I was driving through Secaucus, N.J., a few weeks ago and passed a bar where the Good Rats were playing. That was pretty funny. So was that time I came across Nash the Slash playing Goodtimes Fun & Grub outside of Niagara Falls. Going to see The Shirts at CBGB, however, is downright hilarious—even if few people remember the band enough to get the joke.

Consider that the setting is a lot more like a high school reunion, with countless variations of people asking each other what they’re up to now. One of them mistakes me for some CBGB veteran named Rob, so my apologies if he hasn’t fallen apart as much as I have.

These aren’t mere aging punk rockers, though. It took a special breed to be a Shirts fan. Outside of Long Island’s 3-D, The Shirts were our city’s most perfect example of a bar band attempting to cash in on punk. 

More amazingly, they did it from the revered stage of CBGB. The scene was addled enough that nobody cared that The Shirts were a sappy AOR band battling easy-listening tendencies. There were plenty of teens gullible enough to think of vocalist Annie Golden as a pure punk princess. One of them was Thurston Moore, who apparently didn’t care that Golden sported a pants suit for The Shirts’ surprisingly good 1978 debut on Capitol.

I can’t tell you about their second and third albums. Not many people can. 

Anyway, The Shirts have reunited with Only The Dead Know Brooklyn, with the original line-up sans Golden—last seen onstage with Adrian Zmed in a short-lived musical based on Noah’s Ark. That brings us back to tonight’s strange show amongst a strange show of nostalgic CBGB alum. 

This isn’t even the first Shirts reunion, but it’s treated like an event. And, with the band continuing its various songwriting pairings, the quality’s a mixed affair. They start with a pair of horrific songs that are as soulful as Taylor Hicks, but there’s soon a slew of other perfectly catchy new tunes. 

The new femme vocalists tend to over-emote like everything’s a beer commercial, but the crowd doesn’t mind. The band—always older than your average punks—even dare to include “Teenage Crutch” in the old-song trinity that wraps up the set. Then people start to leave, and the floor’s clear for the nerdy kid from some Slavic country who keeps posing around the club for snapshots taken by his father. And that brings everything back to normal.