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March 3, 2006 > Arts & Entertainment > Caught up in a good crowd

Caught up in a good crowd

By Julia Bursten | Thresher Editorial Staff

Crowd-surfing never made my “things to do before I die” list before Monday. I have been to enough punk-esque concerts to have seen the consequences of this particular audience recreation and believe me: Some of them are not pretty. But when I found myself being pulled down from the shoulders of kilt-clad and mohawked Flogging Molly fans by security guards a few evenings ago, I understood why people put up with the potential for groping and head injuries for a chance to swim over a thousand sweaty hands.

There is something funny about crowds at most concerts, but the punks will always puzzle me more than most. The music and the dancing is always desperate and violent, and if fans walk away with an ounce of energy left to kick a trash can on the way out, they feel disappointed that the concert was lackadaisical. No one left Warehouse Live with that complaint Monday.

Perhaps it was the four-and-a-half hours between the doors opening and Molly taking the stage, but the 2,000 Irish and Irish-loving rock fans packed onto the soccer-field-sized floor of the Warehouse were more than a little belligerent. A particularly aggressive and particularly drunk swarm of shirtless moshers played dance-floor soldiers, directing the impossibly close-packed crowd around the floor using coordinated shoving and head-butting into the unsuspecting backs of other fans. The result, only slightly less chaotic than the climactic fight scene of Boondock Saints, was a slow wave of swaying and collapsing bodies that inevitably erupted into good-natured bar brawls along the front rows.

In all this confusion and flailing of limbs on a sweaty and beer-stained concrete floor, no one would be shocked to hear reports of serious injury. But there was a deep, ritualistic and benevolent undercurrent in these fans even more powerful than the deafening amps scattered across the stage. Every time a zealot slipped on a cigarette butt or mistakenly punched a stranger instead of a best friend, everyone in the vicinity of the struggling fan stepped in to help him or her up and out of danger. The concertgoers’ intense passion for Flogging Molly’s music translated into an unexpected compassion for their fellow fans.

Experiencing life in the crowd itself was more than worth the concert’s ticket price, but Flogging Molly deserved all the hype and bedlam their fans built up. Their better-known tracks sound just as clean and even more inspirational live than on a speaker at a private party on campus, and the band played a few extended versions and rare cuts that fans are unlikely to find on CD.

Dave King, Molly’s founder and lead vocalist, came onstage around 11:30 p.m. and did not end the show until after 1 a.m. — a longer set than most headliner bands would choose to play on a Monday night. The band matched the crowd’s energy perfectly, knowing just when to pull out a ballad and allow the dancers to catch their breath through a cigarette filter, but never slowing down long enough to lose the crowd’s interest. The venue itself helped the cause: As Molly sped up, the Warehouse’s framework began to shake and drip condensation as if it were another mosher stomping around the concert.

While the headliner was worth the wait, two of the three opening acts made the hours leading up to the headliner unduly painful. Ese, a Latino punk quartet, had more energy than talent but not enough of either. Plus, the lead singer had mastered the art of offensive standup better than the art of singing on key. The Briggs were less odious but profoundly unremarkable in all other respects.

But the third opening act, the Dead Pets, showed much more potential. The British septet bills itself as “punk rock ‘n’ roll poets” and gave an enthusiastic and promising preview of the new wave of English punk. With a sense of style that hovered between the Clash and a Parisian runway, the Pets pulled off a rendition of “Great Balls of Fire” that must have had Jerry Lee Lewis rolling in his grave.

Molly will be back in Texas soon and is debuting a documentary at Austin’s South by Southwest Film and Music Festival March 18. And while I still need a few days to recover from the concert’s sheer intensity, rest assured that I am putting crowd-surfing on my “things to do at least once more before I die” list immediately.

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