What the fuck happened last night @ The Dive?

I woke up passed out on my couch covered in Pabst Blue Ribbon and Life Is Shit festival swag, with a pounding in my head that sounded like Godzilla was trying to kick my skull in with his little pinky toe, and a mouth that felt like it was used as an ashtray at some point in the night. It's been a while. Feels good to be alive.

Yeah, I had a fucking blast at the Life Is Shit festival last night. I think the best part was that for the most part, nobody was there to see the bands... LOL It seemed like everyone was just there to be there, to hang out with friends, with the bands playing coming in 2nd as for the reason why everyone came out. Pretty cool. Not to say that all the bands sucked - only some of them did. What's with bands nowadays not having bass players? Seemed to be the theme going on stage last night. Whatever. As a Drummer, if your band doesn't have a Bassist, I have no interest in you. Teach a Guitarist how to play bass and try again. Bands without bass players are sad. It's like watching a drunken old man struggle to stand up after falling down.

The highlight of the night for me was, and always is, getting to see the magnificent Dangerboner rip the place a new asshole. I love this band. Watching them play the songs from their 2009 masterpiece Enter The Bonerzone is one of my favorite things ever. The maniacal singer berates everyone for showing up, tells the crowd that they're not worthy to see Dangerboner perform, and then him and the band just pummel the crowd with a mind numbing aural assault that went from Angry to Happy to Scary at the drop of a hat, sometimes all 3 in the same song! LOL They were fucking great, like electrified anger, and I consider myself lucky to lay witness to their annual yearly colon cleansing. Just incredible stuff. A very close 2nd was seeing Leather Lungs play to a crowd of their friends, girlfriends, and me. "We're never up this early... and we're never this sober... this is weird." the singer / bass player lamented from the stage, but that didn't stop Leather Lungs from playing an amazing set of reverb drenched, evil sounding, kick ass energetic Rock 'N' Roll that's just a treat to my ears. I don't know how this band isn't more popular, but that's your loss, not mine. :-) I grabbed a copy of their latest CD Leather Lungs Are Humans Too, which the guys in the band were nice enough to give me for free as an early Christmas present, all because they didn't have any tee shirts in my size. Fut guy shirts people. I can't stress that enough. That's where the money is at. Spend the extra $2 when you're getting your shirts pressed up. It's worth it. Us old guys with money will appreciate it. ;-) Illicitor were mad good too, but they had the stench of that Life Is Beautiful festival all over them, which sucked. Can't come pose at a festival for shitty people when you just played a festival for the beautiful people. That's like saying you support animal rights while chowing down on a bloody rib eye steak.

Everything is updated. I think I'm going back to bed. I had too much fun at the Life Is Shit festival to be up this early, where the common question asked of me last night was What are YOU doing here? ha ha ha Yeah, great hanging out with friends, especially the ones who tell me my band sucks and my drumming sucks!! "2 Roll Joe" ha ha ha ha Thanks "Pal". ;-)

There's really only 3 reasons why I'm going to the third installment of the Life Is Shit festival tonight:

1) The annual appearance of Dangerboner, one of the most intense, incredible, ingenious bands to ever grace the tiny stage at The Dive. Their music is fantastic. Their stage show is the stuff of Legend.

2) In 2 words: Leather Lungs. One of Vegas' most criminally underrated bands ever, this fuzz loving, reverb soaked trio of real Rock 'N' Rollers have a new release out called Leather Lungs Are Humans Too, and they've posted a song from the album called Party Down on their Soundcloud page, and you can click here to check it out. It's a bit of a rager, and it reminds me a lot of The Mummies, both in Sound and in Spirit. They're the only reason why I am getting there early, to see Leather Lungs. They are definitely worth the effort.

3) Oh... I dunno. Cheap drinks? Checking out bands? Cool raffle prizes to be won? Something to do? All of the above? Yeah, click here to check out the event page on Facebook, with all the info on what's going on and what's being raffled off. It should be a fun evening with lots of cool peeps. Come out and rage. It'll be fun.

