How I Got Into One Of The Most Hated Punk Rock Bands Ever
I was 13 years old, sitting in my room, listening once again to either Dookie or Kerplunk by Green Day, when my brother came in. He rolled his eyes, he hated Green Day and hated that I was a fan of them. âHere, listen to this insteadâ, he commanded, handing me a CD with a yellow background and a weird black pattern on it. It said ‘Screeching Weasel Kill The Musicians’ on it. Color me intrigued. I put it on, and he had me skip to track 9, âyou’re gonna love this, you can’t like Green Day and not like Screeching Weaselâ.
The intro began, and I’m like âokay, this is fine so far I guessâ, and then the fast part started which perked me up a bit. Then the singing started. At the age of 13 this was by far the funniest and one of the more shocking songs I had heard in my life (GWAR and Green Jell-O set the bar kinda high). I was immediately hooked. I started the CD from the beginning after that, and probably listened to the whole thing a few times on repeat that day. Eventually my brother asked for his CD, so I gave it back to him.
A while later my brother and one of his buddies were listening to something loudly in his room. I asked my mom if she knew what it was. âI think it’s that Screeching Weasel or whateverâ. OH SHIT! I ran up there and popped my head in asking if it was indeed them again, and it was, this time a cassette of Wiggle. THERE WAS MORE?! After my brother and his buddy left, I swooped into his room and looked for whatever I could find, which was just Kill The Musicians again, which was just fine. I grabbed it up and listened to it as much as I could before he’d ask for it back again.
After another while he let me borrow BoogadaBoogadaBoogada from him, which again was just absolutely mind-blowing. I needed more Screeching Weasel, but I also needed more of…just music like this! I eventually bought my own copies of Kill The Musicians, Boogada, Wiggle, and an album I hadn’t heard yet called Anthem For A New Tomorrow. I listened to these religiously, along with my Green Day albums, wondering where I could go from here. Well, from there I’d go to Descendents, Bad Religion, 88 Fingers Louie, Pennywise, Dead Kennedys, and all the rest of what some dickweeds call âentry level punkâ.
When I finally made a friend who was also into punk rock he told me that Screeching Weasel sucked and that their singer was one of the biggest assholes ever. I was like âwell, no, they’re great, but why is he such an asshole?â He then showed me âThe Punk Rock Dress Codeâ, an article Ben Weasel had written for Maximum Rock ‘n Roll. While reading it I asked my friend âIs he…is this for real? Does he mean it? What the fuck is this?!â (Also if you haven’t read that, please do, it’s so fucking stupid) Then I was shown more of his articles, and I was like âokay yeah he’s a douche BUT THE BAND FUCKING RULES!â
Well it turned out that most of the other into-punk-rock friends I’d meet along the way hated Ben Weasel and his band too, or would say âI only like Boogadaâ or âI only like My Brain Hurtsâ. Hell my favorite album by them is Wiggle, which basically no one agrees with. Then 2011 happened, and, uh…well Ben went from âlovable curmudgeonâ to âirredeemable piece of shitâ, but that’s a whole other can of worms.
Big thanks to Dan for writing this super relatable story. It’s so much like my own introduction to punk. Same album and everything. For those of you wo lack culture, you’re probably unaware that Dan is in a super fun punk outfit called Pantzig. Go listen to it here. -SD
âThis subculture is equally responsible for ruining my life as it is saving it.â              -Dolphinfartz đŹđ¨
Many thanks to Steve for allowing me the opportunity to dig into my formative years. Itâs a rambling, goofy, nonsensical mess⌠but thatâs what being 15 is all about. Not to put your dear editor on the spot, but thatâs what I love so much about his site, writing, and attitude about music. The energy and excitement never leaves some of us and, at the front of that bus, Steve is driving.
For the sake of my own personal TRAJECTORY, letâs call my agents of punk enlightenment Bob1 and Bob2. The former was the shift supervisor at my first after school gig, which consisted of slinginâ Slurpees and stealing Camel Lights from an asshole named Joe that owned the local 711 empire. Other than being my means to purchasing the seven hundred dollar rusted Corsica that was perennially for sale in a neighboring cul-de-sac, my new job also chopped my social life off at the knees. Weekend late shift aside, there was only one place my fellow âgritsâ, as we were strangely dubbed, hung and, you guessed it⌠it was in the parking lot of my employer. Rendered off limits to those of us lucky enough to sport the Christmas-colored bowling shirts our shift-work required, I instead turned my attention to skateboarding, music, and the readily available ditch weed one procured in nowhere, Maryland.
