Favorite Concert: Schoolhouse Spazcore

I really enjoyed reading all the blog questions challenge posts from a few days ago and while I was drafting mine it sparked an idea to kick off a new one. I follow a lot of music blogs and folx on Masto with a music bent, through which I’ve discovered some really great artists. I’ve grown to love this feed of music discovery; it brightens my day!

Shows and concerts are also a big part of my music adventures, so this challenge is to share your most memorable / favorite / epic concert you’ve been to. I’d love to read posts from Jake, Naz, Jason and Brad if they’re so inclined to share.

My Most Memorable Concert

The year was 1998. It was a different time. The internet had arrived, but it was still tangential to life. I was 19 years old and in my first years of undergrad at a rural Pennsylvania university. Back then, music was also a big part of my life and I was deep into the underground post-hardcore scene.

I was in a band at the time, and my friends were all in bands. We played anywhere that could hold a few dozen people and had electricity. One particular night in October, my friends in The Juliana Theory were playing a show opening for headliners Knapsack. There was also a band in between called At the Drive-In. I wasn’t familiar with At the Drive-In, but I was very into Knapsack’s Day Three of My New Life and I was always down to support friends, so I made a plan to check out the show.

The show was taking place at The Armburst Schoolhouse, a venue I had never been to and actually had never heard about before seeing it on the show flyer. Google Maps wasn’t a thing back then, so I MapQuested it on my school-issued desktop computer and printed out the directions. It looked to be in the middle of nowhere. Carless, I borrowed my buddy Todd’s Blazer and drove about 40 minutes to the destination, which in fact, was in the middle of nowhere.

I rolled up to a nondescript, abandoned one-room schoolhouse. A couple punks were smoking outside and there was a gravel lot with a couple tour vans and maybe a dozen cars. I paid my entry fee at the door (probably $5) and got one step closer to a blown mind.

The Theory’s set was solid, but what I witnessed afterward was like something from another planet. At the Drive-In took the stage (er, classroom?) by storm and blasted the fortunate few in attendance with a level of energy and intensity no one was prepared for. For about 30 minutes they crashed through most of the cuts from their most recent record, In Casino Out. Cedric and Omar were absolutely frantic and on fire, flanked by Jim on the other side as the stable anchor.

As a musician myself early in my journey, this performance solidified for me what live music should be. It should be a release of raw emotion. Movement through pulsing meters. Perfectly imperfect, with no regard for what may come in return.

Anyone who follows this scene knows that the rest is history for At the Drive-In. They went on to release Relationship of Command, tour with Rage Against the Machine, and spawned amazing projects like The Mars Volta and Sparta.

And even thought the internet was in its infancy, some forward-thinking saint was there with a shoulder-mounted camcorder to record the performance with no concept that it would live on in infamy on a thing called YouTube: