| By
PETE WALTON
 Some
of the world's best bands have played The Stone Pony in Asbury
Park, New Jersey. You'd never know to look at it that the
Pony is such a hallowed place in the history of rock 'n' roll.
The Pony
is a great destination in the summer. Only a few feet of street
and a path of wooden planks over the sand separate it from
the beach and the Atlantic Ocean. But going to the Pony in
the wintertime can be a test of endurance. The gentle ocean
breezes of summer gives way to wicked winds which whip across
the water.
This night,
December 13, 1995, followed a day of rain and snow flurries.
By 7 p.m., several hundred people had gathered outside, many
of them shivering in the cold, having left their coats elsewhere
(since carrying a coat at a rock show is usually more trouble
than it's worth). Once inside, the crowd provided the human
ingredients for a steaming sweat box. On a good night at the
Pony -- and this was a very good night -- it's hard to believe
that the number of people crammed into the joint is within
the limits of the local fire safety ordinance.
So this
overheated pack of music lovers, moshers, mini-kids, and moms
and dads had come in from the damp chill to see silverchair.
If anyone of them was disappointed, it wasn't apparent before,
during or after the sold-out show.
The three
teenagers from an east coast oceanfront town in Australia
who had come to this east coast oceanfront town in New Jersey
took the stage and proceeded to take the place by storm --
a musical storm which did not let up from the opening of Leave
Me Out to the drawn-out ending of Israel's Son.
Looking
for all the world like a teenage garage band (which they truly
were not so many months before), silverchair hammered out
eight of the 11 songs on their debut album frogstomp, Acid
Rain from their Tomorrow EP (something a bit special for the
fans, bassist Chris Joannou said in a radio interview earlier
in the day), and three heretofore unrecorded songs -- Slave,
No Association and Nobody Came.
Daniel
Johns was very talkative during the show, as only once did
silverchair play two songs in a row without comment from the
guitarist/singer. He fully let himself go as Israel's Son
concluded, emitting a series of obscenities, hoarse screams
and impassioned moans. Joannou was bucking and grinding at
stage right, and drummer Ben Gillies' sent his long hair flying
throughout the show as he reminded some older fans of Led
Zeppelin's John Bonham.
To handle
the overflow crowd, a tent had been erected behind the club
and those in the tent could see the show through a large opening
where a metal door had been rolled up.
"Just
'cause you're in the tent doesn't mean you don't have to jump
around," Johns said. "You can try and get down the
front if you like. But you'll have to like, walk over all
these people."
 Moshing
and crowd surfing took place throughout the evening -- there
was even crowd surfing between songs.
"Crowd
surfing to nothing?" Johns marvelled."Oh, rock on!"
Though
one of The Stone Pony's claims to fame is the fact that local
rocker Bruce Springsteen has often shown up unannounced to
jam with a featured act there, the crowd on this night had
little reaction to Johns' introduction of silverchair's massive
hit Tomorrow as "a Bruce Springsteen song."
"Or
someone that's really famous around here," Johns offered.
He may have met with the same reaction if he had mentioned
the name of another local rock notable, Jon Bon Jovi.
But there
did not appear to be many devotees of the type of music made
by Bon Jovi or Springsteen in attendance on this night. (Major
Springsteen aficianado John Watson, silverchair's manager,
was laid up in New York City with a cold.)
In addition
to silverchair's considerable base of young fans, there were
a fair few "oldtimers" in the crowd. In talking
to some of them after the show, comparisons were made between
the young Australians and such bands as Black Sabbath and
Led Zeppelin in terms of their hard edge and upfront approach
to music. This might have been expected, since the members
of silverchair had cited those groups as influences.
During
the course of the show, it became apparent that there was
something special about silverchair. It wasn't that they showed
technically perfect musicianship (although you could match
Gillies' chops on drums with anyone working today). It wasn't
some flashy stage presence or deeply profound lyrics (though
Johns' words to Faultline were so moving in live performance
that you could easily shed a tear for the young boy who died
in the Newcastle, Australia earthquake when the silverchair
members were only nine or 10 years old).
What the
show revealed was the absolute excitement and enthusiasm of
three people, unaffected by celebrity, who were doing something
they liked to do, and doing it well. Though a product of the
'90s, silverchair have none of the pissing and moaning that
stinks up so many of their contemporaries. silverchair's sound
is raw and refined at the same time; it respects the music
which made rock 'n' roll real while emerging as fresh as the
date on today's calendar.
POSTSCRIPT:
As the
band left the stage that night, they headed out the door and
onto their tour bus. The crowd filed out from the hot space
inside the Pony into the cold New Jersey air. I walked the
seven blocks back to the place where I lived, and got a strange
and strong feeling that somehow, this night was going to have
an impact on my life. I had no clue that exactly two years
later to the very night, I'd be at a silverchair show in Melbourne,
Australia, and that Daniel Johns would dedicate Israel's Son
to me. If you don't believe it, I don't blame you, because
it sounds pretty much impossible.
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