8Sided Blog

a zine about sound, culture, and the punk rock dream

This Place is Gonna Explode in Flames

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Marc Weidenbaum posted his answers to a ‘concert questionnaire’ yesterday on his (highly recommended) Disquiet blog. I assume this questionnaire is one of those things passed around on Facebook, friends tagged, and so on. While reading Marc’s answers, I started coming up with my own. Remembering was pleasant and wistful, with us all missing concerts and chances to find new favorite bands and experiences. I thought I’d share my answers-at-this-moment here in the notebook.

Last Concert → Sadly, I was being a homebody and didn’t go to many concerts just before the pandemic (if only we had all known, right?). I saw some local band or DJ a week before lockdown — it escapes me who it was. All I remember is during the show a friend offered my wife a job that she ended up taking. But the last concert-concert was probably Dale Watson in Brooklyn during Mondo NYC. That show was one big party, raucous out the wazoo, and, in retrospect, a pretty good send-off before a year without concerts.

Worst Concert → Surprisingly, I’d say Massive Attack in 1991 at SOBs in New York, their US debut. There was a ton of hype, and I was very excited, but the performance was meandering, mostly instrumental, and strange, not too different from a bad DJ set. I left midway through. A decade later, I read an interview where Massive Attack was asked what their worst show was, and they named this one. It turned out their vocalist (Shara Nelson?) bailed out a day or two before. They didn’t know what to do and were nervously winging it. 

Loudest Concert → My Bloody Valentine in San Francisco on the last reunion tour. I took my earplugs out for a few minutes during the ‘holocaust’ section of “You Made Me Realise” to experience it raw. I’m glad I survived. The venue — an old aircraft hanger — may have had something to do with the volume as I saw them again the next night in Los Angeles. L.A. was still loud but not “this place is gonna explode in flames any minute” loud like it was in S.F.

Seen the Most → Besides the bands I toured with, probably Sonic Youth, who I saw about four times starting with the Daydream Nation Tour. However, they might be tied with Alex Chilton. My favorite Sonic Youth show? When they opened for Neil Young at our local basketball arena. The size of the venue did wonders for the band’s squall. 

Most Surprising → There was no opening band listed for that My Bloody Valentine concert in San Francisco. While waiting for the show to begin, a rumor started to go through the crowd that Sonic Boom, formerly of Spacemen 3, would be opening. Exciting, yes, but Sonic Boom’s solo work at the time was mainly droning (but good) ambient type stuff. Then the crew set up Sonic Boom’s gear, which included a full drum kit, bass amp, a second guitar amp … curious. That didn’t look like ambient music. Then Sonic took the stage with a band and immediately launched into Spacemen 3’s “Revolution.” Hey, what?!? And then the band proceeded to play a 45 minute set of nothing but Spacemen 3 songs. Now that’s what I call a surprise. And it seems like it was a one-off as Sonic Boom was nowhere to be found the next night in Los Angeles.

Best Concert → There are many vying for this slot. Zeena Parkins at Timucua White House would also go under the ‘quietest concert’ category if there were one. The Butthole Surfers in Houston in 1988 (with The Flaming Lips), which was definitely the most life-changing concert. I wrote about that here. Pylon and Public Enemy, the couple of times I saw them both (separately!) in 1990. And, as an unexpected callback to the top of this list, Massive Attack in the mid-2010s. They were so good I was speechless for about an hour after the show.

Next Concert → Who knows. I had tickets to see Kraftwerk play so close to my house I could have taken a long walk to the venue. The pandemic said no. And Terry Riley was set to play Timucua a few months ago. Fingers crossed that these get rescheduled. 

Wish I Could Have Seen → I had a chance to get in a car with some friends and go see Hüsker Dü in New Orleans. One of those friends had a college radio show that night and needed someone to sub. As much as I loved Hüsker Dü at the time, I loved being on the radio more, so I stayed in Ruston, LA, and filled in on his show. My thinking was that I’d catch Hüsker Dü the next time around. They broke up a few months later.

