On my way to the club, I walked hunched in the drizzle behind a fellow in a leather jacket with white paint on the back: "Punks not dead." I pondered this idea and assumed we were heading to the same place, only to watch him pass by Geno's without a glance.
The statement stuck with me as the opening band began to play. Their vocals were right on — a raspy snarl bantered over fuzzy distorted, wailing guitars, and precisely militant drum beats. They covered obscure old-school punk bands, and praised punk legend GG Allin. But ideologically something bothered me about them. Here were a band playing subversive music, but making tasteless jokes about knocking girls up, cancer, and the AIDS epidemic. It struck me that there is a boundary a band should not cross when trying to make statements; "offensive" and "subversive" are certainly not the same thing. I began to doubt the dude's leather jacket's claim. But then, Big Meat Hammer played.
When BMH got on stage a certain energy gathered in the room. It's the kind of feeling you get at a show when you watch a band with strong senses of self and purpose. The crowd and I gathered at the foot of the stage, most knocking back Schlitz and singing along. Since 1989, BMH have been shaking up notions of conformity in a small city where it's easy to get lost in the flow of the next-most-talked-about commodity/band. These types of shows should be unifying, not alienating, and that's exactly what the set got across. You could call them classic, true to their scene, old-school punk rock. Their performance Sunday (my first time seeing them) reaffirmed for me the idea that there is a timelessness to punk rock's original ideologies, and that they are still very much alive.
Related:
The call of the wild, RIP 3516, Billy, Don't Be a Hero, More 
- The call of the wild
It’s not easy being in a band whose two primary songwriters have quite different ideas about how to write an indie-rock song.
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Over the years, hordes of bands have played 3516 (Darkbuster and many more), and this Monday at the Middle East upstairs, there’s a benefit for the displaced rockers.
- Billy, Don't Be a Hero
The second of a two-night stand in Boston, with no overlap from the previous night, the Saturday show started off with a few of Corgan's better-known tunes only to drift off into la-la land at around the halfway point.
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"Oh my God, this is going to be so fucking crazy!" screams a teenage girl behind me.
- A real blast
The guttural rallying cry of an audience member on the other side of the mezzanine makes everyone laugh a bit, mostly because it peals out during one of Mogwai's gently arpeggiated intros.
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There are few genres into which Elvis Costello hasn't delved over the years, but he's always seemed particularly comfortable within the traditional back-porch country that occupies this latest session.
- Re-taking a leak
When last we left Bradford Cox of Deerhunter, it was November of 2008, and he was ready to put that year to bed. A couple of months earlier, an eager fan downloading one of Cox's many "virtual seven-inches" had sleuthed out a whole Mediafire folder full of goodies that Cox had posted but not protected.
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This article originally appeared in the August 16, 1977 issue of the Boston Phoenix.
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Bad times for the big guys have generally been good news for the rest of us.
- Back to the earth
‘I didn’t want to be a salsa singer — I wanted to be a singer .’
- Hitsville USA
There are singles artists and there are album artists. Watch videos from Beck's The Information (Windows Media)
- Less
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