SOCIAL DISTORTION - An Almost Acoustic Christmas. (Bootleg)

This may be the only concession to the coming festive time of Consumer-mass you’re gonna get from me and this is stretching it a bit; but I give you SOCIAL DISTORTION’S Almost Acoustic Christmas, a widely circulated bootleg which is neither acoustic or particularly ’Christmassy’ if you’re looking for some festive rock’n’roll yer better off checking out The Yobs Christmas albums. But if yer after a set of self confessional punk’n’roll then this might just be the prescription. Recorded on Dec 12th 2004 at the annual KROQ Almost Acoustic Christmas in California. The set the band played veers more to the Rock than the Punk, but Mommy’s Little Monster still sounds mighty fine, as does Bad Luck and their covers of Johnny Cash’s Ring Of Fire and the Stones’s Under My Thumb, in fact they all do. Anyway check it out here for yourselves and make up yer own mind. Quick story before I go. Back in 1992 I promoted a gig with Social Distortion in Stevenage. It was one of four they did in Britain to promote their Somewhere Between Heaven and Hell album, a great gig only marred by a swastika being carved on my girlfriends car by a disgruntled skinhead, but that’s a whole other story. Anyway spoke to the band who were a nice bunch of people, and blagged a guest list place and backstage pass from their booking agent for the gig at The Underworld in Camden . Two great gigs in the space of a few days. At the London gig singer Mike Ness was reminiscing about the short tour to the audience and mentioned that they played Stevenage and how it was “a strange concrete muthafucking place” Thanks to the backstage pass I got a chance to speak to Mike in the dressing room afterwards. I mentioned what he‘d said about my hometown and he was all apologetic for the remark, and then surprised when I shook his hand and said “you aint fucking wrong there mate.”