In-Depth with Buffalo’s Angel Rivera: A Punk’s Punk of the Highest Order
- matt smith
- 11 hours ago
- 9 min read
Chances are if you’ve been a fan of Buffalo’s punk scene — whether now or at any time over the past 30 years — you’ve seen Angel Rivera on stage ripping it up.
The man has been nothing if not omnipresent, boasting a resume that reads like a Who’s Who of Buffalo punk bands past and present, including: Spitfire & The Rebel Yell, The Fabulous Wolfpen, Neyko, Viva Noir, The Rabies, The Legendary Hearts, Brixton Sons, The Outside Broadcast , Dotson Moon, Crop Circle Project, The Card Cheats, Super-Tugger, Kanuton, Gates of Steel, The Urban Achievers, and Abandoned Trains. (We’ve probably forgot one or two, but you get the idea.)
Not only has Angel been a fixture on the city’s punk scene, the man can play guitar, embodying a style that fuses Johnny Thunders, Steve Jones and Wayne Kramer for a sound all his own.
Recently, we were fortunate enough to sit down with Angel for a sweeping conversation that covered a span of topics, including his punk origins growing up in New York City and New Jersey, his current hardcore punk band — Abandoned Trains, his involvement in the city’s annual Joe Strummer Tribute, the politics of punk in the Trump era and Buffalo’s heavy music renaissance.
“I’m very thankful to the Buffalo music scene for letting me do my thing,” said Angel. “I don’t think I could have done all of this anywhere else.”
As we said, our talk was sweeping, so much so that it would be impossible to run in its entirety. That said, we bring you this abridged version and we hope you enjoy. We thank Angel for his time.
1120 PRESS: Thank you for speaking with us! You’ve been such a presence on the punk scene here for so long but you’re not from Buffalo. How did you end up here and how did you work your way into the scene?
ANGEL RIVERA: I was born in Brooklyn and raised in Queens until I was 13 and then I went to high school in New Jersey. I graduated high school early at 16, and then went to U Mass. That was a mess (laughs). So, I came back home for a couple years and then went back to U Mass in '90. I graduated in ’94 and afterward I moved to Detroit for my first job. I worked for the power company up there at Detroit Edison. I moved here to Buffalo in ’98 because my wife got her PhD at UB. We were only going to be here a couple of years, but then ‘a couple of years’ turned into 30 (laughs). We moved to Allentown and lived in this great little house. I was reading Art Voice and there were ads in which people were looking for people to play in different bands. So, I just went to a bunch of these open rehearsals and stuff. I met this woman, and she was starting a garage rock band. There used to be a bar on Military across from Showplace. It was a dive bar, and she used to work there, so I met her over there. Anyway, things fell apart. We never ended up playing any shows, but just through hanging out I ended up meeting people to play with. That was really the start of it.
1120: Can you tell us how you discovered the world of punk rock because, obviously, it’s had a long-lasting impact on your life.
AR: My entrance into punk rock was the Circle Jerks ‘Group Sex’ album. That was the first punk album I bought. You bought albums back then because of the covers. If the covers looked cool, you bought it. And this Circle Jerks album had 20 songs on it. So, I thought it was a value, you know? I didn't know it was only going to be 20-minutes long (laughs). And by then, I knew of the Ramones, so I bought a Ramones album — ‘Leave Home’ — which was their second album. I still stand by the belief that is their best album. From that Circle Jerks connection, I got into Black Flag. It was the mid-80s and that's when they started doing shows at the American Legion where I lived. So, my friends and I started going to local shows and that led me to CBGBs where I saw Agnostic Front and Youth of Today. It was such a great era.
1120: What were the bands that you gravitated toward?
AR: Black Flag, Circle Jerks, and Dead Kennedys I really got into. Ian MacKaye and Minor Threat, too. Agnostic Front. And The Clash of course. Everybody I went to school with hated that kind of music. Just despised it. So, the hardcore kids like me were definitely at the bottom of the barrel, especially in Jersey because in the early-to-mid-80s there you had the preppy kids and the metal kids, and they were into Motley Crue and Bon Jovi.
Back then too, the music scene was violent. Everything was very tribal. When you went to shows, you had the skinheads, you had the punks, and there would be fights and just general mayhem the entire time. It was super tribal.
I remember one night we had to make a decision: Motorhead was playing, and the next night The Exploited had a show. We were trying to decide which show we could go to and not get beat up. Everyone loved Motorhead. But the metal kids would beat you up, and then you had the skinheads who would beat you up, and then you had the punks. We ended up going to The Exploited because we felt safer at The Exploited.
1120: Do you remember your first punk band?
AR: Yeah. I started my first band in 1988 called ‘PCB.’ In New Jersey, that term had a double meaning. In Jersey, you had all the pollution but, also, the guys I was friends with were going to Catholic school, so they would tell everyone they were in the Peaceful Christian Brothers.
We did mostly covers and I remember we played a show and we did Agnostic Front, Black Flag, and I think we did a Replacements song, and something else. Anyway, we did a couple songs and before our set, two other bands played: One played Rush, and the other band played Pink Floyd. We were supposed to have 15 minutes, and they turned us off after 11. They pulled the plug on us.
1120: So, you’ve been in a long, long list of bands in Buffalo over the years, but your current original punk project is Abandoned Trains. How did that come about?
