Welcome to the second episode! We’re glad you’ve joined us…

This weekend we talked about five bands that made us, for better or for worse. Thanks as ever, Dan, for the compelling topic!

Please click below, as per your preferences…

As previously, we have a YouTube playlist to go with the episode…

Dan’s Notes

I took a bit of an autobiographical spin on my list, I guess you could say, and selected bands that had a big influence on me during various points of my early life.

De La Soul

Age 13-permission to be weird in the time of the mullet

Before I was first exposed to the punk rock scene, I got most of my music through watching Muchmusic after school, especially shows like Rapcity which I used to watch with some fellow nerds from my neighbourhood whose parents went to church with my mom or something like that, before we would take turns being bad at various Nintendo games. This was in the late 1980’s in Devon, where 90% or more of the kids I went to school with were die hard fans of hard rockers like AC/DC or newer thrashers like Metallica, so seeing a video with a bunch of chubby weird-looking guys being pushed around by cooler classmates like “Me Myself And I” really spoke to my very un-cool self. When I saw group member Dave had choppy asymmetrical hair with stuff shaved in the sides of it, my nerdy adolescent self thought that would be a cool thing to try with my own hair, being young and unaware of the appropriative nature of the new looks I was hoping to pull off. This began the early teen years tradition of setting aside part of my allowance to slide to the neighbourhood barber when sent there by my parents for a pre-first day of school cleanup so that said barber wouldn’t call them and ask if they were okay with the undercuts with lines shaved in the short parts or whatever rather than the scruffy mullet worn by the majority of kids my age in Devon at the time. Pos from De La wore big round glasses, so when I found out I needed glasses I picked ones with big round frames. They were a crucial inspiration at a time when I was just realizing that someone could develop their own sense of style, even if execution did not stick the landing based on inspiration, before I even really knew stuff like punk rock was even a thing.

7 Seconds

Age 15- a band that felt like mine in an awkward early time

When I first got into punk after starting high school circa the early 90’s, I enjoyed the energy of it all but it took a little while before I found a band that really felt like mine. Most of the folks my age who went to shows were skateboarders who had their own little subculture within the subculture, including bands like NOFX who leaned a little too into irreverent ignorant humor at times for my uptight nerd self who had previously been listening to mostly “conscious” rap like Public Enemy and The Native Tongues collective, even if I only kind of vaguely understood the political nuances of those groups’ messages at the time. Of the more well-known older bands I was exposed to in those early days- Black Flag seemed a bit too macho on the live album that was my first exposure to them, Minor Threat had a couple of songs I wasn’t entirely sure I could get on board with, and the Misfits just seemed silly. Then one day of the only older punks who lived in Devon at the time that I knew of loaned me a tape that just blew me away with its mix of passion, energy, and awkward sincerity – 7 Seconds’ “The Crew”. They were mad at sexism, mad at racism, and didn’t want to get old. They were ready to fight and spray paint the town but fervent about their commitment to positive attitudes, the young people determined to overthrow “the system” with general vibes backed up by three hectic guitar chords can be. Some of the lyrics and stylistic choices may seem a little cringy in retrospect but for a good few years my morning ritual was to throw on this LP front to back while downing most of a pot of sludgy eye twitch-inducing coffee before going out to face the day. Their later albums definitely slowed down, and took on more and more of a blatant influence of things like their frontman’s love of early U2 that led to him falling out of favour with a lot of stylistic gatekeepers of the hardcore genre but The Crew is one of those iconic albums of the genre and on of the first that really drew me in. My morning ritual for many years consisted of listening to this record front to back while drinking my morning coffee to get that blast of aggressive positivity with my morning caffeine to really get the day going.