The communal CD player that lived in the stock room was of unknown origin. It was a bespeckled piece of shit that I immediately knew had a blown-out speaker. After all, I could only hear Hetfield when blasting Metallica. With no Hammett in the monitor, I reckoned it was ultimately not worth the risk of bringing my precious collection into contact with the half-junked Petri dish. I was instead subjected to a litany of hard-won musical life lessons, the majority of which were negative and would make the bravest of us shudder.
As a Marylander, you canât move without bumping into a lacrosse player and I seemed to work alongside most of them. Great dudes, for the most part, but I was subjected to the deeply layered and multi-faceted discographies of Barenaked Ladies, Dave Matthews Band, Seven Mary Three, and Matchbox 20 seemingly at infinitum. My burgeoning depression and isolation was only bolstered by the new guy insistent on the rich dividends paid by closer examination of the âback catalogâ of Sublime, Incubus, and 311. Itâs not that I didnât yet have my thing, necessarily⌠I was (and still am) still head over heels in love with the first Green Day album but I hadnât the bandwidth to understand that there was a world beyond 99.1 on the FM dial. The faces that peered down at me from my postered walls were the suburban-issued standards of Cobain, Staley, Cornell, Vedder, rinse, repeat. Enter Bob1, the goofball that first averted my gaze from the Mt. Rushmore of grunge adorning my bedroom walls.
To this day, Iâll never know how old he was. In my mind, he seemed endlessly mature and suave. He just seemed, you know, fucking cool. He once bought me a case of Michelob bottles for staying late one night while he fooled around with his boyfriend in a Ford Escort. Itâs likely the wizened and world weary shift manager was closer to, uhhh, 19. The gap, at the time, was enormous. Our overlap in 711 tenure wasnât nearly as long as one would gather from my high regard for the guy. The gift he gave me was unintentional but altogether more life-altering. His day typically consisted of scamming money orders, smoking in the office, and digging through his backpack that was impossibly jammed with scores of tapes. He abhorred CDâs and, for some reason, would expound at length on the merits of the cassette. It seemed a bit short-sighted, but everyone has their soapbox.
As the summer of Bob1 rolled around, my hours ramped up and I became a trainee for the overnight shift. In theory, this was to consist of doing literally nothing until the donut dude showed up around 4am. Not much for work itself, Bob1 instead cracked open my skull⌠through my ears. One night, as we were refreshing the cold box with newly uncrated Yoo-Hooâs and, more than likely, extinguishing the propellant on cans of whipped cream; he popped in a mix tape. Bad Religionâs âModern Manâ followed by Operation Ivyâs âThe Crowdâ followed by Screeching Weaselâs âAshtray.â Just like that, I was gone. Whatever needed to shift had shifted. Iâd found something I was unaware was missing but it locked into place and I was forever changed.
Bob1 was fired a few nights later. Shit, maybe it was months later. All I ever heard was him being caught âmanipulatingâ himself in the backroom. As would be expected when unceremoniously fired from a post of such esteem, you donât get time to pack. The only severance was, unfortunately, not for him. The silver lining, for this future punk, was an abandoned knapsack of predominantly unmarked tapes. The ones donning legit packaging and liner notes were undoubtedly pilfered from Planet Music, a short lived megastore whose lifespan was undoubtedly shortened by the endless parade of Catonsville shoplifters, myself included, worth their weight in overpriced longbox Compact discs.
Bob1 was never to return, though I saw him the following year watching pornography⌠at the public library. By that point, it was far too late. His tapes were now mine. Months of research aided by (still-spotty but perhaps the best gift Iâve ever been given) my dialup, revealed the unmarked album Iâd been obsessing over was my first copy of NOMEANSNOâs world-beater âWrong.â I couldnât wrap my still-forming brain around it, but it yielded two things. My first favorite album and the P.O. Box for Alternative Tentacles. That was all it took.
