More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Dan Ozzi
Read between
October 5 - October 12, 2023
No one saw Nirvana coming. When Geffen/DGC Records took a chance on the band’s sophomore album, Nevermind, in September 1991, expectations were modest, with only 46,000 copies shipping to stores in the United States.
By April, a thousand copies of Sweet Children’s four-song debut EP, 1,000 Hours, were being pressed for release by Lookout, but there was a problem: the band no longer wanted to be called Sweet Children. To distinguish themselves from another Gilman band, Sweet Baby Jesus, they decided on a new name, Green Day, a reference to an afternoon spent smoking pot.
The band played their first show as Green Day on May 28, 1989, opening for Operation Ivy at Gilman.
By 1993 the album had sold fifty thousand copies, but it might have been able to sell much more had their label been able to meet the demand. Green Day loved Lookout, but clearly the band was growing at a pace that was too fast for a three-person operation to handle.
Other columnists, like Lee Diamond, dumped a bucket of ice water on indie bands thinking of making the jump to a major, dispelling the three most common attractions: Those big fat advance checks and generous studio budgets seem impressive until you realize they come out of your royalties; A&R reps often seem young, cool, and relatable, but ultimately they’re label employees and not your friends; and lastly, “NO person or band in the industry has a contract that allows them complete artistic control. NO ONE.”
He concluded that an artist that made $3 million for their label would earn “about 1/3 as much as they would working at a 7-11.”
The band performed “86,” a new song wherein Armstrong lamented how, despite all the accolades, playing sold-out arenas around the world and landing on numerous magazine covers, he was still heartbroken about their ban from Gilman Street. “We’ve played in front of 20,000, 30,000 people,” the frontman told SPIN, “and I still haven’t felt the same thing that I felt playing in that place.”
“Some bands went deeper into the underground to eschew ambitions, and some bands went the other way,” says Appelgren. “Unfortunately, there was still this notion that being ambitious was radioactive. Either you pretended you didn’t have any ambitions, or you had them but you wouldn’t admit it.”
They adopted the moniker Jimmy Eat World, a reference to a funny thing that happened in the Linton household when Tom’s brother Jim beat up his other brother, Ed. Ed ran into his bedroom, locked the door, and reemerged later with his retaliation: a picture he’d drawn of Jim swallowing the entire earth, captioned JIMMY EAT WORLD.
“The Maximum Rocknroll issue, ‘Some of Your Friends Are Already This Fucked,’ that was on everybody’s minds—the horror stories of getting screwed,” says Adkins. “The worst-case scenario is you’d hear about some group going into the red making their record, the label hates it, they won’t even give it back to release it, and they own the songs, so you can’t even do anything with them. We were cautious of things like that going down.”
The Capitol Records logo on the front of Static Prevails didn’t put Jimmy Eat World at odds with their fans, mainly because they hardly had any at this point. When the album was released, they’d barely been a band for two years and hadn’t played all that much outside of Arizona. They couldn’t really sell out because, as Burch puts it, “the band was so young that there wasn’t anything to sell.”
“The very first show we ever played was a bar called the Gorilla Pit,” says Hoppus. “It was a weeknight, and we drove in and it was me, Tom, Scott, and Cam, who was a friend of ours that we skated with. We loaded in and there was literally the bartender and one patron sitting at the bar. He said we could set up on the stage. We set up and started playing the first song. After the first song the bartender said, ‘Hey, please turn it down.’ So we turned it down. We played another song and he said, ‘Please turn it down some more.’ So we turned it down some more. We played a third song and the
...more
I went to my mom and I was like, ‘I’m at a crossroads here. I can either drop the band and focus on college and get my degree, or I have to drop college, because the band is overtaking all my time.’ She said, ‘You can go back to college anytime. You only get one chance at being in a band, so go do that.’ So I dropped out of college and we started pursuing touring full-time.”
Hoppus was pushed for a new name for weeks before finally blurting out “Blink-182” off the top of his head. The added number was meaningless, but lore grew among fans about its origins, which the band fueled by giving various decoy explanations in interviews. The 182 would be cited as a reference to Hoppus’s goal weight or the number of times Al Pacino says the word “fuck” in Scarface. But really, Hoppus swears, it means nothing.
You have no idea how distressing it is to be gone from home, living in a van, getting paid after a show, and looking at how far we had to drive to the next show, saying, ‘If we each get one burrito at Taco Bell, we can have enough to buy gas to get to the next city.’ When you’re touring in that manner, and you get to these cities and people are asking, ‘Hey, where can I buy your CD?’ you’re like, ‘Well, why am I busting my ass on tour if people can’t even get our CDs?’ It’s really upsetting.”
Somebody walked around and said, ‘Hey, Blink is here to present their new record!’ Out of the entire office, five or six people came to listen. We played the first song, then the second song, then by the third song people started checking their BlackBerrys, saying, ‘Uh, I have to go make a phone call.’ By the fifth song, it was one person, who was on their BlackBerry the whole time. By song six or seven, it was just me, Scott, and Tom sitting there by ourselves. That was our reception from MCA when we presented our first major-label record, recorded in a real studio, with a real producer. We
...more
Bixler-Zavala eventually dropped out to play in a handful of local bands, most notably drumming for Foss, a grunge rock group fronted by another former El Paso High School student named Beto O’Rourke.
