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Punk Rock Bowling has become a Memorial Day tradition in downtown Las Vegas

Picking Punk Rock Bowling’s lineup each year is a lot like putting together the perfect comp, says festival co-founder Mark Stern, who still handles all of the booking himself.

“Our first compilation that we did, we hand-picked it,” says Stern, who formed BYO Records with his brother (and Youth Brigade bandmate) Shawn in the early ’80s. “It took hours putting the sequence together, so that everything flowed, from this ending to that, and the key, and the bands, and just how the whole thing would work. That was really important. You wanted it to flow and not just like, ‘Oh, we have all these bands and we have to throw it all on here.’

“So I kind of do the same with the shows,” he says. “I want it to be cohesive, you know. I don’t want it to be all over the place. You want to see how it’s going to flow, and we don’t want it to be all the same type of music. You know, I like to throw different things out. I mean, we brought the English Beat out and put them on with NOFX. Everybody thought that would be weird, and I’m like, ‘I think that would be so great,’ and it worked great.”

Actually, the same could be said for the entire Punk Rock Bowling extravaganza, which the Stern brothers first organized almost two decades ago. The event started as an informal gathering among friends, kindred bands and labels from the Southern California punk scene bowling against each other for fun. “It was pretty much a tight knit scene,” Stern says. “All the labels worked together, and all the bands did, too. So it was just kind of a get-together with everybody, like a little convention.”

When the SoCal crew caught wind that their Fat Wreck Chords counterparts were doing something similar in San Francisco, they proposed moving the party to Las Vegas, where both camps could have a bowl-off. Punk Rock Bowling’s first year in Las Vegas featured more than two dozen teams at the Gold Coast in 1998. Me First and the Gimme Gimmes played at the Double Down for the awards party. “And then everybody found out about it,” Stern recalls, “and it just blew up.”

The festivities moved around the valley every year for the next decade or so with stints at Castaways, Sam’s Town and Sunset Station before finally moving downtown. Each move was predicated on practicality. When Castaways closed, for instance, the tournament moved to Sam’s Town, a locale that everybody loved (and still do — the resort continues to be a base for the bowling tournament, which takes place at three different locations and draws 1,000 bowlers on 200 teams) until the distance from downtown dictated another move.

By that time, music was becoming more of a focal point, and most of the shows were happening downtown. Shuttling attendees back and forth proved to be a futile endeavor, so the Stern brothers set up shop at the Sunset Station. That didn’t exactly turn out to be an ideal location either, so in 2011, Punk Rock Bowling made the move downtown, and that’s when the event, by then a Memorial Day tradition that transferred from Presidents Day when the weather was more favorable, bloomed into a full-blown festival. When the fest first came to Fremont Street (well, the parking lot behind Fremont Country Club, to be more precise) and the punks planted themselves on bar stools and proceeded to get plastered, the barkeeps weren’t exactly prepared, Stern says.

“The first year we moved down there, we all stayed at Binion’s,” he recalls. “They actually drank Binion’s bar dry. They ran out of booze. They had, like, one old bartender who was freaking out. They didn’t have enough staff. We try to tell people … We had similar things happen at the Gold Coast, where we would tell them, ‘Hey, people drink. You’ve got to stock up, have a lot of staff.’ You know how it is. ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah. Don’t tell me how to do my job. I’ve been doing this for 40 years.’

“We went through a lot of trials and tribulations,” Stern adds. “At first, of course, people don’t really think it’s much. You know, they kind of dismiss it, the amount of people and the amount of business that they’ll do. And even when we do it, they still don’t really embrace it. Took a while, you know. It was hard to convince, you know.”

Wasn’t hard to convince fans to find their way to Las Vegas. Since setting up shop along Stewart Avenue, where the festival has been held for the past couple of years, Punk Rock Bowling routinely draws 15,000 to 20,000 fans, and that’s about as big as the organizers want to see it get, according to Stern, who says that he’s also not interested in having more than one stage at the festival proper. He’d rather continue bringing bands in for colossal club shows than having a bunch of acts appear on a bunch of different stages at the same time.

“We try to take a different mentality with the festival,” Stern says. “I go to a lot of festivals, and I see how things are run. So first off, I’m not that crazy about multiple stages, because at the end of the day, you’re only going to be able to see so many bands. So why not make a really good bill on one stage? We also don’t really want to be any bigger than it is. We want to keep it to point where it sounds good, everybody can see, prices are fair.

“We want it to be an intimate festival,” he goes on. “We want it to just sell out quickly, and if you want to go, buy your ticket early when we announce. And if you’re lucky enough to get one, then you go, and if not, well, you try next year. And it’s the same with the club shows. I mean, we put these great lineups together and you can go see it in one place. You’re going to be the lucky one that gets to see it.”

This year for the first time, fans in Denver and Asbury Park, New Jersey, will be able to claim that distinction, as Punk Rock Bowling has expanded to those cities. As for why those places were picked: The brothers — who have added more folks to help with the heavy lifting, including a full-time designer, who took over artwork duties from Mark — wanted to give punks on the East Coast a chance to get in on the action without having to empty out their pockets. The Mile High City, meanwhile, just made perfect sense as another place to add a pop up because of the siblings’ long-standing relationship with the local promoter in town and the convenience of routing from Las Vegas.

“We wanted to do Asbury because it’s right by the beach, and it’s a great setup, and there are a lot of people on the East Coast who will never have the opportunity to Vegas to do it,” Stern says. “You know, it’s an investment. You’ve got to fly across the country, get a hotel, pay for the ticket, and you’ve got to eat and drink all weekend. It will cost. There’s a huge punk scene on the East Coast, and there’s a lot of people that would love to come out and probably can’t afford it.

“We’ll make it smaller and see if we can get people excited about it,” Stern concludes. “Just like we did in Vegas.”

Read more from Dave Herrera at reviewjournal.com. Contact him at dherrera@reviewjournal.com and follow @rjmusicdh on Twitter.

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