More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Dan Ozzi
Read between
December 21, 2022 - January 21, 2023
“He had a band with some friends called Sonic Pudding, and they became I Ate the Sandbox, and then they ended up being Schon Theory,” says Yocum.
He flipped through the pages of Book Your Own Fucking Life and found a listing for Adkins and Leibow’s new promotion company, Bring Me the Head Of Productions, which described itself as “a non-profit collective dedicated to putting on all-ages, low-door and no alcohol punk shows.”
“It was kind of awkward because it was like, Who is this guy? Why is he here? And why is his shirt tucked into his jeans?” remembers Leibow.
They weren’t exactly putting the band up at the Four Seasons and charging nights at the strip club to the company card. They didn’t have to, really. The band admits to being such suburban rubes that they were dazzled by L.A.’s simplest amenities. Even the concept of valet parking was foreign and impressive to them.
“This was in the era when these fancy writers were talking about Jawbox and Texas Is the Reason, or Rites of Spring, Cap’n Jazz, Jawbreaker, Knapsack—all of these bands,” he continues.
Being the polite southwesterners they were, though, Jimmy Eat World were still appreciative of the progress they were making on the road, particularly when grinding it out with their contemporaries like Mineral, Braid, and Jejune. A tour opening for the Promise Ring and Burning Airlines in the spring of 1998 saw them playing to six hundred people a night. The tour’s final stop, in Philadelphia, featured the debut of Jets to Brazil, a new band formed by Blake Schwarzenbach after the demise of Jawbreaker.
The recently launched and increasingly influential music website Pitchfork was unimpressed, giving the album an abysmal 3.5 out of 10. The critic wrote of Jimmy Eat World, “They sound like sensitive white American boys. I imagine if one of the photos in those vaguely homo-erotic Abercrombie and Fitch catalogs came to life and start[ed] playing music, it would sound like this.”
On the large stage, they opened for more established acts like Face to Face, Unwritten Law, and the Muffs. And on the side stage, they played five-dollar weeknights gigs with other unremarkably named locals like Product and Grip.
Most bands reputable enough to fill SOMA were bound to eventually wind up on Cargo, the area’s main indie label, which was home to acts like Three Mile Pilot, fluf, and Deadbolt.
These shows were intended to prove that the new lineup meant business. Blink-182 were no longer the scrappy San Diego underdogs who played empty weeknight shows for free Snapple. They were now a successful group of professional musicians who demanded to be taken seriously. And they called this venture the PooPoo PeePee Tour.
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.
“I was in a band called Three Blind Bats and he was in a band called Startled Calf,” remembers Bixler-Zavala.
He’d grown up on SoCal punk bands of the seventies and eighties like the Adolescents, T.S.O.L., and Social Distortion, and proudly carried on the O.C. punk tradition with releases from a new crop of upstarts that included White Kaps, Glue Gun, and the Grabbers.
The band spent October and November on the road, headlining over a cycling lineup of openers that included the Murder City Devils, the (International) Noise Conspiracy, and Cursive.
But while the Donnas boasted a number of notable members in their growing fan club, dubbed the Donnaholics, they were also attracting more admirers waiting for them outside with Sharpies and records. Livermore called them the Raincoat Brigade. The Smugglers had another name for them. “We called them GBGs—Girl Band Geeks, these middle-aged creepy men who’d hang out after the shows and wait for the Donnas to get them to sign stuff and give them gifts,” says Lawrence. “Sometimes the Donnas would be exhausted and there would be ten guys who looked like extras from The Lord of the Rings hanging out
...more
“People threw shit at us onstage. They changed the lineup every day on Warped Tour, so one day we played between NOFX and MxPx, which is the worst thing that could’ve happened. They were throwing CDs at us, flip-flops, cigarettes, spit, all kinds of shit.”
“These days, though, teen-pop is in remission, and MTV executives think they may have identified its successor: punk rock. On ‘TRL’ this is ‘Spankin’ New Bands Week,’ which means performances from five punk-inflected bands in five days: the Donnas, the Used, Simple Plan, New Found Glory and Good Charlotte.”
