NOFX, They’ve Actually Gotten Worse Live

Don’t be fooled by the title; on their latest live CD (the most recent of five), iconic California pop-punkers NOFX sound better — tighter, faster, smarter — than they have in a while. It’s probably because these guys really do shine live, where they can bounce shit off the audience, be their smartass, snarky selves, rant about politics, and perform tricks like the one here where they crank through eight songs in the span of, well, one for a “normal” rock band.

In a way, NOFX have remained the standard-bearers for a lot of the original spirit of punk rock: the nihilism, the fuck-it-all attitude, the uncompromising, unapologetic politics, the humor, the booze/drugs, and yeah, the over-the-top power of the live punk show. That’s how it all really got started, after all; the Clash, the Sex Pistols, and the Ramones didn’t become icons because they sat in their bedrooms and released a slew of albums to stay-at-home kids, right? Live is where punk really lives.

And while Fat Mike, El Hefe, Melvin, and Smelly repeatedly make fun of themselves for fucking up, hell, I could care less. Occasional flubs aside, They’ve Actually Gotten Worse Live roars like the post-Green Day pop-punk implosion never morphed into emo, all middle fingers in the air, drunk fun, yell-along choruses, and blazing punk guitars. You get the loud, snotty rock, naturally, plus the impromptu song to make fun of a moron audience member for requesting a birthday shout-out for herself, the ragging on the frizzy red-haired guy up front, and the unending intra-band heckling.

Personally, I think the band’s at their best with the more political stuff, but hey, that’s just me, and if you’re not into NOFX’s politics, well, you probably already know you don’t like the band. They take the formerly-acoustic “You’re Wrong,” off the Never Trust a Hippy EP, and amp it up into a fiery, barn-burning indictment of people who blindly believe the guv’mint, treat Fox News media people like prophets, and cling to trickledown economic theory. And while I didn’t care too much for the slower, mellower original, the punked-up version’s pretty badass. The band follows it up with the East Bay-sounding “Franco Un-American,” a fist-pumping anthem of anti-kneejerk “patriotism,” and things don’t really slow down ’til “Eat the Meek,” which is a surprisingly sweetly-sung reggae slow jam about, um, eating poor people to make more room in the world. (Meant sarcastically, I’m assuming, but hey, you never know.)

They throw in songs from pretty much every part of their ridiculously lengthy career, from White Trash, Two Heebs and a Bean (“Stickin In My Eye”) and Punk in Drublic (“Scavenger Type,” “Lori Meyers”) up through more recent stuff like last year’s Wolves in Wolves’ Clothing (“Instant Crassic,” “We March To the Beat of Indifferent Drum”) and 2003’s War on Errorism (“Whoops I OD’d,” which Fat Mike dedicates to a golf buddy who literally OD’ed the morning of the show, on the golf course).

The aforementioned 8-songs-in-6-minutes trick works nicely, by the way, and oddly demonstrates just how tightly NOFX’s whole discography hangs together — they nail together “Murder the Government,” “Monosyllabic Girl,” “I’m Telling Tim,” “Instant Crassic,” “Can’t Get the Stink Out,” “See Her Pee,” “I Wanna Be an Alcoholic,” and “Fuck the Kids”; holy crap, they could all have been put out on the band’s latest album and not on five different discs that span 10-plus years.

Normally, I tend to view live albums as being about as useful as best-of albums; I can count the really, truly vital ones I’ve heard on one hand (think Hüsker Dü’s The Living End). Bands like NOFX, though, I think they honest-to-God need to put out stuff like this, to capture the live energy you just don’t get on the “real” CD. Damn, this makes me want to finally get out and buy all the NOFX discs about which I’ve said, “yeah, I’ll get that one of these days,” all those years.