I found these videos on youtube, there are a ton of them from the Cleveland Hardcore fest in 1995.  This was the second really big hardcore fest I went to and it totally skewed my idea of what young people could do for pretty much the rest of my life.  The promoters for this show were Randy, Justin and Julie and they got a help from a bunch of folks.  It couldn’t have possibly been any more for the kids by the kids.  It was in a giant venue, but there wasn’t a lick of anything official about it.  I’m pretty sure that Justin and Julie were still in high school at the time;  that makes it extra-amazing because I work with young people and I don’t know that many with enough motivation to pull something like this off.  We got on the show, not by merit, but pretty much by virtue of being friends with Randy and Justin (I guess things never really change).

I have lots of stories that I tell about this show (because I ramble a lot and tell stories). I think there were two Cleveland fests and this is “the other one”.  This is the year before the One Life Crew riot. There were a ton of amazing bands, and finding such a wealth of videos all from the same show is a really good cross section of what was going on at the time.

One other random good one from the weekend.  The show was no re-entry.  At one point, the nearby Pizza Hut was totally full.  It was mostly bands because they were the only ones that  could come and go freely.  I put on “pour some sugar on me” on the jukebox and every single person at every single table was singing along at the top of their lungs.   It probably wasn’t EVERY person a EVERY table, but that’s how I remember it, so I’m sticking to it.

hot water music.

At the time, I think they just had a demo and a 7″ out.  We were lucky enough to play with them (also in Cleveland) earlier that year at the Lorain YWCA.  I think that most people at the fest didn’t know who they were, and then they just blew everyone away.  The first video is from the fest itself, the second video is from the same year but a different show.  I included it because seeing them play eating the filler at the fest was hands down the most moving rock and roll moment I have witnessed.  long acapella bridge sans microphones, screaming at the top of their lungs while chris (he’s the skinny one right?) was just punching himself in the face and singing at the same time.  I’ve seen lots of bands go off and freak out, but this one is up there.  Since they weren’t huge yet, not that many people knew the words so you didn’t hear a lot of people singing along.  Just a few dudes on stage with no microphones belting it out in a giant auditorium.  Not as many people had Lungfish beards back then, but at the end, dude’s beard was just dripping with about 1/4 cup of disgusting phlegm.

jihad:

I loved this band.  People disagree with me, but I pretty much think of them as Earth Crisis for kids that didn’t want to admit that they liked Earth Crisis.  Listen to all the chugga coming out of those guitars.

los crudos:

I had just gotten back from Chile and I saw that someone had written “Los Crudos” on a bench on the top of a hill in the MIDDLE of NOWHERE.  I also at the time had plans to write a zine in Spanish.  This was a horrible idea because I had absolutely no connection whatsoever to the audience for that zine.  I decided to see if I could interview them for this zine (which I never wrote).  I was also a little bit more rocky with my listening comprehension and not accustomed to their accents so we decided to do the interview in English and then I would transcribe it to Spanish (horrible idea).  I never did transcribe the recording because it was about 90 minutes (then the tape ran out) of intelligent, but very stream of consciousness political rambling.  A few highlights that I do remember:

-”You’re very lucky to be interviewing Los Crudos without Martin.  Because if you he’s here, you don’t interview Los Crudos, you just interview Martin.”

-Lenin, the bassist was really drunk…like alcohol poisoning drunk.  He spent most of the rolling around back and forth on a bunch of gravel and he would just randomly yell out the last thing that someone else said like a drunk punk hype man.  ”Don’t mean sh*t!” and “Kick their *ss!”

anasarca:

I think I had heard them a few times before when my friends would tape record someone’s Pitt radio show and then give me copies.  They were really good.  I didn’t realize that they were from this area, but at the time, Washington DC and Baltimore were these exotic locations that I had never been to.  The funny part about that is that we would regularly drive to Lancaster for shows and DC would have been so much closer.

fifteen:

I never knew that much about them and I was too busy trying to be “hardcore” to pay too much attention to pop punk bands.  But I knew that at the time a lot of people thought that they were a big deal so I made a point of watching them.  I keep meaning to try and get some fifteen records because I know I would be way more into it now; being “hardcore” is pretty much a lost cause at this point.

still life.  At the time, I didn’t care about this band one bit.  Now, I think they’re pretty OK.

mandela strike force

some of these dudes went on to be in Ink and Dagger.  One of them is not alive anymore.  He was funny a lot of the time, sometimes he was just mean.  I didn’t really know him very well at all just some back and forth on the straightedge list.

fracture – Featuring Atom without the package.

Franklin:  Featuring Ralph, about whom one of the greatest songs of all time was written.

If I get around to it, I might post up the videos I have of Despair from this show on youtube.  I have Transit aka Passover videos from this show also, but no need to put that on the youtube.

I’ve been meaning to write up what happened, but I will get to that later.

Jon took some pics.  Keith took a lot of pics.  Sam wrote up a quick recap.  I made a pretty lame video.  Here it is.

If you want to know who won what.  results are after the cut.  They are a little “grey” because we ran into some unintentional discrepancies with course cutting.  This is why there are no real prizes, because then I would have to put actual thought into what to do about that stuff.

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