“I don’t know if anybody knows this but we didn’t play here last year. But do you know the real reason? Didn’t feel like it.”
NOFX had a rough 12 months. Last May, the band played at Punk Rock Bowling in Las Vegas, just eight months after Stephen Paddock opened fire on the Route 91 Harvest music festival with a high-powered assault rifle, killing 58 and wounding 422. NOFX, being NOFX, made a joke about it onstage:
FAT MIKE: “We played a song about Muslims and we didn't get shot. Hooray."
ERIC MELVIN: "I guess you only get shot in Vegas if you are in a country band."
FAT MIKE: "That sucked, but at least they were country fans and not punk rock fans."
Tasteless? Sure. But NOFX has said worse things. That didn’t matter once TMZ picked up the video, though: The hammer fell hard on Fat Mike & Co. — Stone Brewing, the beer company who had literally just released their NOFX-branded Punk In Drublic lager, canceled their partnership with the band (though still continued to sell the beer, because corporate virtue signaling is all the rage). Furthermore, NOFX were slated to headline the inaugural Camp Punk In Drublic the following week in Thornville, Ohio — a festival with a lineup and activities hand-selected by Fat Mike himself — but following the controversy, they were booted from the bill at the last minute.
Fat Mike has claimed the band were then “effectively banned” from playing in the U.S., which is not exactly a real thing, because you can always play a show, but the band did take a big hit in the pocketbook for the remainder of 2018 as their U.S. tour schedule was completely empty. (The rest of the world didn’t seem to mind, as NOFX continued to tour the U.K., Europe, Canada and Mexico since the PRB incident.)
I attended the first (and last) Camp Punk In Drublic last year, and despite having a stacked lineup (some might say the card even improved after NOFX was removed, as Descendents were added as a last-minute replacement headliner), the crowd wasn’t as big as organizers probably hoped for, and many of the activities promised in advance never materialized.
John Reese, a former business partner of Kevin Lyman who helped put on the Taste Of Chaos and Mayhem Festivals among other events, saw an opportunity and re-branded Camp Punk In Drublic as Camp Anarchy, either not knowing or not caring that NOFX already has a song called “Anarchy Camp” which would’ve made for a much better name. Camp Anarchy had a lineup just about as bulletproof as Camp PID (including Rancid, the Damned, Bad Religion and the Suicide Machines), but the big selling point was the Sunday night headliner: NOFX would play their first U.S. show in over a year.
I recently interviewed Fat Mike for his Cokie The Clown project, and he still had many complicated feelings about the Vegas incident. But when “The Time Warp” from Rocky Horror Picture Show began to play and the band members danced their way onstage, you’d never know it: Mike just looked happy to be back.
He chose to address the elephant in the room right away, making the joke that kicked off today’s issue of Colors Of Insomnia. It was a nice way to diffuse whatever residual tension existed, and it let the band fall right back into their normal routine of playing a song, cracking a handful of jokes, then playing another song (or two in a row, if you’re lucky).
The band was rusty at times, with a few songs not actually being played to completion and a few others having obvious lyrical flubs (guitarist/vocalist El Hefe completely skipped a verse in “Eat The Meek,” a top 10 NOFX song, which should be a fireable offense). But in a set filled with circle pits and sing-alongs, one song struck me in a way I wasn’t expecting: “I’m So Sorry Tony.”
“I’m So Sorry Tony” is buried deep on the tracklisting of NOFX’s 13th studio album, First Ditch Effort, and it’s a tribute to Tony Sly, the frontman of No Use For A Name, who unexpectedly passed away in 2012 after accidentally overdosing on painkillers. He was 41. To date, his death is the only musician’s death that ever made me cry. Not Kurt Cobain, not Michael Jackson, not Prince, not Tom Petty. Tony Sly brought me to tears.
Sly’s music spoke to me in such an intense way in 1995, when I was a 13-year-old just discovering what punk rock was through Green Day and the Offspring. No Use For A Name’s Leche Con Carne blew my mind wide open, and officially turned me toward a life of punk rock fandom. Maybe another band or album would’ve eventually done the same, or maybe I would’ve continued to listen to Dave Matthews Band and the Spin Doctors; who knows? I’m grateful nonetheless.
I wasn’t a fan of all of NUFAN’s material; I thought the band turned too soft in the early 2000s, like they were chasing the Blink-182/Sum 41 commercialized pop-punk train. Then Sly started putting out solo records that I had a hard time connecting with — I look back on those records now with a much higher appreciation and understanding, as they weren’t intended for some guy in their mid-20s to connect with; they were designed for him to purge himself of his demons. During my time at Alternative Press as the music editor, I remember being needlessly critical of Sly’s output — I don’t know if it was because I had higher expectations or I if was trying to prove to myself that I had grown up past skate-punk and my tastes were more evolved. But looking back now, I regret all of it. Tony Sly was brilliant, and I had my head too far up my own ass to realize it.
The night Tony died, my wife and I went to see the Bouncing Souls, one of her favorite bands. I had already cried at work earlier that day. I stood in the back of the venue the whole time, not talking to anyone, just being alone with my thoughts. I didn’t enjoy a minute of the gig; we even ended up leaving early because of my mindset. I cried again in the car on the way home.
It’s been seven years since Sly’s death, but I still think about him.
There’s a line in “I’m So Sorry Tony” that chokes me up whenever I hear it: “All the endless nights we had, the 20 years of laughs/I’ve looked but I can’t find any photographs of us/It’s weird to take photos with your best friends/’Cause you don’t think you’ll never see them again.”
I’ve always had a weird aversion to taking pictures of myself with friends. I’ve talked about this with my therapist before, and it ties into low self-image — I don’t think I’m worthy of standing next to my friends, basically. As such, I have tragically few photos with the closest people in my life, outside of my wife. I’m extremely lucky in that the majority of people I view as close friends are still alive and well, but I know it’s only a matter of time before that’s not the case. I almost died last year, and there was a period of time when I was lying in a hospital bed wondering if this was it, then how I would be eulogized? Would someone write a song about me? Probably not. (I mean, there kinda already is one, but that’s a story for another newsletter.) Would people regret their critical remarks about me? I dunno. I just want to be remembered. I think we all do.
I’ll never forget Tony Sly.
Today’s subject line is a lyric from the song “Exit” by No Use For A Name. RIP Tony Sly. Listen to the song below, and if you dig it, you can buy the record it’s from on Amazon (and by clicking that link, there’s a chance I may make a few cents):
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