Social Distortion and Descendents at The Met Philadelphia

The marquee on North Broad was already lit when we got to the corner, and the blade sign was throwing that old theater glow down onto the sidewalk, where a Troegs tent had gone up and people were standing around in the warm September air with nowhere in particular to be yet. Three bands were on the bill for Tuesday the eighth: The Chats first, then Descendents, then Social Distortion. Between them they carry close to fifty years of punk rock, and all of it was going to happen inside a room that was built in 1908 for grand opera. I have walked past this building for most of my life. I have been inside it a few times since it came back. It still gets me, and it got me again standing out front with Geoff and Malcolm, looking up at a facade that spent a long stretch of the last century looking like it was not going to make it.

The Bill Ran Youngest to Oldest

A support slot is usually just a warm up. This one was a timeline. The Chats formed in 2016, Descendents in 1977, Social Distortion in 1978, and the running order put the youngest band on first and the oldest one last, so the whole night moved backward through the thing it was celebrating without anyone announcing it that way. Social Distortion announced the run in February as a summer and fall tour of North America, and the published routing put Descendents and The Chats on nearly every date, Philadelphia included. Ours was at The Met, 858 North Broad Street.

What I kept watching from the floor was how three different bands, with three different amounts of road behind them, each decided to handle the same crowd. One came out swinging because it had to. One came out precise because it has had forty years to work out exactly how precise it wants to be. One came out patient, because the room was already his the moment the lights went down. You do not get that comparison on a single band night. You only get it when a bill is stacked like this one was.

I went with Geoff and Malcolm, which is the right way to see a show like this. Both of them stood through the opener instead of turning up in time for the headliner, and that turns out to matter, because the opener is where a night like this actually starts.

The Chats Came the Farthest

The Chats are from the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, which is a long way from North Broad Street by any measure you want to use. They formed in 2016. Eamon Sandwith plays bass and sings, Matt Boggis is on drums, Josh Hardy is on guitar, and the song that got them out of Australia is “Smoko”, released in August 2017, about two minutes of a tradesman refusing to be interrupted on his break.

That video went past twenty million views on its own momentum and pulled in Dave Grohl, Josh Homme and Iggy Pop as fans, which is not the usual career path for three teenagers from a coastal town. Their first album, High Risk Behaviour, reached number five on the Australian chart in 2020, and their second won the ARIA Award for Best Hard Rock or Heavy Metal Album. They call what they play shed rock. Watching them open a 1908 opera house on a Tuesday, it made complete sense: the joke is in the lyrics, never in the playing, and they came out working.

Descendents Have Been Doing This Since 1977

Descendents started in Manhattan Beach, California, in 1977, with Frank Navetta on guitar, Tony Lombardo on bass and Bill Stevenson on drums. Milo Aukerman joined as the singer in 1979, and their first album, Milo Goes to College, arrived in 1982 named for exactly what the title says. He was leaving to study biology at the University of California, San Diego.

That is not a gimmick, it is the shape of the whole band. Aukerman went on to a doctorate in biochemistry and spent years working as a research scientist, coming back to the band between stretches of laboratory work, until 2016 when he finally gave the science career up and did this full time. The lineup has been Aukerman, Stevenson, Stephen Egerton and Karl Alvarez since 1986, which is a longer marriage than most bands manage and most of the reason they still sound like one organism onstage.

They are also the reason a lot of what came after sounds the way it does. Putting real melody on top of hardcore tempos was genuinely unusual in 1982, and Tom DeLonge of Blink-182 has credited this band with shaping how he sings and plays guitar. Standing there listening, I was thinking about how much of the music my kids’ generation takes for granted traces back through four guys who wrote songs about coffee and girls and being left out.

Social Distortion formed in Fullerton, California, in 1978, and Mike Ness is the only constant member across the entire run of it. That is nearly five decades of one person holding a band together, and you can hear the accumulation. After the group reassembled in the middle of the 1980s it pulled country, blues and early rock and roll into the punk, and that blend is what separated them from almost everyone they came up with. Mommy’s Little Monster in 1983, Prison Bound in 1988, then the self titled record in 1990 that went gold and put them on the radio.

The reason they were on North Broad at all this year is new work. Born to Kill came out on Epitaph on the eighth of May, their first album in fifteen years, and the tour carries its name. A band with that much history could coast on the old catalogue forever and nobody would complain. They made a record instead, then took it around the country in rooms like this one.

The Room Was Built for Carmen in 1908

Now the building, because the building is half of why the night landed the way it did. The Met opened on the seventeenth of November 1908 as the Philadelphia Opera House, built by the impresario Oscar Hammerstein I and designed by the theater architect William H. McElfatrick in a neoclassical style, out of ivory white pressed brick, terra cotta and marble. Opening night was Bizet’s Carmen, with Maria Labia in the title role and Cleofonte Campanini conducting, in front of a house seating more than four thousand people. Visit Philadelphia still describes it as the largest theater of its kind in the world when it opened.

Hammerstein’s Philadelphia opera venture did not last. Hidden City Philadelphia laid out what came after: the Metropolitan Opera Company bought out his interests by 1909, and across the following decades the building did nearly everything a building can do. The Philadelphia Orchestra under Leopold Stokowski used the stage around 1929 to 1932 for works that needed a bigger house, including, by Hidden City’s account, the American premiere of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck. Later it was a movie house, a ballroom, a basketball court, a mechanics school after a fire, and from 1954 a church. It was individually listed on the National Register of Historic Places in February 1972, which is the paperwork version of a city admitting out loud that it had something worth keeping.

What It Took to Get the Building Back

Admitting it and acting on it are different jobs. By the early 2000s the city had declared the building unfit for occupancy and demolition was a live possibility, and the congregation that owned it raised the money to stop that from happening. What turned it around after that was a partnership. The developer Eric Blumenfeld, who had already spent years working on the Divine Lorraine and the rest of the corridor further down the same street, worked with the church and with Live Nation, and the restoration came to $56 million. Federal historic rehabilitation tax credits were part of the arithmetic, and the National Park Service certified the finished work in August 2019. The doors opened again on the third of December 2018 with Bob Dylan on the stage, and the room holds roughly 3,500 people now.

When it reopened, Inga Saffron wrote about what the return of the opera house meant for North Broad Street, and that framing has stayed with me. Nobody restores a 1908 opera house because a punk tour is going to need somewhere to play in 2026. You restore it because a street needs a reason for people to walk down it after dark, and because a room that big, sitting empty, is an argument that the neighborhood around it does not matter. Once it is open, the room decides what it is for, and on Tuesday night it decided it was for this.

Old Philadelphia meeting new Philadelphia, right there on the same block. A house built for Bizet holding a crowd for three punk bands. Plaster ornament restored to its 1908 detail with a Troegs tent parked out on the sidewalk. I stood in the middle of it with two friends and could not stop thinking that this is the argument I keep making about culture in this city, made better by an actual night than I have ever made it in a meeting. Venues are infrastructure. They carry a street the way a bridge carries traffic, and when we treat them that way, a hundred and eighteen year old building gets to have a second life loud enough to be heard from Broad and Poplar. Thanks to Geoff and Malcolm for the company, and to whoever decided this room deserved to open again.

Sources and references

About the Author

Harry Hayman is a Philadelphia-based entrepreneur, music producer, and cultural advocate. Through his work with the Feed Philly Coalition, he explores and documents the creative, culinary, and civic life of a city he believes is one of the most inspired places in America.