Much like Fugazi was infamous for doing, At the Drive-In would shame people mid-song for stage diving, or stop playing until the aggressors left.
“Playing with Rage was one of the worst experiences of my life,” says Ward. “Everyone in the front is there, one, for Rage and, two, to fucking murder each other. So when we came out and played, it was just shit being thrown at us and people flipping us off.”
Bixler-Zavala opened the tour’s Detroit show by addressing the men in the audience. “If you guys wanna do that karate-kicking shit, if you wanna beat the shit out of each other, please don’t do it at our show,” he said. “I think it’s about twenty years into this so-called punk movement where we need to reinvent shit. Slam dancing and the bastardized term ‘mosh,’ it doesn’t exist with us.” A week later, at a show in Cursive’s hometown of Omaha, he took additional preventive measures by instructing the venue to keep the house lights on as a deterrent, insisting, “Keep the lights up so I can see
...more
When Ward returned to the States, he started coughing up blood. He told a doctor that he was drinking a bottle of vodka a day on top of smoking a pack and a half of cigarettes, and often went days without much food or sleep. “The doctor was like, ‘Well, yeah, that’s what’s wrong with you. You’re dying inside. If you don’t stop that, something bad will happen,’” he says.
In the months following At the Drive-In’s implosion, a clear rift between the members developed publicly. The structure and the spectacle had parted ways. By the end of 2001, Bixler-Zavala and Rodríguez-López had splintered off to form a new group together, the Mars Volta,
At the Drive-In was a force that shot out of a small corner of Texas like a rocket. For six years, they grinded their way around the globe to play for anyone who would watch them. It was only in their last six months together that the rest of the world caught up long enough to get a fleeting glimpse. But in the end, the velocity, the attention, and the intense pressure of it all rendered them too unstable to last. They hit a brick wall at a thousand miles per hour and left behind a spectacular explosion. “Maybe it was always supposed to be that way,” says Ward. “It was just like the live show:
...more
Green Day released their fifth album, Nimrod, which took aim at Maximum Rocknroll founder Tim Yohannan. The raging “Platypus (I Hate You)” was a two-and-a-half-minute score-settler with Yohannan, a smoker who was ill with lymphatic cancer. “Shit out of luck, and now your time is up / It brings me pleasure just to know you’re going to die,” frontman Billie Joe Armstrong snarled. Six months later, Yohannan was dead and Armstrong expressed no remorse.
“Towards the end of the nineties and into the 2000s, selling out wasn’t the worst thing you could do anymore, and I do feel like there were some people who felt things were handed to us on a silver platter,” says Anderson. “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.”
“I think I’d do it again,” Castellano says of her major-label experience. “We were so nervous about being fucked over the whole time that I don’t think we had fun with it. I mean, we had a lot of fun, don’t get me wrong, but I’d try not to be so worried all the time. It’s hard—it’s your band, which is your entire life. For us, it was our job, our creative outlet, and our best friends. It was everything to us. We didn’t have many friends outside the band. It’s hard not to be protective over that. But I still wish I’d just enjoyed it.”
“If you sit in a room with ten major-label A&R guys and you’re not running to take a hot shower in the next fifteen minutes, there’s something wrong with you,” he says.
“I fucking loathed Tony Victory. I thought he was the biggest fucking asshole hypocrite. I respected him—he’s smart and he worked his ass off—but he was a toxic piece of shit,” says Lazar. “He’d always talk that indie propaganda bullshit and then he’d sign these bands to slavery deals. It still makes me fucking nauseous.”
“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.”
“In those moments, when we were on the fringes of our reach, it did not feel inviting. It felt like a hard sell,” adds Keeley. “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.”
That was when it dawned on them that their business was on the precipice of a seismic shift. “I remember Lyor going, ‘Every fucking kid downloaded this record, I know it! Everyone knows every single fucking word.’ That audience was ground zero for downloading,” he says.
“I thought it’d be a hit. I still do,” says Lazar. “If there is a God, and when I die he says I can ask him any question, I will ask why ‘Signals’ wasn’t a hit.”
“He came backstage and he was freaking out. He was so psyched,” remembers Rickly. “He was like, ‘You guys are fucking stars. You’re stars! You’re gonna be the biggest band in the world. You’re amazing live. You have magnetism. All we gotta do is get you the right person to write singles for you.’ And we were like, ‘We don’t do that.’ He just said, ‘Okay.’ And that was it. He totally checked out.”
“Australia, it’s built on fuckin’ convicts, man,” she says. “Melbourne, particularly, was very violent and dark, whether it was romper-stomper-style beatings, which were quite regular, or seeing men expose themselves pretty much on a daily basis as a schoolgirl. They’re called flashers and, seriously, I saw them all the time. But I was not afraid. I would go for it: I’d be like, ‘Motherfucker, I’m gonna kill you!’ I’d chase them and throw shit at them and scream at them—all the things that they did not want to experience. It made me so fucking angry. It was such weakness to me.”
