New Found Glory was off my radar for nearly a decade until they showed up in Bangkok on Tuesday night. At 27, I didn’t even have any idea the soundtrack to my youth, the cure to my teen angst, was still alive and kicking.
Before we get to the show however, here’s a quick snapshot of my teenage youth.
I’d pop a freshly burned mix CD into my seafoam green Sony Walkman, put some air in the tires of my GT BMX and cruise around suburban New Jersey singing New Found Glory’s first hit single “Hit or Miss.” “No more long rides home, no more of your station!” I’d sing over the sound of the howling air rushing through my helmet and headphones.
That was 1999, and I was in eighth grade. Life was tough. My parents had me doing shitty chores while I tried to hold down advanced algebra at school. It wasn’t easy. I genuinely believed New Found Glory put it best in the song Dressed To Kill, reciting “I know it’s hard for you / To understand what I’m going through.” In reality life was probably the easiest it would ever be during those years.
As high school flew by and an MP3 player replaced the Walkman and a car replaced the BMX bike, one routine never changed: I’d still rock out to New Found Glory. We’d put it on to get pumped before Lacrosse practice, I’d play air guitar and mumble “And it’s all downhill from here!” in the shower. And then I graduated from high school in 2005, and the entire genre of pop-punk slowly waned from my iTunes playlist.
On Tuesday night at Live House JJ Green, New Found Glory brought us all back to adolescence. We moshed, screamed and belted out lyrics to pop-punk songs that managed to put the struggles of puberty into words, to a melody full of whiny voices, repetitive power chords and heavy distortion.
I expected to see throngs of Thai teenagers lining up to see a band that may have garnered a second wave of popularity abroad in some washed up attempt at reclaiming fame. I couldn’t imagine NFG experienced the same bout of popularity in the early 2000s nearly 8,000 miles across the globe. What I learned was that this kind of music appeals to angst everywhere. The people at New Found Glory were the same as I was back in the day. The crowd wasn’t what I expected – it was a horde of twenty-somethings clad in plaid, tatted up, riding Harleys Davidson motorcycles, and it seemed like everyone had real jobs. These weren’t teeny boppers. These were the same people that likely sought refuge from their completely made up teenage problems nearly a decade ago by listening to the same music that I did.
And they also didn’t forget how to get hysterically rowdy and properly rock out.
With no opening act to get the crowd’s mentality rolling, the show got off to a reasonably slow start. A few fists rose up in the air, and just about everyone bobbed their heads to the pounding chords, but they surely weren’t channeling their inner angry teenager. The slow start was understandable because it’s pretty much like this: you shouldn’t like this music anymore, and it’s totally uncool to revert back to the days when you got upset over trivial matters like mixed-signals from girls, or a “C” on a paper about Holden Caulfield finally finding his sense of belonging.
Front man Jordan Pundik initiated some casual banter with the crowd, joking that the original drummer from New Found Glory was missing due to not practicing safe sex and needing to be present while his wife gave birth. It elicited a few laughs, but it wasn’t until the band launched into their fifth song, Hit or Miss, that people got excited. The crowd changed. Fists started flying and beads of sweat flew off the long lochs of former teenage punk rockers as they initiated full-torso head-bangs. A swirling maelstrom of tight jeans, band T-shirts and flying limbs erupted in the middle of the crowd. During the first exclamation of the chorus, “Have I waited too long? / Have I not found that someone?” it was clear: The mosh was on, and we were all angsty teens once again. I chugged the rest of my beer, slammed the plastic cup down on the bar and slipped into the tornado of rockers reveling in the anthem of their youth.
The band, even after touring for 18 years, managed to inject an enormous dose of youthful energy into their performance. Jordan threw out a generous portion of high-fives to the crowd; the guitarist, a blue-haired Chad Gilbert, got on the monitor speakers and wildly jammed out; and the band even taught one of their new songs, the hate filled tune The Worst Person from their new Resurrection album to the audience so they could sing along.
“This one is for our old school fans who have been there since the beginning!” Jordan screamed before thrashing around the stage and inciting what might look like, to our parents, a full-fledge riot as the chords of Dressed To Kill filled the aptly sized Live House venue. I managed to walk away with some bruising, got a few elbows to the ribs, and even got hit hard enough in the head that the ringing in my ears almost drowned out the music for a song, but you know what? It was incredible. It represented the antithesis of sitting in an office, with responsibilities, reading intellectual material and making decisions where money is at stake. Looking around I knew everyone felt the same way. For a moment, the crowd at New Found Glory didn’t give a shit about any of that.
It was during the band’s encore performance of All Downhill From Here that almost everyone squeezed out the last bit of enjoyment from this momentary, blissful relapse of immaturity. The show was even better than I had expected and that’s because the crowd, mostly millennial Thais, made the monumental decision to say: Fuck it, I don’t care if I’m listening to New Found Glory in my late 20s. I’m gonna act like I’m 16 again and not give a shit.
Photos: Richard Marks
