Photos by Colin Jones
It’s a Sunday school night (November 8) but I drag my hard-working girlfriend Annie to the Fremont Theater in SLO to check out punk rock band Pinhead Gunpowder.
Uhh, who? she asks.
Well, maybe you’ve heard of Billie Joe Armstrong: lead singer/guitarist for rock Hall of Fame and punk legends Green Day? Now she’s getting interested.
The show sold out pretty quickly after it was announced but thanks to StubHub, I scored a pair of tickets for $40.
Upon further reseach, I learn that Pinhead has been around since 1991 and is now Billie Joe’s side project.
He and his three bandmates hit the Fremont stage at 9:30 p.m. and wasted no time unleashing their unique brand of sonic fury. You know it’s gonna be a good night when the shorts-wearing, shirtless drummer immediately begins to bang away.
For the next 65 minutes, it was an onslaught of guitars, drums and some excellent vocals that you could clearly hear. Everyone appreciates a good sound mixer.
Still, it felt more like a two-hour concert because they played 32 songs. That’s way more than Springsteen.
But the key element about punk’s enduring lure remains this: two-to-three minutes of all-out musical intensity. Then it rinses and repeats a few seconds later.
For me, rock and roll is meant to be loud, really loud, but even I had to reach for a tattered napkin to stick in my ears halfway through their set. Annie with her fancy earplugs just gazed at me and chuckled.
Pinhead played mostly original songs that blurred together after a while, but suddenly threw in a snippet of Dylan’s “Baby Blue” before resuming their three chords of mayhem.
Billie Joe can be a cheeky dude and proved it by wrapping up the performance with a spirited, amped-up version of “Do You Know Where You’re Going To” (the theme from Mahogany).
East Bay punk band Stay Out opened the evening’s festivities with Billy Joe surprising the crowd by joining them to play a great rendition of the Ramones’ classic song “Cretin Hop.”
My ears are still ringing.