I could not get a ticket for Bad Religion’s intimate show at the Echo last January, so I got one for their sold out gig at the Palladium on Thursday, different setting but probably same rowdy ambiance of non-stop crowd surfing, ferocious moshing and instantly fists-in-the-air-sing-alongs. I honestly must say I don’t share this Bad-Religion-changed-my-life feeling that a lot of these guys and girls seemed to express last night, but I have a special connection with Dr. Graffin,… should I call him Dr.? When looking at him on stage, haranguing the crowd, making lots of theatrical and expressive gestures addressed to his bandmates, truly living his songs and announcing one called ‘Fuck you,’ it was funny to imagine him as a respectful professor teaching evolution… like me, at least for the teaching evolution part! I actually totally admire the guy who managed to have these two successful careers in parallel, finding connections between the two, establishing a true meaning in his music with an intelligent message based on a mix of punk culture and science, anarchy and evolution; hey! Darwin was the first true punk, defying authority and religious dogma!
The band took the stage for a long set of 31 songs, encore included, and I realized I knew a lot of their songs without having attentively followed their career. Each time, it seemed that fans were asking for more in a moshing rage. It wasn’t too bad where I was, but the center of place was chaos, with a long line of crowd surfers powering its way to the pit, made of countless shirtless guys and shoeless girls, who were also losing their valets and everything else, received one by one by the army of security guards standing in the pit! One of these crazy kids jumped on the stage just before the encore, tried to rip off the setlist duct taped on the floor, and jumped back in the crowd in my direction, before the guard was able to catch him! And believe me, the Palladium pit is quite wide, so I put my head down, convinced he would land on the first rows, but he vanished in the air and I never saw him again.
Watching these kids in this huge crowd screaming the lyrics of each tune, I could tell that they all lived through Bad Religion’s songs, I actually had never seen so many people wearing a band’s t-shirt at a concert! Bad Religion was celebrating more 34 years of career, and Greg Graffin said that ‘something miraculous – haha – happened, called ‘True North’, may be alluding to the fact that the album was their first ever top-20 album and highest ever peak on that chart.
The uptempo songs had a lot of their usual ‘religion is controlling people’, ‘science is overtaken’, and other ‘think by yourself’ ‘question everything’ lines, encouraging mankind to evolve, change the world and emerge from superstitions, delivered with Graffin’s unique angry (but not aggressive), proud and authoritarian style. It’s not light stuff, it’s rather reflective, and you always get the impression he is telling very important things, but of course, there is also always a large dose of sarcasm or irony in all this, avoiding to just illustrate Einstein’s sentence, ‘To punish me for my contempt for authority, fate made me an authority myself’. But this is the deal with Bad Religion, the lyrics are clever and even a ‘Fuck you’ should not be taken at face value.
During the long show, they were browsing their super large catalogue, playing a lot off their brand new album ‘True North’, but digging as far as their 1982 album, from ‘We're Only Gonna Die’ to ‘Fuck Armageddon… This Is Hell’ in the encore. Alternating between slower songs and faster ones, long ones and super short ones, there was a true optimism emerging from all these muscular anthems, even though when Graffin was singing about the ‘New Dark Ages’ or ‘Los Angeles is Burning’, an obligatory one to sing at the Hollywood Palladium.
‘The first time I went to the Palladium, I saw the Clash', Graffin said near the beginning of the show, ‘It was in the 20th century’,… Amazingly, they played many songs which belong to this 20th century era in front of this huge and mostly young crowd, then, as an answer to all the things that have been thrown on stage, Graffin threw a towel to the crowd, the Elvis way, and sang four more songs for the encore. 20th century references apart, the carnage left over after the show was a clear evidence that the popularity of the band is certainly not showing any sign of fading.
Setlist:
· Past Is Dead
· We're Only Gonna Die (From Our Own Arrogance)
· New Dark Ages
· True North
· Anesthesia
· Generator
· I Want to Conquer the World
· 21st Century (Digital Boy)
· Overture
· Sinister Rouge
· Fuck You
· Los Angeles Is Burning
· Recipe for Hate
· Suffer
· Sanity
· Nothing to Dismay
· You
· Do What You Want
· No Direction
· Beyond Electric Dreams
· Submission Complete
· Come Join Us
· Against the Grain
· No Control
· Robin Hood in Reverse
· American Jesus
· Sorrow
Encore:
· Fuck Armageddon… This Is Hell
· Vanity
· Infected
· Dept. of False Hope
I was very close, and the sound of the videos turned out very bad… these guys are loud!