Punk Rock Bowling festival roars to life in year 25 — PHOTOS
Her voice exits her throat like a rock fired from a slingshot.
“Punk Rock Bowling, would you like to do something stupid?” Phoebe Lunny bellows rhetorically.
Dude, we’re all ears. And footlong liberty spikes, dyed-pink mullets and perspiration-drenched denim battle vests.
Lunny has clambered down from the Monster Stage at the Downtown Las Vegas Events Center for the second time now on Saturday afternoon.
“Lookin’ at you, dad, get out of my way!” the singer-guitarist for British punk trio the Lambrini Girls howls at some slow-footed bystander as she clears space in the crowd, dividing the audience in half.
“We can’t take our aggression out on the powers that be, but we can take our anger out on each other in the pit,” Lunny notes while calling for the “biggest mosh pit the festival has ever seen,” a potentially perilous command considering that we’re standing on asphalt.
Soon, the music kicks back in, and it kicks hard. Lunny mocked overblown male bravado — “When will I learn that men just do it better?” she snarled sardonically on “Company Culture” — while coming with plenty of overblown bravado of her own.
During their set, a pair of inflatable sharks were batted around in the pit, their teeth almost as serrated as Lunny’s riffs. While the band didn’t quite achieve their goal of catalyzing the fest’s all-time largest pit, by the time their 30 minutes was up, everyone was sweaty.
It was just 4:40 p.m.
Take a deep breath, maybe stretch a little, for the Punk Rock Bowling marathon has officially begun.
Getting weird and wild
Come Memorial Day weekend, this is the place to get wild, a little weird, and perhaps do some shopping for Misfits onesies in the bustling vendor area.
Every year, PRB feels like one big family reunion where the grown-ups are not only free, but encouraged to act like kids again, often with their kids in tow — you see a lot of young’uns in noise-dampening headphones atop Mom and Dad’s shoulders.
“What’s it like to grow old?” Cock Sparrer frontman Colin McFaull asked in song during the British band’s rousing, show-closing set of fist-in-the-air, blue-collar punk anthems as they headlined the fest for the fourth and final time, going out with a bang.
Well, the whole point of PRB is to forget the answer to said question — if only for three days.
Jeff “Stinky” Turner got the memo.
The 61-year-old singer for Oi! lifers the Cockney Rejects shadowboxed across the stage incessantly, pounding his chest to the beat as the band dug into their tough-nosed, proletariat punk. (“We can’t help it if we’re working class yobs / We can’t help it if we hate the snobs,” Turner growled on “East End.”)
Not all the Brits in the house were as no-frills as those two, however: The Adicts brought some serious razzle dazzle and boulder-sized beach balls to the main stage. Their set began with an airing of the “Clockwork Orange” theme combined with the Ramones’ “Blitzkrieg Bop,” a succinct encapsulation of what the band’s all about: They dress like Droogs from that Stanley Kubrick classic and mete out fast, hooky punk rock, replacing the Ramones’ jeans-and-T-shirts anti-aesethtic with a visual flamboyance embodied by the punk peacock that is frontman Keith “Monkey” Warren.
‘Don’t slow it down!’
“No one’s crazy anymore,” Warren bemoaned on “Crazy,” issuing what sounded like a challenge — one soon accepted by Power Trip, the rare metal band to make a main stage appearance at PRB.
Despite being somewhat of a musical outlier, they fit right in on Saturday because Power Trip’s fired-from-a-cannon sound is rooted in the mid-’80s crossover movement, in which bands like D.R.I., Cro-Mags and the Crumbsuckers merged hardcore and thrash into something meatier — and meaner — than both.
“Don’t slow it down!” singer Seth Gilmore commanded of his bandmates and the crowd at once, headbanging hard enough to dislodge vertebrae.
Sore necks aside, everything on this day really boiled down to one band: Youth Brigade, the Los Angeles-born battering ram who performed on the Monster Stage earlier in the evening.
The band was formed in 1980 by brothers Adam, Mark and Shawn Stern. The latter two would launch Punk Rock Bowling in 1999 as an informal weekend of bowling among some punk rock buddies before it evolved into a full-fledged festival in 2010.
After missing a year to the pandemic, the fest celebrated its 25th anniversary this weekend.
“Twenty-five years — thanks for coming,” singer-guitarist Shawn Stern said at the beginning of the band’s set, which was tinged with incredulity at times.
“It’s crazy that I wrote this song in 1982 and it’s more relevant today,” Stern said while introducing “What Are You Fighting For?”
“Do you hate them for the color of their skin / Or perhaps the country that they were born in / Discriminate, annihilate / Is this the virtue of a rational man?” he then sang.
Ultimately, Youth Brigade’s performance registered as an extended plea for unity, an attempt at countering divisiveness with togetherness.
Above all else isn’t this what punk rock’s all about anyway?
“I know it’s hard to find something to believe in these days,” Stern noted, “but we have to believe in the community, believe in each other.”
“Remember,” he announced at show’s end, by way of farewell, “we’re all in this together.”
Contact Jason Bracelin at jbracelin@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0476. Follow @jasonbracelin76 on Instagram.