I would of loved to have listed the band Illicitor as the 3rd reason to go to the gig, but they're playing the Life Is Beautiful festival, as well as the Life Is Shit festival, and that's a bit hypocritical, to say the least, so fuck 'em. ;-) Remember when Guilty By Association did that? They played the Anti-Bar fest out in the desert to a bunch of dirty delusional underage Punx and then rushed back into town to play some raging 21 and over gig @ Boomer's, a bar? LOL Yeah, I don't remember stuff like that either. ;-)

This comes straight from the official Civilians Facebook page, a public decree from our trusted and fearless leader Trueland, but rest assured that it is a group effort, a total piss take on everything going on around here in town, but yet deadly serious in it's intent. We do it all the time anyways, drinking and bullshitting, and we had been planning to do a podcast / radio show for a while now, even doing a few dry runs down at the pub just to see how it would feel, and after this weekends adventure at WBKE Vegas Radio, apparently, we have decided to do it for real real and not for play play and put our opinions / thoughts out there for public consumption for some gawd awful reason, and I'm pretty sure it's going to come back to bite us in the ass somehow... I know it does for me all the time because of the website, so yeah... Honesty is the best Policy? Yeah right! LOL This is going to be fun. :-) Anyways, here's the statement. Get involved. Be into Pints With Punks before anyone else, because you're going to want to eventually. Yes you will.

From The Civilians Facebook page.

We (Civilians) had such a good time at the radio station last week that we decided we should have a spot. That's right, Sunday afternoons starting in October my band mates and I will have own very own radio show! Who, in their right minds, would let us have a radio show, you ask? The lovely folks over at WBKE VEGAS RADIO, that's who!On our LIVE show we'll be talking Music, Politics, the Scene, or whatever subjects may arise. We'll also be interviewing and playing music from Local, as well as National and International touring acts. Kick-off date soon! - Trueland

P.S. If you're in a local band and want to be a guest on the show hit us up. Cheers!

Pints With Punks. Spread the word. Check it out. Facebook page can be found here. "Like" it. Be our Friend. :-)

I'm still not sold on Carr. All I see is a guy who's being mollycoddled for his inaccuracy and poor team management. He's had enough time to figure shit out. Produce or GTFO. Mack hasn't been a threat, and I wish he was. Murray is a beast though. It's great to have a running threat again, no matter how limited. I finally saw a good punt from King. Now I see what they're talking about with him. Our Defense gave up over 500 yards, and that's not good, but, a win is a win. I'll take it. Go Raiders!! :-)

The radio show The Civilians did on Fri. was fun. With Erika and Bob in tow, we all headed off Downtown to the WBKE Vegas Radio station without a clue what to expect. When I got there I found Jeremy and Matt outside busking on the sidewalk outside, and on the inside I found a friendly bunch of people with a refrigerator full of Guinness and Newcastle for us, but no tacos, as we were promised. Oh well. 1 out of 2 ain't bad. ;-) It was majorly fun. Thanks to Tim and Evan of the Lost N' Found In Las Vegas show for hosting us, and Thanks to everyone else who was there for the generous hospitality. It was a fun interview. I don't know when you'll be able to hear it again, but it will be worth it, just to hear Ride On and Glasgow done in a Beardcore manner... ha ha ha.

In my haste to post about all things Civilians related (and there's still tons of stuff that I'm forgetting), I forgot to list the latest additions to the website, as best as I can remember them anyways. Here they are:

Pictures of the Pet Tigers playing @ the Beauty Bar taken just a few weeks ago. Click here to check them out.
Pictures of The Generators playing @ the Beauty Bar. Click here to check those out.
Pictures of The Psyatics playing @ the Dive. Click here to check them out.
Pictures of the Hub City Stompers playing @ the Dive, from the same night. Click here to check those out.

As I was giving The Psychedelic Furs / The Church show a write up, I noticed I had a bunch of Gig Reviews that I had completely forgotten about... lol I double checked them for proper hyperlinks and spelling, and posted the first 2 that were the oldest. The first Gig Review is the write up on The Mapes / Alan Six gig that went down @ Atomic Liquors way back in April, and you can click here if you're interested in reading it. It's more for me than you anyways. The other Gig Review, again, from April, was a write up on when The Civilians took a road trip to AZ. for the weekend to play with some really cool bands in places we've never played before, i.e Cottonwood and Tempe. Click here to read all about Day 1 in Tempe where we played at the Time Out Lounge, which is where my friend Wes tends bar. Day 2's adventures in Cottonwood are written up as well, but I don't know if I wanna finish it. It was much too crazy, too much insanity, and definitely too much fun to be put up for public consumption. :-) Oh, and we almost died in a crazy ass snowstorm on the way back from the gig, and I'm pretty sure I saw some dude die in a car wreck on that trip back as well. Yeah, isn't driving on the freeway fun?

I'm sooooo miffed that they moved the World Championship Taco And Salsa Festival back a month. I was looking forward to attending that thing for weeks now. I was hoping to place in the Top 3 in the taco eating contest... ha ha ha Oh well. It's not like I don't have other things to keep me occupied.

