The show on Friday was cool. I tried counting the number of high school punky kids wearing Ramones shirts but lost count after a while. There was also the occasional drunk concert-goer who had to practically get carried out. One guy was trying to help a girl walk out and he tripped on something and fell, but she got caught beneath him and hit the ground first. Ouch. That wasn’t pretty.

MU330 were fun, but the sound guy didn’t do a good job at first. The horns were too loud and I couldn’t hear the bass at all. On the bright side, they were funny. They were all wearing custom t-shirts with “330” on the front and the singer read us a Trivial Pursuit question. Then he invited a couple people to skank on stage, and then about 30 such skankers climbed up. Before too long, the guitar player was waving hello to the bass player who had all of sudden gotten very far away. The highlight of their set was 1) when we spotted a kid with crutches on stage trying to skank and 2) when the first couple skankers were on stage, the singer yelled, mid-song, that the kids had to “SKANK HARDER! C’MON!! HARDEEEERRRR!!!” and the kids went to a super-skank mode.

The next band, Streetlight Manifesto, were a lot more organized and, for lack of a better term, accurate. The music was more intricate but also more melancholy. I’m not sure how I feel about mellow ska, but it was entertaining. No one skanked on stage because at their last show, some of the skankers got hurt and the singer kicked everyone off.

The headliner, the Voodoo Glow Skulls, were oddly my least favorite group of the three. They screamed more than I cared for and I couldn’t tell where any of the notes were. I just heard lots of distortion and power chords with some horns thrown in. I guess they were more ‘punk’ than the other bands. But they did play the theme from Charlie Brown and a couple other songs I recognized, so it was cool. I guess I’m just getting old – by 11:00, I was all ska’d out and ready to go home. Ugh, what’s happened to me.