Blood, Snow, and Bif Naked
The defining event of my sophomore year
The best concert in the history of human music happened when I was fifteen years old.
It was a late September heat wave. In a fit of insanity, the adults agreed to transform the Triple A baseball field into a ski hill.
Dozens of snow machines were commissioned to spit white powder across a five-storey ramp. As the world’s snowboarding aristocracy plummeted into a hastily erected halfpipe, Joydrop, Econoline Crush, and Bif Naked whisked a crowd of youngs and dumbs into an unsupervised frenzy.
They called it Snow Jam.
Everyone was there; every older boy bad influence; every teenage girl I had ever indulged in a daydream. The girls left their houses in jeans and t-shirts, but beyond their cul-de-sacs they donned knitted hats and stripped into bikinis.
They met the bad boys in the woods beside the bus station. The boys brought the pot, the girls shared their stolen bottles of Smirnoff. They drank themselves into an innocent stupor, the way only first-timers can, and then they stumbled through the gates and into mosh pits. In less than an hour, these yobs churned the Triple A outfield into mud, their near-naked bodies bashing like bumper cars through three hours of feral skate punk.