In my recollection, the Bob2 era feels like it was either concurrent or years later. In all honesty, it was likely mere weeks after the aforementioned masturbating traineeâs inadvertent punk rock gift. Somewhere in there I got the worldâs shittiest car. Regardless, I hadnât seen my cousin since my family had fled the increasingly drug-addled neighborhood of my youth when I was 13. A couple years on and my cousinâs family had finally followed suit. In the intervening years since weâd last played wiffleball together and dicked around the gross creek behind our Baltimore rowhouses, Bob2 had grown really long hair and braided it like Dexter Holland did in one of those videos. Google that monstrosity⌠wow. At the time, though, it was the coolest and most punk thing Iâd ever seen. Plus, Bob2 was a rad skater. Heâd grown long and lanky. He was a bit awkward on land, sure, but he was all grace and flying limbs on his Alien Workshop board. He was my entree into the world of actual skaters. It was here that I realized I was not, in fact, an actual skater. I clumsily pushed and crashed and recklessly fell off stuff, but he was great. When the rain or uncompromising Mid-Atlantic humidity pushed us inside, he still insisted on practicing carpeted kickflips or other such tasks I found increasingly unlikely. At the exact middle of our Venn Diagram, though, was the grainy and over-saturated VHS we found at the thrift store when scanning for punk threads.
Unlike the myriad JNCO clad dudes in ball-bearing necklace vids he foisted upon me, it was 1989âs âBlockhead Skates: Splendid Eye Tortureâ that quickly became our indoor activity of choice. As his dusty SNES retreated further into the rearview, my next logical step came into view at exactly the five minute mark. To this day, I can still trace the choreography of Steve Berraâs halfpipe maneuvers, only if because it was how I was introduced to Minor Threat. âStumpedâ and, later on in the compilation, Fugaziâs âBrendan 1â again split my wig. It was likely years before I was âcoolâ enough to know that the singer was the same dude! In much the same way Bob2âs predecessor was deserving of a more shadowy moniker, my cousinâs deserving of anonymity for no reason other than those fucking colored rubber bands that he lovingly braided into his locks in the fall of 1995.
Massive thanks to Adam for writing this brilliant story, and for the very kind words. What a classy guy! Obviously he is highly adept in the art of wordsmithery. You can catch many more of Adams thoughts and words relating to punk and Hardcore on NOECHO.COM, or follow him on twitter @adam_yoe đŹđ¨
Anyone who has their own story to tell should shoot me an email and I’ll put it on the site. Hit me up doesntsuck604@gmail.comÂ
I suppose there are a couple moments where I could make the claim and point definitively where I believe that music changed my life. Was it for the better? Iâd like to think so, sure.
It was around â91 or â92 in Southern California. I was a mouthy little suburbanite living on the outskirts of Long Beach. I was well into punk rock music by this time so I guess that story weâll save for later. However, most of what I and my small group of friends had learned of punk was being taught to us by the older kids. The older brothers, sisters, and cousins were the ones imparting this loud and angry ethos of musicality upon us, the troublesome little shits of the neighborhood.
They taught us about Minor Threat, the DC scene, and what straight edge meant to some people. We learned from them the importance of Bad Religionâs logo, and how punk wasnât stupid or naĂŻve. It was to be taken seriously. They even taught us about TSOL and what âCode Blueâ meant â not that the lyrics didnât spell that one out for us!
Those older kids gave us a lot to go on which, honestly, without punk rock music to back it all up and facilitate these ideas and concepts that lurked behind all of the attitude and the leather and the distortion â shit, who knows where Iâd be today? It was actually really great to have some guidance to help us circumvent all that music and madness. I mean, aside from irony, what was MĂśtley CrĂźe really going to teach me about drugs with the song, âKickstart My Heartâ playing on an album clumsily named, âDr. Feelgood?â All while knowing full well that they were blasted out of their minds most of the time. It was all suddenly so dumb. It was a dumb image and an even dumber message. Punk rock music taught us that everything on the radio was bullshit. And our older pals taught us how to use punk to hone our newfound bullshit meters.
It was at one of their many house parties that I saw for the first time, Bad Religionâs video, Along the Way. It was playing on the television in the living room. A copy of a copy on VHS, so the tracking was dipping and waving in and out. It was a good bootleg for the most part.
I was already listening to Bad Religion by this time – only slightly less than religiously (har har). Iâd first borrowed a blank cassette copy off a guy at school who had recorded the No Control album onto it. The music was so consistent, and driving, and good. The lyrics of the first song, âA Change of Ideas,â were written so that their cadence flowed so well alongside those perfect, chainsaw guitars. And the drums! Fast and gunning for the end of the song so much that you couldnât wait for the next tune to start while hoping the current song would never end. It was, and remains, a great fucking album.
Back to the party.
