Last Friday night, while cruising around in my all-wheel drive, I found myself being pulled, being inexplicably drawn as if by a tractor beam to the Rosen Krown. There, a fairly impressive gathering of Rochester’s leather-clad, low-down-and-out were there to burn Cupid in effigy while The Grinders fiddled for the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.

This was a flashback to the mid-'90s, when the band dominated this overcast burgh with loud and snotty barroom rock ‘n’ roll, singing songs of teenage lust and petty crime. The show on this night starred guitarist Paul Morabito (Chesterfield Kings, The Moviees, and Lovematics), and featured songs from the Grinder hymnal — along with some Jethro Tull and the Stones — and ended in a fistfight. If you throw beer cans at the band, you get what you get. This is the kind of thing that happened back in the day — like the time I put Todd Grinder through Richmond’s ceiling during a show.

And hats off to my honey, who did the cell phone boogaloo and scored us two tickets to the Stones in June. So scratch another one off the bucket list.

Frank De Blase is CITY’s music writer. He can be reached at [email protected].