Talking Backward

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I encountered Kramer through his band Bongwater, and his production work with Galaxie 500, Low, Daniel Johnston, and many others, all recorded at his Noise New York and Noise New Jersey studios. Kramer’s label Shimmy Disc was a trove of curiosities and, yes, treasures — a label as distinctive as Factory and early 4AD but perhaps even more surprising. The identifiable sound of Kramer’s production (those drums, that reverb) balanced an unpredictable and eccentric A&R taste. Shimmy Disc was a paradox because, when buying one of the releases blind, you sorta knew what it would sound like without having any idea what you were getting into. The genre or style of each record was a mystery until the needle touched the vinyl.

I’ve been fascinated by Kramer’s activities for a long time. Perhaps even more now that he’s living Florida and has established his Noise Miami studio. If I had a band, I would totally take advantage of the fact that Kramer is a four-hour drive away.

I was excited to discover an interview with Kramer, conducted by the writer Rick Moody, on the Believer Magazine site. Then I was disappointed to find out the interview is only three questions long. But that disappointment was short-lived once I realized Kramer answered those three questions with over 10,000 words covering his music story’s early years. And what a story it is — Kramer is an excellent writer, and almost every paragraph is gripping. I’m in for one of the top pledge tiers on Kickstarter if he ever decides to self-publish a memoir.

Kramer’s long answers to the first two questions are terrific and filled with entertaining stories. He talks about his early touring band experience with psychedelic trooper Daevid Allen and the band Gong, and then his entrance into the avant-garde, rubbing shoulders with the likes of John Zorn, Karl Berger, Tom Cora, and (hilariously) Ornette Coleman. In an episode of my newsletter, I discussed a long-form interview with Jim O’Rourke. This second part of Kramer’s interview is like that — it’s ridiculously rich in recommendations and rabbit holes. There’s also lots of folksy wisdom, such as this nugget: 

Never expect your heroes to be fine people. It’s far better to expect the exact opposite. Then you can be thrilled to death when you meet someone who treats you just as you would treat them. Hang on. Hang on just a little bit longer. You’ll meet good people. Eventually.

Kramer is such a great storyteller. Reading this piece had that feeling of a novel you can’t put down. Mesmerized under Kramer’s spell by the first two sections, the third question shook me back to consciousness. Rick Moody asks, “How did you meet Butthole Surfers, and what was it like touring with them?” No doubt, this ride was about to become a roller coaster. 

I find it challenging to explain the Butthole Surfers to anyone who didn’t see them in the ’80s. I saw them twice in 1988, and the effect — especially that first show, with Flaming Lips opening no less — was life-changing. They weren’t the same band for me once they went from two drummers to one, which is a hipster-y “before they were cool” thing to say, but that really did change their sound. During the time I saw the Butthole Surfers, there wasn’t any comparable band. Maybe that video of Throbbing Gristle doing their last concert at Kezar Stadium comes close, at least in intensity. But it’s still a different animal.

The first time I saw the Butthole Surfers was the second ‘real’ concert I ever attended. Someday I’ll tell you my first but now’s not the time. I grew up in Central Louisiana, remember, and we didn’t have many concerts. Well, there were a few — Elvis played our town a few months before he died. But I didn’t go to any live shows throughout my pre-college years. Then I got talked into a road trip to see the Surfers in Houston. That’s a five-hour drive, folks — I just double-checked as I find it hard to believe that we used to drive five hours each way for a concert. It was the first of many of these drives.

I remember not being that excited to see the Butthole Surfers. I thought they were some comedy punk rock act (years earlier I wouldn’t have been that off base). But I read about the first Flaming Lips album in The Bob, bought it, and loved it. I got in the car to see them. 

