Manchester emo night celebrates a birthday
From disco nights to Taylor Swift sing-alongs, attempts to cash in on musical trends are legion. However, Live Free or Cry, a bimonthly emo-themed night at the Shaskeen Pub in Manchester, is and always has been a passion project. It’s lasted eight years, but since the pandemic ate one of them, 2024 is technically the seventh anniversary.
“The people running it and the people in the bands genuinely have been in the scene for 20-plus years,” founder Aaron Shelton said by phone recently. “We’re not following bandwagons, we’re playing songs that we listened to; we watched all these bands, even toured with some of them…. It comes from a really honest and heartfelt place.”
In the early days, bands like Taking Back Sunday, Paramore or Panic! at the Disco weren’t lumped together as emo.
“We always called it The Scene, which included emo, pop punk, hardcore, metalcore, all offshoots of, I guess punk rock would be the father of it all,” Shelton said. “One of the beautiful things about it was it always felt like a place for all the people who didn’t have a home, the outcasts, quote unquote. All the punk rock kids who didn’t know where to go.”
It’s an inclusive milieu.
“The emo image is always Hot Topic, black hair and nail polish, [but] I see nu-metal kids show up and metal kids and goth kids,” Shelton said. “It’s born out of a genre where the Get Up Kids and Bane would play the same show, and everyone would be psyched about it. It really is a place for everybody.”
Shelton worried the first Shaskeen emo night in 2016 would be a one-off. It included a set from The Nintendos and a pair of Boston DJs. Six months later The 603 Emo Collective performed; it included Shelton and members of a few other area bands. When it fell apart, Shelton started Early 2000s, which became Dangerous Nights, and something of a house band.
“That’s been kind of the constant,” Shelton said. “We’ve played 80 percent of the Emo Nights at this point.”
The effort has evolved and grown. Shelton promotes emo nights in Concord, at Tandy’s, as well as Lowell and Salem, Mass. It’s become a community along the way.
“Between the bands and the audience, it’s kind of found itself,” Shelton said. “In the first years, the crowds were rarely the same. Now I see a lot of repeat people; you can almost predict the type of audience that will show up at this point.”
The celebration on June 29 will include two bands. My Chemical Chungus, a Worcester area band, will be making its LFOC debut. “They’re normally a My Chemical Romance tribute band,” Shelton said. “They recently started branching out and playing more songs. I spoke to them, and they were excited about the set that they had.”
The second act, A Blockbuster Summer, “is your all-encompassing cover band; they do ’90s, ’80s, emo, basically whatever the show calls for,” Shelton said. “They’re just a very talented group with really incredible harmonies out of two singers…. I think it’s going to be musically a very strong night.”
Asked what has surprised him most over the past seven years, Shelton had a fittingly emo response.
“I joke with my band and my fiancée that every time we do one, it’s going to be the last,” he said, “and it just sells out again and again. I think there are four other emo nights in New Hampshire because it works so well. That’s been the surprise; not that I thought it was going to phase out immediately, because it’s been a constant in my life for over two decades, but I didn’t expect it to be this successful for this long. I’m constantly surprised year after year that it just keeps working and working.”
Live Free or Cry w/ My Chemical Chungus, A Blockbuster Summer
When: Saturday, June 29, 9 p.m.
Where: Shaskeen Pub, 909 Elm St., Manchester
Tickets: $10 at the door, 21+, facebook.com/LiveFreeorCryNH
Featured photo: Courtesy photo.
