is the situation I found myself in around 7:30pm last Wednesday as I sipped a Tecate beer in Mr. Smalls Theatre, an old church converted into a music venue in Millvale, Pennsylvania. I had purchased a ticket to see Bob Mould, who was the lead singer and guitarist of the Minneapolis hardcore band Hüsker Dü in the 80s and has been steadily putting out records and touring as a solo artist since Hüsker Dü broke up almost 40 years ago.

I was in a bad mood, for a variety of reasons — a kind of shitty day at work, a bartender being a jerk at the place I got dinner before the show, the stress of my apartment building partially losing power the night before. I was feeling particularly cranky about there being an opening act, which would likely push Mould’s start time past my usual bedtime.

I felt some relief when the opening act, whom I had never heard of, came on stage and started picking up their instruments. I was thinking to myself something like “finally ... let’s get this over with.”

And then the drummer hit the kick drum, the very first note of the entire show, and I could feel it in my chest, and the guitarist and bass player joined in, and like a pacemaker, it reset my heart. The opening band was fantastic and Bob Mould was fantastic and I banged my head and bounced up and down and three hours later I was gushing about the show to my Lyft driver on the way home.

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I was never really a punk rock kid. It wasn’t that I disliked punk — my high school band played a mixture of punk and what would have at the time been called “college rock,” and the first song I ever wrote, “Eddie on the Edge,” was definitely in the punk rock vein. But it wasn’t what I listened to, and it wasn’t, you know, me.

Some of my reluctance to embrace punk was musical, some of it was social, and some of it was probably just being a few years too young to have been exposed to punk when it was fresh and world-changing. (Both the Clash and the Dead Kennedys had broken up by the time I became aware of them.) As I put it in a post I wrote a few years ago about my first “drinking buddy”:

Before hanging out with D, punk rock to me was defined more by the people I saw liking it than by the music itself. At the time, I thought of it as poorly-recorded and sloppily-written music, performed by people who couldn’t play their instruments very well, fiercely loved by a tight-knit group of people who were cooler than I was.

Although I perceived the punk rock kids at my high school as “cooler” than I was, my resistance to punk was undoubtedly in part because, on some level, I understood that I was one of life’s winners. I grew up in a functional, professional middle-class family, I was good at school, I was white, I was male, I was straight. In other words, I didn’t need punk rock. It was just another genre of music to me.

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D, who gave me my first proper introduction to punk, was not your typical punk rocker. He was a short, pudgy Chinese kid who wore thick glasses, quiet and unassuming, the youngest child of immigrant parents.

Although I kind of soft-pedaled it in my post about us hanging out in high school, D was subjected to merciless teasing in junior high. The perpetrators — most of whom I became friends with years later — probably genuinely thought they were doing it in good fun and being friendly. (They certainly teased each other as well.) I don’t think any of them were being intentionally cruel. But, still.

The nature of the teasing was this:

D’s last name was Yu. When our “friends” saw him in the hallways, they would serenade him with any popular song of the time that contained the word “you” in its title or chorus (U2’s “With or Without You” being a particular favorite), putting special emphasis on the “you/Yu.” He fucking hated it.

But it was exactly the kind of teasing that you couldn’t really complain about to the authorities (especially in the 80s). Hell, the teachers probably would have just found it funny.

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The moment that I finally got punk rock was during the George W. Bush administration in the early 2000s. Something about the sense of impotent rage, of being completely powerless to stop the senseless slaughter of the second Iraq war, the way the smug self-satisfaction of Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld turned my stomach, suddenly made the Clash the only band that mattered for me. (It also probably helped that after Clash singer Joe Strummer’s death in December 2002 the left-wing publications I read were full of tributes to how he had politicized so many people.)

As Henry Rollins reportedly told an audience after Trump became president the first time, “This is not a time to be dismayed, this is punk rock time. This is what Joe Strummer trained you for.”

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I’m not going to claim that I felt any great sense of political community with the crowd at the show (mostly middle-aged white guys like myself, who have comfortably aged into middle-class professional jobs from the looks of us, or hipsters in their 30s who hope to do the same), or even much of a sense of belonging.

But the music, man. When the drums and the bass and the guitar all hit at the same time, in lockstep and transcendently loud — that gives you a sense of power, of being part of a greater whole, if even just for this moment at this show.

It’s not just punk rock that can do this, of course. Metal, hip-hop, jazz, Beethoven (“the headbanger of his day,” a friend recently called him) can all achieve a similar effect. As the jazz drummer Max Roach famously if possibly apocryphally once said, “the politics is in the drums.”

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The opening act was a guy named J. Robbins, backed by the, as he noted, “appropriately named” J. Robbins Band. Though I didn’t recognize his name before the show, it turns out he is a storied member of the Washington, D.C. punk scene, having played bass in Government Issue and then gone on to found Jawbox and several other bands. (I was also somewhat shocked to learn that he’s almost six years older than I am — when he took the stage I took him for someone much younger. Punk rock keeps you young, I guess.)

He plays a melodic brand of punk, which I appreciate, with interesting, angular guitar lines threaded in between the aggressive, heavy strumming common to the genre. The highlight of the show was a particularly anthemic song called “Soldier On,” which has been in heavy rotation for me ever since Wednesday:

Freezing in the shadows of the fascists and the fakes
Shocks to beat you down again, how much awe can you take
But hammer into anvil, it’s the hammer that will break
Soldier on
Soldier on
Life is long
Soldier on

J. Robbins Band, Mr. Smalls Theatre, April 30 2025.

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J. Robbins’ music can be purchased on Bandcamp and streamed on Spotify (and probably other streaming services). And “Soldier On” is the first new song in almost five years (and I think only the second song by an American band) that I have added to my go-to punk rock playlist, “Let Fury Have the Hour”: