Laura Jane Grace has tried for years to get an Operation Ivy set to happen at Riot Fest. Eventually, she took matters into her own hands when the venerable Chicago festival asked her to perform an Op Ivy set backed by Philadelphia ska band Catbite at this year’s edition (a week after unveiling the set at Supernova Ska Festival).
“I hope it’s all leading towards Operation Ivy getting back together and playing,” Grace says from her Riot Fest trailer a couple of hours after her crowd-pleasing set. “I get it when people are down on nostalgia being dumb, but I don’t think it’s a nostalgia thing. To me, those songs are lyrically fucking flawless and more relevant than ever. Punk music is folk music — it’s about passing down the songs — and they were that one band in high school that united all the different sects. Skaters liked them, punks liked them, jocks liked them. Everyone had that fucking CD in their flipbook. Riot Fest’s brand has always been getting bands to reunite, and they’re the last punk band that could realistically do that and matter.”
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In some ways, serving as the world’s top Op Ivy cover band has allowed Grace to appreciate one of her favorite bands in new ways. Taking on the band’s music provided her a closer and more analytical look at the songs — particularly the lyrics — and she realized that the Bay Area band’s work (particularly Jesse Michaels’ lyrics) greatly impacted her songwriting both in bands and as a solo artist.
Of course, she also never planned on performing her take on Michaels’ lyrics, as “tribute band” wasn’t exactly in her post-Against Me! cards. Even when she technically birthed the project with Catbite — who Grace says had a much tougher role than she did since they had to learn all of the songs, as opposed to already knowing most of the lyrics as a fan — it was done so as a late-night sleepover activity rather than some impetus for a(nother) new musical project.
“[Catbite] toured through St. Louis a couple years ago, and I have a studio spot there, so I reached out to them like ‘Hey if you need a place to crash after the show or whatever,’” Grace says. “They stayed over, and I was like ‘Let’s stay awake and record some Operation Ivy songs on my four-track cassette.’ We recorded a cover of ‘Healthy Body, Sick Mind’ and jammed all night. There were no further plans, yet somehow this came to be.”
That’s not to say all of it came entirely naturally. Grace says the folks behind Supernova Ska Festival “spearheaded” the effort to get everyone together for September’s two appearances. In fact, she only had one formal rehearsal with her new backing band before they hit the stage for the first time, and she’s still getting used to the idea of performing an entire set of covers. But perhaps most challenging of all is that this is the first time Grace is only performing vocals without playing guitar.
“It takes a lot more effort because I’m not used to the way I sing without a guitar,” Grace says. “I know how to sing from my diaphragm with a guitar on me, but I don’t know how to do that anymore without a guitar. I find myself getting out of breath more. We only had one practice for this whole thing, so I felt like we hit our stride. It’s like, fuck, if we could just get a couple more of these shows, we could be Operation Ivy and play all the shows that they never played.”
Aside from the physical strain, Grace is also left with the anxiety of performing the songs of her very much still-alive childhood heroes and hoping for their approval. To add to that reality, Op Ivy bassist Matt Freeman’s son was handling sound duties for one of the other bands playing Riot Fest. While she hasn’t performed the songs for any of the original band’s members just yet, she knows they’re certainly aware of it (and Michaels even gave it his blessing).
“I reached out to Jesse because I’ve been friendly with him on socials and stuff like that, so I wanted to make sure it was cool with him,” Grace says. “I asked him if he would design a t-shirt or something for it, and he was into the idea, but he was too busy. I’m scared of what Tim [Armstrong] thinks. He’s my fucking teenage punk rock hero. All of them are.”
But the most important thing to Grace about all of it — and part of the reason she still loves Operation Ivy so much — is that the music reminds her of her youth and helps bring the songs to the next generation of punk kids. So far, the two tribute shows have done just that and brought about some full-circle moments for the singer.
“When I was 13 or 14 years old, I lived in South Florida, and there was one fucking indie record store called Offbeat Music,” Grace says. “That record store introduced me to so much — including Operation Ivy — and that store’s been closed for decades, but the owners, Sam and Debbie, were there at Supernova Ska. I ran away from home twice when I was a kid and went to that fucking record store both times. I got picked up by the cops there. So, to have them in the audience was a really cool moment.”
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