Tim was like, ‘I’m lonely. I miss you. You’re never around.’ And I was just like, ‘ . . . Tough shit? You’re a fucking grown-ass man.’ I was twenty, twenty-one. And he was in his mid-thirties. ‘I’m not here to fix you.’ I was a kid. I was a fucking kid!” Leaving Hellcat to sign to a bigger label only made the situation more personal. The word that most frequently came up, she remembers, was “loyalty.”
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, 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. Their world had shrunk, and they suddenly found themselves very alone, the scene’s punk band non grata.
She talked about how restrictive it was living in the world of her husband and his band. “The way he runs his business is very mafioso,” she said. “And I didn’t like being married to the mob. And I was. I didn’t just marry Tim, I married all of them.”
Meth became Dalle’s drug of choice, because, as she says, “I had done so much cocaine that I actually couldn’t snort it anymore. The people I was hanging out with, [meth] was what they were doing. As a girl with ADHD, who takes legal speed now, I was like, ‘Oh my God, I found my fucking thing!’”
After that, Dalle flew back home to spend the holidays sleeping off the past two years. “I went to Australia for three months to get away from meth and get away from everyone,” she says. “It was killing me. I was completely out of my fucking mind. I became completely psychotic and paranoid. I’d be up for three days at a time. I once sat in a car and wrote down every address that I could find in the navigation, for seven hours. I heard Mickey Mouse in the drain, I heard people having sex all the time. I cut down a tree with an electric chainsaw after being awake for three days and almost cut my
...more
“When I look back, I’m amazed that that was my life,” she says. “I’d never let anyone treat me like that now. A label, an ex-husband, people, press—I would never allow it. And I could give a shit what people say about me at this juncture. In the grand scheme of life, there is so much stuff that does actually matter. What someone thinks of me is none of my business.
As the singer’s pain grew stronger after the procedure, vocal takes started coming out flat and lacking in emotion. “I just wasn’t happy with what he was doing. Neither was Alex,” says Rickly. “Alex stole his pain meds and told him he couldn’t have any more and needed to record.” After depriving Way of his Vicodin and giving him several unsuccessful pep talks, Saavedra tried one more motivational trick. “I punched him in the face,” he says. “I thought I knocked him out at first. It shocked the shit out of him. In hindsight, it was very jockish, but at the time it made sense. I think the
...more
says tour manager Jeff Pereira. “You’d walk off the bus and instantly, the first thing you’d hear was ‘You saved my life!’ I’d never heard that said more than when I was with Gerard.”
The group put together a list of potential names, each one worse than the last. There was the Chicago Tar, It’s the Cops, and, most repulsive of all, Jimmy Crack Corn and the I Don’t Cares. Finally, the name Rise Against was suggested, and it sounded too good to be true. “We thought there had to already be a band called Rise Against,” says Principe. “But there wasn’t, so we went with that.”
So the band turned to their third choice and booked time at the Blasting Room, the Fort Collins, Colorado–based studio owned by Bill Stevenson, drummer and songwriter of legendary punk bands Black Flag, Descendents, and ALL.
Stevenson instilled in McIlrath a lesson the young frontman would keep in the back of his mind every time Rise Against stepped onstage: Don’t start a punk band unless you’re willing to go to war every night.
“I grabbed this acoustic guitar and went out to his porch on this beautiful island outside Vancouver,” remembers McIlrath. “I’m playing it, trying to write that part. I look over and everyone’s in the window staring at me. I was like, ‘Man, they must think I’m so cool. They think I’m a cool songwriter and they know they’re witnessing an important moment.’ I walk back in and they’re like, ‘Dude! That’s Sheryl fucking Crow’s guitar. Nobody touches that!’ And I was like, ‘Ah, sorry, sorry! I had no idea!’”
“It’s weird for a guy from a punk and hardcore world to be talking about how powerful major labels are, but it worked for us,” McIlrath says. “It made me believe that you can write great songs, but if you don’t have a giant machine to push them to people in the right way, they might fall on deaf ears. We’d released ‘Give It All.’ It didn’t change our lives. We’d released ‘Swing Life Away.’ It didn’t change our lives. We gave those songs to this giant building in Santa Monica and it changed our fucking lives. That’s when I never looked back. I knew why I’d signed.”
“It was our first tour where it seemed like there was an unnecessary amount of tension,” remembers Rise Against frontman Tim McIlrath. “Every tour we’d done, everyone got along and we were all in the same boat. Against Me! got out there and it seemed like they’d decided they were not in the same boat. They were in a different boat, and they wanted that to be known.”
Their behavior didn’t make them many friends on the tour, but Grace maintains that it helped them in the grand scheme of things. “I think it made us seem like a dangerous band,” she says. “We came out of that tour with the most buzz out of any band. Rise Against played it slow and steady and very smart, just inch by inch. But I was just going for bigger grabs and trying to make larger gains.”