Like this - time to crow about my band The Civilians a bit. We're currently "signed" to the Crowd Control Media family, and they've been nothing but nice to us, and I personally couldn't be happier to be on their record label. I'm also very proud of the fact that we're the only Local Vegas band that's NOT signed to a Local Vegas label. ;-) Anybody can be signed to a Local label, but try getting a label from another state interested in your band, and wanting to put your stuff out for you - that's not an easy thing to do, and like I said, I'm proud to be a part of The Civilians machine that did it. Our label puts out records by bands, not Prince tribute CD's. We have the first CD out, a self-titled release which you can stream entirely for free by clicking here, and now we just finished up recording our second release, which is going to be a split LP release with The Defenders, a Punk / Oi! band from Santa Cruz, CA. Click here to check out their website and see what they're all about. I can't wait to get up there and play some gigs with them. The Civilians were supposed to play in the Bay area with The Generators in October I think, but the Promoters couldn't cover our fees to play the gigs, so that weekend fell apart, but we'll be up there for sure sometime soon. We did get the honor to be asked to play with The Generators for their annual Christmas gig in December, which was very cool of them to offer, and I'm looking forward to that gig as well, but I digress. Back to the recording of this split. We recorded the 7 songs in a matter of days, choosing from our musical arsenal a few new ones, a few old ones, some we've never even played live before, and recording and mixing was all done at Camel Hump Studios by "Magic Bag" Brown, as always, and the songs came out fucking fantastic. I can't wait for you all to hear the songs. I think you're gonna like them. :-)

Give a monkey a video camera and he will capture some of the magic, which is what I did with Bob while we're were at Camel Hump recording the tunes. I edited the footage together and this is what I came up with. It could of easily been another 5 minutes longer... lol Thanks to Trueland for designing the Ins and Outs cards for the video. :-) The name of the video is The Jack In The Box Sessions, Pt. 1. I don't know if there will ever be a Part 2... 

In other Civilians news, we're appearing on WBKE Vegas Radio tonight, on the Lost N' Found In Las Vegas show, hosted by Tim and Evan, where we will be drinking lots of Guinness and eating tacos and being chatted up about this and that and whatever. We're gonna talk about the new / old album, the upcoming new / new release, and I think the gals in the band are even going to play some Beardcore acoustic versions of some of our songs, which should be interesting to hear. Jeremy is convinced that this is the end of the world and The Civilians with this Beardcore acoustic guitar Punk rock shit, and he's right to be mad, because this is only a short step away from the gheyness that is Beards In Vegas and what they do over there, but whatever. The Civilians do what they want, just like the little boys in beards do, but the difference is that the Civilians aren't trying to make a career out of being Beardcore, like the other bandwagon jumpers in bands here in town. Nope, The Civilians are just playing some songs acoustically on a radio show, albeit an Internet radio show, but a radio show nonetheless, and that's when you're supposed to play acoustically, on the radio, and not in a Punk club full of people wanting to get drunk and high and rock the fuck out, so yeah. If you're bored at Home early tonight, trying to figure out the root note of songs you're going to cover, then take a break and give the Lost N' Found In Las Vegas show on WBKE Vegas Radio a listen tonight. You'll actually get to hear a good Local bands music, which is better than that 'other' Local Internet radio show going on tonight, which only plays the bands of the Local label which pay for advertising on said show. Lame, but whatever. Pay to Play only works in Vegas. I don't know why.

Everything is pretty much updated, but I don't really know or even care right now. The number of 'Likes' on Facebook just keep going up, and the number of hits for the website just keep getting higher and higher, and I really don't give a fuck. I mean, I'm thankful and all that, but it's inconsequential, ya know? There's too much going on to be concerned with such trivial things, like all the Drama and mudslinging going on about that Sasha Perry Army Of Kids documentary on the Las Vegas "Punk" scene circa 2002. Click here to watch it if you haven't already. Yeah, I can't be bothered to comment on what a crock of shit that video is. Looks more like a Jock / Emo convention to me. Sorry.

After you're done checking out The Civilians on the Internet Radio show tonight, head on down to the Double Clown for the old guys convention celebrating the release of the We're Loud compilation, put together by ex-Vegas compatriot Jamie Lamb, from The Dirty Babies, and if you don't know about that Legendary band, then just go kill yourself now. I have no time to explain to you how great they are/were, and I haven't the stomach to tell you what you missed out on by not being into the band or seeing them perform live all the numerous times they did. I'm sure if they were allowed to play the big Punk Rock Posing festival you'd all be up into them and proclaim them one of your favorite bands ever, but that would only be because the corporate Punk gods told you to. Yup.