Back from the dad

It's nighttime, a couple hours north of Richmond, Va., and singer Preston Woodward and guitarist Art Tendler for the punk band State talk in the front seats of a full-size van, jumping topics with the kind of quick-synapse subject-leaping that can make road trips epic (think Dean and Sal losing their minds between New York and Denver), from digestion science to Civil War battles to vaudevillian concertina players.

The band's fill-in bassist, Jef Porkins, naps in the back, and drummer Keir Murray is already in Richmond — he typically jets to long-distance shows thanks to his parents' frequent flier miles — and regular bassist Jeff Navarre is off on Hawaiian vacation.

Hawaiian vacations? Flying in to shows? It doesn't sound very punk rock. But wait. The story gets even less punk rock:

Woodward, a husband and father to five, cleaned out the full-size Econoline van before making the rounds to pick the rest of us up in the morning, but there are still a few stray children's books and a shiny, plastic tiara resting on the console between the cup holders in front.

Since re-forming in 2003 after a 15-year hiatus, the Ann Arbor-based band has made up for lost time, gigging steadily and pumping out a slew of records in the last seven years. To accommodate family life, they don't actually tour; out-of-state trips, such as the headlining spot on the second and final night of the "Winter Apocalypse" fest that has this van Richmond-bound, are done in one-off, sleepless marathons.

Underground punk labels as far-flung as Minneapolis, California, Grand Rapids and the band's own Statement imprint have put out more of their music in the '00s than the band ever produced in the '80s. Still, none of them has outlived the legend of a small-run, 7-inch produced with some mixing help by Stooges guitarist Ron Asheton and released on Statement back in 1983. To this day the band still measures its successes, and failures, by its ability to match the energy of No Illusions, a seven-songs-in-eight-minutes-and-change hardcore punk scorcher that rips as hard as any of the early Touch & Go releases of the same era.

While Negative Approach, the Meatmen and other heroes of that day have been getting their deserved due with recent waves of Midwest hardcore nostalgia via oral history, zine anthologies, record represses and reunion shows, the State guys continue to do their own thing — write songs, release records and play shows with renewed purpose and enduring fury — and that seems just fine with them.

A highway road sign for Dismal Hollow Road catches Tendler's eye out of the dark. He digs its creepiness and reads it aloud. (Hours later, on the post-show return trip to Michigan, Tendler will spot the northbound version of said sign shortly before we pull over for some 3 a.m. Steak 'N' Shake. This time, he and his bandmates joke it could be a slogan for their grueling travels.)

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