The house had a bit of dinginess to it that youâd come to expect from a local neighborhood house in the â90s. The leftover style and look of the â80s, complete with faux wood paneling on the entertainment center AND the television; the tan carpet that mightâve been white so many years ago; the cigarette burns on the arms of a worn smooth, mud brown corduroy recliner; and the stale scent of old beer lingering with the aroma of several freshly cracked new ones.
I remember walking in, seeing the video had just started. The credits came up and their logo flickered. I heard familiar sounds of tuning and random drum hits. I saw and heard Greg Graffin. I grabbed the nearest chair from the dining room table, pulled it right up to the screen, and sat directly in front of the set. It was just like that old Maxell tape ad: the âBlown Away Guyâ with the shades in the chair bombarded by the incoming wall of sound. Nobody was watching but me anyway.
It was the first time Iâd been able to actually witness the band perform. (This was still before my first ever show of theirs at the Palladium in Hollywood just before Generator came out. Yeah, yeah – another story.) And, since I was trying to learn drums for my own shitty little punk band that I was in, I was locked onto good olâ Pete Finestone. That dude was an animal. I still believe that he was the one that truly defined the driving power that Bad Religion came to have. Donât get me wrong. How Can Hell Be Any Worse is clearly one of the best, and Finestone is present for half that album. But Suffer? No Control? Against the fuckinâ Grain?!
Yeah, no contest.
Finestone was ripped too. He was fucking those drums up on every song! Thereâs even a part where heâs pulling something broken off his rack tom and then just clicking in the next song like there was nothing in the way but the audience. And those people were getting rocked! Although, the funniest part for me was when they interviewed him and he just down plays his role in the band as if he wasnât actually the bedrock of force that the rest of the guys were standing on.
One of the high school mentors came up to watch with me. He took a sip of his beer and blew smoke from his cigarette at the screen.
âYou gotta keep practicing so you can get as good as him.â He pointed.
âYeah.â
âYou still have a long way to go though, dude.â
âYeah. I canât practice at my house. Parents hate my shit.â
âWell, I mean, heâs buff, dude. You gotta long way to go. Youâre just a little skinny guy.â He chuckled as he took another drink.
âOh. Yeah.â I laughed it off. I was still glued to the set.
A few months later I took the bus over to Zed Records in Long Beach and bought my own copy of Along the Way. I watched it until it wore out. I memorized it. Honestly, I still have it memorized.
Since I couldnât practice at my own house, I sat on a stool in front of a mirror in my room, put the video on, and pretended to play what Finestone was playing. It was really the only way I could practice â mimicking the physical as best I could in order to get that muscle memory working.
I think the slip cover on that VHS was in tatters by the end of it all. But I swear to this day that whenever Iâm writing or playing the drums, one of the things I think of is Pete Finestone behind his set at those Bad Religion shows. I think of what sort of rolls or fills he would do and try to incorporate that sound and that feel into my own parts.
They should bring Finestone back for a reunion, man. That dudeâs drumming changed my life.
Thanks for reading.
Thank you Cary, for the trip down memory lane! You can hit Cary up on twitter @CaptFakeHeadÂ
If you’re reading this and thinking “hey I have a story about how music changed my life!” please, write it down and send it my way. I don’t care if it was 1978 or 2018. All stories are welcome as long as they’re about punk or punk-adjacent music. Catch me on Twitter @SteveDoesnt or email me at doesntsuck604@gmail.com
When I was a kid the world barely expanded beyond the cul-de-sac at the end of my street in Northside PoCo. I knew about 4 phone numbers. To me, a long distance was the walk to my school, which then seemed like miles but, in adulthood, it probably clocks in at about twelve minutes. The world to a child seems enormous, but a child’s world is rather small; mine was anyway.
I was pissed off.. My mom died when I was eleven. After that I started to act out. I felt like I had to grow up but I wasn’t ready. I would get in trouble at school for being destructive. I wanted to be cool and fit in, but I never really understood how. I would try to tag along with the bad kids but I didnât have the same clothes as them, and I wasnât allowed to stay out late like they were. I didnât realize it at the time, but I spent those years searching for my place in the pack and never finding anywhere I felt at all comfortable. Everything changed one night when I was 13 years old. That was when I found punk rock.
