FEAR! I'm Gonna Live Forever

Live show review, March 2nd, 2023 The Paramount, Los Angeles

The title of this is funny pretty much only to Gen X geezers—should we rename ourselves Geezer-X? But in case you were born during the Reagan administration or after, the movie Fame’s title song is ripe for a punk cover as it fits perfectly. Few of us thought we would make it to 30 but now we find ourselves attending punk shows with septuagenarian singers. “You ain’t seen the best of me yet!”

Lee Ving was born in April of 1950—72 years old in the picture above that I took at the show. He’s not playing guitar anymore, I don’t know why, but I’m guessing it’s either a problem in the hands or in the back. There’s only so many miles you can put on before the parts wear out. But he’s still going out and playing live, which is part of the excitement of us aging punx, knowing that we’re slowing down but that we don’t have to stop. Yeah, I made it for the show during the Voodoo Glow Skulls—still keeping the legacy of horns alive in punk—and stayed through Fear, but then went home right away, all in all, having been out in public an hour and forty-five minutes. In the days of my first shows, it was meeting up with friends before, getting to the show together crammed in one car, seeing all the bands, then heading somewhere after to drink until we passed out or do some crank and stay up until dawn. But the simple lack of sleep destroys me now.

Fear played a 35-minute set with all the hits you would want. “I Love Livin’ in the City”, “Let’s Have a War”, and the rest. And a 72 year-old man singing “I Don’t Care About You” ages much better than other old-man retro acts like the Beach Boys singing “Surfer Girl” or KISS singing “Christine Sixteen.” As a side note, my first big rock and roll experience was seeing Gary Puckett, while opening for the Monkees in 1986, sing “Young Girl” as a blizzard of panties covered him. Gary Puckett is still alive and only eight years older than Lee Ving. But back to my point, Fear played a short set with all the hits, and got the fuck off the stage.

My girlfriend, Jennifer, told me that over the years, Lee Ving has changed his homophobic lyrics, as he has LGBT people in his family now, and has witnessed the hurtful nature of the words. I listened closely but couldn’t tell if the “give guns to the queers!” line was still in “Let’s Have a War,” which is debatable about whether it’s a homophobic line or a revolutionary line—Ving tossed around slurs back in the day like he was throwing trash out a car window but, taken literally, and with a reclaimed version of the word “queer” it’s a different stance. My take on this was that it was homophobic when Ving sang it, but had a band like Tribe 8 covered it, it would not be. But overall, I’m a fan of redemption, of changing how one lives, and coming around. I’m glad he lived long enough to see positive change, when so many old punks I knew from back in the day who used to be anarchists became weirdo libertarians or Q Anoners.

A strange difference between shows now and then for me is the expectation of future shows. During the peak of my live music years in the early ‘90s, I thought all the bands I was seeing would be around forever, that I would always be able to see the Didjits and Alice Donut once a year when they came through town. I saw my favorite band, Steel Pole Bath Tub, about once a month for many years and the realization that they were breaking up in 1995 was devastating, on a world level for me. I don’t get out to punk shows very much anymore, and I have a feeling when I see a band now that I won’t ever see them again. When I saw Jawbreaker two nights at the Palladium a few years back, I savored the shows as an experience I may not get again, and I’ve seen them twice since. I assume now that things won’t last with the same faith I thought things would last forever back in the day.

There was something in the atmosphere of a punk show that made me feel invincible, that in this zone of music and mayhem, that I was completely safe and unhurtable—now, the fun is more in knowing that I survived long enough to make it to this show, more a celebration of “I haven’t died yet” than the euphoria of “I’m gonna live forever.” Every one of us AARPunks at a show has an emotional graveyard of dead friends and favorite local bands forgotten to the world. I used to see a show and feel a sense of hope that my life would work out, and now, it’s more of a sense of gratitude for the experiences I’ve been given and a very loud elegy for what and whom I no longer have access to. See you at the next show?