The Most Punk Thing I've Done in a Long Time

Let's say yes to doing more stuff.

“The show will go on, but for right now we need everyone to seek shelter,” someone announced over the PA. 

Seek shelter? Where? We were in a massive, vacant parking lot where we’d spent the day wishing there was some shelter from the sun, not the rain. The best on offer were a pair of ‘shade tents,’ catering-style canopies like you might find at a carnival or church picnic. 

The temperature soared well above 90 degrees with Denver’s unrelenting sun beating down on the asphalt expanse. The sorry shade tents could cover maybe 5% of the total number of attendees at any given time, and the cheek-to-jowlness of the steamy crowd beneath made them just as unpleasant as the uncovered world. 

This was NOFX’s 40th anniversary and final tour. Two days. 17 bands! No seats. No grass. No outside food or beverage. I’d arrived with my friend, neighbor, and bandmate, Adam, around 3 pm, but some folks had been there since noon, lured in early by a craft beer tasting that kicked off the festivities. 

We caught a tight, energetic set from one of my favorite bands, The Bronx, and a couple less tight, less energetic, but still enjoyable sets from punk legends Face to Face and MXPX. Six hours later, it was finally time for the main event. 

Except for those clouds. Yikes. 

There are gray, foreboding clouds, and then there are black, scary clouds. These rolled in from the mountains and their first few frigid drops felt great. As those drops became bigger and more frequent, though, we headed toward the shade tents to weigh our options. 

The tents were just as packed as the mosh pit had been earlier in the day. But without the aid of aggressive, thumping music, it was more awkward to simply shove your way to where you wanted to be. Eventually, we managed to squeeze our way under an edge as rainwater began to pour over the canopy inches away.

I turned to Adam, who had driven. “If you want to bail on this situation, that would be okay with me.” 

“What do you mean?” he asked. “Bail on the tent?” 

“I mean if you just wanted to bail on the whole thing and go home,” I said. After all, less than 30 minutes away lay our warm, suburban houses with their soft, middle-aged-friendly beds, and our wives and children who, had they been with us, would have been confused and miserable. 

I only had a ticket for Saturday, but I knew Adam had tickets for both days. I thought he might not like to brave a torrential downpour, lightning, and hail for what might end up being a very late-night set when he could just come back the following day and catch NOFX then. 

We decided to stay. And in retrospect, if we had begun the near-mile-long trek to the car at that point, we would have gotten hammered by the very worst of the storm to come. 

Again, fewer than one in 20 attendees could physically fit under the two tents combined. So I wasn’t sure where everyone else ended up, but it got pretty hairy for a few minutes. 

You can see the sideways-blowing nature of the precipitation above, flying right into the tents. I must’ve been a good 10-12 feet from the edge of the shelter, but a piece of hail still managed to sting my cheek. Everyone kind of instinctively huddled together, put our heads down, and stood there like March of the Penguins for about 10 minutes while the worst of it passed over. 

It wasn’t too bad in there, huddled with strangers, although the lack of escape routes was off-putting. I could see the headline: Dozens Struck by Lightning at Denver Punk Festival. I was pretty sure I was not going to die, and that was good, but if the weather somehow got worse or the tents gave way, we could be in a pretty rough spot. 

It rained so hard that the lot began to flood. Suddenly we were standing in a shallow river whose frigid waters lapped the tops of our shoe soles, slowly and miserably soaking our socks. I stood on my tippy toes but eventually, it was no use. 

“My feet are soaked!” a woman yelled.

“Everyone’s feet are soaked!” replied her companion. 

That made me feel a little better. We were all in this boat together, experiencing the same wet, the same chill. I even reminded myself that my swollen dogs had been roasting for the last several hours and that I should relish the cool relief the mountain waters had seen fit to provide.

Eventually, the pelting, sideways rain passed and we were left with a more reasonable rainstorm, though still not anything you’d want to walk out into. A lone figure came running across the dark expanse, darted under the tent, and told us he’d been holed up in a porta-potty for the last half an hour. He said people were frantically banging on the doors and they’d pulled in as many as they could – four to five people per porta-potty, by his report.

At a rough count, several hundred people must’ve waited out the storm in such a manner. 

“It wasn’t as bad as you’d think!” he said cheerily. 

After enduring all this, a couple random dudes fluttered through the tent saying the show was officially over.