In 1995 my sister, who was two years older than me, started hanging out with these skater-chicks from school. There were three of them, and of course I developed a substantial crush on all of them immediately. They wore Airwalk sneakers, they had their hair dyed different colours and they all packed around skateboards. I knew if I wanted to impress them I needed to have a skateboard too. Somehow I inherited one, I think from one of my sisterâs friends, but it was huge! It must have been meant for extra tall adult men with giant feet or something, but it was all I had and I made it work.
All summer long I tried to figure out how to ollie on a strip of pavement in our backyard, and when the skater-chicks were over I would make sure I was nonchalantly watching X-Games or something cool like that. Despite my efforts, summer had ended and I think they still just saw me as the dorky little brother of their friend. I needed a new angle and I decided this âpunk rockâ stuff they were always talking about was going to be my gateway to immortal coolness in the eyes of every 15 year old girl at my school.
Like most bedrooms of older sisters with pesky younger brothers, hers was stringently off limits, but I needed to infiltrate it to have access to her CD collection. Me, I was still on cassette. My sister was the only one in the house with a CD player, but I knew I could dub her CDâs on to tape if I could just buy enough time. Iâd had success at this in the past with Pear Jam and Cypress Hill, so I knew it was possible, but I also knew that if I was caught, I would have to face her vicious fingernails and my tape would be promptly destroyed before my eyes.
It was around Christmas that year when I decided to make my move. My sister was preoccupied, probably watching Sailor Moon or Degrassi on the TV downstairs. There was a window of opportunity so I took it. I snuck into her room and went straight for the CDâs, but I had no idea what I was looking for. How do I know which ones are punk!? I started by looking at the album covers, but that wasnât getting me anywhere; None of the bands had âpunkâ in their name either, and there was no sticker on the front that said âthis is punk rockâ. Defeated, I started looking at the song titles on the backs and finally, on the back of one gnarly looking CD with a kid chewing his own arm on the cover, I saw it, a song called âPunkhouseâ. I knew this one had to be what I was looking for, and it had 31 songs on it too. More bang for my buck! The album was Kill The Musicians by Screeching Weasel.
I popped my blank cassette into the front of the machine and the CD into the top. I made sure the volume was all the way down. Then I hit record on the tape, waited a few seconds (you always wait a few seconds because the beginning of any tape is unrecordable), then I hit play on the CD and got the hell out of there! It was nerve wracking, having to wait for it to finish, worrying the entire time that my sister might go into her room. Of course I would have to sneak in at the half-way point too, flip the tape over and queue the CD up where it left off. I managed to do all of this and get out alive with my tape in tact.
I waited until nightfall, after she had gone to bed, because if she saw me with my walkman she might investigate what I was listening to. I remember it like it was yesterday: Everyone was asleep and, because we had relatives visiting, I was demoted to sleeping on the couch downstairs. I huddled up in the blankets, put my ear buds in and hit play . . . *GUITAR*/ âSHE TOOK ME INTO HER LOVELY HOME/CALLED NICARAGUA ON THE PHONE/SHE WENT TO SEE INDIANA JONES!â . . . Then the snare came in like a machine gun, and in that moment; In that very instant, the importance of trying to impress the skater-chicks was completely removed from my brain, and what happened immediately after that, I can only describe as absolute clarity. In a split second, and for the first time in my life, I knew, without a doubt, exactly who I was and where I belonged. I didnât realize I was searching for something, but I knew I had found it. I listened to that tape, front to back, at least twice that night, and every day walking to and from school for probably six months straight. It was fast, it was rude, political, grubby, snarly, it was pure excitement! Iâve never been the same since.
This is a story Iâve heard told many times; something along these lines anyway. Everyone describes their introduction to punk with the same words and phrases: âclarity” “hope” “a place to go” “where I belonged” “my tribe” “what I had been searching for” “homeâ. I love all of those descriptors, and for me, I would add one more, âa world beyond the cul-de-sacâ.
Not long after that fateful December night, my sister moved on from punk. I even inherited her CDâs, and cherished them until they were obsolete. I still have them though.
Over the years my taste in music has broadened significantly. Iâm not ashamed to admit that I even went through an intense gangster rap phase, but punk rock was always a constant, always bubbling away inside me. Everything Iâve ever done was in the spirit of punk. It was always my identity, It always will be, it was never a phase, and that asshole Ben Weasel will always be my savior.
Hey! If you have a story of your own you’d like to share, send me an email: doesntsuck604@gmail.com
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How I Got Into One Of The Most Hated Punk Rock Bands Ever
The Doesn't Suck 