Alright, I’ll confess right off the bat. I got there late. To be fair, this concert was an hour away from my place without weekend Jersey Shore traffic. After over an hour and a half of traffic, I walked into the Summer School Tour at Starland Ballroom right in the middle of Beauty School Dropout’s set. I was bummed to have missed Arrows in Action, who I had listened to on loop leading up to this concert, but BSD was truly the only reason I even considered driving this far for an early Friday evening concert anyway.
We’re in an era of remakes, revivals and renaissance. The big-ticket names of music—Lady Gaga and My Chemical Romance and All Time Low— are almost exactly the same as the big names in the mid 2000s. When that desire for nostalgia dies down and the culture craves something new and creative and daring, bands putting in the hours now—like Beauty School Dropout, Charlotte Sands, and Rain City Drive at the Summer School Tour—will be the first in line.
The first time I walked in late during the middle of Beauty School Dropout’s set was at Warped Tour down in DC. I’ll write more at length about Warped Tour another day, but one notable difference from “the old days” was the balance of main stages to side stages. No shade to Warped, because even bands that weren’t headlining were bound to draw a hell of a crowd— Red Jumpsuit Apparatus, Knuckle Punk, the Wonder Years, to name a few. The pumped up crowd of maybe 500 people crowded around Beauty School Dropout’s stage felt just like the Warped Tours of the olden days, back when I first saw Crown the Empire and Like Moths to Flames. At BSD’s Warped Tour set, there was barely a phone in sight, the pit was wide open and welcoming just the right type of fight, and . No one is surprised if All Time Low has a hype crowd, but it’s so much more impressive to be a small ticket band at a big ticket concert with the power to make an audience rock this hard. They drew me in.
Beauty School Dropout’s energy was just as contagious here at Starland Ballroom as it was at Warped Tour. If we’re using metaphors of the cultural renaissance, think of Beauty School Dropout as the ultimate in hair-rock icon revival with a sonic mix of alt-rock, punk-pop and maybe a dash of early 2000s man-whore crunkcore. But there’s just a touch of something indescribable, something inscrutable.. something new, and it keeps the crowds rowdy and ready to rock. With raw lyrics that are just as fun to scream as they are to sing and a beat good enough to hear at the club, the pit was open like a cyclone from the moment I entered until the very last note played.
Amongst a steady stream of bodies thrown towards the front of the room by enthusiastic crowds, one pink-haired crowdsurfer ended up on stage with the band jamming out. What gentlemen they were, swatting away a stagehand who tried to drag her offstage. I’ve seen too many big-ticket bands lately, I fear, where security would have ripped that fan apart before they could even say “Hi, Mom!”. Starland’s wood-paneled homey basement vibe contributed to feeling like this was a much more classic experience– like returning to the roots of what rock means.
The big fans at the bottom of the stage blowing through their hair made for the types of photographs my mom had up on her wall as a teen in the 80s. Not a shirt remained intact by the end of the show. They were hot, they were magnetic, and they were damn photogenic. As I watched them drop the rockstar persona, shake the crowdsurfer’s hand, and begin taking apart their own set, I was struck by how down-to-earth they seemed to be for a group that I consider to be the obvious future of the scene.