They say you can’t go home again.
I’ve never been one to listen much to them.
Living in the Annex now gives me a chance to be stumbling distance from so many of the bars and clubs that held my weekends together throughout high school and university. One such place is Sneaky Dee’s. And this being a music blog, we’re not talking about downstairs Sneaky Dee’s, in all its nacho glory, but upstairs Sneaky Dee’s. You know the place. You’ve been there. Every city has a Sneaky Dee’s. It’s where your friend’s band played, LOUDLY, and the beer was super cheap and afterwards, outside, your friend came up to you and asked you how you enjoyed the show and you looked at your watch and replied with the time because the combination of the ringing in your ears and the alcohol in your eyes was confusing you and then you threw up on the sidewalk and only half noticed that you threw up on top of someone else’s throw up, adding to the mosaic on the street, and the next morning the first thought you had when you opened your eyes was that you knew exactly what time you puked.
You’ve been there. Sneaky Dee’s.
One Friday night last month I had a friend coming in from out of town and we hadn’t been to Sneaky Dee’s in years. It was a Friday night and apparently on Friday Nights Sneaky Dee’s is home to night called Homesick which is billed as an “emo night”. This particular Friday night was going to be a special show as there was another… um… emo crew?… called Emo Night Brooklyn who were coming all the way from… yep, Brooklyn.
Two emo crews, one stage. We couldn’t believe our luck.
Well, more accurately, we poured countless pints of the newly tapped keg down our throats, invited another friend along with my girlfriend, and set to work figuring out exactly what was in store for us.
Now, I’m not good with labels, and emo to me conjured up kids in heavy make up who cut themselves just so they can feel something. It’s a standard emo joke, I know, but one that seems to fit so well I can’t resist using it as a descriptor.
After some drunken googling and youtubing, we stumbled upon a bit of a setlist from previous shows and the bands on there were surprising to me. Blink 182, Taking Back Sunday, Something Corporate, 30 Seconds To Mars, My Chemical Romance… now, to me, I would never really have registered those bands as emo. Emo in my mind was something a bit sadder, that slow wah-nah-nah music that you kind of lurch alone to on the dance floor like those half-zombie people I accidentally ran into that one weird night at the Dance Cave in 1997 (an establishment also now within stumbling distance from the new place, I might add).
I would have called all these bands pop-punk or, if I wanted to get even less cool, mall-punk.
But apparently they were emo. And apparently I like emo, and not-so-secretly either as these bands have popped up routinely in my playlists over the years.
So we figure there is a DJ of sorts playing this music and this Brooklyn crew sounds interesting (based solely on the fact that I spent New Years in Brooklyn this year and LOVED it) and, at the very least we know it will be loud and the beer will be cheap.
We were not prepared for the kind of show this was. Not at all prepared.
Inside the bar for five minutes and already each of us was double fisting the $3.50 beers and worrying we had made a big mistake. The crowd was younger than us, on average, by at least a decade and on stage there are no fewer than ten guys all standing in line behind a table that had two laptops on it. Their girlfriends were standing on the stage too, off to the side, but very visible, and they were all just kind of… hanging out. This is Homesick meets Emo Night Brooklyn.
The music IS loud, the beer IS cheap but there is no DJ. There are no performers. There are no musicians.
I kid you not, the ENTIRE show consisted of seven of these guys taking turns hitting a button on the laptop to play the next song while the other three jumped around the front of the stage in a coked-up panic BEGGING, PLEADING, FORCING the crowd to sing along.
“Wow… Blink 182! You guys know this one. SING IT!”
“Come on guys, who LOVES this song! You know the chorus. SING WITH US!”
I could go on, but you get the idea. And I’m not even exaggerating… that was the entire show. No talent whatsoever, just a group of guys bludgeoning the crowd with their screaming lyrics, pleading eyes, pumping fists and bouncing bodies.
This is apparently a thing. A show that hinges solely on preying on your nostalgia and fills the room with happy, catchy pop-punk emo lyrics that everyone knows and loves.
I have mentioned this a few times (foreshadowing!) but the beer is CHEAP and here’s where the story turns unexpectedly on us.
We start to SING. While many songs are unknown to us, there start to be some real classics. We start to dance. We start to bounce.
When the jacked up cokies – a term that sounds much cuter and nicer than cokehead, no? and fits better with the “we’re all friends” atmosphere of the night – do a call and response, we RESPOND.
And, we MOSHED. For real. I was in a mosh pit with my girlfriend.
I am 38 years old.
At one point, towards the end of the night, we actually made our way onto the stage itself and were dancing right next to friggin’ EMO NIGHT BROOKLYN themselves.
I don’t know what happened… I don’t know at which beer we decided to just give into the idiocy of the show, but dammit we had a good time. When we were deciding to leave it was a bit of “suddenly realizing how embarrassed we should be feeling” mixed with a pinch of “Awww, do we have to go?” I’ve never been to another show quite like it.
So there you have it – emo night. You will need to be drinking, but if you can get yourself just past the point of caring how ridiculously untalented the organizers are, you’ll have a great time.
Sneaky Dee’s – Homesick Emo Night – Every Friday Night
* * * * *
Song of the night for me – Taking Back Sunday – Make Damn Sure
I may have lost my voice a bit to this song…
The point in the night we felt the oldest when hardly anyone else danced or sang…
Wheatus – Teenage Dirtbag
And the hungover rehashing the next day…
that led us to deciding our Halloween costumes this year, not realizing that the Internet, being so damn good at everything, had already thought them up…
