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NOFX’S FAT MIKE TALKS PUNK IN DRUBLIC FESTIVAL, SET FOR PALLADIUM
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The Mighty Mighty BossTones, Pennywise and Get Dead will perform at festival
Jason Greenough
Special to Worcester Magazine USA TODAY NETWORK
From the very inception of Punk In Drublic Festival, Mike Burkett, otherwise affectionately known as Fat Mike, has had one constant ingredient for the “secret sauce” that makes every year a rousing success: get Bad Religion on the bill.
However, that won’t be possible for the festival’s Worcester stop at the Palladium Outdoors on Sept. 25, so the NOFX frontman is getting what he knows is the next best thing.
Joined by Boston ska punk legends The Mighty Mighty BossTones, Pennywise, and Get Dead for the weekend punk rock hoedown, NOFX and Burkett are pumped for what the latest Massachusetts installment of the annually touring festival might have in store. But let’s be honest — he knows what makes a festival of this magnitude successful, and he’s sticking to that formula.
“I love it. I love that the BossTones are on it, and I won’t do one of these unless the bands are [expletive] great,” Burkett says. “That was the idea, where people only want to see five bands, so let’s make sure there’s a good half-hour in between bands so people can drink and
“You should be able to drink wherever you want, not in just a little garden space, and more than five bands is ludicrous. So, let’s make sure that all five bands are good. And let’s do the show on weekends, because people are still working during the summer.” SUBMITTED PHOTO
Punk
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not have to listen to music from five different stages, and let’s just make sure the bills are really good.”
While, due to COVID restrictions, this year may not carry all of the extracurricular, punk-inspired fun that the festival has brandished in years before, whether it be “The Wheel of Misfortune,” target practice with rocks and plates, playing badminton with the bands, or throwing a few back at a padded bar in the middle of the mosh pit, Burkett is confident that the music will speak for itself and bring the punks to the parking lot all the same.
It’s long been a part of the mission statement that whatever has been absent from other shows, this festival wants to make it happen — sort of like a real-life pleasure island, a la Pinocchio — and Burkett is proud to have stuck to that mission and built onto it, year after year.
“The thing about Punk in Drublic is that we invented a festival where everything that we didn’t like about other festivals is part of what we’re doing, like having kids there,” says Burkett. “You should be able to drink wherever you want, not in just a little garden space, and more than five bands is ludicrous. So, let’s make sure that all five bands are good. And let’s do the show on weekends, because people are still working during the summer.”
Every show and every city that hosts PID is different, of course, but as a native of Newton, Burkett feels a different type of connection with bringing the festival back to the Commonwealth, with no small thanks to their connection with the guys in the BossTones.
While their friendship runs deep with the plaid boys of Boston, the love doesn’t stop there, though, as every band on the bill shares a mutual affinity for each other, both on and off the stage, and that makes for a truly magical outing.
“With every band on the show, we’re all good friends, which is so fun and so unlike metal, rap or pop,” says Burkett. “In other styles of music, there’s competition and rivalry. It’s not that way in punk rock. In punk rock, everyone is just stoked to be there and they’re supportive, and we’re all so lucky to be doing what we’re doing.”
At the end of the day, all Fat Mike and the boys in NOFX have wanted to do is curate a festival experience that was fun, freeing and absurd. Because, at the root of the genre, that’s what punk rock is.
He jokes that the band has pledged to “try a little harder” on stage in lieu of all the extra fixings that have entertained festival-goers in the past, but Burkett and his gang of punk rock compadres aren’t about to stray away from their career-long motto of fun on stage.
If they’re having fun on stage, the crowd is having fun, and with the closeness he feels with the area, even if Burkett doesn’t see it as something of a hometown show, it does have that essence with the excitement leading up to it, and his main hope and proclamation as we close in on the festivities is pretty simple.
“I guarantee that you might have a good time.”
