Roy Jurgens on January 6th, 2019

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It wasn’t exactly the Starwood in 1981, but in many ways it harked back to those days. Forty years young and still chugging along, Long Beach’s T.S.O.L. (True Sounds of Liberty) brought a heavy dose of nostalgia to the Regent on Friday night. The varying tribes were out in full force, many still displaying the mohawks and punk regalia of their misspent youth, while others were still youthfully misspending it.

T.S.O.L. finally took the stage after a hopped-up crowd had already sweated through four openers, and the seasoned veterans did not disappoint. Jack Grisham, ringleader, headmaster and court jester, grinned from ear to ear, as the kids who could have been his grandchildren mixed it up in a roiling mosh pit. (Side note: It was refreshing to see the participants heeding the time-honored code of picking up kids who fall and being careful with the girls who braved the donnybrook).

Grisham is a bear of a man, but with a gentle nature that belies T.S.O.L.’s working-class image. He also has a fiendish sense of humor, as he brought more than heckler to task. “What,” he asked, “You want to see me cock? That’s my daughter over there. Tomorrow when you’re in the Safeway, why don’t you walk up to an elderly man walking with his daughter and ask to see his cock. That’ll get you shanked.” (I’m paraphrasing.)

T.S.O.L. hardly wheezed through their set. The hits were played, as they roared through stellar versions of “World War Three,” “Superficial Love, “Dance With Me” and the crowd-pleaser “Code Blue.” It’s notable that T.S.O.L. aren’t comprised of Grisham and some hired guns, like many long-in-the-tooth acts cashing in. Bassist Mike Roche, guitarist Ron Emory, and Grisham are original members dating back to the band’s inception in 1978, and keyboardist Greg Kuehn (father of FIDLAR’s Elvis and Max Kuehn) traces his T.S.O.L. lineage back to 1982. It could be argued that while the band’s varying genres, dabbling in hardcore, deathrock, metal and post punk, made them difficult to pin down, it kept them from being the one-trick pony that hobbled many other bands of their generation.

Youth Brigade immediately preceded T.S.O.L., and the Stern brothers (Shawn, Mark and Adam, along with brother from another mother John Carey) played a rousing set of songs about fistfights, punctuated by Shawn Stern’s earnest pleas for peace and harmony between songs. One cannot help but notice how a band like Youth Brigade paved the way for the Green Days and the Blink-182s of the world. Life is often unfair to those who blaze the trail, as they are denied the gold.

Go Betty Go were positively darling during their short set. The Glendale quartet has been together for 18 years of joyful pop-punk fury and show no signs of slowing down. Bizarro goofballs Tartar Control and post punk ghouls Egrets on Ergot opened the festivities.

Photos by Roy Jurgens