whatever happened to the safety dance?
Loud guitars and shrill screams greeted those who ventured into the main hall of the Fort Cheyenne Event Center for Fire Fest, a two-day hardcore and metal music festival last week.
Last Tuesday evening, as the pig-squeals and drop-D breakdowns of local hardcore band Off With His Head echoed in the large, dual-staged hall, a number of people—some late adolescents, some just barely adults—stood in a 25-foot circle and began to uniformly swing their limbs, violently, while standing in place. It looked like performance aerobics gone horribly wrong.
Hardcore dancing has become a bizarre, aggressive—and in some cases violent—way for people to "enhance" the experience of heavy metal and hardcore shows.
"[Hardcore dancing] is an aggressive release," said Austin Jeffers, lead singer of Off With His Head. "[It] just fits with the music."
"I think hardcore dancing is derived from the different styles of music that have inspired hardcore, like punk, and the different types of moshing that came from those scenes," said Nate Miller, member of the band Animosity. "I danced for many years to release aggression in a positive way, but nowadays people are doing it simply just to look cool."
Miller, 22, said that his love for dancing began to wane when his hardcore scene, founded by what he calls "smart punks," was co-opted by the very people he originally rebelled against in high school—bros and thugs.
"The underground scene has been co-opted by thugs who bully around people who saw the now-mass-marketed hardcore scene as 'cool,'" Miller said. "One guy may swing his arms in one way, and everyone will be impressed, but if another kid does it clumsily, he'll be made fun of or beaten up. It could be the downfall of hardcore music."
There were times, in a crowd numbering in the hundreds, that the circle of dancers would dominate the room, stretching the length of the hall during bands like Animosity and locals Misericordiam. Sporting similar tight-fitting T-shirts, bandannas, tattoos, shorts and shoes, the dancers would fly around the circle, punching or kicking anyone too clumsy or standing too close. A few fights and injuries resulted.
To many in the hardcore scene, such acts are often the result of people violating strict rules of respect and pride that follow the hardcore scene.
"The dancing, everything is about respect and unity," said Krystal Sanchez, 18. "If you're a poser or a scene freshie and you earn your respect by showing what you're about, you're cool, but if you get hit or knocked down in the pit, you're being sent a message."
Despite the tough talk, Sanchez, one of few female hardcore dancers, admitted that some people who get hit in the audience aren't doing anything wrong, but have to expect that they are going to get hit if they stand too close to the dancers.
"[Getting hit] happens at shows. If you don't like it, you can stand in the back. We're not trying to hurt bystanders."
Outside, in an ambulance parked at the curb, 17-year-old Crissy Lough held a bloody tissue over her nose. She had been hit in the face when someone she knew dancing in the pit knocked her out cold.
"It's just something you have to deal with at hardcore shows," Lough said as EMTs from the North Las Vegas Fire Department checked her for other injuries.
Her torn blue jeans and shoes were speckled with blood, and her left eye was a red mess. Nearby, her friends waited for their ride.
"When you stand at the side of the pit, you have to be prepared and ready for this kind of stuff," Lough said. "It happens."
No Mojo working
A town famous for short-lived music venues may just have crowned a new futility champion. Mojo Bean, the westside coffeehouse staging all-ages shows since early July, shut its doors last week barely three weeks after opening. Promoter Marc Sterling, who booked events there with his wife, Dana Thorsness, and local band Fletch, says its owners were evicted after the landlord received complaints from another business in the same strip mall near Rainbow Boulevard and I-95.
"They didn't like kids being over there, and they told the landlord that if the kids were still there they wouldn't renew their lease," Sterling says. "Then the landlord came over and slapped a 24-hour vacate notice on us."
Coupled with the closing of Henderson's Rock N Java earlier this month and a Jillian's announcement that its shows will go 18-and-over while the Downtown site undergoes renovations, long-limited live music options have suddenly dwindled out of sight for area teens.
"We've got kids all over Las Vegas writing to us, saying, 'Oh, my God, please no,' " says Sterling, who spent a long night hauling equipment out of the Mojo Bean site, which had recently undergone a significant interior facelift, including the addition of a large wooden stage. "We have shows on the books scheduled all the way up until two and a half months from now, and there's really no place to move them."
Despite being forced to shutter not just Mojo Bean, but also popular teen hangout the Alley this year, Sterling soldiers on in search of a long-standing, all-ages music hub. Along with Mojo Bean owner Angela Parzanese, Sterling, Thorsness and the members of Fletch have begun scouting larger spaces with an eye toward a quick reopening, though with new location parameters.
"Our goal is not to play musical chairs with venues, so we really want to make the right decision about the place that we go into," Sterling says. "We made a checklist of things that we need to look for, and one is to get to a place where we're not bothering anyone—commercial or residential. Those people just did not want kids in their parking lot, and we got that message loud and clear. The other thing is that it needs to be bigger. At that little Mojo Bean space we learned that the shows tend to run bigger than the place can really hold."
Conceding that he's considered retiring from the venue business since the Mojo Bean ouster, Sterling credits Fletch—the band in which his son, Ryan Brasher, plays guitar—for continued pursuit of the all-ages dream. "They feel like they have a contract with the kids in this town to keep an all-ages venue going," he says. "The members of the band grew up in this town under these same conditions, so this issue just hits home with them."
Movin' on up
Las Vegas went a quarter-century without a band on Epitaph Records' roster. Now it has two.
Local rock quintet The Higher has joined Escape the Fate on the acclaimed punk imprint, making it official by inking a three-album contract at label head Brett Gurewitz's Los Angeles home last Friday. Via telephone en route to the signing, guitarist Tom Oakes says the band chose Epitaph despite considerable interest from several majors.
"We talked to pretty much every label, but we really didn't want to take our band to a major yet. This is our fourth year now, and we want to build a natural fan base. We don't want to get our one shot, and if something goes wrong we have no career, no life," Oakes, 21, says. "Epitaph is definitely the smartest option for us. [The] Offspring's Smash sold 11 million on Epitaph, so the capability of selling millions of records is there. But if you sell 200,000 records on an indie label, you're pretty incredible. If you sell 200,000 on a major, you're worthless."
The Higher released the 2003 EP Star Is Dead and last year's full-length debut, Histrionics, on Fiddler Records, then knew it was time to move on. "Fiddler definitely got us started and got our mind-set to where we're at today, but we wanted somebody who would take care of our band and get our record out there for kids to hear," says Oakes, who is joined in the Higher by vocalist Seth Trotter, guitarist Robert Ragan, bassist Jason Centeno and drummer Patrick Harter.
Gurewitz, who discovered The Higher through an online message board—"Seth's phenomenal voice" and their "R&B influence" stood out to him—says he knew he wanted them in the Epitaph fold as soon as he saw them live at the Roxy in LA earlier this year.
"By the end of the second song I was convinced that I wanted to sign them," Gurewitz recalls. "I walked up to them after the show and gave them an offer right then, to show my commitment. I only sign bands I think can go all the way, and I believe that the sky's the limit for The Higher."
The Higher began preproduction on its first batch of songs for Epitaph this week, with an eye toward an early 2007 album release.
As for his newfound Vegas pipeline, Gurewitz chalks it up to mysterious industry winds of fortune. "From time to time there's different hot spots throughout the country, and Vegas is just blowing up right now," he says. "A while ago it was Oklahoma City. New Jersey has been hot. Seattle's been hot. LA's been hot. Now Vegas is hot. I have no idea what causes stuff like that, but it's real interesting."