Adam, still clinging to the hope that NOFX would play for the shivering smattering of remaining fans, sent Punk Rock Joe,¹ an old friend of his we’d met up with during the day, out to seek confirmation. As Joe trudged toward the soaked, abandoned stage, a sound tech crawled out from under his wind-toppled tent and cried out to whoever would listen, “NOFX is not playing tonight! There will be two sets tomorrow! Go home! Go home!” 

Punk Rock Joe returned from the glowing, wet haze and delivered the news. We decided, at last, to call it a night. 

As we walked by the literal wreckage of collapsed scaffolding and cars abandoned in 3-4 feet of water that had collected under a bridge, we began to remark that despite not seeing NOFX, this was the most punk-rock thing any of us had done in a long time. 

And it almost didn’t happen! Which is the point here, not just to regale you with parking lot adventure stories. 

I don’t have a large or easily accessible community of fellow punk fans. But I made a choice months ago to buy a single ticket and hope for the best. The experience could have gone poorly, and it was objectively unpleasant in many ways. 90-degree heat. $10 PBRs. Long lines for food and no place to sit and eat it. A conspicuous lack of contingency plans for violent shifts in weather. 

But when all was said and done, it was a wild and memorable experience. NOFX did right by us: Anyone who had a ticket for Saturday could just come on back Sunday and get in for no extra cost, which I did. I got to see NOFX’s early set and even attended the beer tasting I’d skipped the day before. 

Lately, some have sounded an alarm about a “loneliness epidemic” sparked by technology and social media, and exacerbated by COVID. In her article, “What Happened to FOMO?” on the ‘After Babel’ substack, author Freya India suggests that increasingly, “We want to avoid the risk, the rejection, the awkwardness, the effort and energy that the real world demands. Our major problem isn’t fear of missing out. It’s fear of taking part.” She spots this distressing trend among her Gen Z peers, but I think it applies to those of us in middle-age as well, if perhaps for different reasons.

I could feel the ‘fear of taking part’ creep up on me as I hesitated to click ‘purchase’ on my single, lonely ticket. There were so many reasons to say no. It was kind of expensive. It would be a long day. Would I find anyone to go with? Would I feel like a loser if I was by myself? Did I really want to ask my wife to watch the kids for this? Would I be exhausted the next day? Could it be broiling hot and have no shade? Might there be a lightning storm? Could I manage to get heatstroke and hypothermia in the same day?

I don’t think any of us woke up one day and said, “That’s it. I’m done going out.” We took on responsibilities – work, family, ambitions, extracurricular commitments, etc. – that took precedence over our social lives for understandable reasons. But by devoting the best of our energy to these individualistic endeavors, it became easier and easier to say no to social opportunities.

Recently, a friend at work lamented that he and his husband hang out with friends “about once a quarter,” and when I visited my best friend from high school, his wife admitted, “We don’t really do the whole ‘hanging out with people’ thing.” 

When it comes to declining opportunities to do stuff, I think we too often assume that a “next time” is right around the corner. With NOFX’s final tour, I had the benefit of knowing there would be no next time, but we don’t have that luxury with most invitations. The problem is that when we say no to enough invitations, the invitations stop coming. 

So before passing on an opportunity to go out and do something — see a show, grab drinks with friends, attend a dinner party, play in a pickleball tournament, whatever — maybe we should ask, “If I knew I would never get this chance again, would I still say no?”

Going to NOFX hurt my wallet, my ears, my lower back, and more. But it left me with a great story to share. It gave me a chance to let loose and dance. It gave me and Adam a chance to hang out. I met some new people, heard some good bands, and tasted some nice beer. I got in the mosh pit where the vibes were great. Someone even crowd-surfed in a wheelchair!

At one point, I felt a tap on my shoulder. Oh great, I thought, someone’s about to tell me I’m crowding them or blocking their view. Instead, I turned around to find a scrawny kid with his hands cupped and outstretched toward me. I recognized this gesture as the universal, non-verbal symbol for, “I see you are a big dude. Can you please hoist me up onto all these people so I can crowd surf?” 

I had not done this for anyone in many years but was happy to oblige. 

1. The moniker ‘Punk Rock Joe’ was based on a misheard introduction during which I asked something like, ‘do they really call you punk rock Joe?’ and this guy, Joe, had no idea what I was talking about. Then it became a sort of running gag for us all to go on calling him ‘Punk Rock Joe’ throughout the evening.