A Steamroller of Positivity this Way Comes.

I'm bringin' the Negative Step to you this one last time. The above is a flyer that I made for their very last show, so sad! There's a story behind it (of course!), and I will tell it to you... now.

About a week before this show, Negative Step played a house party. Joolie and I showed up a few minutes late, and they were mid-song. As we walked in the front door, they stopped playing just long enough for us to get a man-hug from August, which was awesome. Imagine if every show started that way... Hmmm, that might get annoying. Forget I mentioned it.

Anyway, the band resumed playing the hardest core, and I start looking at the crowd. Pretty normal mostly, except for the naked guy (he was wearing a cowboy hat). In between songs the naked guy mentioned that he "lived there" and naked was "how he partied." Who was I to disagree?

The music was fast and August was in top form, making quips, being funny. It was great, I was having an excellent time. I thought to myself, the only thing that would make this perfect is if there were some mindless, hilarious violence happening while the Step rocked like fuck.

It turns out, I didn't have to wait too long.

The folks watching the show had made a big semi-circle, to give the band plenty of room to stretch out. This was a house party, so there wasn't a "pit" as much as there were some folks who were dancing. Time marches on, and then it was just this kind of big-boned emo kid, by himself, dancing his awkward brains out.

At this moment, an epically drunken crusty punk attacked big emo, very limply. A standing wrestling match quickly devolved into rolling around on the filthy wooden floor. It looked funny, and we were all laughing. It soon became apparent that one of the participants in this little skirmish was trying to play for keeps. Believe it or not, it was the drunk punk (I know...didn't see that coming) who was trying to make the hurting happen.

We were all about to move in on drunky, when the crowd parted, and the naked guy comes charging through to save the day. He jumped on drunky's chest, and proceeded to beat the living daylights out of him. It was over in seconds. Then the naked guy leapt to his feet, said something about how people bringing fights into his house were bullshit, and disappeared back into the crowd.

If you have ever heard the words "never knew what hit him," this was a textbook example of that. Drunky got up swinging at the air. "Who hit me!?" he was yelling, as his face started to swell up. Everyone laughed at him until he left. The band finished up, and that was that. What a fantastic night!

The next day, August asked me to make the flyer for their last show, and so I did.

Even though I made the flyer, I couldn't go to the last hurrah of one of my favorite local H/C bands. I had to go to crappy old work. Luckily, my darling Joolie was kind enough to record the show for me on a cheap cassette recorder. I have digitized the whole show and posted it for your listening pleasure, get some!