“Do you ever worry, when you tell someone you’re in a punk band, that they assume it’s like this?” My show-going companion posed this question to me during the third of four support acts for pop-punk legends The Queers at Backstage Bar & Billiards in Las Vegas last Friday night. I told him no, but that’s only because I’d only ever self-describe as “punk rock” for two different types of people: those who clearly understand which type of punk I meant, and those I hoped to scare off from asking any more questions. I would describe my relationship with the punk on display at this gig, nestled on the edge of the painfully-American Fremont Street Experience in Old Las Vegas, as similar to that of a tragic uncle. I feel bound by blood to this stuff, connected for life, but also deeply embarrassed by its stubborn lack of development (or even creativity), content to cycle through the same boob and fart jokes well into old age. Let’s head on in for the first band of the evening: Stagnetti’s Cock. Surprise! You’re allowed to smoke in here. It’s Vegas.

The first of four local openers, Stagnetti’s Cock was easily the worst by far. A peer-review of any dozen punks would surely conclude that this trio sucks hard, even if the band themselves were a part of the voting panel. Theirs was a cheap and unfriendly version of bad-joke punk, with their inexplicable on-stage existence the apparent punchline of the joke. The trio relied on language crude enough to guarantee an eighth grade detention and the singer/guitarist’s yacht captain hat to carry them through. Their sole strength is as a context-free sticker in the bathroom of a dive bar – a single quiet chuckle at best – and I witnessed one later that weekend, which would have been more than a sufficient understanding of their existence. As musicians, they were terrible, but that’s hardly a dealbreaker for me, as many of my favorite bands actively avoid virtuosity; it was their total lack of inspiration or follow-through that defined their sheer pointlessness as live entertainment. The Al Bundy-esque misogyny, just as often delivered by their female bassist as their male guitarist, had me feeling like I was trapped, Hellraiser puzzle-box style, inside a pair of novelty fuzzy dice. A sixteen-dollar Jack and Coke during their set had the opposite of its intended effect, sobering me up as I double-checked with security that re-entry was not allowed.

Up next were Gob Patrol, not to be confused with Fat Wreck Chords recording artists Goober Patrol. (The presence of Fat loomed large over this show, not only from the close proximity of The Punk Rock Museum and the sounds of the bands on stage but from the various t-shirts, pins and hats spotted in the crowd. 88 Fingers Louie, you remain alive and well in the hearts of your fans.) This group appeared to be the (comparatively) youngest and punkest on the show, brandishing half-and-half dye jobs, fishnets, spikes, smelly combat boots and a cabbie hat worn the way Tim Armstrong did in his Op Ivy days – all in all, the kind of punks Robocop is quick to exterminate. Gob Patrol were clear fan-favorites, rousing up a sputtering circle-pit for most of their set to songs in the key of spiky ’90s pop-punk-adjacent punk. I was picking up notes of Defiance, The Casualties, Moral Crux and even a little Filth, with shout-along choruses such as “I’m fucked up / I don’t give a fuck”, which I typed in my iPhone notes to remember later. The group hyped up their new CD at the merch desk, talked about maybe playing shows in Arizona and Texas someday, and laughed about how they have yet to “make it” as a band, all while two of their scantily-clad goth-cheerleader friends dutifully gyrated on stage. My favorite part was the singer’s constant drinking / regurgitating / spitting his Truly hard seltzer, like Darby Crash had he lived long enough to suffer through the corporate-ambivalent Liquid Death Era of punk. Not even God’s Hate could make those cans look anything less than dainty on stage!

Unlike the updated beverage choices, I was impressed by the fact that this generally older, mostly male, highly white crowd stuck with good old-fashioned cigarettes for their smoke of choice. I didn’t see a single vape, but every fifth guy clutched a Marlboro or a Newport between his crusty fingers, ensuring that I couldn’t wear my shirt again on this little trip without reeking of Backstage Bar & Billiards. It was through this grody haze that Battering Ham took the stage. I guess it’s a pun of sorts, but why? Why would a ham be used for battering? It’s likely I will never know, but this trio delivered a dad-rock form of EpiFat melodic punk, far tighter and better-rehearsed than the preceding acts. They leaned hard into NOFX’s antiquatedly-edgy brand of sarcasm, as well as NOFX’s speed-metal pop-punk riffing, blazing through a set that included a song about George Takei and a mash-up cover of Journey and .38 Special (imagine a Girl Talk remix of The Ataris’s perennial “Boys Of Summer”, if you will), and ended on “Hot For Preacher”, a Van Halen parody about the hilarious topic of child abuse at the hands of Catholic priests. Not to be outdone by Gob Patrol’s on-stage dancers and Stagnetti’s Cock’s horniness, Battering Ham brought out a fairly sophisticated Muppet-style female robot costume for their song “Sex Working Robot”. Assuming you’d like to take some Battering Ham home with you, I have some bad news – their sole Discogs entry is a track on the 2018 CD-r compilation Give Us A Future! entitled “Anarchopharm”. They confirmed that a new CD EP, however, is in the works.

