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Rickly had assembled Thursday from connections he made in the New Brunswick scene.
The songs laid the groundwork for the defining elements of Thursday’s sound—soft melodies that built up to loud, intense sections, which sometimes collapsed into textured chaos.
But it was the imperfections that became Thursday’s calling card, as if the band had accidentally stumbled into a style that sounded just wrong enough to be right.
Brummel, a straight-edge college dropout with a shaved head, ran a fiercely independent label that snubbed its nose at the majors.
Tony Victory, as he came to be known, cast an imposing shadow over the hardcore scene.
Red flags aside, Thursday gladly accepted Victory’s modest budget to begin work on their sophomore album, Full Collapse,
The emotional resonance of Full Collapse would get the band tagged with the increasingly common and often unflattering “emo” tag, which would lose them respect among more snobbish listeners.
Rickly in particular stepped up his game, transforming from a gawky teenager with goofy pop-and-lock moves to a full-blown showman.
But to the members of Thursday, the whoopee cushions just served to emphasize that they were stuck on a record label that didn’t appreciate them or share their artistic vision.
he found himself drawn to bands less for their sonic features and more for their artistic DNA. “I was interested in the frequency of artists. Certain bands have the right frequency, regardless of genre, and I was interested in finding them.” Something about Thursday’s Wetlands performance resonated with Lazar. The band wielded a mix of art school acumen and street grittiness, he thought.
But the band always knew that the standout suitor in their minds was Island, a label that was home to mega-sellers like U2 and Bon Jovi.
“Lyor and Julie came from Def Jam. The ethos was completely different. They articulated a vision that was incredibly compelling,” says Lazar. “Who was cooler than Jay-Z in 2001? Lyor was involved in the birth of the most fundamentally important musical genre at the end of the twentieth century. No one else had that.”
The Thursday-vs.-Victory feud made for juicy punk drama on internet message boards, but the real takeaway of the statement was tucked into its latter half: Thursday was leaving Victory to sign with Island Def Jam.
Thursday’s deal with Island benefited Brummel financially as well. Victory pocketed around $1.2 million, Rickly says, assuring Thursday would have a hefty bill to recoup with Island Def Jam before seeing much of a profit themselves.
“This is the tragedy of all this DIY punk shit, that everyone has to pretend like they don’t want it,” says Lazar. “For a scene that prides itself on authenticity, it’s such a bunch of fucking bullshit.”
Unlike with Full Collapse, whose speedy and raw recording process held little room for second-guessing, every minute detail of War All the Time was nitpicked and overanalyzed.
Thursday was burned out from endless days at Big Blue, but Lazar kept dropping by to pump them harder and harder for a single.
The recording process was so drawn out, draining, and at times absolutely miserable that the members of Thursday were unsure how they felt about the finished product. They sometimes heard moments of genuine magic when listening back, and other times heard nothing at all.
On Victory, the band was one screamy rock band on a roster of many, but at Island, Thursday was treated like rock’s saviors.
“All the stuff we could control felt bulletproof. We could steer our own ship pretty handily. But when we would have these ‘career-making moments’ that bands dream of—being on TV for the first time, playing Coachella’s main stage in front of eighty thousand people—anything like that, we bombed.”
Thursday soon learned that their label would now be headed by Antonio “L.A.” Reid, the former Arista Records hotshot CEO who had overseen the runaway success of rising pop stars like Avril Lavigne, P!nk, and Ciara.
For the first time, they left the familiar comfort of Big Blue Meenie to record in Cassadaga, New York, with producer Dave Fridmann, who was best known for his work with bands like Weezer, the Flaming Lips, and Mogwai.
Island Records and Thursday cut their respective losses and went their separate ways on a handshake, and both parties were happy enough. The label moved on to their next big thing, and the band considered themselves lucky to part on good terms and in one piece.
Dalle began playing music through Rock ’n’ Roll High School, a Melbourne collective for aspiring female musicians run by Stephanie Bourke, a music instructor and drummer for the bands Hecate and Litany.
Dalle immediately clicked with the band’s mohawked thirty-year-old frontman, Tim Armstrong, a lean and handsome punk poet with whom she shared a chemistry that felt instant and natural.
