The Dillinger Four Time Machine
My first memory of seeing Dillinger Four was either at the Foxfire Coffee Lounge in the Warehouse District of downtown Minneapolis or at the Whole Music Club on the University of Minnesota’s West Bank campus. Both shows would have been in 1997 or 1998, during my third year of high school. It was a time when three-quarters of my bi-weekly supermarket carry-out paychecks went to purchasing CDs at Extreme Noise, Treehouse, Cheapo, Best Buy, Circuit City, and/or Mutant Pop mail-order. The remaining quarter went toward putting enough gas in my car to get to those record stores and venues. And Marlboro Lights. To be frank, music was the only thing I truly cared about. It was a way of life, and everything felt fresh and exciting, as a now-legendary scene of Midwest emo and melodic punk unfolded before our very eyes. In hindsight, it seems impossible to have kept up with all the music and all the shows back then, but then again, I was a 17-year-old high school student—and admittedly not quite the autodidact I eventually grew into.
What I recall most fondly about that time period was finally etching my outline in the world, and with that came one of my most cherished identities: a show-going, record-collecting, punk rock T-shirt–wearing musichead. I could walk into the Foxfire Coffee Lounge, order a Jones Soda, head to the back room where the stage was, and just exist in this fantasy world of punk and roll while enjoying a puff with my comrades—truly a place apart from the MTV generation and recycled radio programming that was important in its own right but often difficult to escape.
Seeing Hot Rod Circuit at Foxfire blew the hat right off my head, and I rushed to their merch table to dish out ten dollars for a copy of If I Knew What I Knew Then. Jimmy Eat World, Pedro the Lion, and Alkaline Trio were also highlights from Foxfire-era Minneapolis, and the list goes on. But there was one show in particular at Foxfire that has been tattooed on my heart and mind: Dillinger Four and Lifter Puller. While I don’t recall much about Lifter Puller beyond the sense that they were a band to keep your pulse on, I remember vividly D4 putting on a show for the ages—one that brought the hardcore kids, the pop-punk kids, the emo kids, the metal kids, the hip-hop kids—everyone—together. We all sang along. Together. Dillinger Four haven’t left my rotation since. Their melodic punk-and-roll goodness has followed me to Edmonton, Japan, Honolulu, back to the Twin Cities, and back to Japan again, always bringing me back to that feeling of freedom in the late 1990s.
When I learned D4 was coming to play in Osaka this spring, I quickly secured my ticket (yes, a physical ticket!) and let the countdown begin. As time tends to pass more quickly with each year that melts away, the show snuck up on me, and suddenly it was D4 day—time for my maiden voyage to Sakai City in the south of Osaka for a midlife punk rock adventure. Admittedly, I was more excited for this than most recent shows. I couldn’t believe the band that helped shape so much of my listening in late high school was actually performing just an hour down the road.
Needless to say, Dillinger Four did not disappoint, and the idea that they might have was the furthest thing from my mind. They brought it all and left nothing on the table. An absolute epic performance—as good as, if not better than, the first time I saw them in the late ’90s. It’s not often you get to rediscover your 17-year-old identity, but when you do, its best to embrace it with an open heart and simply be grateful for the experience.
Montage of D4 at Livebar FANDANGO:
You can order Dillinger Four’s latest release, This Shit Is Geniuser, at Imakinn Records (Japan) and Anxious and Angry.