The Flaming Lips were terrific. Their now-infamous visual show was pretty low-tech back then. They turned on multiple fog machines, creating a thick white cloud on the stage. And then the band played with a bright light behind them, dark shadows within that cloud. We never actually saw the group. When they finished, I remember thinking, “That was the weirdest thing I ever saw.” I had no idea that it would move a notch down to the second weirdest thing in about 20 minutes.

Remember how I said it was difficult to explain the Butthole Surfers? I’m not going to try. There’s a bootleg recording of the concert here, but that’s only half the story. The sounds they were making were unreal — Gibby’s vocal manipulations alone, via the SPX1000 and a digital delay unit, blew my mind. Add the visual overload happening on that stage with the backward projected movies, the cymbals on fire, the eye-patched topless dancer (it’s true) — I wasn’t the same after all of that.

The audience added to the surreal scene, repeatedly climbing tall speaker stacks and jumping tens of feet into the crowd. I never saw mayhem like this before. After the band finished their encore, Gibby came back on the stage and yelled at someone in the audience to approach him. Gibby bent down and exchanged harsh words with this individual. He suddenly pulled a bottle out from behind his back, smashed it over the guy’s head, and walked away.

I’ve thought about that moment a lot. What was it about? Was that guy okay? How could the band get away with that? And then this Kramer interview revealed the secret to me over three decades later:

Gibby clamors back onstage and runs behind Paul’s guitar amp, only to emerge a few seconds later with a large plastic box which I immediately recognize as a case of breakaway bottles we’d been lugging around Europe for weeks … breakaway bottles look like real bottles, but they are actually props made of sugar to be used in theater, film, the circus, etc… you can smash them against someone’s face and no one gets hurt.

There you go. 

I saw the Butthole Surfers again in Houston less than eight months later. My friend David joined me and shot this gorgeous 8mm footage, recently digitized and uploaded to YouTube: 

David writes about this footage and his experience filming it here. And I’m with the YouTube commenter on the show — I’m pretty sure it’s December ’88 at Ensemble Hall, not Numbers (which is where I saw them the first time). But I digress.

When you drive five hours to see a concert you want to make the most of the experience. That’s partly the reason why we used to smuggle tape recorders and 8mm cameras into the shows. We also always tried to blag our way backstage after the concerts. My friends and I all volunteered at the college radio station, so we often used the trusty “we’re here to interview the band” ruse. It worked more often than you’d think.

And we made our way backstage at this second Butthole Surfers show. I remember Gibby towering over a flock of adoring punkers, grinning maniacally as they shouted his name: “Sign this for me, Gibby!” I wandered into a side room, and King Coffey, one half of the drumming duo, was sitting alone. I sat down and struck up a conversation. The Ensoniq EPS sampler was released that year, and we talked about that. King had purchased one, and I wanted to know all about it.

After a few minutes, I decided to do some actual radio business. I pulled out my recorder and asked King if he’d do a ‘radio ID’ for my show. That entailed King saying who he was and then ‘you’re listening to …’ followed by the station’s call letters. He asked me for the station info. “KLPI in Ruston, Louisiana” I replied. King told me to hold on for a minute, and he sat back, deep in thought.

I couldn’t figure out what King was doing as he was visibly making some sort of calculation in his head. Then he quickly leaned forward and said, “I’m ready — start the tape!” I held my recorder to his mouth, and he says, “This is King Coffey of the Butthole Surfers, and you’re listening to KLPI in Ruston, Louisiana, which backward is …” And then he spouted a couple of seconds of nonsensical gibberish.

We laugh, I thank him, and then my friends and I get in a car and drive five hours back to Ruston. 

A couple of days later, I go to the radio station to transfer my recording to ‘cart.’ If you’ve seen WKRP In Cinncinatti, then you’ve seen Johnny Fever take what looks like an eight-track tape, stick it in a slot, and a commercial or radio ID plays. Pre-digital, that’s what radio DJs used. The cart was always cued to the beginning, playing the audio at the push of a button. And, for some reason, to get my recording on the cart, I first had to transfer it to reel-to-reel tape.

