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SOCIAL DISTORTION
THE SAME OLD NESS
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Mike Ness has never met a cliché he couldn’t wrestle into a rock-and-roll anthem. It’s a strategy that’s served him well for 25 years, all the way up to his band Social Distortion’s sold-out two-night stand at Avalon a week ago Tuesday and Wednesday. Yet back in the early ’80s, when he was just another alienated skinny white kid from Orange County with too much eye make-up and a vaguely Anglo-centric take on anthemic punk rock that you can still hear in those slight slips into a Billy Idol Brit sneer, nobody would have guessed that Ness would be instrumental in transforming punk rock from reckless youth rebellion modeled on the English explosion of ’77 into something much more potent — a contemporary folk idiom that’s as American as a ’57 Chevy cruising down Route 66. Which is not to take anything away from Mommy’s Little Monster, Social D’s now classic 1983 debut (reissued by Time Bomb in 1995), a disc that distilled the archetypical punk experience of just being different from all the other kids in school ("Her eyes are a deeper blue/She wears her hair that color too") into the rousingly tough yet remarkably tender anthem that gave the album its name. The same disc includes the equally touching road-weary salvo "Another State of Mind," a track that proved Ness could even breathe fresh life into one of the most tired topics in the entire rock-and-roll canon — the loneliness of touring. It took five years, a lot of hard living, and, apparently, a number of trips to the tattoo shop before the miracle worker returned with Prison Bound (reissued by Time Bomb in 1995), an album that recast Social D once and for all as apple pie from the wrong side of the tracks, to mix a couple of Nessian metaphors. The Clash didn’t meet Johnny Cash for the first time on Prison Bound, but they became blood brothers in the imagination of Ness, who revved up "Ring of Fire" and started churning out retro-fitted three- and four-chord hard-luck rockers with meat-and-potatoes names like "Ball and Chain," "Born To Lose," "Bad Luck," "Prison Bound," "Crown of Thorns," and even "No Pain, No Gain." Clichés can run from Ness, but they can’t hide. And so, with a little Link Wray playing in the background, Ness hit the Avalon stage as a new generation’s Man in Black, carrying the very same Les Paul goldtop with the "Orange County" stencil enshrined on the cover of last year’s Sex, Love and Rock ’n’ Roll (Time Bomb), to plow through the same set Social D had done the night before and probably the night before that, too. Never mind the numbers of fans who’d heard him proudly proclaim his Lynn roots the night before at exactly the same point in the set — this is how the pros do it, night after night after night. Ness did have a few new tricks up his sleeve this tour. A keyboard player added a few nice organ fills and played a pretty little piano intro to "Under My Thumb," a Stones song Social D have been covering since, well, the dawn of time (i.e., 1981). And since the passing of long-time second guitarist Dennis Dannell in 2000, Ness, who used to handle all of the soloing himself, has starting splitting lead duties with young gun Jonny "2 Bags" Wickersham. Indeed, as of 2004, when John Maurer called it quits after 20 years as Social D’s bassist, Ness was not just the only remaining founding member of the band but the only guy who’d been around for any significant period of time. But it takes more than a couple of new members and a keyboard to have any significant impact on a sound as solidly structured around a rocker as immovable in his object as Ness. And if new tunes like "Don’t Take Me for Granted" were cut from the same well-worn cloth as "Story of My Life," the sing-along Social D ended the night with, well, that was purely by design.
BY MATT ASHARE
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