Each show’s bill paired touring acts like Florida’s Hot Water Music and D.C.’s Q and Not U with local mainstays like thrashy punks the Degenerics and screamo favorites You and I, whose guitarist lived in the bedroom across from Rickly’s. The biggest name in the area was Lifetime, whose swift and bratty punk songs made them New Brunswick’s most revered band and, if the title of their 1997 album was to be believed, Jersey’s best dancers.
Whether or not they were ready to try out their stuff, Rickly added Thursday to the flyer for that day’s show with Miami’s Poison the Well and two Jersey upstarts, Midtown and Saves the Day.
Saavedra ran a small, local record label called Eyeball Records, which had released EPs by street-punk bands like the Casualties and L.E.S. Stitches, as well as moshy hardcore acts like Breakdown and Terror Zone.
A handful of them sold at each show around the tri-state area, where the band’s name was becoming more familiar among dedicated fans of underground screamo and hardcore, ranking among other basement shriekers like Neil Perry, Orchid, and Yaphet Kotto.
Reversal of Man, Charles Bronson, and Good Clean Fun all penned anti-Victory anthems in the late nineties, although Chicago’s MK Ultra may have written the most scathing one with their forty-second ripper “Bring Me the Head of Tony Victory.”
His aggressive marketing campaigns helped bands like Hatebreed, Snapcase, and Earth Crisis reach levels of commercial success previously unheard of in hardcore.
Adam Turla, frontman of fellow Eyeball Records band Murder by Death, remembers getting a burned CD-R directly from Rickly after the two bands played a show together at an anarchist bookstore in Turla’s hometown of Bloomington, Indiana. “Somehow Geoff had gotten my address and he showed up at my door at midnight after the show,” he says. “He was like, ‘Hey, we’ve got this new record. I really want you to hear it!’ He handed off a copy of Full Collapse that they’d recorded but wasn’t out yet. He was just so proud of it. I had never heard anything like it. Most of the hardcore and emo that I’d
...more
When I started working with them, we were fighting for scraps—four dates with Skycamefalling here or three dates with From Autumn to Ashes there.
“I think they were underwhelmed by the album at first. I remember there was a band called Student Rick that was on the label at the time. I think they thought it was the Student Rick record that was gonna do things for the label,” says Rule.
They were a band with pretensions but not pretentious—a refreshing antidote to the indie rock snobbishness he felt emanated from stodgy labels like Matador Records.
“I didn’t buy a house or a fucking Bentley. I just cranked that money into other bands,” Brummel says. “I pumped the money into Taking Back Sunday, and Atreyu, and Hawthorne Heights.”
From there, Lazar booked another session for the band at Long View Farm, a studio in an isolated, rustic barn in North Brookfield, Massachusetts.
Lazar remembers accompanying Lyor Cohen to a Thursday show at Roseland Ballroom, in New York, with Island labelmates Thrice.
It was one of those things where I was like, ‘I deserve this. I sold my soul to the devil’ or whatever. I really put that on myself. If you grow up punk and a Catholic, that’s how you think.”
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.
Burkett, however, claims that Wleklinski’s hair, which went past his shoulders, his thigh-high shorts, and his general “Dungeons & Dragons–playing metal dork” appearance didn’t match the band’s aesthetic and prompted his dismissal. “It was his image,” Burkett asserts. “Image matters! I’m sorry, but it does. If you want to be part of a band, you have to fit the image. If there was one Bosstone who decided he didn’t want to wear plaid suits, the Mighty Mighty Bosstones wouldn’t have worked.”
“Tim, especially back then, took an hour or two to warm up. He’d cut him off before he was warmed up. He would literally shut down the studio and go play Frisbee golf.” “I did have a nine-hole Frisbee golf course on my property,” says Richardson. “You have to work very deeply. So basically, when it got too tense I’d say, ‘You know what, guys? Let’s go play nine holes.’”
“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!’”
“Rise Against was that entry band to political punk rock, and that’s where you do it, at the Omaha Twisted Christmas or whatever,” says Kelly. “That’s where you go out and say ‘Fuck George Bush!’ And people say, ‘Wait, did he just say fuck the president? I’d never considered those words together before!’ And the next thing you know, that person might be listening to Crass.”