Submission Hold

Age 19 – hometown connections to the secret foster parents of the west coast scene

Submission Hold were the first band for me to really tie our sleepy little home town to a larger more vibrant community of “the scene”. It didn’t hurt that their singer’s dad was one of the vice principals at FHS so they would make a point of stopping through whenever they toured east. They started out under the name Insult To Injury and spent a week in town during their first cross Canada tour, various band members occasionally wandering into spots like Molly’s while trying to see what the locals got up to. I wrote them fan letters and started my first band when I heard they might come back through in hopes of getting to open for the,M and while they didn’t end up playing that year, they came through on the following tour and that band did get to open for them on our very last show, the night before I moved to Alberta with my family. Once I was living on the western side of the country their growing popularity and influence on the scene became even more apparent. They always had a ton of distinct screen printed patches for sale as merch, and in any city I visited during the time they were an active band, anyone I met who was wearing one of those patches usually ended up being pretty good folks. On top of that they were super involved with local activism around Vancouver, and had legendary bands from the more DIY end of the punk scene from all around the world play in the basement of the big rundown house they all lived in with some other members of the local arts and activism community. The singer and the bassist were also a cohabitating romantic couple who ended up playing de facto mom and dad to so many travelling couch surfers and other weirdos passing through town and letting them stay over for a night or two at said house and get a fancy home cooked vegan meal or two before they moved on. So many people I knew when living on that side of the country had been drawn to Vancouver (occasionally washing up across the Strait in Victoria instead) because of being fans of Submission Hold who had asked if they could come visit them and then never ended up leaving. They pushed musical boundaries too, and by the time they had signed to Ebullition Records in the late 90’s had added unconventional instruments like flute and violin to their avant- garde punk mix as well. There was a brief period of time in the last vestiges of a time before the internet really took over a means of spreading one’s music that they were like a Can Con Fugazi who managed to cultivate a network of connected friends and fans all over the world just by touring constantly and leaving a trail of patches and 7”s in their wake that served as literal badges of coolness if you knew what they meant.

Crimpshire

Age 20 and thereabouts – Getting the wrong ideas from a good writer

Sometimes when you are young and stupid you can easily take the wrong idea from the works any great writer. And Aaron Cometbus, drummer and co-lyricist of Crimpshine and many other bands was a writer I idolized in my early 20’s, and I definitely feel like I took the wrong ideas from his works on the whole, both through music and his iconic COMETBUS zine. I devoured his stories of hopping freight trains, eating out of dumpsters and sleeping on couches or living in rundown houses with too many roommates and other chronicles of the lives of weirdos in the East Bay and beyond, and instead of thinking wow those are some captivating descriptions of crummy times, my stupid brain thought “hey, that must be the sort of thing you have to do to become a writer as good as him”. Crimpshrine were an iconic pop punk band from the east bay scene in the mid to late 80’s but whose members were effectively children at the time they were an active band, and their lyrics were a reaction to their lives at the time, not a proscription as to how a life is best lived. But as I said previously, I was young and stupid at the time and prone to taking the wrong point from things, and did my best to ape the sorts of life situations I heard described in the song lyrics and zine writings and spent my early 20’s like a silly fanboy so convinced of my own supposed “real punk authenticity” or whatever. Why have a bunch of roommates in a rundown shared house when you can sleep on the couch of an even more packed-to-the-gills house instead, and who needs to shower all that often when your plans for the day will peak at scrounging up a pack of smokes and opening your first bottle of malt liquor before noon? Of course all of this was meticulously documented in notebooks for some big writing project or other about my incredibly authentic and not at all just trying to copy my favourite writer at the time sort of life, that ultimately would never materialize because I was too busy getting drunk before noon on someone else’s couch that day. Some ill-advised choices for sure I guess, but the sort we all have to find a way to move through to get to where we are I guess. I did get to meet Aaron Cometbus once, at an all night keg party/punk show at a house I was sleeping on the couch of at the time in Portland Oregon on Halloween in 1999. One of his bands was playing the show and after their set I saw my chance to approach him in the kitchen and maybe tell him how much enjoyed his writings, but didn’t want to seem like too big of a fanboy so I decided to play it cool and open with the fact that I had discovered a store in town run by retired identical twin former pro football linebackers that had tons of cheap black Chuck Taylor All Stars high top sneakers for sale, as I knew that he, like myself, required footwear that could best be described as “boat-like” or “appropriate for clowns” in size. Of course, I had forgotten that I was dressed up as an elderly woman in a cheap grey wig and flowing thrift store mumu at the time (it was Halloween after all) and had been drinking for probably 12 hours straight at that point so it came out more like a long series of slurred syllables punctuated by the words “Big shoes eh?” , to which he responded “uh…..ok sure buddy”. While my remaining brain capacity for conscious thought struggled for a way to recover from that rocky start of the interaction, the whole situation was interrupted by both of us being tackled by my friend Jesse, who was dressed in a fake beard and long brown wig and wearing a blue bathrobe over improvised bedsheet toga and yelling “Jesus Loves You,  Aaron Cometbus!” while trying to plant a kiss on the writer’s cheek. Divine intervention indeed.

