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I've been so stoked about this show for months, ever since I saw it announced on Mass Concerts sometime back in December. Not only was NOFX, arguably one of the best and most successful punk bands ever, playing, but supporting was the well established Lawrence Arms and the up and coming pop punk soon to be powerhouses The Loved Ones. I knew before 2006 started that this was going to be one of the best line ups of the year.
I was interviewing The Lawrence Arms while The Loved Ones started their set, which I didn't mind because I spent about a half hour before the interview waiting in a dressing room hearing Fat Mike tell some crazy stories with a bunch of other people. That guy (and I'm assuming anyone that has been in a band for over 20 years) has seen more crazy shit than I could possibly think of. Waiting to do the interview was just as entertaining as the show itself.
I heard The Loved Ones open up with "Suture Self," my favorite song of theirs, which led me to try and listen to it while I was starting the interview. I finished the interview and was still able to catch slightly less than half their set, which was very surprising to me. Josh, who lost his $140 bid on Ebay for tickets to this show but got in when Sarah was sweet enough to give him her ticket, told me that the crowd was not into them at all, heckling them to play some Lifetime or Kid Dynamite, and requsting The Lawrence Arms to take the stage. If you listened hard enough, you could almost hear individual conversations between songs due to the lack of clapping from the crowd, which bummed me out, since they are an awesome band. They didn't harmonize all that well, but I still thought that their songs would have been good enough to win the crowd over.
Josh, who may be one of the biggest NOFX fans that I know, decided to try and sneak a cigarette in the bathroom before The Lawrence Arms played. You can't smoke in public buildings in Massachusetts, and the Palladium wouldn't let people outside to smoke. There was also a note saying that anyone caught smoking in the bathroom would get kicked out of the show. I advised Josh against it, but he said he'd give it a try.
The Lawrence Arms took the stage to a(nother) surprisingly unresponsive crowd. I was expecting people to be going nuts, especially when I heard that they had sold out of most of their copies of Oh, Calcutta before the show even started. Again, I could almost hear conversations between songs, but I thought later that this could have been because I was standing at the bar instead of up front.
They played a good set, with my favorite songs being from their new album ("The Devil's Takin' Names" and "Cut it Up"). I didn't get to see them all that well because I was standing so far back, so I spent a lot of time on my toes trying to catch a look of them playing.
Matt (who got into the show because Josh knew someone who had an extra ticket) and I were getting worried during their set that there was no sign of Josh. I knew that the line was long, so we didn't get all that worried until The Lawrence Arms set was almost over. We both checked our phones to see if he called, which he did. Matt called him back and Josh said that he got kicked out of the club because a bouncer thought that he was doing coke while taking a piss. I (and some other bouncers according to Josh later in the night) tried to get him back in, but those attempts failed, leaving him out in the cold with his ear to the door trying to catch some of NOFX's set. Matt, being the good friend that he is, told Josh that he would stay for half of their set and then they'd hit the bar across the street while I watched the rest of the show (which enabled Matt to drink a car bomb, a beer, two shots of tequila and a triple shot of whiskey, which led to him throwing up outside of my car for almost two hours).
I was writing a set list as NOFX played the songs, but it got lost during the after show fiasco that went down. NOFX opened with "The Decline," which made everyone happy to hear them play and pull off quite well, and ended with "The Brews," which brought back memories of my first time seeing them live and going nuts when they ended with that song. Other songs they played were "Radio," "I'm Telling Tim," "Linoleum," "Leaving Jesusland," "You're Wrong" (skate punk version that wasn't as good as the acoustic one on Never Trust a Hippy), "Perfect Goverment," "Murder the Goverment," "Idiot Son of an Asshole," "Bob," "Bottles to the Ground," "Franco Unamerican," and others that I can't remember at this time.
Fat Mike, wearing pajamas, was quite drunk and talked about doing coke for the last ten days, how drunk he was, how this was the ninth best show of this tour (a twelve date tour), and he told a story about girls putting needles through his nipples in New York (which he also was told backstage). El Hefe and Erik Melvin were also funny when they needed to be, but Fat Mike was clearly the main drunken focal point of the night. He even got pantsed by Eric Ghint before a song, which was pretty damn funny, especially since it took him awhile to pull his pants up.
During "The Brews," Fat Mike fell off the stage, and needed help getting back up the stairs. Hefe and Melvin, with help from the crowd, took over vocal duties. Fat Mike tried to play and sing again, but he seemed much too drunk and threw his bass to a roadie and tried just singing, before giving up and walking off stage with the other three members of the band finished the song. It was so awesome to watch, which put a great and entertaining ending to a great and entertaining show; pretty much everything I had expected back in December when I first saw it announced.
Written by: RF