It’s Tuesday night in Seattle and do you know where your punk rocker is? Most likely at the Showbox watching Teenage Bottle Rocket followed by Pennywise ignite a firestorm of unadulterated punk rock!
It’s been nearly a decade since I’ve seen Pennywise. When they finally hit the stage, it was like someone poured gasoline all over the stage, then ignited it all with several matches. Pennwyise lit up the entire packed like sardines house with their raw punk rock energy.
They played loud and fast before coming up for air and enthusing about the legalization of weed. Lead singer Jim Lindberg asked if anyone in the audience had a vap pen or some mushrooms on them now. Personally, glorifying any drug use when a large portion of the audience consists of impressionable teens, rubs me the wrong way. I’ve seen other bands do it and I just think it’s bad form.
Jim Lindberg is back in the band after leaving to pursue other adventures. He made a movie called The Other F Word (see my review in this publication). He riled the audience into a wild frenzy and the constant crowd surfing was evidence of his prowess.
Pennywise has a new album coming out consisting of “new old songs.” That is, songs they wrote in the early days of the band when they were still playing house parties, but never recorded until now. From what I could hear, they sounded really good — fast and fierce.
They even paid homage to bands who came before them, doing a cover of Black Flag’s Gimme Gimme Gimme before charging into a raging version of Nirvana’s Territorial Pissings (my favorite Nirvana song).
They finished out their set with my two favorite Pennywise songs, Society, followed by Bro Hymn. There was no encore, but none was needed. As I said earlier, this show was non-stop, raw punk energy. The sweat created from all the body slamming and crowd surfing probably created its own weather pattern when the doors opened to let everyone out. Besides Lindberg, Pennywise is Fletcher Dragge on guitar, Randy Bradbury on bass, and Byron McMackin on drums.
Opening for Pennywise was Teenage Bottlerocket from Laramie, Wyoming — certainly NOT a city you’d expect a punk band to come from, but TBR take punk to the maximum level. They played hard, fast and wild! They hit the stage with the intensity of, well, a blasting rocket. Front man Ray Carlisle belted out the songs at rocket launch speed while bouncing about the stage nonstop. Meanwhile his twin brother Brandon slammed the skins like a mad man, his long hair often whipping into his face.
Often, guitarist Kody Templeman took over on lead vocals with a voice that sounded like he should sing more pop punk songs reminiscent of Blink 182, and belied the band’s hard punk sound.
Besides the aforementioned, TBR also consists of Miguel Chen on bass. This show was pure punk.
