Wednesday night was the only day during South By Southwest that I didn’t have any specific plans. I decided to watch a hockey game and then I was going to get some work done and catch up on some sleep. Luckily for me that didn’t happen.  Luckily for me I was wearing my Mishka Bad Brains shirt.  My friend Sam came over to my hotel to watch the end of the hockey game with me and he saw my shirt. He just casually asked me if I knew that the Bad Brains were playing at 11pm at Emo’s. Oh yeah, and some band named Off! was opening for them. The second the game ended I got my ass down to Emo’s to catch both bands and boy am I glad I did.

If you don’t know by now, Off! is the newest band from Keith Morris. Morris was a founding member of Black Flag and then he went on to front the Circle Jerks (who I shot at SXSW in 2009). The band also features former members of Redd Kross and Rocket From The Crypt. My favorite part of the band might be their least legendary member in Dimtri Coats from the band Burning Brides.  Coats guitar sounded so perfectly 1981.  The band could have been an early 80’s LA hardcore band except they seemed totally relevant and not one of these faux retro bands.  They fucking melted faces and instantly made me a huge Off! fan. What a fucking great band.

After Off! was the legendary Bad Brains.  As a punk kid growing up in DC the Bad Brains were pretty much gods. The pretty much created the DC hardcore scene that meant so much to me as a 15 year old. They eventually made the same move I did moving from DC to NYC and continued to fuck shit up along the way.  I never got a chance to see them, missing their epic performance at the Vice Halloween party a few years ago by about 15 minutes. I couldn’t have been more psyched to see them. When they got on stage they very calmly performed their songs, nothing like the Bad Brains of the late 70’s/ early 80’s but somehow they still blew everyone’s fucking mind.  People were crowd surfing and moshing to their slowest reggae dub songs.  It was fucking insane.  At the end of every song H.R. would simply bow to us and move on.  It was amazing to see.

Anyway, it was a fucking amazing show and made me so glad I decided to leave the hotel. These pictures are not the best because it is really hard to shoot photos in a mosh pit, but fuck it, I got the shots…

Click here to see all the pictures of Off! at SXSW.

Click here to see all the pictures of Bad Brains at SXSW!

Oh yeah, and keep up that PMA.

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