POP MUSIC REVIEW : Mishap Puts a Damper on Fullerton Punk Fest

When Casey Royer came home with his first punk rock tattoo more than a decade ago, his mother got mad.

“I said, ‘Dad’s got tattoos,’ ” Royer, one of the founders of the Orange County punk movement, recalled during an interview in 1989. “She said, ‘Dad was in the war.’ I said, ‘Punk rock is a war.’ ”

And war has its casualties.

Royer was fronting his band, D.I., Saturday night, winding up a five-band Orange County Punk Festival at the Ice House when things turned scary.

A teen-ager had been surfing and tumbling atop a sea of hands, heads and shoulders, as young punk and alternative rock fans stupidly are accustomed to do these days (it’s a custom glorified in the hit Nirvana video, “Smells Like Teen Spirit”).

Suddenly, he took a backward plunge, landed on his head, and lay bleeding and unconscious. The accident stopped the show and brought a fearful hush over a sell-out crowd of about 700, many of whom had been slam-dancing, body-surfing and, despite the security crew’s efforts to stop them, diving with abandon into the massed bodies below from a railing overlooking the dance floor.

Police and paramedics were summoned. The injured man, identified by friends as Kevin Grossman, 18, of Huntington Beach, quickly regained consciousness, according to police, who added that he was speaking clearly to the attendants before being taken by ambulance to the emergency room at St. Jude Medical Center, where he was treated and released.

D.I. continued with its show after an 18-minute delay, but the accident took the festive feeling out of the crowd at what had been like a rowdy but peaceable Mickey Mouse Club for punks (all ages were admitted, no alcohol was served).

No more abandoned punk dancing after that. Body-surfing excursions were few, brief and careful, and the frenzied whirl of bodies that had been the slam pit turned into a circumspect Maypole dance. The dancers couldn’t help noticing the red stains on the floor, about 10 feet from a stage-front security barrier.

Injury and fighting are the logical outcomes of slam dancing and its variants. At the very least, slamming is a severe imposition on those who’d rather concentrate on the music than spend their evening dodging or being bashed by stray bodies from this absurd game of mock-football without pads. Hey kids: How about a return to that original, nonviolent form of punk dancing, the Pogo?

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The accident short-circuited D.I. in the middle of its greatest song, the furious anti-heroin tirade “Johnny’s Got a Problem.” But Royer and his four band mates had no trouble revving up after they resumed. Now 34, Royer has been involved in Fullerton punk from the start, having played drums in the first lineup of Social Distortion in 1979. He then made his mark as the original drummer of the Adolescents. Praising the fans’ fallen comrade as “a trooper,” he gave them a bit of his punk philosophy:

“Have fun always, forget the bull,” he said, introducing a strong new song about damning life’s torpedoes and trying to live full speed ahead.

“What is life? What is life? It’s just a party,” went the refrain, delivered with a ferocity that acknowledged that life is anything but a party, therefore requiring special fortitude of those who would live as if it were.

The problem with hard-core punk bands like D.I. is that they mainly sacrifice melody for thrust. Hard-core made up most of the menu for this evening with D.I., the Vandals, the ADZ, the Offspring and Guttermouth. But the most interesting alumni of the early ‘80s O.C. punk boom have been bands like Social Distortion, Tender Fury and Joyride, who emphasize melody along with thrust.

Nevertheless, a D.I. best-of compilation (something that doesn’t yet exist, but ought to), would be as good a hard-core sampler as you might come across, full of songs that thrash hard with just enough riffy melody to keep them interesting. Most of those nuggets--among them “Johnny’s Got a Problem,” “Walter Hung Himself,” “OC Life” and “Chiva”--surfaced during the set and came across well, thanks to Royer’s active, spirited stage presence, leathery voice, and hard-charging instrumental backup. There was enough prime D.I. to offset the more formless thrashers that filled out the show.

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Royer pulled double duty during the long, five-hour evening, also handling the drumming for ADZ, an offshoot of the original Adolescents fronted by singer Tony Montana. Royer sarcastically dedicated a new song, “Where Were You?,” to Rikk Agnew, another original Adolescent who recently left ADZ (and whose third album on his own is due soon).

