DESCRIPTION:
Dag Nasty the band and the song, live at City Gardens in Trenton, NJ 1988.

Part of the Live...Suburbia! 28 songs and 28 stories mix.

Dag Nasty - Dag Nasty
"You have Can I Say but not Wig Out?" questioned an older punk rocker in my freshman art class named Dave, "...here...just take this now and give it back to me in a few days".

He pilfered through his black pack pack adorned with pins from Newbury Comics of various punk and hardcore bands before handing me a black cassette tape with a yellow squiggle on the cover. The band photos looked mature and remotely professional not aggressive and innocent.

"Let's wig out at Denko's...on coke and Doritos....malt liquor on a Minor Threat sticker" I read aloud slightly confused as Dave worked on a paper mache sculpture of himself pissing on the school. He used a piece of yellow yarn for the pee stream that was splashing on our school's mascot, a blue devil.

"Will you fucking relax?" he replied.

School bus rides were a mix of dread, relief, anxiety and nausea. The piercing laughs of adolescent girls, flying lunch bags, books smashing the knuckles of unsuspecting nerds and some mustached lesbian with mirrored glasses navigating and hitting every inconsistency in the pavement.

My ride home with Peter Cortner and Dag Nasty was marked with a completely new feeling that was equally tense and familiar. The thrash beats of Can I Say often reminiscent of Minor Threat were less prominent and Corner's vocals were slightly off key in a completely endearing and interesting way. Had they been perfectly fit to the notey riff heavy hardcore of Wig Out it would have been too streamlined, too polished. Instead they sat on top of Brian Bakers memorable riffs while Roger and Colin kept the Dag train steady. I hadn't heard music like this, nothing mixed melody and actual riffs like this to me, at least not any hardcore that I had been exposed to. I had an equal love for powerfully strummed chords and thrash beats as well as the unique picking of Rikk Agnew and other Orange County counterparts but this was completely different.

It felt like it was pitch black when I stepped off the bus a few steps from my house. A posted up on a large rock in my back yard that overlooked a muddy run off where flies circled and frogs swam and cycled through the album one more time. I wasn't sure if I liked the acoustic number When I Move but I had so many guitar lines and melodies circling through my head that it didn't matter. Whenever the tempos started to break towards the middle too much a thrash beat would be peppered in, in fact Simple Minds was as fast as anything needed to be but with a completely unique vocal style.

I spent the rest of the night perfecting and recreating the squiggle on the album cover until I could draw it from memory and thought about being 18 and telling a biker dude at the Golden Needle to ink it on my upper arm in the commitment spot.

Wig Out sounded like the empty parking lot behind every supermarket in my town, the dark October afternoons after school and the sweaty ride skate home with burning knees after rolling around to the point of dehydration.

Photographs by Ken Salerno and others.
Daghouse.com
Doublecrosswebzine.blogspot.com
livesuburbia.com