Bad Copy

When I was a wee punk, back when my hair was spikey and my eyeliner was thick, I was obsessed with AFI. I was part of their fan club, the Despair Faction. I had all their albums and all the variations of all their albums. I covered all my school book covers, notebooks, and journals with their lyrics. And I even followed them around California and Mexico on tour, Goth Grateful Dead style. And then life happened. Their sound changed. I wasn’t so angsty. Careers took over and calling off work to sleep in a sleeping bag outside of a venue in Phoenix wasn’t as plausible as it used to be. My connection to them kind of just floated off into the ether. Sure I saw them when they came through on The Blood Album tour, but COVID made me skip their Bodies tour. I just figured that I had lost my flame for them… But that’s when I saw that they had a new album coming out, a new tour, and Davey had a new Lemmy ‘stache paired with a shaggy curly look complete with long braided mullet pieces (if you don’t know, just look it up. I tried my best). So I grabbed my camera and headed over to The Salt Shed to relive some youth and make some new memories.

I took my place in the photo pit and was adjusting my settings in preparation for the opening act to take the stage. I turned around to scan the massive crowd, and that’s when I saw a friendly, familiar face – Aaron Saye! Those of you who don’t know Aaron and call yourselves music fans, have never lived. Aaron lives in Colorado and, for a long time, was one of the amazing people who helped to run the 7th Circle Music Collective, a great DIY space in Denver. He also has the world’s most amazing band t-shirt collection. I met Aaron at an AFI show in Chicago… when we were in high school… in 2003. Our paths have crossed in various ways ever since. I was so happy to see him, I screamed, hopped up on the barricade and reached into the crowd to give him a hug. We promised to meet after the show. What a world!

In all the years that I have seen AFI, one of the things that I remember most about their live shows is how they always pair the perfect opening band(s) who compliment their newest album or sound. Tonight, we were graced with TR/ST (pronounced TRUST). They are a duo from Toronto that leans heavy on dark synth pulses and submerged vocals. The quickly set the a mood in the 3,000 cap venue that was strangely intimate yet full of reverberations and shadows. There was basically no stage banter; they were all business, moving from one track to another with a “thank you” thrown in here or there.

The crowd seemed to be into it. While it’s safe to assume everyone in the venue was there for AFI and not every one of those fans came primarily for electro-darkwave, a good portion embraced it. Mid-set, you could see pockets of genuine reaction — nodding heads, eyes closed, people absorbing rather than just waiting for AFI to come onstage. Overall, my introduction to TR/ST was a solid one. They set the tone for the night, warmed up the crowd, and held their own in the massive venue.

As the crowd waited anxiously for the Ukiah-bred, Bay Area-raised four-piece to take the stage, a familiar chant began. “Through our bleeding / We are one” the crowd repeated over and over as core memories that I thought had been buried started to rise to the surface levels of my brain. I remember being on a road trip of California with my parents to look at colleges (I refused to go anywhere in the Midwest; I wanted to be a West Coast music snob SO BAD back then), going to a library in a tiny town outside of Yosemite to use their internet so I could enter a Despair Faction contest to possibly win a meet and greet with the band at the Riveria (spoiler alert: I won. I still have the photos of me with GIANT hair grinning ear to ear next to each member). I suddenly remembered hopping a plane with two friends at 20 and trying to navigate our way around Mexico City with almost no Spanish skills only to eat at a Chili’s near the venue where we ran into some of the tried and true road team, who hooked it up and let us watch the show that night from the VIP section. It’s amazing what a few words in a chant brings back…

After what felt like an hour of chanting and cheering, AFI took the stage. The opened with “Miseria Cantare” and headed right into “Girls Not Grey.” The crowd went wild for it. The 18 song setlist did a great job of spanning the band’s career. They dabbled in a few of the new songs off their latest album, Silver Bleeds the Black Sun, which was actually released earlier in the day. They played “Love Like Winter,” one of my favorites off Decemberunderground. They killed it on crowd favorite “Beautiful Thieves” off Crash Love. They even played “File 13” for the first time since 2018. Ya’ll… I used that song as part of a project in my high school Health class in 2001. Someone please tell me why I can’t remember what I did yesterday, but there I was, shouting along to every single word of a track from 30 years ago!

And while we’ve all been forced to aged a bit with time, with some expedited help from a global pandemic, they’ve still got it. They look great. They’re in shape. They sounded amazing. Davey’s vocals are as strong and powerful as ever. Hunter leapt into the air as Jade spun in his trademark circles around the stage. All while Adam hammered the drums with a force you could feel in the floor. So many bands that I was in love with have slowed down over the years. It’s been personally very hard to watch some of the people I considered idols and drew inspiration from turn into drunken messes with a visible loss of drive or passion for their craft. But not these guys. They put on a show and they play all songs – new, old, and everything in between – with an energy that resonates that they’re giving it their all and that they’re still stoked to be doing this.

All of these thoughts and feelings came to me at rapid speed throughout the show as I walked the venue finding nooks and crannies to take photos from. And when they played “Days of the Phoenix” (a song that I would not consider neither sentimental nor one of my favorites) I will be goddamned if I did not get choked up and shed a few tears as more core memories danced somewhere just behind my eyes. And then Davey did it… he hopped off the stage and into the crowd; not for the first time during the set, but for the most important time. The band was playing “I Hope You Suffer” and suddenly, he was floating above the crowd as Fritch (one of those tried and true roadies) helped with his chord and mic. All these years later and Davey Havok is still successfully head walking on the crowd. I loved it!

After a quick two song encore which ended with “Silver and Cold,” the crowd thinned out. I fought my way back to the front and found Aaron and Will, a new friend he made (because of course he did), and we all walked out of the venue together. Aaron and I caught up on the corner, trying to download the highlights of our lives to each other as fast as possible. But my mind was only half there; I kept thinking about all of the ways that AFI served me over the last decades – all the people I met because of this band, all of the experiences I had, and all of the feelings that they helped me to highlight and process through all parts of my adulthood. I exchanged Instagram handles with my new friend Will, got Aaron’s phone number, gave everyone a hug, and headed off into the night. And while I’m sure you could tell that I had a great time at the show, one of the surefire ways that *I* know it was a great show is that I have not stopped listening to AFI since and I don’t plan to anytime soon.