Welcome Home: The Wonder Years tear the roof off The Electric Factory

The Wonder Years | Photo by Cameron Pollack | cameronpollackphotography.com

“Philadelphia, it’s so fucking good to be home.”

The feeling – expressed from the stage by The Wonder Years‘ frontman Dan “Soupy” Campbell – came for me in waves, each more forceful than the last. I was returning to shoot at one of my favorite venues, wearied from a long semester, a considerable lack of sleep, and most recently the wonderful, unpredictable mess of Philadelphia pre-Thanksgiving traffic.

I entered the E-Factory during the middle of You Blew It!’s maddeningly brief set; a band I adore and looked forward to seeing played for all of 25 minutes, and my time with them was cut short due to a sea of cars on Spring Garden, and a sea of people in front of me in the will call line. I caught the end of “Award of the Year Award”, a personal favorite, and was also amazed by “Better To Best”, the song that started the seemingly endless stream of crowdsurfing that followed.

Up next to the plate was Albany jock-punk band State Champs, an act that really should have continued supporting All Time Low, given their almost uncanny similarity; their singers are incapable in the same ways, their stage presences are nearly identical, and their supportive demographics are both comprised of mostly preteens. While the group was certainly high energy (they spurred on a circle pit, as well as a tsunami of crowd surfers), this was, for me, the low point of the night; I didn’t come to the Factory that night to see a band 2010 me might have seen, maybe. They were an abrupt discontinuity, a break in the bill’s mood and subgenre that, at least for me, brought the night to a halt. If I wanted to see a bill like that, I could have gone to the factory more or less any other night.

After a brief set change, the big boys finally came out to play. Motion City Soundtrack entered to thunderous cheering, and I was greeted with a shock as the crowd pushed the barricade forward, much to the chagrin of security. As the two minutes of audio from the latest Star Wars VII trailer boomed over the monitors, the diehards shoved their way to the front, and my 7th grade self was squealing. Motion City Soundtrack was, until I got publicist approval to shoot, one of those bands that I’d never thought I’d see; they are, for me, somewhat mystical, shrouded by idolatry, a band that I’ve adored for what seems like longer than time itself.

 

Staying focused on shooting for the first three songs of their set proved extremely difficult; seeing “L.G. FUAD” performed live was nothing short of a spiritual experience (I very likely irritated at least one fellow photographer by screaming along to every word in the photo pit). What MCS lacked in stage presence (they were the most immobile band on the bill, relatively speaking) they made up for through their live sound, which was in several cases much heavier than their studio recordings. At the end of the set, the security guard monitoring the photographers turned to me and remarked monotonously that “they were on way too long”, and that he’d take a jam band any day of the week. I awkwardly chuckled and replied “yeah,” wishing in my head that they would stay on and just happen to play their entire discography.

The subsequent set change made time slow to a crawl; I had awaited this show impatiently for months, ever since No Closer To Heaven, The Wonder Years’ latest effort, dropped in September. The album had stayed in my personal rotation since its release; the sound was addictive, the production the best I had heard on a punk album for some time, and the lyrics seemed to fit the mould of my life in the same way many people claim that Top 40 lyrics do.

As I sat on the steps of the barricade scrolling through the photos from the previous three sets, the crowd behind me grew restless, screaming along to the roadie’s soundchecking, constantly trying to displace one another in the front row, attempting to get at least one hand on the barricade. The number of people squeezing in, looking for a way to perfectly see their idols in the flesh and maybe, just maybe getting their hands on a setlist that the band had touched, grew rapidly in those slowly ticking minutes. 9:55, the time the band was supposed to come on, came and went, and I got up and looked around for any sign of the set starting. Next thing I knew, the room went black, and red wash lighting erupted from the rear of the stage, pouring over an already deafening crowd.

As the guitar intro of “Brothers &” started, a wave of excitement came over the audience, resulting in a huge push forward. The barricade behind me gave out, and I was knocked over, hitting my head on the lip of the stage. The security guards immediately rushed the photographers out of the pit as hundreds of people screamed “we’re no saviors if we can’t save our brothers” in an angry unison. As I dizzily collected myself at the side of the stage, tending to my camera gear before my own head, Dan “Soupy” Campbell was already giving the crowd everything he had, standing on the monitors and urging the crowd on, making them scream every single word of “Cardinals.”

 

At that point, with my head throbbing and my senses overloaded, (cheesy as that sounds) I had never been prouder to call Philadelphia my home; seeing that great a magnitude of passion shared actively between a band and its fans doesn’t happen just anywhere. This band and its fans were subject to one another in ways that I had never seen in any city I had lived in prior. I shot some more from the side of the stage, and then shoved through the crowd and set up on the flight of stairs near the back of the room. I spent the rest of the set in something of a daze, watching in awe as the band rocked their way through “Hoodie Weather”, and screaming along myself to “I Don’t Like Who I Was Then”, and “I Just Want To Sell Out My Funeral”, two of my personal favorites. I left the Factory that night visibly shaken, with a bruised head and a moderate limp, but proud and energized in a way that I’m simply not after most shows.

After a day spent eating with my family and assuring that I wasn’t concussed, I attempted to look back on this concert with 20/20 hindsight. There was a poetry in this show; a jaded, wearied, lovelorn college student coming back to shoot a show where a hyperactive, emotion-filled bearded man and five of his friends were singing about something perfectly similar. Throughout The Wonder Years’ set, especially the songs off “No Closer To Heaven”, there is ample talk of the past, of lost love, of juxtaposition of what we as people want versus what is. The show gave me, and I think the other people in the crowd as well, an opportunity to take stock. Throughout that set, in all of the screaming choruses, we all implicitly understood what everyone else had lost. In that hour and some, we all saved each other, and spared ourselves from grief, if only for a while.