AR: Going into COVID, we had recorded probably 80 or 90 percent of the last Super-Tugger album. And we were on our path to getting it out. But then we just came to a stop. We got the album all together and we were ready to go, but everything just fell apart during COVID. We were down for a couple of months. I was at home, people were at home, you couldn’t really go out anywhere. So, I just wrote, and I started writing these angry, angry songs. The only thing that made sense to me at the time was going back to 80s hardcore. All the shit those bands said back then was becoming real and it's still real today.
You know, The Dead Kennedys seem tame now in terms of what they were talking about policemen doing — planting drugs and planting stuff on people. I mean just the fact that people now are be taken away off the street with no due process. The Dead Kennedys were warning about this shit 40 years ago. And it's happening. And you know, at the time when I was writing those angry songs, the pandemic was happening and the way Donald Trump handled it and the rejection of science and everything — it drove me back to the time when I was a youth and rallying against Reagan.
Science and knowledge are so undermined now. As far as (the Trump administration) is concerned, it’s not even up for debate. And I'm an engineer by profession, you know?
1120: So, that’s the origin of the band; what’s happening today with Abandoned Trains?
AR: We’re working on a new album right now. We've got a bunch of songs coming together. Ben, our bassist, left the band last year. So, we brought Joe Kennedy (guitar) and Jason Garcia (bass) into the band. We’re having fun and just trying to see where we stand. We’re trying to get a sense of the sound we now have and that's why we’ve been writing newer songs because we’re just trying to just find ourselves.
1120: You’re also heavily involved in Buffalo’s annual Joe Strummer Tribute. How did that come about?
AR: The Clash were one of the most important bands and their music has always meant a lot to me. That first Clash album is so much more raw than the Sex Pistols ‘Never Mind the Bollocks...’ I was very fortunate to see Joe Strummer with The Pogues when I was in New York City in the 80s. Joe was playing rhythm guitar and, I’ll never forget, he came up and he sang ‘London Calling,’ and ‘I Fought the Law.’ I then got to see him twice with The Mescaleros.
When The Mescaleros’ second album came out, ‘Global a Go-Go,’ he did a free concert up on Yonge Street in Toronto. I left work early that day and drove up. Afterward, he was flying out of Toronto to go play the David Letterman Show and so I stayed behind. He signed my book of pictures and some other stuff I had. It was great just hanging out with him. When he died a few months later, it was just devastating.
I wasn't involved with the original Strummer Tribute setup. The guys in Wolf Tickets were; Chris Malachowski. I didn't really know those guys yet, but then through the circles I was in, we ended up meeting. We were supposed to play Strummerville with The Viva Noir but we weren't able to make it happen. Then in 2014, I ran into Nick Gonzales at Mr. Goodbar. He was buying wings, and I hadn't seen Nick in like, shit, 15 years or so. So, we start talking and he goes, "Angel, you wanna play in The Clash show?" I said, "Yeah, I wanna play in The Clash show. Let's do it!" And that first year, man, it was so good. And we’ve just kept going ever since.
1120: Speaking of Joe Strummer, are you noticing any increase in politics in punk
during the era of Trump?
AR: I don't know how much the punk rock community is engaged with mainstream politics anymore. And to be honest, I don't even know what ‘mainstream politics’ means anymore because we’re so fragmented nowadays. Take Charlie Kirk, for instance. A guy like that existed in a certain space. He was around, but I don't know how many people in the mainstream were really aware of him before what happened.
Trump has so many toxic people around him. He’s going to have the UFC on the White House lawn. His whole administration is made up pro wrestlers — like, they are all ‘the heel.’ If you rail against them, they just make stuff up. They distract and disorient you. So, I think at the end of the day, you have to stick with the fundamentals, with what matters. People matter. What do we want our country to be? Do we want to isolate ourselves from the world, or be part of it? What does it mean to be American? I think these are the important things.
You can write a song about Trump today, about some dumbass shit he does, and two months from now you'll forget what the fuck you wrote about because there'll have been another 85 things that have happened. So, you have to focus on big things like humanity. Joe Strummer and The Clash, they would write about big things. The things that matter like human rights, people, human beings. The rest is just nonsense, in my opinion.
1120: Having been around now for almost 30 years here, what’s your impression
of today’s scene in Buffalo?
AR: What's amazing is, guys like me at 55 can still play out here in Buffalo and play out
pretty much all the time. And we’re playing heavy music. This younger generation of kids coming up, they're playing heavy music, they're doing all these shows like under bridges and down in South Buffalo at places like that Italian restaurant (Casa di Francesca’s). It's great to see all the energy! We went through a period like 10 or 15 years ago where everyone just switched to acoustic instruments. It’s great to see kids back to just cranking and playing loud. It seemed like for a while, Generation X was gonna be the last loud generation. Like, we were just gonna rage until we died. So, it’s just awesome to see the younger people in Buffalo picking that up now and making it their own.
1120: Do you ever see yourself stopping?
AR: I have no plans to stop. I imagine, eventually, it’ll depend on how I feel and how healthy I am but it’s all good right now. I play for myself, you know? I play for myself and my band. If we're all having fun, who cares how old you are? As long as you can find a group of musicians who are into making music, who are into having fun, who are letting off steam, and as long as there are people who want to come out and see you, then really, that’s all that matters.