Royer was much stronger on drums and backing vocals than he’d been a year ago at an Adolescents reunion concert. Again, a dearth of melody kept ADZ’s half-hour mixture of early Adolescents nuggets and new material from being consistently interesting. But Montana did bark with convincing ire at times; he seemed able to recapture the feeling he had as a skinny, alienated teen-ager who took abuse at school for being a punk--and who found, in the Adolescents’ searing debut album in 1981, his chance to lash back.

Montana has changed, which is the natural course of things: He’s now a teacher, working with mentally and emotionally disabled kids. And punk rock has changed, too: Nobody gets beaten up anymore for liking punk music. Instead, such hard-core bands as the Adolescents, D.I. and their peers are considered forebears of the now-ascendant alternative hard rock that dominated the ultra-successful Lollapalooza tours and is a staple of MTV.

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Consequently, the younger fans in the audience might view as ancient history some of the Vandals’ comical songs about early-’80s skirmishes between punks and their enemies. But they responded raucously to such Vandals’ oldies as “The Legend of Pat Brown,” a tale of a run-in between a punk and the police, and “Urban Struggle,” which sets to spaghetti-Western strains the story of combat between the denizens of Costa Mesa’s seminal early ‘80s punk venue, the Cuckoo’s Nest, and the regulars at a cowboy bar next door.

The point of the Vandals’ whole existence (only bassist Joey Escalante remains from the early ‘80s edition of the band) has been to crack jokes about the punk scene and other sectors of pop culture, from video games (“Join Us for Pong”) to funk music (“Lady Killa”). They were not afraid to seem puerile on stage--in fact, the more so, the better.

Singer Dave Quackenbush, with his ungainly, leg-lifting shuffle steps, and mad-contortionist/guitarist Warren Fitzgerald were happy to play the fools. Fitzgerald and hard-hitting drummer Josh Freese, both moonlighting from the hard-rock band Xtra Large, gave the Vandals an element of instrumental prowess to go with the nonsense during a nonetheless overlong 70-minute set that was being recorded and videotaped for a live album.

Most of the humor was crude--never more so than when Fitzgerald summoned six young girls to the stage during the middle of his cover of the Ricky Nelson oldie “Teenage Idol.” He began playing a demented kiddie show host, counseling them about male sexual urges in a way that approached, but never quite crossed, the line between mere bad taste and the sort of offense that demands condemnation. The Vandals are the Benny Hills of punk rock. A half hour of them, like a half hour of Benny Hill, would have been more than enough.

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The Offspring, on the other hand, are a newer band whose latest album, “Ignition,” mainly takes an earnest, straightforward look at post-adolescent coming-of-age issues.

While the four-man band played a direct, no-nonsense set, singer Bryan Holland didn’t try to embody the psychodrama that dominates the record. The Offspring played it for fun, with Holland offering the best pure singing on a bill given mainly to ranting. With shaggy-haired, thickly bespectacled guitarist Kevin Wasserman a near-ringer for the Garth character in “Wayne’s World,” it’s probably best that the Offspring don’t take themselves as seriously live as they do on record.

Delays in moving the audience into the cavernous, brick-walled Ice House kept most concert-goers from catching the opening set by Guttermouth, another relative newcomer to the Orange County hard-core punk scene.

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Given the overall fun spirit of the long evening, punk rock isn’t quite so warlike as it was a decade ago. In those days, remarked one veteran fan who attended the Ice House show, a long-haired band like the Offspring would have been in danger of taking a beating from shorn, narrow-minded punkers. This time, one cueball-headed fan shouted a taunt about hair, but nobody was in any danger of physical abuse. Now, that’s change for the better.

How mainstream has punk become? Veteran O.C. punks will tell you about how, a decade or so ago, police in Huntington Beach and Newport Beach used to stop punk rockers on the street, taking their names and pictures for dossier files, the way some police react now to suspected members of street gangs. Institutional memories of punk rock violence that took place in the early and mid-’80s doubtless had much to do with the municipal pressure that, until recently, seemed to descend on every Orange County venue that catered to punk rock crowds.

Near the end of Saturday’s show, Fullerton Police Sgt. Douglas Cabe, who was in charge of a five-officer detail assigned to keep watch outside the Ice House during the concert, had this to say about this particular batch of wild punk youth:

“The crowd has been extremely well-behaved. The main thing is, (there was) no alcohol inside. We wouldn’t mind seeing them back, they’re such a good group.”

Self-inflicted casualties aside, the news from the front at the Orange County Punk Festival is that punk rock no longer is a war.