Holiday's in the Sun diary

Friday August 24th - around 7:30 pm
Youth Brigade takes the stage. I have seen them live
on various occasions in Los Angeles, Bakersfield and
Las Vegas. My hometown loves this band, always
packing Jerry's Pizza every time they play. Maybe
because I have seen them so many times, I quickly
became more interested in getting more beer.

GBH was coming up next and I decided I would try to film their set with my video camera. We got the camera and made sure everything appeared to be working. Being low budget, we have been cursed by weird problems in the past and I didn't want it to happen again. Chauncey and I made our way to the front of the stage. Some very nice girls in front of us said they would help keep an open shot for the camera. We just wanted some cheap feels. Finally the time arrived and out walks the band. Camera switched on and the filming begins.

If you have never filmed a punk show from the crowd you would have no understanding of what takes place. Basically it requires having to hold your arm (and it has to be the same one) up in the air for about an hour.
Try this at home for the next 10 minutes or even until you finish reading this review. The blood shift makes it begin to feel like its going to explode about 30 minutes into it. Numbness occurs at about 45 mintues. Discoloring around 55 minutes. On top of this you must deal with being doused by every flying liquid headed for the stage. Also you must somehow try to figure out how to stabilize your body amongst all the pushing and shoving so the eventual product doesn't look like its been filmed in Earthquake Cam. Finally you must realize that you will be hit in the head by at least a minimum of three crowd surfers.

GBH was much better than I ever expected. Playing just about everything anyone wanted to hear, they just played on and on. At about an hour and 3 minutes into the set, Colin came up and grabbed the camera from my hands. He then proceeded to film a close up of his face, the crowd and the band. I was thinking Holy Shit, this is Pulitzer Prize stuff going on. He gave the camera back to me and I finished recording their set. Their long exhausting set ended with the crowd going fucking crazy. I felt bruised, battered and beer stained but I was just happy to have the set on film.

Chauncey and I headed out the doors to look
for Switchblade Mike and also to get some air.
We were heading down the stairs when we met
up with some freak who wanted to be on camera
telling some whacked story about getting his
shirt ripped off. So we turned on the camera and
he told some whacked story about getting his
shirt ripped off.

Continuing down the stairs we made it to the entrance to the hall when I
noticed something odd. Switchblade Mike was standing outside looking through the window at us. I thought maybe he'd been kicked out for shitting his pants which is a common occurance for Switchblade Mike. But this seemed like something much worse this time. Thats when we made the first ill fated decision.
To go out and see what was wrong. We thought we would have in and out privilages but that wasn't happening tonight. We went out the doors only to be told we werent comng back in this evening. At that point the San Francisco chill was starting to feel real good so we just said "fuck it".

Switchblade Mike told us he was just hot and tired and that's why he went outside. While we were standing there, our rock star sensors started to bubble and we soon realized why. Standing right by us was Andi from Snap Her. Her band would be playing the following evening. Andi is 100% punk, but yet still cool enough to talk to 3 sweaty pee-ons from Bakersfield. We talked for a bit about the benefit show we put on with her band and Anti Flag a few years back when we were still pirate DJ's. After saying goodbye we headed down the street in search of a cab.