Less Than Jake and Goldfinger

It’s two hours before the doors even open, and already a line is stretched from the front of the Wiltern Theatre in Korea Town (Los Angeles) all the way to the end of the block. It’s a crowd of tattoos and mohawks, piercings and tight jeans, vintage punk t-shirts, and shredded fishnets. Emo kids run around everywhere. It’s not Emo night, though. You’d think it might be a showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, but it’s just Ska. On Saturday night, The Wiltern Theatre hosted Suburban Legends, Big D, Less Than Jake, and Goldfinger.

Suburban Legends opens the show and comes out with explosive energy, but LA crowds are fickle and a few hecklers bother them in between songs. However, most of the crowd is warm and inviting; Suburban Legends has plenty of showmanship and crowd interaction. One of the problems is the venue size, however. In the small theatre, formally a playhouse, the sounds coming from the amps clash and threaten to blow, it seems. With all those horns, mall-punk vocals, and distorted guitars, the music itself is hard to understand.

Once Suburban Legends leaves the stage, Big D takes it. While they come out with plenty of energy and most of the crowd is ready to go by now, the sound still sucks. The horns are over powering and easily covered up any guitar solo that is played. The lead vocals, sounding somewhere between mall-punk and a white-boy rapping, aren’t easy to follow in the least. However, the crowd at the front of the stage is getting into it, and a slam-dance/mosh pit is started in no time.

After the set is over, Less Than Jake takes the stage and immediately becomes friends with the crowd; at one point, during some audience chat, the guitarist takes an empty cup from someone in the front of the stage and refills it with beer. The lead singer promptly says, “See if AFI will do that for you.” After this statement, he decides to continue by adding, “And we look better then Fall Out Boy.” At one point, they even pull a kid on stage and have him sit next to the drum kit, in protest for his parents not allowing him to go to the Anaheim show the next night, while they play, “Conviction Notice.” While the sound is still a bit brutal, it is more bearable from the back of the house, where the sound has a chance to spread out a bit. Between the amazing energy and crowd interaction, Less Than Jake fills the theatre with electricity.

Finally, Goldfinger takes the stage and it seems like the whole place is about to go mad. The singer comes out and instructs everyone to turn “this into a real rock show”; yelling in the microphone for the crowd to surge forward, jump over rails, whatever they have to do to get to stage. Suddenly, people are surging forward and security is throwing bodies left and right. As the commotion begins to settle, everyone realizes that the lead singer is no longer on stage. For a few moments, everyone looks around and wonders. Then, with a roar, he appears in the crowd and opens up their set while crowd-surfing. Determined to make it a “real rock show,” he returns to stage and gets the crowd in front amped enough to begin slam-dancing and moshing again.

While the sound throughout the show was a bit harsh, it was a great show, nonetheless. Between the energy of the crowd and the energy of the bands, everyone left pretty happy. It seemed that each band wanted to have a personal relationship with their fans; after and before their sets, you could find band members out in the lobby drinking beer or outside smoking a cigarette and chatting with fans. See if AFI will do that.