Ballyhoo! — We Ride at Dawn Tour with Chad Tepper

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Reggae-rock gets sneered at by people who have never stood in a room full of it, and the sneering misses the point so completely that it is almost useful as a filter. The crowd at a Ballyhoo! show is beach-town kids now in their thirties who learned every word off a burned CD in a Civic, and the band — improbably, from Maryland — has spent two decades being adopted by a Southern California circuit that treats them as local. Nobody in that room is performing taste. They are singing along, loudly, badly, with their arms around someone. Chad Tepper opens, which pulls in a younger pop-punk contingent and makes the floor an odd two-generation mix for the first forty minutes. It is the last Friday in January, the deadest stretch of the calendar, and this is the kind of show that exists to prove the month is survivable. India Street in Little Italy; doors at seven, the band on at eight.