I successfully transferred King Coffey’s routine to reel-to-reel, and I readied it for the cart. His fake ‘backward’ talk got me wondering … nah, there’s no way. But the thing about reel-to-reel tape is you can flip a switch, and the tape plays backward. So I listened to the tape in reverse and — you guessed it — King actually did say the station call letters, city, and state backward. Perfectly. It sounded like I was playing it forward. That band made my mind reel even days after the show.

It was about fifteen years later that I picked up Michael Azerrad’s essential history of the US ’80s independent music scene Our Band Could Be Your Life. There’s a chapter on the Butthole Surfers, and, casually, Azerrad throws out the trivia nugget that King Coffey has the unusual ability to translate any sentence backward accurately. 

There you go.

But this is about the Kramer interview, which you should now go read. It’s kind of a love story — a love for music, adventure, and adventures in music — and Kramer closes the piece with these words about the Surfers:

I will love these people long after I am dead. And of that death, thanks in great part to my months alongside them in 1985, I will not be afraid.

This post was adapted from Ringo Dreams of Lawn Care, a weekly newsletter loosely about music-making, music-listening, and how technology changes the culture around those things. Click here to check out the latest issue and subscribe.

A Lot of Honking: The Age of Social Distanced Concerts

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I expect a lot of honking. Ray, a longtime friend, alerted me to The Road Rave, an event billed as “North America’s first-ever drive-in festival of the COVID era.” The festival is led by EDM sensation and Ultra Music Festival veteran Carnage, performing alongside at least four other acts. A maximum of 500 cars will line up in formation, facing the stage, each with two to six inhabitants encouraged to stay seated during the event. “Roaming golf carts” will take concession orders.

The Road Rave takes place Saturday, June 20 (postponed from the original date of June 6), about six miles from my house. It’s sold out. No, I’m not going, but thanks for the invite. That said, I’m close enough that I’m sure the not-too-distant sound of 500 cars honking will echo over Lake Holden and into my eardrums throughout the evening. Every bass drop — honk honk honk. Every on-stage glitter explosion —- honk honk honk. Every DJ raising his hands in the air — honk honk honk. There will be a lot of honking.

We’re now in the phase of The Strange Times where watching a concert from the seat of a car seems attractive. I get it — we’re making our way through this any way we can. And even a glimmer of normality that’s not normal at all can provide reassurance. But, man — all those cars.

In the last several months, there was a push to explore the idea of environmentally-conscious, carbon-neutral touring. Massive Attack and Coldplay were high-profile advocates of the concept. So it’s ironic concert-goers are now encouraged to lean into the fossil-fuels, idling their automobiles as a festival broadcasts over an FM signal, and a guy in a golf cart takes another nacho order.

It’s not only The Road Rave. The concert promoting Borg, known as Live Nation, is planning nationwide ‘drive-in concert’ tours this summer, taking place in the various parking lots of its 40 amphitheaters. And for promoters who don’t own stadiums, drive-in theaters are a no-brainer for events. However, most existing drive-ins are far outside of bigger cities, and the owners would rather show movies. Says one proprietor, “We don’t mind doing one-off special events, but most of us feel we’re here to show movies.” Less hassle, less honking.

In an article about the absence of live music, the drive-in theater aspect inspired Rolling Stone contributing editor Rob Sheffield to remember a scene from ’70s movie dystopia:

There’s a scene I keep re-watching from the Seventies sci-fi zombie trash classic, The Omega Man. Charlton Heston is the last human left alive in LA after the plague. He drives out to the empty theater that’s still showing the “Woodstock” documentary. He sits alone in the dark, a ritual he’s done many times before, watching the hippie tribes onscreen boogie to Country Joe and the Fish. “This is really beautiful, man,” a dazed flower child tells the camera. Heston recites every word along with him. “The fact is if we can’t all live together and be happy, if you have to be afraid to walk out in the street, if you have to be afraid to smile at somebody, right—what kind of a way is that to go through this life?”

