The bassist and singer of Anti-Flag felt there was no longer a place for him in hockey. Now, he's back as the band sold out their cover of "The Hockey Song."

There are not many things that can clear Chris Barker’s head quite like playing hockey. But when the pandemic ground the world to a halt and all the rinks closed up, the bassist and singer for the political punk band Anti-Flag had to go searching for a different outlet.

Instead of skating around and firing pucks cathartically, Barker, who is better known as Chris No. 2, threw himself into his music.

“I was just trying to stay fresh and so I was writing and recording something every day,” he said from his basement on Zoom while the band was on break from touring. “I would get up, go to the office, pick up a guitar, write a riff and try to turn that into a song or part of a song and if they developed, awesome, but if not, I would try again tomorrow.”

One of the things that ended up sticking was a short song he wrote as an ode to Violent Gentlemen, an apparel company that has hockey in its blood.

“They’ve been friends of mine for quite some time,” Barker said. “It kind of sounded like their energy, so I thought maybe they’d want to do it.”

So Barker sent it over to Mike Hammer, one of the founders of the company, to have a listen. Hammer loved what he heard and wondered what else they could use it for.

Barker threw out the idea of pressing it as a seven-inch vinyl, but since the song was only one minute long, figured they would need to come up with something else.

That’s when Hammer said, “What about ‘The Hockey Song’?”

You know, the one by legendary Canadian folk singer Stompin’ Tom Connors. Originally released in the early 1970s, “The Hockey Song” has become the unofficial anthem for hockey played on backyard rinks to NHL arenas.

For Barker, it was an easy decision.

“I couldn’t believe that no punk band that I could think of immediately has covered it,” he said. “I know a lot of people have and a lot of rock bands have covered it and taken it into their own world, but it wasn’t something I could remember any of our contemporaries doing it.”

While Barker was all in, he knew that tackling such a classic song would be a daunting task.

“People have their emotional attachment to where they were when they heard it or how they heard it,” he explained. “The main thing for me was the energy. It’s such a fun song, so we had to make sure we embraced that.”

Although Barker felt that he was treading on sacred ground, he was no stranger to the terrain. Growing up in Pittsburgh, Barker fell in love with hockey at an early age not long after the Penguins drafted budding superstar Mario Lemieux first overall in 1984.

“It became such a phenomenon in Pittsburgh,” Barker recalled. “Everybody got a hockey stick for Christmas and the game was different in the streets. We weren’t playing football in the streets anymore – we were playing hockey.”

It wasn’t long before Barker graduated from the road to the rink and started playing competitively.

For nearly the next decade, hockey was a significant part of Barker’s life. He started off playing left wing, something he laughs about now given the left-leaning political punk band he plays in, but he was eventually moved to defense.

But by the time he became a teenager, the cost of playing was becoming too much for his family to bear. On top of hockey’s financial strain, Barker’s foray into punk music led him to question the power structures and politics in the world around him, and he felt as though there was no longer a place for him in the game he loved.

While he acknowledges he didn’t initially find his people in hockey, he found them in punk rock. Barker joined Anti-Flag on bass in 1999 and has been with the group ever since.

While Barker found his place in music, hockey never really left his life.

“I’ve always had hockey sticks and a net in the back as a way to stay close to this thing I love deeply, but I still felt hurt by it and afraid of it,” Barker said. For a long time, Barker felt hockey was like a ghost that was always in the room, haunting him.

Although Barker once felt he had to leave the game behind, it was his political activism through his music that helped bring him back to the sport.

“Now as I scratch the surface of these really cool things like Pride Tape and Hockey is Diversity in Germany or Players Against Hate in Washington D.C., all of these social movements I’ve found as an adult, there’s also this space for me in hockey as well,” he said.

It also didn’t hurt that after the Penguins landed another generational talent in Sidney Crosby in 2005, Barker had another reason to find his way back to the game.

It was during Pittsburgh’s Stanley Cup run in 2008 that Barker finally started playing hockey again.

“It felt really good to open that door and start that relationship again,” he said. “I gingerly started going to stick times and figuring it out. I made friends at those stick times and joined their teams, and then it turned into joining three teams, and then it turned into bringing my gear on tour with me.”

While Barker may not have been able to fathom covering “The Hockey Song” years ago when he was at a crossroads with the game, it’s now the perfect confluence of his worlds.

After firming up the plans with Hammer, Barker hit the ground running and started putting the track together.

“It happened really quickly,” he said. “It took longer to get the other guys to play on it because we were so scattered.

But after the band had put its finishing touches on it, it was mothballed for a year or so.

“We didn’t have a plan with what to do with it, and vinyl pressing plants were backed up so weren’t sure what to do, but going into this hockey season, it seemed like the right time to get it out into the world,” Barker said.

It didn’t take long before the limited-edition vinyl was sold out on the Violent Gentlemen website. It’s currently not available digitally, but Barker thinks the band may make it available online at some point. It probably won’t be until after Anti-Flag’s latest album, Lies They Tell Our Children, is released in early January.

“It was a cognizant move to make sure it wasn’t overshadowing this thing we spent a lot of time and energy on,” Barker said.

It’s the band’s 13th album, and Barker said it is deliberately different from some of their previous work.

“We were pushing ourselves to challenge the creative process of the band to be better and to be different than it has been in the past,” Barker said.

One of the ways they did that was by putting a concept record.

“We are looking at specific issues that have plagued society or led us to the 2022 we live in today, which is one of hyper divisiveness, rampant exploitative capitalism, a world that continues to, unfortunately, squeeze the planet like a lemon for the profit of a very few,” he said.

“We wanted to put on display the cultural shifts or political policy changes or examples of corporate greed that have happened in the past that led us to today. Each one of the tracks kind of goes back in time.”

While the new album unquestionably rails against many issues that have been at the core of Anti-Flag’s activism for decades, “The Hockey Song” gave the band the chance to showcase a side of itself that is less visible.

“Being in a political punk rock band, it’s not a side we show that often,” Barker said. “I’m grateful that we got to expose a different side of the band and a different aspect of it. It is a fun aspect of our personalities.”

Hockey has a way of doing that. After all, it’s the best game you can name.