Friday, March 5, 2010

November 9th, 1997: Agnostic Front, Vision, Strong Intention, In My Eyes @ 180 Club, Hagerstown, MD

This show was amazing for me. I would finally get to see Agnostic Front play live. Holy shit. This was 1997 so it was before any of their "come back" albums on Epitaph, so it was all old stuff. I don't know if this show was part of a "reunion" tour or if it was a one-off after they had come back from a long break, but people were psyched and they were great. It was good finally getting to see Vision play to a bigger crowd as well. People were really into them at this show. Maybe I'm getting my 180 Club shows mixed up but I want to say Damnation played this show too. If anyone can confirm/deny that for me that would be great. I love how Strong Intention are billed above In My Eyes on this show. Sure, they'd been around longer, but even though their first full length wasn't out yet, people were pretty psyched on them. You could count on Strong Intention playing just about any 180 Club show you went to. The 180 Club probably held about 250 people or so and there was a good long stretch of time where it was the only venue in the area for bigger hardcore bands to play. These days it takes a damn good show to get me to drive an hour and a half, or at least a city full of good friends and good food (like Leatherface in Philly this weekend), but I remember a time when I was going out to Hagerstown, which lacked both, on a pretty regular basis where the drive almost seemed like nothing.

I must have started thinking about booking shows myself around this time as the back of this flyer has phone numbers for Mike Damnation, Anthony, Pete, and Neal from In My Eyes, and Adam from Strong Intention.

UPDATE: I got confirmation from a couple of Hagerstown expatriates that Damnation did indeed play this show. Thanks Justin and Aaron.

3 comments:

Jason Powell said...

This was one of my favorite shows I ever saw. Damnation was incredible, as was AF, which, like you mentioned, had JUST reformed after a long time, and Vision killed it as usual. Plus it was the first time I ever saw IME (did you know the kids from the First Step drove all the way up to see them play this show?). Remember Roger getting shocked from the mic? That place was such a dive. No fights until the very end, and I think someone got stabbed like right after the show ended and people were filing out. I also remember at this show that a girl was trying to shoot photos of Damnation and Mike Schliebaum on purpose kept getting in her way and hanging off Mike DC the whole time. This was really a great show.

Mike Riley said...

Hell. Yes. Thanks Jason. That's the type of response I want to see more of on this blog.

Jason Contino said...

I remember this show I got shocked when I tried to sing along to victim in pain. It was a bunch of great bands and the crowd was really positive. And yes Damnation AD did play.