311 in Columbus: From stranger to fan in one night
It’s easy to get soft as a concert photographer. Shoot the bands you love, tell the same war stories, keep dipping into the well of nostalgia until you’re drunk on your own bias. I’ve done it — hell, I thrive on it!
But sooner or later you need to push yourself into unfamiliar waters and photograph a scene you don’t already worship, sweat with strangers you don’t already call your tribe. That’s what 311’s The Unity Tour was for me. Three bands, two of which I barely knew, one I’d only absorbed through cultural osmosis. No safety net. Time to earn it.
Sitting on Saturn opened and immediately set the tone: three kids from Southern California with too much energy to stay still and a singer whose hair seemed genetically engineered to glow under stage lights. Their sound was a blender — punk, ska, indie — not always neat, but always alive. They pulled the crowd right in, the kind of band that makes you remember what it feels like to be young and stupid and convinced you can save the world with three chords.
Then came Badflower, and I’ll be damned if they didn’t steal the night for me. The pink beanies in the pit should’ve tipped me off — this band has disciples, not just casual fans. They looked younger than I expected, too fresh-faced to be writing songs this sharp, but the performance was a wall of conviction.
Their bassist never stopped moving, their lead guitarist’s mane a dead ringer for Claudio Sanchez in full flight, and the dueling solos hit with the kind of precision impossible to fake. Midway through, the vocalist confessed he’d nearly cancelled the show — some private ailment gnawing at him — but he powered through and left nothing behind. I believed him. I believed all of it. They’ve got the tools and the hunger. When they headline, I’ll be there with both hands on the camera and no distractions.
And then — 311. A band that was huge when I was a teenager but never crossed my radar beyond the hits. I was too busy with thrash metal and adolescent rage to care. But in Columbus, twenty years later, I finally understood what their disciples had been carrying all this time.
They hit the stage with “Beautiful Disaster” and from there it went off like dynamite. Twenty-three songs, spanning decades, delivered with the kind of swagger only a band who has survived and thrived for that long can pull off. The crowd — old fans, new converts, diehards in logo t-shirts and wide-eyed first-timers — roared every lyric back like scripture.
I came in skeptical, cold to the myth of 311, but I left baptized. Not by nostalgia, not by preference — but by sheer force. That’s what this job demands sometimes. Not love at first listen, but respect at first impact.
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