Show Review: NOFX Final Tour, Punk in Drublic @ The Cow Palace 09-16-2023

Farewell tours are a strange business. How does a band perform with sincerity and a sense of purpose that feels genuine without the trappings of a cash-grab mentality that us cynical fans have come to expect? I’ve personally never been to a farewell show outside of bands in the local music scene where I grew up, so I wasn’t very sure what to expect aside from what I was seeing on social media. A 40-year-old punk band going on with an absolute bang at each and every show, celebrating not only their longevity but celebrating the music scene that they came up in. What better place than San Francisco, the second home to one of the most iconic bands to come out of the 80s hardcore punk scene in Los Angeles, to wave goodbye to an incredible career?

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Show Review: Teenage Bottlerocket, Skatepark of Tampa, 6/26/2021

Photos and review by: Alan Ralph @ARPhotoSF

Over the past month or so, there has been a huge increase in the amount of indoor tours being announced nationwide.  Despite the grand reopening of America, COVID-19 policies still exist and are different for every venue and every city and every state.  Some are still intensely enforced, while others are not and were put in place just to comply with local statutes.

In early May, shortly after Laramie, Wyoming’s Teenage Bottlerocket announced a 12-date tour, their St. Petersburg (Florida) tour date garnered headlines when the local promoter Leadfoot Promotions announced, for the safety of everyone in attendance, that they will be charging $999.99 per ticket (up to four total) or a discounted price of $18 for those who could prove that they are fully-vaccinated.  By the end of the month, the venue in St. Petersburg got cold feet, the show was moved to Skatepark of Tampa, and this story hit the national news circuit on CNN, even as all 250 discounted tickets to the show had already sold-out.  

Although San Francisco, the international headquarters of Spinning Platters, is slowly reopening from its now 16-month COVID lockdown, our rock photographer is still in Florida.  Since the promoter relied on a crew of volunteers to make the show happen, fully-vaccinated Spinning Platters volunteered to help out, and in the process, was able to photograph and attend Teenage Bottlerocket!

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Album Review: Bad Cop/Bad Cop – Warriors

“We will not back down, we must refuse to stay silent!”

Probably one of the best things to happen from Donald Trump becoming the—and I shudder as I type this—President is the anticipation of all the amazing politically-charged punk rock that will invariably come back into the public consciousness. This is not to say that it wasn’t always there—it was and always will be—but humanity is a fickle species and without something to kick its ass into gear occasionally, it relegates the plaintive cries of the marginalized into the background. That’s where punk rock comes in to kick everyone in the face and scream “LISTEN UP!”

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