Charlton Heston gives a sardonic smirk. “Yup—they sure don’t make pictures like that anymore.”

On the other hand, there are approaches to social distanced gatherings that border on performance art. For example, the restaurant outfitted with mannequins and the TV show with an audience of balloon people. A precursor to social distanced performance art might be 2018’s Mile-Long Opera, where listeners walked along NYC’s High Line. Singers were encountered along the path, each singing in tandem, and, as an ‘audience member,’ you are encouraged to keep moving. It’s a compelling idea, but nowadays, even a performance in motion has its COVID-19 dangers. Jane Moss of The Lincoln Center, considering the option, worries about transfixed groups stopping to watch in a virus-spreading bottleneck: “The more ingenious and intriguing you get, the more people want to come together to see what you’ve done.”

Performance art directly inspired one daring concert experience. Marina Abramovic’s exhibition (and terrific documentary film) The Artist Is Present featured the artist sitting across from a stranger in silence. The simple act of this face-to-face meeting — at about a socially distanced six feet — caused intense feelings of intimacy in many participants. Some of the seated museum-goers broke into tears during their sittings. From this idea came performances at the dormant airport in Stuttgart, Germany. A musician from the local orchestra gave a series of ten-minute ‘concerts’ to solitary audience members. They faced each other at a short length, with no conversation and no applause. In a NY Times piece covering the event, listeners spoke about the same sort of intimacy that Abramovic’s temporary partners felt.

This intimacy is unexpected, but innovative answers to the live-music-under-COVID problem will produce unexpected results. That’s the subtext of all performance art — experiment with people’s expectations and things will happen. And the further away we get from a traditional live performance, the less it looks and feels like a concert. Understandably, that worries a lot of people.

Others have attempted to zero-in on the center of the Venn diagram linking live music and COVID-19 safety. There was this small event in Münster that featured famed DJ Gerd Jansen, social distanced dancing (in theory), a 100-person limit, and €70 tickets to break even. And in Arkansas, blues-rock singer Travis McCready played to a sold-out — but still smattering — crowd who were temperature-checked before entering:

On the surface, the concert had all the makings of a typical rock & roll show. Stage lights set the mood. The audience clapped along, with some even dancing in their “fan pod” seats (tickets were sold in blocks to keep groups six feet apart). But when the bank of floodlights at the front of the stage illuminated a nearly empty 1,100-seat theater during Travis McCready’s set, the reality of the situation was clear. The first socially distanced concert in the US felt more like a dress rehearsal than a typical concert experience.

It’s something, but is it helping? And by that, I mean, helping us cope or return to something like our ordinary lives? Since reading the Vulture piece I linked to above I think a lot about this paragraph:

The first fallback options—play to an empty house (as a small sub-ensemble of the Berlin Philharmonic has done) or distribute a few hundred listeners around a hall that could seat 2,000—would only emphasize the melancholy weirdness. That kind of event can have an impact as a ritual of mourning, a dramatization of all we’ve lost. But it’s no way to lose ourselves in some alternate, virus-free world of the imagination.

The music is only one reason we go to concerts, festivals, nightclubs, or raves. We also go for the community, to connect with (as Seth Godin says), “People like us who do things like this.” We’ve all forged at least one friendship with someone we saw at ‘all the same shows.’ Many of us even met our future life partners at a club or concert. These solutions I pointed out — attending in cars, listening alone to a flute player, or boogying at a distance in a near-empty club — only solve the ‘music’ part of the equation. It’s true that we miss and crave the rush of volume, performance, and the live music experience. But until we regain the electricity of community that accompanies it, we’ve, so far, only captured the facsimile.

This post was adapted from Ringo Dreams of Lawn Care, a weekly newsletter loosely about music-making, music-listening, and how technology changes the culture around those things. Click here to check out the latest issue and subscribe.

