Sunday night was a magical night for music when Descendents and Frank Turner And The Sleeping Souls played the final night of their tour together at The Salt Shed, one of the nicest venues in Chicago history! Even a rainstorm didn’t keep thousands of people from attending the show and they waited in line well before the doors opened to get inside.
First up was Nobro, hailing from Canada, a country that has produced a lot of great punk rock over the years. Now if you hadn’t heard of the band before, and didn’t know a thing about them going in, you may think to yourself, “what kind of bad name is that for a band?”, but you’d soon realize how wrong. you were when you see five ladies take the stage. It suddenly took on a whole different, and way better meaning! Then when they picked up their instruments and started playing, they immediately won you over! Nobro plays upbeat, garage party punk with fun and clever lyrics and a great attitude. They had a bunch of fans right up front that were dancing and singing along so they clearly have built up a nice fanbase already. The band had great catchy songs and were just a ton of fun. They easily won over tons of people who never heard of them before and everyone was unanimously saying how great they were. Nobro is well worth your time to seek out, and absolutely worth seeing. It’s a safe bet that after this tour they are on a lot more people’s radars, and they deserve it.
Frank Turner And The Sleeping Souls was next. The venue was packed already at this point and people were excited. Turner has enjoyed a solo career that has lasted well north of ten albums and has built up a very big fanbase. When Turner plays live, he’s joined by his band, The Sleeping Souls. There was no sleeping during their set however as the band was full of endless amounts of energy, and so was the crowd. Turner and crew played a really interesting mix of punk and folk music, I guess you could call it Folk Punk. The songs had lots of singalong elements, some were fast, some were slow, some solo Frank and most with the full band. The crowd loved every minute of it. The pit was massive, people were dancing everywhere. Turner is a fantastic and charismatic frontman. He spoke a lot between songs and was incredibly entertaining and often time funny while doing so. At one point he instructed the crowd to separate down the middle and started talking about the wall of death. The crowd obliged thinking he was asking them to do a wall of death, but when they separated and you had two sides of the audience facing each other with a big open space between them, Turner then said that we’re not doing a wall of death, we’re going to do a wall of hugs! He got perfect strangers to run up and hug each other throughout the audience! Talk about the punk rock power of unity! This was a running theme throughout the set, uniting people and how the power of punk rock can bring on change. It was really inspiring, as was the entire 75 minute set. Everyone was smiling.
Speaking of smiling, everyone was smiling even bigger than they already were when Descendents took the stage. These punk/pop pioneers have been making great records and putting on amazing performances for well over 40 years now and show no sign of slowing down. Not only have they not slowed down, it seems they’ve been more active the past few years than they have been in awhile. Every time the Descendents take the stage it is a really big deal to a lot of people of all ages, and that excitement resonates through the entire audience.
The band took the stage sans Bill and Milo and Stephen made some small talk while they were waiting for Bill to take his drum throne. Once everyone was in their positions they blasted right into “Everything Sucks’ and the crowd went nuts. The band delivered that song with the enthusiasm of a band full of 20 year olds full of adrenalin. It’s really awe inspiring to see how much energy this band has after being at it for over four decades. These four guys playing together is clearly the fountain of youth for them as they somehow keep getting better and better the older they get. Their performances are flawless and such a great thing to witness. They quickly followed up with “Hope” and that got a bunch of kids crowd surfing. Those who weren’t were jumping up and down, or in the pit, or simply singing along and pumping their fists during the choruses. This visual was a constant for the rest of their set.
The band played plenty of the hits and sprinkled in some of the newer material as well. There has never been a bad Descendents record, each one is a must have and each one has many great songs on it, so their entire discography was pretty well represented this evening. Of the many highlights, some included “I Don’t Want To Grow Up”, “Rotting Out”, “Myage” “Clean Sheets”, “My Dad Sucks”, “Silly Girl”, “Good Good Things” and so much more! If you were going to put together a playlist of the best Descendents songs, most of them would be songs they played on this night. They didn’t spend a lot of time between songs, but when they did, Milo always had entertaining or thought provoking things to say. There’s a reason he’s perhaps the most beloved frontman in punk rock history.
The band played for over an hour and the sound in the Salt Shed this evening was spot-on, it sounded so good! After a double whammy of “Bikeage” and “Smile”, the band left the stage. It was hard to know if they were done or if there would be a encore because for some reason the house lights were on in the crowd for their entire set. Thankfully after a short wait, the band returned to the stage to a huge roar of applause to deliver a three song encore. This is where it got really special because they opened the encore with “Jean Is Dead”!!!!! They never play this song live! In all the years I’ve seen the band play, which dates back to 1986 with only missing one show in all those decades, the ONLY time I witnessed them play that song was when they did the full Milo Goes To College album at Riot Fest about ten years ago. That song being a huge personal favorite of mine made this extra special and it was totally unexpected. They followed that up with “Catalina”, another of the all time greats! They went out on another real high note by ending with “Get The Time”, a beautiful ending to an absolutely incredible performance in a really amazing venue!
