It was Easter, and metaphors of resurrection that had been eaten for brunch in the afternoon were proving harder to digest as the evening wore on. The Middle East stage stood silent, and then Matt Hock, the Explosion’s mischievous singer, came out behind a big bullhorn and shouted, “All the way from Chicago, Switzerland: the International Noise Conspirator!” Four boys and a girl emerged in matching denim suits and mod haircuts. One of the boys hastened to explain that they were from Sweden, not Switzerland. The International Noise Conspiracy, as they are called, played a tactful garage punk, which is not the way garage punk is usually played. The INC are interested in rock and roll as a secret code for the transmission of radical ideas to young minds; they are aware of the semantic properties of style. “Someday you’ll wake and it will be just us,” the singer said at one point, “the young, beautiful, and revolutionary.” Someday, perhaps, but I was feeling old, ugly, and conservative, and I could have sworn they’d nicked the bass line to their anthem “Smash It Up” from a Rage Against the Machine song. But then they seemed to find their métier: a fevered call-and-response refrain ended in a wild scream and the singer briefly had the crowd in his grasp. The ratio of political lectures to songs thereafter was about 1:1. They made a smug and inept attempt at an R&B rave-up that incorporated “Baby, Please Don’t Go,” and they left the stage with a collective raised-fist black-power salute.

The Explosion, from Boston, were making their first home-town appearance in some time. A few songs in, guitarist Sam Cave stepped forward and said, “Joey Ramone is dead.” He said it in an accusatory way, as if none of us should have been there. But having come of age ignoring the pre-emptive reports of punk’s demise, Hock was not about to let the death of a founding father stop the show. “I was going to address that,” he said, picking up his bullhorn. “This just in: Joey Ramone isn’t dead. He’s just . . . tall.” Which seemed emblematic of the way the Explosion encounter punk rock on their excellent debut, Flash Flash Flash (Jade Tree) — with reverence and irreverence, a refusal to take the dead or the living at their word.

Rocket from the Crypt are the hardest-working band in rock and roll, and since leaving Interscope for the comfort of the indie label Vagrant, they have gotten only stronger. Group Sounds is a bit darker than their last few albums, but their performance, as always, was a well-oiled greatest-hits set staged in the manner of the old Ike & Tina Turner soul revues, two-piece horn section included. “This one was supposed to sound like the Real Kids,” announced Speedo, the singer, introducing a newer song called “Heart of a Rat.” “But it ended up with this Neil Diamond-coming-to-America-Ellis-Island feel.” Which is, of course, a wonderful problem that has been plaguing RFTC all along: an inability to separate rock and roll from show business. At the end, Speedo pulled some people up on stage to dance: “Anyone know how to do the jerk? It’s only been around for 35 years.” Frayed power chords dipped in brass, a heavenly sound that was still ringing in my ears on the way home when the BBC announcer confirmed that Joey Ramone was dead, from lymphoma, at age 49.