Exploring New Opportunities in Livestreaming

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Quarantine has led to the proliferation of livestreamed concerts, confirming the need for music in uncertain times. I’d guess that many more people are checking out livestreams than regularly went to shows before the pandemic. And like every other change that’s occurred in quarantine’s wake, there’s a lot of thought on how livestreaming might remain established once things normalize (fingers crossed). Before COVID-19, there were suggestions that virtual touring might gain popularity as a means to offset the environmental toll of actual touring. Current events have pushed the prospect to the forefront for entirely different reasons.

It seems there are two main categories of livestreamed concerts. First, there’s the streamed band performance, like a concert movie with the artists playing a straightforward set from a stage. And, secondly, the intimate live-from-home show, where band members — individually or together — perform casual, stripped-down versions of songs. The nature of live-streaming changes the dynamics of performance through its limitations, but, for the most part, it’s an imitation of an in-person performance. Here’s Cherie Hu in Pitchfork:

Recreating such emotions in livestreaming requires taking advantage of the medium, which often means getting rid of the superfluous spectacle you might otherwise see in normal stage setups. From the fan’s perspective, the “stage” in a livestream is just the screen, and the audience is the chat room. There’s a diminished sense of hierarchy between artist and the fan, leading to interactions that can be much more social, interactive, and intimate.

There’s a lot for the artist to lean into here. The trick is emphasizing the unique aspects of livestreaming — the loss of hierarchy, the ability to interact with fans (and for them to interact with each other), the flat screen — rather than relying on what’s lost. The platforms that win are the ones that build features that could only exist in a digitally livestreamed ecosystem. And the artists fully exploring and exploiting these features will have the upper hand, too.

Creating experiences that are exclusive to a live-streaming format — you won’t get this in clubs! — also adds possibilities for monetization. The key is giving something special, not found elsewhere. Free streams of concerts are found all over YouTube, and, to offer a high-profile example, Coachella livestreamed the last few festivals without any fee. As DJs are also finding out with their DJ sets, years of offering performances for free makes monetization of similar content difficult. Getting creative and thinking far outside of what happens in a club environment is a must.

Another note: if, after COVID-19, live-streaming remains an established part of a band’s marketing and income toolbox, then I see an opportunity for studio spaces and music venues. Many cities could have brick-and-mortar ‘livestream studios’ where bands could perform. These spaces would have the technology and infrastructure to stream performances and make each one distinct and tailored to the act. The interactive and livestream-exclusive features I mention above are built-in, with each studio offering a different specialty or feature set. Engineers and staff are on hand to manage technical as well as online (e.g., chatroom and social media) tasks. The artist would book a date, plan the details of the performance, show up, and play. The business could be stand-alone, or part of a live music venue, a recording studio, or even a co-working space. And it’s not just for bands — theatrical plays, author readings, performance art, and academic talks are some of the other potential client use cases. If live-streaming continues its path to normalization and you’re an entrepreneur looking for a future business idea, this might be something to consider.

Foreign Dissent: International Punk Rock in a Digital Age

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Craig Mazer frequented Bad Mood Records, the rag-tag record store I owned 25-ish years ago. He was active and instrumental in Florida’s punk rock scene and published a slick-but-not-too-slick newsprint fanzine called IMPACT. Decades later, and here I am doing my thing in music-land, and Craig’s still championing the local punk rock scene. Give some credit to the lifers.

For six consecutive years, Craig’s promoted an Orlando event that might’ve been unimaginable without the internet. It’s called Foreign Dissent, and the idea is to showcase mostly undiscovered punk rock bands from all over the world to Orlando’s scenesters. It’s a diplomatic gesture from a group of fans that often get misconstrued as antagonistic and uncompromising. But punk rock is a welcoming tribe. It’s always fostered connections and curiosity among its global family. For example, my punk rock adolescence involved trading fanzines and cassettes across the ocean to addresses in exotic places like Croatia and Poland, usually copied from the classifieds in Maximum Rocknroll.