Still with me? One thing that stuck out through all of these bands was how little it seemed to matter to the crowd what was actually happening on stage. The crowd was more arthritic than rambunctious, and seemed just as semi-satisfied by the wasted time of Stagnetti’s Cock as the rowdy pogo-punk of Gob Patrol. It appears they mostly just wanted to stand around in a room, holding a beer and smoking a cigarette indoors in proximity to “punk”, with the actual quality of the performers taking a secondary role. It’s hard not to feel like in 2025, civilization is kind of already over and we’re all just milling around until a metaphorical security crew chases us out of the venue (Earth) entirely, but this pungent sense of defeat permeated Backstage Bar & Billiards, like a prehistoric era where no one ever bothered to invent fire or the wheel and homo sapiens didn’t last long enough to leave a mark in the fossil record.

I was more than ready for The Queers, but show promoters “Big Daddy Carlos & Ava” decided a fourth opener was necessary. That’s where At Odds came in (pictured above), easily the least embarrassing group of the evening (for whatever that’s worth – Sockeye might be the most embarrassing punk band of all time and I’d sell a kidney to see them perform). This trio, as local as the other three, offered no bad jokes, robots or dancers. Rather, they blazed through the serious side of Fat Wreck Chords, something akin to the earnestness of Strung Out, Rise Against and Strike Anywhere. They announced that they loved Bad Religion right before covering a Bad Religion song, and later covered Face To Face’s biggest hit, “Disconnected”, to unanimous approval from the still-hanging-in-there crowd. They thanked their audience for being “great” multiple times – At Odds were the good-guy heroes of the night – and they seemed to mean it, too, thrilled to be playing on a real stage with a real touring band, and with each other. Let the other guys clown around.

And speaking of clowns, it was finally time for The Queers to take the stage. While I hold the music of The Queers near and dear to my heart, from the unparalleled idiot-genius of their first two self-released seven-inch EPs (does anyone have $8,000 I can borrow?) through their Beach Boys-inflected mid-’90s output, I am no fool – I know that bandleader Joe Queer is haplessly misguided as a person at best, and dismally bigoted at worst. I have run out of benefits of the doubt to give to what a friend called “all them idiot goth/punk ‘legends'”, and while I don’t think Joe Queer intentionally inflicts harm on the marginalized and oppressed, I sure as hell wouldn’t want him running for city council. I pondered his strained, sad legacy as I watched a young guy with an incredible ass-length ponytail line-check The Queers’ gear alongside a beefy, straight-faced drum-tech. Luckily for my lower back, I didn’t have to stand around waiting much longer, as Joe Queer appeared on stage and the two techs assumed the positions of bassist and drummer – they were his bandmates! I should’ve known that there would be no Tulu, no Hugh, no B-Face, but rather a couple of random stand-ins ready and willing to tolerate their lower castes so that they might add “The Queers” to their musical resumes. Cant blame them! And lucky for me, these two youngsters nailed it, running through the exact same songs I would’ve wanted to hear from a live Queers set in 1996, delivered in a rapid-fire medley style seamlessly chaining the songs together, the rhythm section’s energy propping up yet another frail-looking, disappointing American named Joe. I was afraid they might lean on more recent material (ie. from this current millennium), but Joe and Co. gave us the good stuff, “I Spent The Rent” into “I Hate Everything” into “You’re Tripping” with the benefit of a youthful rhythm section looking to prove itself worthy of the band’s heritage. I cannot confirm that they didn’t eventually slip into more modern material, however – I left after fifteen minutes or so, as I had plans to meet with the rest of my crew who had gone to see Pitbull instead (which, by all accounts, was a far more soul-sucking affair). Not since the George W. Bush administration had I attended a punk show with an estimated zero number of queer people in the crowd, for a band still calling themselves The Queers no less.