Aesop Rock

Early 30’s – How Alive? Too Alive…the permission to try and fix some things.

Late 2007 through the full year of 2008 was a time of big changes in my life, when I made some moves that were ultimately for the better but rocky in execution to be sure. During that time, my listening habits had swung more towards the indie hip hop scene, with my favourite artist at the time being Aesop Rock. His style of writing can be a little hard to parse at first as his words tend to bob and weave around subject matter, with descriptive flourishes and off kilter rhyme schemes that sometimes feel like you are trying to get your sea legs under you when figuring out just what the hell he is talking about. Rather than just being dense for dense’s sake, he packs a lot of meaning into each song once you get used to listening to it. During the times in question I was in the midst of a major career change from kitchens and bars to the world of libraries, evaluating whether to continue with an ultimately unhealthy romantic relationship, and trying to shake off some of the bad habits, poor coping mechanisms, and general shitty thinking picked up through my 20’s. So much seemed to be causing big feelings all at once, so many big things changing and causing upheaval ultimately for the better but still not fun to experience in the moment, that it all just felt like A LOT all at once. Listening to Aes’ most recent album at that point, the chorus of “Keep Off The Lawn” about a man confronting the literal ghosts of his past and trying to shoo them away from his front door resonated hard with me and I ended up getting the lyrics How Alive? tattooed across my right wrist and Too Alive across the left wrist. I had also discovered a secret track on one of his earlier releases called “1 of 4”, an uncharacteristically straightforward thank you to four people who had helped him out during a serious mental health crisis, that was so open and vulnerable in its descriptions of realizing when one needs to seek out assistance, that later in the year when I had hit a point where things in my own life were feeling Not Okay to the point that seeking outside assistance in learning better coping mechanisms was probably a good idea, I was that much more open to the idea of doing so. I don’t mean to make it seem as simple as “my favourite quirky indie rapper said it was okay to go to therapy when my life got cruddy by my own making so I did”, but I’ve found that in times of crisis it can feel validating to experience art that supports positive decisions you may be making during those moments, and at that time it really did when listening to an artist whose own life experiences and decisions felt relatable to my own, and I can say that my life is ultimately better now because of going through all of that. His work with Kimya Dawson (formerly of The Moldy Peaches) as The Uncluded is also highly recommended as well.

Matt’s Notes

This is another great idea by Dan! I am pleased to imagine having content for TWO shows ready in advance… this is not normally how my life works!* 

*This, and no other part of these notes, was written a month ago…

My first thought off the FB Messenger was… most formative ALBUMS… cause… in some ways that would be easier! I could make cases for albums convincingly on the basis of…”while ROCK is highly subjective… certain instances of musical excellence… are perhaps less so…”

In terms of bands that made me… again, I feel compelled to point out… “it depends on what you mean by “made””. 

I am going to stop over-thinking it… 

Top Five… out of a potentially much, much, much longer list…

1. The Replacements
2. Leatherface
3. Fugazi
4. Hot Water Music
5. Alkaline Trio 

And because I will blow a fucking gasket if I can’t include a longer list… for context… I have to include:

• Hüsker Dü
• Bad Brains
• Lemonheads
• The Horrible Crowes
• Ship Thieves
• The Jesus Lizard
• Reigning Sound
• The Hold Steady
• Pearl Jam
• The Doors
• Metallica
• Guns n’ Roses
• The Gaslight Anthem
• Sugar
• Rancid
• The Joel Plaskett Emergency
• Nomeansno 
• REM
• Eric’s Trip
• The Jesus and Mary Chain
• Karen Foster (Fredericton)
• Catch 23 (Fredericton)
• Royal Trux
• Lucero
• U2
• Screaming Trees
• Thin Lizzy
• Motorhead
• Wilco

*OK, Jesus… I think I must stop…

This really isn’t just a Bands I Really Like List… I could back up each of these with specific personal anecdotes… the joys of getting older… and foggier… 

Furthermore, I vouch for all of Dan’s choices… the ones that I’ve heard of, anyway!

