Somewhere between a sun-sick sky and the tar-bubbled blacktop of Tomkin Park, the punks gathered like war-painted feral cats around a trashcan fire. The stench of cheap beer, wet denim, and dog breath hung thick in the air—this was not your mother’s music festival. This was Saturday. This was the Shows in Tompkins Square Park This was Skitzopolis.
By the time I stumbled onto the scene—half-blind from the midday sun and high on caffeine and paranoia—the second band had already seized the stage like a gang of wired-up insurgents. Skitzopolis, they called themselves, and they looked like they’d been cut loose from the back of a rusted-out ambulance barreling down the I-10.
Scotty Skitzo, the lead throat, snarled into the mic like a lunatic preacher who’s just discovered the Book of Revelations is set in a dive bar. John Fastlane wrangled the bass like it owed him money. Matt Manic—appropriately named—was pounding the drums like he was trying to summon the wrath of the punk gods themselves, and Jason Jackal was splitting atoms on that guitar, each riff a dirty bomb dropped on our collective sense of peace.
They opened with Opener Boys—an anthem that sounded like a Molotov cocktail hurled through the front window of suburbia. The crowd didn’t so much dance as they convulsed—a frothing, sweat-slicked moshpit of limbs, boots, and mangy-haired dogs dodging combat boots with a streetwise grace.
Somewhere between 58 and 100 Miles, I think I lost a shoe and most of my moral compass. A German Shepherd howled in time with the snare. A girl in a denim vest with safety pins for earrings offered me a beer and a story I’ll never remember. The sun dipped low, but Skitzopolis only got meaner—feeding off the chaos like gasoline on a tire fire.
They closed with RNR Ballroom, which was less a song and more a streetfight disguised as a power chord sermon. When it ended, there was no applause—only howls, barking, sweat, and the sound of punk still echoing off the nearby apartment complexes like the ghost of anarchy past.
No encore. No need. They’d already burned the place down.
I limped off through the crowd, clutching a ripped shirt and the distant memory of sanity, and thought: God bless Skitzopolis. God damn them too 
Next Up: Nihilistics
