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Once “Dammit” was on televisions and radios, the members of Blink started getting recognized not just at venues but at stores and restaurants. In punk vernacular, this is called getting rockegnized.
It was fitting that Blink-182 ushered in the new millennium on MTV. Over the previous six months, off the success of their second MCA album, Enema of the State, the band had become fixtures on the channel,
Bixler-Zavala had a simple goal with his music: “I was always aiming to just get out of El Paso.
At the Drive-In played their small handful of songs at makeshift venues throughout El Paso and then expanded their horizons with a two-thousand-mile loop around Texas.
At the Drive-In was a unit built upon five personalities from five different backgrounds, which made them diverse in every way—culturally, ethnically, and musically.
Their discord was evidenced onstage as the band was visibly divided into two sides—the structure and the spectacle. On stage left, the workhorse rhythm section of Ward, Hajjar, and Hinojos dutifully anchored their songs with reliable timing and technical efficiency. And on stage right, Bixler-Zavala and Rodríguez-López unleashed an onslaught that was impossible to look away from.
Since At the Drive-In’s primary weapon in attracting new fans was the strength of their live show, the band’s goal for In/Casino/Out was a recording that captured the raw energy of their performances.
It was around the time In/Casino/Out was released, in the summer of 1998, that Bixler-Zavala and Rodríguez-López stopped cutting their hair.
What was less often noted, though, was that their high hair was a subtle defiance of the racial homogeneity of the predominantly white punk scene they inhabited.
The band viewed their shows as inclusive spaces for all misfits like them, so when they witnessed unruly slam dancers or large men ruining the experience for women, younger kids, and more vulnerable members of the audience, they put a stop to it immediately.
it was the band’s mission to rid their shows of the misogyny, homophobia, and macho bullshit that plagued the scene, and if that meant losing a few fans along the way, they were fine with that.
Having grown up in an insular music scene that didn’t concern itself much with punk politics, At the Drive-In didn’t have many hang-ups about taking meetings with major labels.
Like many tech startups of the nineties dot-com bubble, Digital Entertainment Network made a lot of cash and a lot of empty promises.
DEN’s objective was to lure young viewers away from television and onto the internet with original, youth-oriented digital video content.
DEN Music Group had employees and funds and an abundance of slick tech-speak about things like “digital expansion” and “online footprints.” They wielded everything traditional record labels did. Everything except for artists.
They agreed to take a chance on the tech company, and in the fall of 1999, At the Drive-In became DEN Music Group’s first signing.
Ross Robinson likens his process of recording studio albums to capturing ghosts. “There’s a life-form that gets created through the members of a band—a pulse that happens and it creates this vibe,” the producer explains. “It’s a deeply spiritual process for me. We’re chasing the only thing that’s real.”
Despite all of the strife that went into Relationship of Command, or perhaps because of it, Robinson accomplished the impossible. He was able to hone At the Drive-In’s complex identity into eleven tracks, striking a perfect balance between the band as a fiery unit and the sum of five contrasting personalities.
Diamond’s passion trickled down until every employee at Grand Royal was under the spell of At the Drive-In.
Almost overnight, At the Drive-In became music journalists’ favorite act to heap praise upon.
Everything was happening so fast for At the Drive-in, and after a while they became powerless to slow things down as pressure took its toll on them.
“We used to have a rule—a six-month emergency button. When you hit that button, it meant—no questions asked—we’re done for six months,” says Ward. “We had built this into our ideology. That night, I remember everyone saying we had to push the button.”
But for the members of At the Drive-In, it came down to a simple choice: Kill the band or it would kill them first. “I could easily have seen someone dying. I don’t think that’s an exaggeration,” says Ward. “It was a pressure cooker.”
By the end of 2001, Bixler-Zavala and Rodríguez-López had splintered off to form a new group together, the Mars Volta, which indulged the duo’s penchant for spacey, psychedelic jamming. Meanwhile, Ward, Hinojos, and Hajjar launched the more straightforward rock outfit Sparta.
