NOFX Packs the King Cat Tonight

If the mountains of snow and the gale-force winds last week made you forget that NOFX is in town tonight, here’s hoping you already scored your tickets. The band’s show at the King Cat Theater sold out.

Not that that’s much of a surprise. NOFX have spent almost thirty years building up a sizeable grass-roots following. And while they’re way too willfully goofy and unpretentious to cop to it, the Cali punk quartet’s stuck around long enough to become elder statesmen to acts like Rancid and Green Day (granted, NOFX are elder statesmen whose repertoire includes a 32-second song called “I Gotta Pee,” but still…). The band’s core membership–bassist/screamer Fat Mike, drummer Eric “Smelly” Sandin, and guitarist Eric Melvin–began playing together way back in 1985, and they’ve spent the ensuing years honing their variety of catchy, sometimes silly, and often politically-incorrect punk to a tight (but always fun) sheen.

Like a lot of elder statesmen, NOFX didn’t quite hit the cash-cow heights of some of the bands they influenced. Fat Mike and company defiantly stayed on indie labels and avoided the music industry dog-and-pony show despite a lot of major-label interest back in the mid-1990’s. Their penchant for integrating snickers with slamdancing seemed like a combination that’d break ‘em big, but their knack for not keeping their mouths shut probably didn’t endear them to the suits running the corporate megaliths. A few years back they stirred things up on Conan O’Brien’s NBC talk show with some explicit Bush-bashing, and they’ve managed to deliver some persuasive protest punk in between the songs about coke-addled clowns and Tegan and Sara.

They’ve reportedly got a new full-length due out later this year, so expect some new tunes intermingled with live standards like “You Drink, You Drive, You Spill” and “Don’t Call Me White.” Rest assured, it’ll all delivered with snot-nosed feistiness that should make this evening’s King Cat crowd a bunch of justifiably happy campers.