Airport
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“Some hand sanitizers have an ingredient used in homemade bombs,” he told me. The offender is glycerin, which is in countless beauty products. This particular frisk was conducted pre-COVID. I’ve got to assume everyone’s hands light up nowadays. Either TSA has abandoned that concern, or crowds of would-be bombers are filling the airports unchecked.
This trip, I once again held up the line like an elderly woman writing a check at the grocery store. I watched my flip flops and my tablet roll by on the conveyor belt as a former prison matron ran her hands over my entire body. I wore a wireless sport bra, pocketless leggings and a T-shirt. I wore no jewelry and used hand sanitizer provided by Logan. I still set off the detector.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I implore you,” I wisecracked, arms spread wide. Apparently there were no “Seinfeld” fans in the line behind me, or perhaps the fact that it was 5 a.m. left them humorless. That’s a shame.
I’m packing for the return flight from Florida, where I’ve managed to visit nearly-empty beaches and dine outdoors or do the cooking myself. My vaccinated host Wendy and I have hopefully dodged the Delta variant by practicing extreme social distancing and masking everywhere but home. I have no doubt that before I board the flight to Massachusetts, my tan will send the Florida TSA into overdrive, since I will slather my skin with enough glycerin to topple Trump Tower.
Maybe, as one traveler stuck in the line behind me at O’Hare suggested with a snicker, I simply have iron-rich blood. Everybody’s a comedian — until I combust in seat 7-B.
Upside
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aged or low-nutrient soil, conditions more decorative plants cannot withstand. If one particular species is dominant in an area, it’s likely because it’s best adapted to those conditions. These plants can tell you much about what’s going on underneath the soil’s surface, you just have to work with them instead of against them. In short, a “weed” is a wildflower that Monsanto hasn’t figured out how to monopolize. Evening primrose flowers are fairly small, and an uncomplicated yellow color, but they attract butterflies by the dozen. And in the winter, their seeds are a favored snack of goldfinches. In a way, are not these birds a sort of secondary blossom? Is the black-cap of a chickadee not beautiful? Learn to see a plant not just as a scraggly green thing, but as a part of anatural system of exchange. Goldenrod does more than produce huge colors of wonderfulsmelling flowers, bees overwinter in their hollow stems during fall. Their aggressive root buds break up compact soil to quickly colonize damaged roadside embankments. Something eats the nectar, pollen, seeds, and leaves. And eventually, what was living becomes fuel for new growth.
You may have heard the term “invasive species,” referring to insect pests and especially egregious weeds. I am not asking you to be OK with invasive species. In fact, I need your help tearing them out of our city parks. To provide an easy, uncontroversial definition, an invasive is an introduced species whose presence degrades the overall health of an ecosystem. Invasive bittersweet, knotweed and footstabbing water caltrops are all a huge problem in Worcester parks and yards. If you allow an invasive weed to grow, it will be the only thing growing in the area, and nothing else will be able to survive off of it.
A well-managed wilderness garden can be differentiated from an abandoned lot by the presence of unmitigated invasive species. I am not letting shady landlords off the hook for yard maintenance! I am suggesting that there is a new way to maintain a yard, which requires less labor, and results in a more beautiful landscape for the people and animals who live in it. All you have to do is nothing, intentionally.
Not to sound paranoid, but over the past 120 years, there’s been a secret war waged by Big Lawn to sell you various forms of poisons all in a bid to try and replicate the croquet fields in English manors. And now with climate change giving us blistering hot summers and annual droughts, the monetary and environmental cost of these lawns becomes impossible to justify. People are spray-painting dead grass! This is sheer lunacy! We’re wasting drinking water on yards no child will ever play on! Why? Someone with a financial interest in selling you fertilizer told you it looked better? And you think I’m crazy?
No one has ever suffered for letting clover grow in their yard. I encourage us all to embrace the wild beauty of a backyard meadow. Do it for the birds!
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A monarch butterfly on a blooming swamp milkweed.
WORCESTER COUNTY CONSERVATION DISTRICT