And… to follow up on a point from Episode Zero… I have been listening to Yesterday’s Ring’s glorious album Goodbye Nightlife (2022) on repeat since we did that episode… I can’t stop listening to it… I am listening to it right now…

OK… after that unacceptably long preamble…

The Replacements

So… as I said in the Episode Zero notes… There is nothing original that I can possibly say about this band, nor about the ways I got into them and the weight they carried with me and a few other people at age fifteen… and ever since…

I think adding a few quasi-random points here will be more helpful than any kind of attempt at a “think piece”…or an over-wrought personal anecdote…

• They are from Minneapolis, MN… 1979 until their last reunion show at Primavera Sound in Barcelona, Spain, on May 28th, 2015…
• Anything biographically you want to know about the band can be found in Bob Mehr’s New York Times bestselling Trouble Boys: The True Story of the Replacements…
• Bob Mehr also won a Grammy for his liner notes for the recent Don’t Tell a Soul reissue… 
• During their reunion tours, Billie Joe Armstrong (Green Day) joined the band as a third guitarist for a handful of dates including at Osheaga Festival in Montreal…
• Paul and Tommy recorded music together for the animated film Open Season (2006)…
• They released THREE records in 2022… if you count the Bleeding Hearts record featuring Bob Stinson’s last recordings… WHICH I DO… the archives are deep with this band…
• There is a fucking charming sequence in the recent movie the New Mutants where the teenaged Mutants are drinking and smoking and partying to Bastards of Young, Breakfast Club style…

Are you completely underwhelmed? I’ll tell you… smoking cigarettes and binge-drinking as a teenager was never as fun as when FUCK SCHOOL or Bastards of Young were playing… and if you want, I’ll make you a mix tape… or burn you a CD… 

A final thought… as I’ve grown older and been through a bunch of shit… it’s the last three albums… from the original run… that I play most often now… I cannot wait for an expanded reissue of All Shook Down…

Leatherface

I’ve got such ESTEEM for Frankie Stubbs as a singer, songwriter, and from all appearances… utterly cool, normal person…

I described the origins of my affinity for this band in the Episode Zero notes…

So… as with the ‘Mats… maybe a quick, bullet-style rundown…

• From Sunderland, northern UK… 1988 – 2012… with a four year hiatus in the mid-late 90’s thrown in there… 
• Basically, the definition of melodic post-hardcore…
• The late, brilliant Dickie Hammond played with members of Montreal band the Sainte Catherines as Medictation… their Warm Places LP was the last music Dickie recorded before he died…
• All releases of Leatherface’s Last album… the last before their mid-90’s hiatus… now include an entire bonus LP of songs from Frankie’s post-Leatherface band Pope…
• A bunch of us drove to Worcester, MA to see Leatherface and Avail… and Frankie hung out in his van afterwards, leaning out the window, being cool as fuck… including taking pictures… they invited us to hang out at their New York City show a couple of days later… we didn’t…
• As a post-script, I read a review of the NYC show in the Big Takeover about six months later… Frankie dedicated “Speak in Tongues” to “the kids from Canada”… nobody identified themselves as such… so then he invited anybody who wanted to come on stage…

There is so much more that I’d say here… but… you might be getting tired?? My personal recommendation is… start with Mush… and then go anywhere from there…

*There have been three recent reissues… of Cherry Knowle, Mush, and Minx… which I hope they keep going! The holy grail for me would be a vinyl reissue of Frankie’s Jesse LP… 

Fugazi

When Jon Bowie threw on “Facet Squared” sometime in the summer of 1993… the opening track from In on the Killtaker… I had one of those moments where I wondered if this was even music… or something else… some other kind of conceptual or spiritual entity… His living room in Nashwaaksis kind of faded away… and then came crashing back… THIS IS THE HEAVIEST FUCKING MUSIC IN THE WORLD, BRO\!??!&…* 

*Approximately paraphrased…

So… the academic in me says… go read the chapter about them in the excellent book Our Band Could be Your Life… and, while you’re at it, read the rest of it, too! Including the chapter about the Replacements…

