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Kansas City Star 06-22-2006 REWIND JOAN JETT and Buzzcocks at Warped
from: kansascity.com
by Timothy Finn, The Star
June 19 at Verizon Wireless Amphitheater
The skinny on this year’s Warped Tour:
JOAN JETT was fun and dandy, but 30 minutes was about enough, especially in those conditions (90-plus degrees on an asphalt parking lot).
For a woman approaching her 50th birthday, she looked great: svelte and trim and full of vim and vinegar. She wore leather pants, black sneakers, and a red leather halter top that revealed abs that look like they’ve absorbed many crunches over the years. She also acted punk: As the Christian screamcore band Underoath finished its deafening blitzkrieg on the stage adjacent to Jett’s, she and her band tried in vain to execute a last-minute sound check.
At one point, she looked menacingly at the adjacent stage, turned and spit on the ground in front of her, then turned her guitar into a bank of amps to release a volley of her own feedback into the air.
Then the other stage went silent, and Jett and the BLACKHEARTS launched into "Bad Reputation."
She is still entertaining and amusing and still very old-school: a little Ramones, a little ’80s pop metal. Her new stuff blended just fine with the hits, but of course they did. She still writes brawny three-chord rock nuggets. And how does she look, people have asked? Well, she’s 47, and she can still get away with singing "Do You Wanna Touch Me?"
Her setlist: Bad Reputation, Cherry Bomb, Change the World, Do You Wanna Touch Me? A.C.D.C., Fetish, I Hate Myself for Loving You, Crimson and Clover, I Love Rock ’n’ Roll.
The Buzzcocks were OK, too — a bit ramshackle, like a shopping cart with one bad wheel. But their sloppiness was part of the charm. Some of the youngsters in the crowd didn’t seem to "get" the ’cocks’ old-school punk thing, which was understandable, given the band’s somewhat weathered appearance. Shelley and Diggle haven’t aged as gracefully as JOAN JETT, so, frankly, they looked like a heritage act. Diggle came out smoking a cigarette and carrying a bottle of bubbly. Nouveau punk, I guess.
Nonetheless they sounded fine, really, as polished as many of the younger bands at the smaller stages. They also loaded their setlist perfectly with lots of great old stuff and some decent new stuff. If they seemed to be playing at a higher speed than normal, perhaps they were trying to stuff more songs into the 30-minute limit imposed on everyone. It worked.
The setlist: Flat-Pack Philosophy, Wish I Never Loved You, Sell You Everything, Harmony in My Head, Fast Cars, Autonomy, Sick City Sometimes, What Do I Get, Love You More, Orgasm Addict, Ever Fallen in Love.
Much less rewarding was the band Thursday, which played right before the Buzzcocks’ set. It’s a screaming emo band with a lead singer prone to histrionics and moments of self-aggrandizement — Bono traits that would be tolerable if he had Bono’s voice and stage presence. Instead his voice felt too small for his band’s prodigious sound, and his screaming sounded like that of a pubescent boy on a wild amusement park ride.
Helmet, another main-stage act, neither impressed nor disappointed. Page Hamilton is still the band’s singer-guitarist. The band still produces what it calls post-hardcore/punk, which now sounds like well-made, slightly progressive heavy rock — music that would fit on some commercial radio formats.
Earlier in the day Helmet got a lesson in demographics when it scheduled its CD signing in the Cingular tent at the same time Senses Fail was signing its CDs in the Myspace tent. The line into Myspace was three wide and about 50 deep. The line into the Helmet signing was paltry. Still a good crowd showed up to hear Helmet play some new and older material. Its new record, "Monochrome," comes out in July. The title aptly describes the heavy, percussive music.
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