Kevin Bronson on November 17th, 2008

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[Things I scribbled at Sunday’s Part Time Punks Festival, first installment;]

It was just past 2:30 Sunday afternoon, the acrid haze from southern California’s wildfires lingering over Echo Park like a hangover, and Michael Stock was nervous. Bay Area quintet the Magic Bullets [pictured above] were moments away from starting the inaugural Part Time Punks Festival with a bang, and Stock, a co-organizer, was caught between sweating last-minute details and living out a dream.

“This whole idea was dismissed two years ago,” Stock says of mounting a festival devoted largely to post-punk music, the underground and more experimental cousin to punk rock. “I remember hearing, ‘It won’t reach anybody but your crowd, and the 400 people you usually attract.'”

By midnight Sunday, there weren’t a lot of naysayers to be found. On the strength of resounding sets by veteran bands such as A Certain Ratio, Pylon and the Nightingales — along with injection of youthful energy by some of their musicial progeny — this first festival gave the twin venues of the Echo and the Echoplex a night to remember.

It was a quite a milestone for Part Time Punks (named for a song by the Television Personalities), the weekly club night launched by Stock and Ben White — “a club that started as a mix of old records and new bands,” Stock says.

Post-punk was long the domain of mostly dance club DJs and vinyl record hounds, but so many commercial bands this decade have used the form as a blueprint that fans are flocking back to the source — as evidenced by recent sold-out shows by Gang of Four and Wire. “People who weren’t paying attention to that era or that genre are now paying attention,” Stock says. “Especially the venues and promoters.”

Stock credits Echo booker Liz Garo for helping the festival land the reunited A Certain Radio as headliner. “It was a fantasy of mine, but just that — I never thought it would happen,” Stock says of the Manchester band that was a Factory Records labelmate of Joy Division. “But it so happened that they’d just finished a new record.”

[More to follow]