Who needs a mediocre new album when you’ve got an excellent back catalog? Photos by Jennifer Cohen.
Every veteran band’s fans deserve a tour like the one gave its followers: One where there isn’t a new album to pimp out, one that isn’t hampered by the new, so-so material that just eats into a set list that should be chock full of classics, one that’s a flesh-and-blood greatest hits set.
Mike Ness and his band only had time to debut one new cut at the show Thursday night, “Still Alive,” a predictable return to the band’s Johnny Cash-and-the-Clash influences. The crowd — a multi-generational mix of new-school emo-era punks and their wife-beater and jeans sporting parents with a dose of Colorado State students — greeted it with mild indifference.
Other than during his outrageously stilted stage banter (crowds in the previous night in Aspen said they can sing along louder than ones in the Fort? Come on, Mike, give your audience enough credit not to think about swallowing that one), it was the only time Social Distortion didn’t have the sold-out crowd in the palm of its hand.
Celebrating its 30-year anniversary as a band, Social D had a lot of opportunity to cherry-pick highlights from its career, and Ness constructed his set like a true crowd-pleaser. Opening with a barrage of old-school tunes to underscore the band’s punk roots, with “Another State of Mind” and “Mommy’s Little Monster,” the band then leap-frogged into the more rock-based tunes that defined its career. “Sickboy,” and “Don’t Drag Me Down” bracketed the band’s most prolific and successful period, and were followed by a roaring sing-along version of “Ring of Fire” in which even the casual, frat-boy fans could join.
Other sure-fire favorites slipped into the roughly hour-long set, from “Ball and Chain” to the encore’s final number, “Story of My Life,” while new wrinkles, such as the relatively new “Reach for the Sky” and the piano-led version of “Prison Bound.” It was, of course, a set that walked the razor’s edge between a workmanlike jaunt through expectation and one that rekindled the fire; the band played it right down the center line, delivering a night that was enjoyable, if never truly inspired.
While gabbing between songs, Ness promised he and the band were heading into the studio to record a new album in the winter. Big deal. His hits-laced set is almost assuredly better than the promotional tour to follow, a truth underscored by the inclusion of only one cut off the band’s most recent and mediocre “Sex, Love and Rock ‘n’ Roll.”
For now, Ness and company were giving fans exactly what they want, and that has very little to do with anything this side of the millennium.
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Matt Schild is co-founder and editor of , which has been grumpily chronicling the underground since 1999. He’s also written for most all of Denver’s weeklies at one point or another, as well as wracking up bylines in an ominous number of failed glossy music rags.
Jennifer Cohen is a Lakewood-based freelance photographer and contributor to Reverb. Check out her .
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