This Weekend's Top Stop: Alleged Bricks

Map It:  Navy Yard 

NATION, a reliable club in Near Southeast, is slated to close, industry insiders insist. The baseball stadium's coming in and many clubs are being forced out. Promoters promise that the club's last local show will be Saturday. T.J. Mahoney, singer/guitarist for the band at the top of the bill, Alleged Bricks, spoke with Express' Tim Follos last night.
(More of this weekend's Top Stops can be found here.)

EXPRESS: Is Nation an important venue to you?
MAHONEY: It is. I've been going to shows there since it was the Capital Ballroom, back in the '90s. That's actually where I met (Alleged Bricks singer/guitarist) Jim Vengeance, we met at a Rancid show at the Capital Ballroom. I remember several shows over the years where I met good friends whom I'm still in contact with or I saw bands that changed my life, my musical views or influenced me one way or another, so even though it definitely doesn't cater to rock anymore, the fact that they still do something on occasion means a lot to me. I'll be sad to see it go.

EXPRESS:What do the other bands playing Saturday sound like?
MAHONEY: We've got VPR, who are very thrashy-style, '80s-style hardcore.

EXPRESS: They sound like street-punk to me.
MAHONEY: You know, they definitely have a street-punk fanbase. They refer to themselves as hardcore and I see just a very '80s hardcore sound for them, where punk and hardcore were still closer together. So I would still consider them a hardcore punk rock band. Porch Mob is playin'. They're a lot like Fugazi -- just experimental, punk rock-influenced, but very musically talented, band on the indie side. Supreme Commander, they play melodic, I'd say early '90s-style hardcore. Very good vocals, very melodic vocals. A lot of thought put into their lyrics. More positive lyrics than negative.

EXPRESS: No screaming, really.
MAHONEY: No, with that band, no screaming at all.
Pessimist Parade. They are a very rockabilly, more on the rockabilly side of punk rock. Johnny Thunders influenced. A lot of long solos, pompadours, that whole thing.

EXPRESS: They're the youngest band on the bill and they play the oldest style of music.
MAHONEY: Yeah. They're great guys. I've known J.J. and Rio for years and we've certainly played with Pessimist Parade more than a few times. And I think the last band's Official. They're just kind of frat-rock, fast-paced alternative rock.

EXPRESS: Did you guys play Oi! Fest?
MAHONEY: Yeah, we actually just played the East Coast Oi! Festival in Allentown, Pa. We're playing the Port City Hooligan Festival in mid-July down in Wilmington, N.C. -- that'll be our second time playing that one. In the past we've played Viva La Punk, which is more of an all-around punk-rock festival at CBGS in 2003 and we're playing the Mid-West Oi! Fest in June as well.

EXPRESS: What was the Oi! Fest in Allentown like?
MAHONEY: It was interesting. With every town you travel to, particularly in an Oi! band, you've gotta kind of adapt yourself to the different social stigmas that they may have. Every scene is different and what they'll tolerate and how tightly-knit the individuals are. And with oi! in particular, it gets affiliated with the skinhead movement, which is just a generally horribly misunderstood subculture of punk rock and the mod movement.

So you have those who understand it and understand that it was born from Jamaican immigrants to England and ska and reggae and has nothing to do with racism.

And then you have those who choose to misinterpret it or take what they see in Hollywood movies and apply that to themselves and those around them resulting in ignorant racism and sometimes you run into that out of town and you might not have as much control over the situation or who you're in contact with as you would in town. So you end up just having to separate yourself from it.

EXPRESS: What is oi!?
MAHONEY: Oi! would be a working-class style of music that originated with punk rock in England, with kids who worked at the factories, really just spent their time between work and family, deciding that they wanted a type of music, a sub-genre of rock 'n' roll for themselves, without necessarily the fashion or political statement of punk rock.

EXPRESS: Is there supposed to be an exclamation point at the end of "oi!" ... ?
MAHONEY: Generally, yeah (laughs) and don't ask me about that, I guess it's just the tradition of it being yelled -- being "hey!" in Cockney slang and nothing more than that.

EXPRESS: Can you give me Alleged Bricks' bio?
MAHONEY: Sure, the basic rundown would be that we started in 2000 and the band was founding by myself and Jim Vengeance, our other guitarist/vocalist. We played our first show in 2001, at the Kaffa House, and this is our original lineup.
Let's see, we went through a brief period where Kent [Stax], our drummer, was still playing with Spitfires United and Iron Cross, where we had some other drummers. He ended up coming back to the band, though.

Release-wise, our first release was a demo in 2002. We have two 7-inch records on Torque Records. One was a split with Spitfires United and one was a split with VPR. We've been on several compilations at this point, kinda from all over the East Coast, nothing incredibly noteworthy. And along with that we've played up and down the East Coast, from Boston all the way down to Atlanta and back and out to the Midwest a little bit.

EXPRESS:Would influences fall into the bio as well?
MAHONEY:Yeah, definitely. Our main influences were East Coast hardcore, particularly D.C. and New York hardcore from the '80s and American and British Oi!, just the melodies of it. Bands like the Bruisers and the Business in particular. And on the hardcore side, bands like the Bad Brains and Sheer Terror.

The album of course is not officially out yet. It doesn't officially hit stores and everything until about July, but it's on Street Anthem records, we signed with them about two years ago and that's our first full-length. The title of that is "Place Your Blame."

EXPRESS: How have you seen the scene change in D.C.?
MAHONEY: Well, surprisingly a lot of the things are still the same. The problems seem to stay the same. Ridiculous violence, social cliques, differences with the locals. The same things just tend to happen over and over again on the negative side.

On the positive side, I would say that at this point there's a sense of unity that wasn't there a few years ago and it kind of reminds me of how things were when I first got into punk rock in the '90s, when the Suspects kind of uniting everyone within the D.C. and Baltimore areas to come out to shows and enjoy themselves and get along.

I'm seeing a lot more of that now and I'm seeing a lot of new faces and younger faces and that's really the life-blood of the scene to begin with.

EXPRESS: What are your politics?
MAHONEY: As a band, we have a firm stance not to be involved with politics. I think people look at bands from the District of Columbia thinking this is the center of politics and expect some sort of political message, extreme in one way, to the right or to the left, and in reality that's not what our band is about, or what any of our members are about.

We're just happy to be playing music and we write about things that mean something to us: Working for a living, the trials of being in a band and I'll admit some of our earlier songs deal with the subject with violence on a reactionary level.

Sometimes it seems like you can't go about your business without somebody trying to disrupt your routine and in my opinion it's always easier to get into a fight than it is to stay out of one. But at the same time, when you live in a city and deal with tough neighborhoods or bad people every once in awhile, physical altercation might occur and you gotta be ready to deal with it if that's the last straw with somebody else and you need to take care of yourself or defend your friends or your family.

EXPRESS: OK. How many tattoos do you have?
MAHONEY: Let's see; I probably have somewhere around three dozen.
Nation, 1015 Half St. SE; 3 p.m., Sat., $8. (Navy Yard)