The eighteen-year-old Dalle and the thirty-one-year-old Armstrong were married that summer in Nevada, easing the constraints of her visa restrictions, with Dalle taking Armstrong’s last name thereafter.
They called themselves the Distillers, and their earliest songs were fast and trashy cuts of unruly punk rock. Musically, the band didn’t break new ground, but their standout feature was Dalle’s voice, which had grown feral since her Sourpuss days.
A small cult quickly grew around Dalle. It wasn’t just her talent that drew curious punks in, but her style and attitude. She was a sneering, cursing, spitting machine in tattered tank tops, studded belts, and hair that was often glued up into a mohawk or liberty spikes.
“The Distillers’ actual lyrics seem not to coalesce into anything colossal, or even understandable,” Kogan wrote,
The review stung, not because it was mean but because it was accurate.
Reading the review served as a challenge for Dalle to up her songwriting game and to discover her own musical identity outside of her husband or anyone else.
At the end of 2002, the Distillers played their biggest shows to date—seven weeks on an arena tour supporting two major acts, No Doubt and Garbage. It was there that Dalle found a mentor in Garbage frontwoman Shirley Manson.
Ultimately, it was Warner Bros. who appealed to the band the most. The label’s Sire Records imprint had an impressive history of punk rock bona fides, touting the Ramones and the Dead Boys.
After some consideration, the band decided to take Aaronson, Whalley, and Stein up on their offer, inking a deal with Sire Records for their third record.
Loyalty, honor, allegiance. These were all qualities firmly embedded in the fabric of Rancid. “It’s like the Mafia,” guitarist Lars Frederiksen once told the Washington Post. “We keep it in the family.”
Armstrong was blindsided by a phone call from Australia. It was his wife, telling him that after nearly six years of marriage, she wanted a divorce.
Armstrong, a powerful and influential figure in the world of punk rock, made life difficult for the Distillers, they say. It felt like there was an industry stink on them as fewer and fewer people and bands were willing to work with them.
As tensions between the two camps boiled over that spring, the June 12, 2003, issue of Rolling Stone threw ten gallons of gasoline on the fire. Inside was a giant photo of Dalle gleefully and sloppily kissing her new boyfriend, Queens of the Stone Age’s tall, redheaded frontman, Josh Homme.
another rumor that had been circulating about Rancid was leaked in the press as well. It turned out that the band had also worked out a deal with Warner Bros. Records for the release of Indestructible.
Rancid had famously brushed off the opportunity to jump to a major label at the height of their breakout success during the mid-nineties punk explosion, a time when they could have joined their Bay Area brethren Green Day in superstardom.
The music video for “Fall Back Down,” the album’s first single, matched the song’s lyrical themes of camaraderie and loyalty—plenty of arms around shoulders and stiff upper lips, with lots of who-needs-you-anyway posturing for the camera as Armstrong played dominoes with friends.
Dalle found herself dragged into a strange time in early-aughts pop culture, during which the media was highly invested in the personal lives of punkified pop stars like MTV power couple Avril Lavigne and Sum 41 frontman Deryck Whibley.
Indestructible drew a line in the sand for Distillers fans, many of whom had found the band through their devotion to Rancid. Suddenly they were like the children of divorced parents, being forced to choose a side.
Two months after the release of Indestructible, on October 14, Dalle and the Distillers fired their own shot with Coral Fang.
Coral Fang possessed a duality that captured Dalle’s shifting life at the time—a mean and ugly record that was also harmonious and graceful.
Dalle started dragging Granelli along to interviews for support. The drummer frequently relied on his quick wit and humor to break up awkward conversations and change topics.
The most frustrating part about sitting through invasive radio interviews was the fact that the Distillers’ singles weren’t actually getting much radio play.
No longer bound to the strict sobriety rules of the Rancid/Epitaph scene, the band made up for lost time with hard partying as drinking and drug use grew more prominent within the band.
Dalle enlisted her loyal friend Bevilacqua and a few other musicians to help her work on a collection of new songs. The result was Spinnerette, a project that tilted away from the scathing punk bite of the Distillers, and leaned more toward dancier electroclash.
A music geek with an encyclopedic knowledge of rock history, Way was like the kid brother of Rickly and everyone at Eyeball.
