Anti-Heros · The Business · D.R.I. · L.E.S. Stitches · One Way System · Sloppy Seconds · T.S.O.L. · UK Subs · Vice Squad

The Social Chaos Tour rolled into Metropol on a Wednesday in August, and "rolled in" is being generous. Most of the bands on the bill traveled in cars and vans, showed up when they showed up, and a couple didn't show up at all. We rented a backline that everybody shared, which, given how the tour was running, was more or less the only way it was going to work.

I was working as a stagehand for Elko Productions. By that point, I'd done plenty of nights at Metropol and was used to package tours that ran like clockwork. This was not one of those. From what I gathered, most of the bands had only the vaguest sense of what was supposed to happen each night — schedules, set lengths, who was on after who. Nobody seemed to be steering the ship. But these were lifers and DIYers, and you don't survive twenty years in punk by needing things to go smoothly. They unloaded their gear, plugged into the shared backline, and got on with it. It was less a tour and more a traveling circus — without a ringleader.

And then they played, and the actual show was great.

Sloppy Seconds brought their Indianapolis brand of beer-soaked, Ramones-fed junk rock and made it feel like a basement party that someone had accidentally left the front door open on. Tight, fast, dumb in all the right ways, and the crowd ate it up.

Anti-Heros were the Atlanta street-punk contingent, and they played like it — meat-and-potatoes Oi! with the kind of bark you'd expect from a band that had been doing this since the mid-'80s. No theatrics. Just songs.

DRI were the odd ones out on a bill leaning so heavily toward UK and Oi!, but they didn't act like it. The crossover-thrash machine kicked on, and the floor turned over instantly. After the more straight-ahead punk earlier in the night, the speed hit different.

UK Subs are UK Subs. Charlie Harper has been fronting that band since I was in elementary school, and he was already a veteran then. They came out, played the songs, and reminded everyone in the room why those songs have outlasted most of the people who first heard them.

But the band of the night — the one I still remember most clearly all these years later — was The Business. They were locked in. Mickey Fitz commanded the stage like he'd been waiting all tour for this exact room, and the band hit every song like it mattered. There's a difference between bands that play their old songs and bands that play them, and The Business were doing the second thing. The crowd knew it too. That set was the high point of the night by a real margin.

From the stagehand side: chaotic load-in, chaotic schedule, a borrowed backline holding the whole thing together, and bands that had clearly done a thousand of these and would do a thousand more. Some nights, the gig is keeping the trains running. Other nights, the trains are off the rails, and you just point at the stage and trust that the bands know what they're doing. This was the second kind. And they did.

Of all the shows I worked at Metropol, this one is one of the easiest to remember. Not because it ran well — because it didn't have to.