This year’s Foreign Dissent — held Monday, October 28 at the respected local venue Will’s Pub — features five countries across eight raucous bands. Denmark, Canada, Northern Ireland, Italy, and England are present, their representatives united by independence, rebellion, and a love for this music and lifestyle. Here’s the flyer:

We know that punk rock is the most DIY of music genres, its historic DIY-ness an unspoken influence on today’s shift to self-release and toward self-reliance. But punk rock was doing this when the internet was basically two guys at a military base sending chess moves to each other. How has the scene adapted to an age where the idea of DIY promotion only conjures social media tactics? Are ‘the old ways’ of punk rock word-of-mouth, city-to-city networking, and flyer slinging still in the mix?

I’m curious, and Craig Mazer — whose promotion of Foreign Dissent happens under the punkily named Punching Babies — obliged my question. “I don’t see too many people handing out flyers. I think it has largely moved to social media as the main avenue for promoting. I do still see posters put up, and I’m sure that word of mouth is still important, but social media, to me, is the main avenue.”

He continues: “Social media is where so many people are. Between Facebook and Instagram, you have a huge audience right there. Now, the question of how effective it is is debatable, but it’s undoubtedly effective to some extent. Personally, I still love the DIY aspect, so I still put up posters and flyers at shows.”

It’s interesting because promoting punk rock was once different than promoting rock n’ roll or bands of other music genres. Just as the internet has lowered the barriers of musical preferences, it’s somewhat homogenized how we promote music. But how does social media — run by corporations of a size that would make Jello Biafra have a seizure back in the day — fit into punk rock?

Craig: “Man, that’s a tough one. I don’t know that it fits into punk rock as much as punk rock has had to give in to it. Social media is so pervasive. And it’s free (putting aside the idea of buying ads on social media), so it would be foolish not to have some amount of promotional presence on it for an event. It also allows for the ease of sharing and spreading the promotion, which can help a lot.”

But there is an upside that enhances punk rock’s tight, idealistic community. Craig adds: “I think that elements of the punk ethos have ‘weaponized’ social media by calling out abusers in the scene, exposing shitty booking practices or venues that are discriminatory.”

I remember local fanzines serving that purpose. People would even make one-off fanzines to expose certain undesirable elements in the scene. It seems that sort of scene networking has moved onto social media spaces.

Craig: “Yeah, definitely. That said, i don’t remember at any time in the ’90s that there was a means (or even much of a chorus of voices) for exposing that kind of stuff. There has been a huge wave of empowerment around it in the last 5-10 years.”

Canada's Bad Waitress are playing Foreign Dissent 6 in Orlando
Canada’s Bad Waitress are playing Foreign Dissent 6

I’m sure the internet makes one other thing a lot easier — organizing an international punk rock showcase. Says Craig, “It would have been very difficult 20 years ago. Even ten years ago, maybe. The internet is truly key, both for the organization of it upfront, but then also for the logistics and communications necessary as it gets closer to the day of show. I couldn’t imagine what it would have been like for a foreign band to organize a tour back in the ’90s, like when I booked tours for [legendary Orlando punk band] Shyster and had to use a (gasp) phone.”

But some things haven’t changed despite the internet. Getting punk rock bands into the US is still a hassle. Probably even more of a hassle.

Craig: “When I did the first Foreign Dissent six years ago, I had no idea what I was getting into. I hadn’t considered that these bands generally aren’t traveling with any gear. Getting into the US is hard enough, but if they come with all their gear, they’ll get tagged as coming here to work. And these small bands can’t afford work visas for a trip where they are probably going to lose money as it is. So I had to quickly scramble to find amps, a drum kit, and everything else. Some amazing friends in the music scene now loan their gear for the backline, or the bands borrow from other bands playing or buy something inside the US.”

But for Craig and many other promoters passionately exposing new acts, the hassle is worth it. “For many of these bands, it’s their first time in the US. And for some, Foreign Dissent is literally the first show they’ve ever played over here. That’s such a fulfilling feeling for me, to be able to give them that opportunity.”