Show Review: 534

For a band that has been around for over thirty years now, Social Distortion has not lost their edge. After a long wait in a hot sold out Hampton Beach Casino, the band took the stage to a long guitar jam. Mike Ness still looks like a bad assed biker from Orange County, and the band looked equally as bad wearing matching prison jumpsuits. The crowd was really into the show with some crazy crowd surfing going on down front. It was a mixture of young and old, punks with mowhawks, bikers, and just regular joes like me. For someone who has been doing this for so long, Mike Ness still plays like it is his last show. He is a great showman and loves to interact with the crowd. It makes for a fun night, but at the same time a very intense and heartfelt performance. The songs spanned the band’s entire career, from "I Just Want to Give You The Creeps", "Mommy’s Little Monster", "Another State of Mind", "Bye Bye Baby", "Bad Luck", "Sick Boy", "Don’t Drag Me Down", and a great new song that ended the first set. "Sometimes I Do" was a crowd pleasing sing along that he dedicated to local fighter Mickey Ward. The encore was "Prison Bound", "Nickels and Dimes", "Story of my Life" and "Ring of Fire". He made a great point of saying how rock and roll was born out of black music, and how Johnny Cash is one of his heroes because he was there for the birth of rock music. Social D’s shows are kind of a history of the last thirty years because of all the different types of music they play. Ness aluded to all of the stories he has to tell about his life, and I hope that some publisher will give him the means to write his autobiography. I don’t know about you but that would be one book I would love to read.