DARTO FIRESIDE BOWL UPGRADE
DARTO FIRESIDE BOWL FULL

It’s not that my parents didn’t know that was the case, but to what extent? Yet they clearly felt I could handle myself.

Keep in mind that at that time, around 2000, the area in Logan Square surrounding the Fireside Bowl was not yet the yuppie, button-down belt it is today, as it was overrun with gangs and violence. And somehow, I gained my parents’ trust, just enough that they would allow me to traverse Chicago’s public transit on my own. The moment I turned 15, I began to seek out shows in the city. This venue was where all the best punk and hardcore bands would play - Dillinger Four, Refused, Buried Alive, Converge, Cave In … I can’t keep count of all the amazing shows I saw during the Fireside’s tenure. The derelict space held around 500 people, meaning that by today’s standards, it probably shouldn’t hold more than 50 safely. The Fireside was a dilapidated bowling alley that at the time was not functioning primarily as a bowling alley. To me, the Fireside Bowl was Chicago’s CBGB, our quintessential, ramshackle punk venue that hosted performances by some of the most influential artists of the genre.

DARTO FIRESIDE BOWL FULL

I began to see the North Shore and rural Ohio as two sides of the same homogenous, boring coin, full of people too self-involved and uninterested in building a broader community. While my family had eked our way from a staunchly middle-class lifestyle to this glossier upper-middle class, I could not identify with the type of überwealth these rich kids dragged along everywhere they went, like specters rattling their chains of affluence in my face. I realized it was futile to think I could make any headway in punk or hardcore on the North Shore. It was clear that if this was the new standard, it might be better if we just stopped doing whatever it was we thought we were doing.

Outside of making abysmal music, we mostly listened to Hatebreed, a Connecticut hardcore band that had recently released what would become a classic album, Satisfaction Is the Death of Desire. We recorded a demo tape, something I have intentionally lost and hope to never recover. Available from Hachette Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group Inc. I had the “pleasure” of starting my first band with some of these moonlighters, a hardcore group called Voices Still Heard - a generic name with zero meaning.Įxcerpted from None of This Rocks: A Memoir by Joe Trohman. Sure, some dabbled in punk, but they preferred to retreat to their parents’ quasi mansions to throw pseudoparties with other brats, less interested in the Vandals and more interested in knowing where the vodka was being kept.

With the “new kid” sheen dulled and no friends to count, I fell back on the only support system I had: punk rock.īy sophomore year of high school, I had become accustomed to the North Shore brats. When they tried to talk to me, I would have an internal parts breakdown, unable to compute the complex theories of “flirt,” “talk,” or “Just say something, man!” So I stuttered my way toward week two of middle school, organically shifting from intriguing and potentially kissable to fully weird and ignorable. Real-life girls! Now, this was frightening because I feared the opposite sex greatly. Was he cool? Was he smart? Was he suave? Was he good at rollerblading? I was none of these, but I tried to live in this moment of pseudo-popularity for as long as it would last. No one wanted to fart on me while proclaiming, “Gas chamber!”įor one hot minute I was not an outcast but an interesting curiosity: the new kid. And for the first time in my life, I was surrounded by other Jews. We now lived a stone’s throw from a real, major city, a place with no shortage of culture.

DARTO FIRESIDE BOWL UPGRADE

It took me less than a week to realize that Winnetka, where my family moved when I was in sixth grade, was a significant upgrade from small-town Ohio.

Darto fireside bowl