heading down a lonely highway

I didn’t start out 2011 intending to see Social Distortion so many times. In the fall of 2010, I’d seen them play a fantastic show in Chicago, and shortly thereafter, they announced a west coast tour in February. February, for whatever reason, is a month in which I tend to go pretty batshit insane. Mostly that’s related to insomnia; one year, I added up all the sleep I got that month and the total clocked in around 50 hours. That’s less than most normal people get in a week. I can function very well for a very long time on very little sleep, but that kind of insomnia wears me down pretty quickly. I start to look at sleep like I look at time travel: as a fantastic impossibility that only happens in books and movies.

Now, I do have a full-time 9(ish)-to-5(ish) grown-up day job. I’m sure you can imagine how useful I am at that job during the month of February. It’s really best for me to be elsewhere, which I’d discovered the year before when I took most of the month off and hung out in Vancouver. It was the best thing I did for my mental health that year. So I thought, oh, they’re touring the southwest in February, I’ll take ten days and go somewhere warm, see some friends, see some shows, relax in an environment where my sleep-dep isn’t going to fuck me up too badly. Off I went!

That was the winter tour. The next tour, in May, they played Milwaukee but not Chicago, and my roommate and I drove up. It was my fifth Social D show of the year, and so things were averaging out nicely to one show per month. But then they went off to Europe and Australia, and although I have followed bands out of the country before and will do it again, I won’t do it for outdoor festivals. I hate outdoor shows of all kinds. So then it was announced they were playing Riot Fest, followed by a fall/winter tour that fell right around Thanksgiving. That’s usually a pretty good time to follow bands around because I can see a lot of shows without taking many vacation days. And I looked at the tour dates and thought, hmmm, I have friends in those towns, I have airline vouchers from getting bumped on a regular basis, I have seven shows to see if I want to meet my totally arbitrary goal of seeing them once a month (on average). Let’s give it a shot!

social distortion at hob san diego, 2011-02-20

I didn’t consider any of these shows for my best-of 2011 lists because when you see a band so many times — especially a bunch of times in a row, which does weird things to your head — you judge the shows very differently. But here’s the full list, ranked as well as I’m able to do it.

tier one

• denver 3 (2011-12-04): Look, I’m not one to complain about setlists when I see a band so often. The whole reason I’m willing to do it is that I don’t care what they play. It’s all rock & roll to me, you know? But sometimes it’s the last show of a tour and Mike’s in a great mood and the setlist seems to have a little something extra. In this case, it was the latter half of the main set: Untitled / Dear Lover / Sometimes I Do / That’s Alright / Nickels and Dimes. The first two are dark pieces of bitterness off White Heat that I love and rarely hear, I’d never heard “Sometimes I Do” and I love it to pieces (although the best part of that song is watching every live recording of it on youtube to find the one that’s least coherent. I love Mike, but the man is a mumbler), “That’s Alright” is a totally ridiculous blues number that they break out a handful of times every ten years or something. “Nickels & Dimes” has no special amazingness for me, but it’s a good set closer.
• denver 2 (2011-12-03): Good friend, good crowd, good mood, good beer, “Untitled” into “Ball and Chain,” which is the only time I heard “Ball and Chain” on that tour. I know people get sick of that song, but if there is one moment I love in a Social D show, it’s when Mike rears back and lets the crowd take over singing the final verse. I’m born to lose, and destined to fail. That song is why I have so far resolved not to tattoo any song lyrics on myself. One thing will lead to another, and I’ll end up with an elaborate neck tattoo that says TAKE AWAY THIS BALL AND CHAIN.
• madison (2011-11-29): When the worst part of the evening was the part where I met the band, you know the evening was pretty great. Was it the “My Sharona” cover? The bag of chalk someone threw? The cheap drinks? The impromptu jam they threw in that I’d never heard before? Listening to them soundcheck “Drug Train”? Whatever it was, the whole evening was fantastic.
• buffalo 2 (2011-11-23): the first night was rough going, but the second night was great. The crowd was better, the band was in a better mood, and it was the first appearance of “That’s Alright.” Turns out that Mike is actually 12 years old. He spent so much of this show laughing.
• fresno (2011-02-16): Gord is always saying that for a show to be great, something has to happen. This is the show everything happened. The blizzard in the Donner Pass. Social D opening for themselves. An ex-con named Todd and a late night at Denny’s. A fight, a nightstick to the face, too much red lighting, “Motherfuckers, don’t make me come down there,” “Ring of Fire”: it was the quintessential Social D experience in 20 seconds flat.

tier two

• chicago (2011-10-06): a short festival set (for Riot Fest), but a great one.
• grand rapids (2011-11-27): weird venue but a great crowd. I forget how much energy I spend dealing with crowd surfers until I go to a show where there aren’t any.
• reno (2011-02-15): everything about this show was nasty. The flight was bad, I had problems getting my ticket, casino shows are always clusterfucks anyway. The pit was ugly and Mike was in a bad mood, but those two things put together made the show really, really intense.
• san diego 1 (2011-02-19): I got beat to hell in the pit because I was trying to keep the crowd off the kids next to me — eight years old, I believe — and Mike gave me a pick for my trouble. This is the first time I saw the background singers, too. I don’t like those songs much on the record, but I like them live, and the two women on background vocals add a lot.
• san diego 2 (2011-02-20): I have nothing special to report about this one either way, except it’s one of the few that was not all-ages, meaning I had only myself to take care of. Often there are kids around me on the rail at all-ages shows, and I’m just not the sort of person who’s going to leave them to fend for themselves in that sort of situation. It’s tiring and it can be frustrating, but there it is. It’s also the first show I took my camera to, thus starting me down the road of taking pictures at concerts.

tier three

• milwaukee (2011-05-07): I wasn’t in the pit for this and I hated every second of it. I can’t really complain, though. The show wasn’t bad, it just killed me to be so far away.
• stroudsburg (2011-11-20): god save me from an incompetent crowd at a punk show. They wanted to have a pit, but didn’t know how. A few people tried crowdsurfing, but there weren’t enough people, and the people who were there just ducked and covered. “There’s no room for racism at a Social Distortion show,” Mike told a room full of white people, at which point three bare-chested boys in the pit with their t-shirts around their heads started chanting “U-S-A! U-S-A!” It was very, very weird.
• buffalo 1 (2011-11-22): I don’t know, the crowd was bad, something was off. I just wasn’t feeling it.
• denver 1 (2011-12-02): I’m still mad at the big drunk guy in the black shirt who crushed me for no reason. Like, really, really mad.

And that’s it! Who should I follow in 2012? I need a band that’s touring somewhere warm in February. Oh, look. Social D fits that bill. …dammit.