The two groups had their own distinct charms but lacked the volatile chemistry that had made At the Drive-In a uniquely explosive powerhouse.
But after their demise, tastemakers who had heralded them as rock’s saviors promptly moved on to a new breed of tamer indie rock acts that included the Strokes and the White Stripes.
“Maybe it was always supposed to be that way,” says Ward. “It was just like the live show: it was chaos for forty-five minutes, and then it was over.”
Just as each of the four members of the Ramones had adopted Ramone as his last name, all four members of the Donnas claimed Donna as their first name, distinguishing themselves by the initials of their real last names.
The outfits were advantageous not only in driving home their Ramones-tribute persona, but in helping audiences differentiate the Donnas from the Electrocutes. The girls played into the roles of their alter egos, even creating a bit of a faux rivalry between the two acts.
The Japan trip saw the Donnas skipping several steps in the traditional career trajectory of a band, as they had yet to even play outside of their home state.
Knowing the label was flush with cash, many Lookout bands were coming to Livermore with their hands out, seeking heftier recording budgets, broader advertising for their releases, or money for van repairs and new equipment.
Other bands wanted to know why they hadn’t enjoyed the same skyrocketing success as Green Day, as if he could simply snap his fingers and magically produce another media firestorm.
He was stepping down as the head of Lookout, he wrote, and would be leaving the label in the capable hands of his twenty-four-year-old protégé, Chris Appelgren, who’d been a Lookout employee since the age of fourteen.
Having grown up in Palo Alto himself, Appelgren felt an affinity for the Donnas, and Neuman, who’d played drums in the seminal riot grrrl band Bratmobile, was an idol to them.
Armed with their first Lookout album, some cash from their parents, and a new fifteen-passenger van, the Donnas took American Teenage Rock ’n’ Roll Machine on the road while their schoolmates began their second semester.
Not only was the band continuing to transition into an arena-metal sound; they were also adopting the personalities behind it.
the Donnas sang their own songs about drinking, hooking up with guys, and hard partying.
Ironically, the members of the Donnas felt little to no identification with their bawdy stage personas.
The Donnas signed with Atlantic Records in December 2001, the first Lookout band to make the major-label jump since Green Day.
“Our attitude was: ‘You can’t reject us if you never accepted us.’ We were immune to that shit. We were never really welcomed into a scene. We were our own scene.”
When Spend the Night hit stores, in October 2002, it joined a long list of other albums released by female artists that year.
to the Donnas, indie cred was less important than exposure. If sticking one of their songs in a commercial helped them reach a wider audience, they were open to it.
Spend the Night’s release was perfectly timed to catch a shift at MTV’s popular after-school show Total Request Live. In an effort to steer the show away from the boy groups and teenage pop stars who’d dominated its programming for years, MTV executives pushed for a new direction.
Every television performance by the Donnas was airtight, almost formulaic, a level of perfectionism that was very deliberate and hard-earned.
The cracks were starting to show in the operations of Lookout Records. It happened shortly after the Donnas had set sail for Atlantic.
In addition to the Donnas, Appelgren and Neuman had invested heavily in a new cluster of signings at the start of the 2000s that diverged from the pop-punk sound the label had built its name on. Among them were Ted Leo and the Pharmacists, the Phantom Surfers, Communiqué, the Oranges Band, Black Cat Music, and Pretty Girls Make Graves.
The two bands owed the most money were Operation Ivy and Green Day, whose three combined releases were the label’s top sellers.
DualDisc was a new technology unveiled at the National Association of Recording Merchandisers convention in August 2004. It was a double-sided compact disc with standard audio tracks on one side and DVD capabilities on the other,
Gold Medal was highly prioritized at Atlantic, and thousands of DualDisc copies shipped to stores across the country for its October 26 release.
Following their release from Atlantic, the band couldn’t return to Lookout, because there wasn’t much of a Lookout left to return to.