A few casual observations from being a fan for around thirty years…

• Joe Lally is one of the most underrated bassists of all time… half of the dynamism of Fugazi… is that they groove in the hardest way possible… 
• The New Maryland Recreation Centre show in the summer of 1998 during the tour for End Hits was literally the perfect gig… all the opening bands were friends… it was a hot, perfect night in July on the outskirts of town… at one point Ian asked the promoter to turn off the fan… it fucking scorched… this was a case where the lived experience EXCEEDED the legend… which in Fugazi’s case is saying a lot… 
• I saw them in Halifax the following night! Cause that’s where I was living at the time! A completely different venue and atmosphere… they played a way slower, more “atmospheric” set…
• It was a testament to the awesome, positive energy of the Fredericton show that this was among the first batch of their Live Series releases…

I could say more… but anybody who has ever seen them live or listened to their records already knows… 

Listen to your inner fifteen or twenty year-old. They know some shit.

Hot Water Music

As with the Replacements and Leatherface, I feel obliged to point to my show notes from a couple of weeks ago…

• From Gainesvile, FL… hometown of Tom Petty… since 1994…
• I will never stop talking about Chris Wollard and how great he is, both in Hot Water and with the Ship Thieves… and with any other projects…
• It is cool as fuck that Chris Cresswell has stepped up to tour and record… and is now a full member of the band… Flatliners are pretty great… but… this band… Hot Water… speaks to me on a pretty fundamental level…
• After I successfully defended my doctoral thesis… I walked around North Oshawa alot… listening to “Never Going Back” on repeat for a few weeks…
• I met Chuck at a Revival Tour stop in Calgary… I paid extra for the VIP tickets… and it was one of the best shows I’ve been to since… my early thirties, anyway… Chuck was super nice… not as tall or burly as you might think from the videos… that same night I met Craig Finn from the Hold Steady… and almost met Tim Barry from Avail… he was talking with Craig Finn… and I didn’t recognize him until he was on stage… he is extremely tall… like maybe almost as tall as me…
• They have so many records… including excellent splits with both Leatherface and Alkaline Trio…
• I finally saw Hot Water in Vancouver in September… I was nearly black-out drunk by the time they arrived on stage… sensibly, I kept to the back… but I did assuredly sing along to the Cresswell singalong Turn the Dial… and I was also wishing Wollard was also there… even though it is totally reasonable that he wasn’t…

Alkaline Trio 

Despite the fact that this is, numerically, last of the five… I am writing this SECOND… after the ‘Mats… 

I’ve been aware of this Chicago band forever… since the excellent split with Hot Water Music… and I’ve listened to all the tracks… including those by ALK3… for like twenty years? It boggles the mind…

But it wasn’t until ordering their latest, 2018’s amazing Is This Thing Cursed? earlier this year that I went all in…

They have something like nine or ten or twelve albums… depending on how you categorize comps, live releases… etc… 

I’ve only just listened to I think all the non-comp / non-live releases as of yesterday…

Their last three records… Is This Thing Cursed?… My Shame is True… and Damnesia… are, collectively, the soundtrack of the last months of my divorce! I’ve been listening to these daily since at least June… five, six, who knows how many times… any given day throughout much of this weird, emotional, and transformative year… I’ve tracked down Matt and Dan’s respective solo releases… I’m hooked… it’s led me to the amazing Lawrence Arms… Asian Man Records… novels… other seemingly random pathways that I wouldn’t have otherwise gone down…

I had a wild three-month relationship earlier this year, and the ALK3 were there for that as well…

Matt Skiba is among the best American punk singers and guitarists since the late 1990’s… Dan Andriano is a songwriter’s songwriter… and Derek Grant pummels the drums with precise runs and fills that are casually fucking amazing… 

I guess that’s all I ought to say right now… but… in a few weeks it’ll be FIVE YEARS since the last ALK3 record… as per Instagram they’re still an active touring band… one would think they are almost obliged to put out another record in 2023?? We can only hope…

Thanks for checking out Episode One! We will return on January 1, 2023… or thereabouts!!

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Filed under: Uncategorized - @ December 19, 2022 10:34 pm