GOOD RIDDANCE – Remain In Memory: The Final Show, Santa Cruz, California (Fat Wreck Chords)
Many years ago, I had the misfortune to be the guy charged with booking Chixdiggit for a friend’s wedding. To save the married couple some money, I put the ungrateful Canadians up at my house for three miserable days that turned into a band I loved musically into people I hated personally.
In 1997, the same thing happened with Good Riddance, when our local alternative weekly rag asked me to write a preview article on GR before their show in my hometown. While No Use For A Name and the Mad Caddies both called in for their quotes as opening acts, Good Riddance never bothered. I took that opportunity to posit the question as to whether the band’s vegan diet had left them so withered and tired after their nightly 45-minute sets that they were just too drained to do anything else – like promote their shows.
Frankly, that was merely a slap at the band’s career-long misguided support of PETA,an organization that believes my uncle should have been denied the pig’s heart valves that saved his life, or that I, recently diagnosed with skin cancer, should be denied my meds which are derived from horses (who never get skin cancer despite constant sun exposure.)
I always admired Good Riddance for their many political stances (even if some were misguided,) and their sheer tenacity at touring small clubs, selling small amounts of records, and being generally underappreciated and overlooked while bands like Sick Of It All and CIV were doing the same things musically but with a little more compromise and a lo more profit.
Since I was on tour when Good Riddance played the gig I was promoting for them, I didn’t get to see them play; but on my return weeks later, I was regaled with quotes from local scenesters who told me that Good Riddance had taken such offense at the article in question that they had asked several locals where I was, where I lived, and that they were gonna “kick my ass.” Which all seemed reactionary and overblown to me; I couldn’t understand how a politically pacifist band would threaten a journalist with physical violence over a few comment. I took note, and our paths didn’t cross for several years.
In 2000, the band toured with Anti-Flag and my friends Strike Anywhere, and were coming to Chapel Hill, NC where I was working at the time. Speaking to the Strike Anywhere boys prior to the show, they told me that they had brought my name up in conversation to Good Riddance, who again reiterated a disdain for me and repeated their physical threats (over some comments in a preview article!)
So when the show happened in Chapel Hill, the Strike boys put me on their guest list under my real name and only introduced me to GR as ‘Johnny.’ I admired them while watching their backstage behavior for teasing openers Anti-Flag for their “gift list” on their website, where the band was basically soliciting presents from fans. But as I listened to them talk, I began to realize the threats to me had to have come from two members of the band who both candidly shared a couple of show-related stories with a violent, thug-like bent, more akin to something a member of the Cro-Mags would be telling backstage than the quasi-pious vegan politicos in Good Riddance.
All that said, the band has gone with Chixdiggit (and Helmet, the Unsane, Sham 69, Leftover Crack, and others) in my “Great Band/Shitty People” file. While I question some of the band’s agenda where stuff like PETA is concerned, and I heard them tell Strike Anywhere to their faces they were only chosen to be on tour for their Pollstar numbers (which tracks attendance at concerts,) and they have at least two members who still imagined their jobs to included some warped punk West Side Story gang-member mentality, I have always had a great respect for this band musically, and particularly for their longevity.
Forever fucking against the grain since 1995, this band has released seven full-lengths on Fat Wreck Chords, and the usual plethora of singles, EP’s, comp tracks, etc. The band decided to play a final gig to a sold-out crowd in their hometown of Santa Cruz on May 27 of last year, the entire 31 songs of which are captured here. What is so apropos of a final show is that the band does song from their last proper full-length (2006’s My Republic) all the way to songs from their first demo cassette. While live albums often fall flat sonically, the one gets a remix from The Blasting Room Studio’s super-duo of Jason Livermore and Bill Stevenson, and packs a punch like you were standing right next to the monitors.
While we always knew bands like the Misfits and Ramones were total thug imbeciles making great music, GR is a band that always cloaked their personnel’s cretinism behind smart lyrics and a tight hardcore sound. While even their most ardent fans couldn’t argue that the band’s departure after 12 years leaves any sort of palpable gap in today’s punk scene, this release does hit all the highlights of a really good band’s important career. And for all the fans that couldn’t be there for the final show, this is the best farewell note you could hope for. Just don’t criticize them in any way, because even though they’ve broken up, like the jocks on the football team, they will still kick your ass!!!
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