Bookend Tucson

I’m 25 and Mike Ness is 42. I’m writing my way through several phases of a quarter-life crisis, he’s rocking his way through a mid-life one. I’m standing on the fringes, a good way back of the pit, nodding my head, while he’s at the center of it all, creating a frenzy and a sing-along, providing a couple thousand folks with a hell of a good time.
And we’re both a good bit removed from our last encounter.
I’d been in Tucson just a week, an 18-year-old college freshman, clueless but eager to soak it all up. I was a week removed from the only home I’d ever known, thrust into dorm life, with beautiful girls everywhere and absolute freedom. I was in a new place, a hoard of new friends already, and on Friday night, I was headed to see Social Distortion play, the first concert I’d even seen that didn’t involve two hours of driving.
Mike Ness was riding high, having turned years of recklessness into White Light, White Heat, White Trash, a thrashing good time of an album. He was hard-core as ever, threatening to beat some guy’s ass who tried spitting on the stage.
I was on one side of the cage in the (thankfully) all-ages club. There was a big group of friends there, mostly punkers from the old hometown scene, emerging occasionally from the pit, sweat-soaked wife-beaters clinging tight. Two pals thought to get the Rebel Waltz tattooed on their right arms after the show.
One of the pals joined me at the show last week, nearly eight years after the first time I’d seen Social Distortion.
Social Distortion has long been on the periphery of my favorite bands, a punk rock outpost for an otherwise country-folk centered music fan. At the best their songs are tight, anthematic rockers, sewn with rough tales of hard living and failure. On stage Mike Ness sells it all perfectly, his persona of hardened punk godfather easily believable as he sketches out in stage talk the places where his songs can’t go. What sounds at times like nostalgia is simply background information. Talk of hard drinking in a parking lot 20 years ago isn’t bragging or proof he belongs there; it builds energy on the way to the chorus: “Story of my life.”
And so goes the shows, so goes Mike Ness, and so goes his audience.
There was Story of My Life and there was Story of My Life, and eight years in between. I think we’re both better off for it.