Dustin Stroud of Say Hello To The Angels on how he got into punk and how it’s shaped his life

Dustin Stroud sings and plays guitar in Austin punk act Say Hello To The Angels.  Here’s the story on how he got into Punk Rock and how it helped shape his life.

Fisher Price: MY First Punk Rock Experience!

I would be lying to you if I said it was my first time. Like when we get busted doing something we’re not suppose to… “I swear to god, it was my first time… or… This has never happened to me before.”

Because, I think the first time I heard Punk Rock was The Sex Pistols or the Ramones, probably in the late 70’s as a child, when nothing was more intense or more hardcore than the theme to Star Wars! I also clearly remember hearing GBH Blasting out of my brother’s Jambox. We would strap it to one of our Huffy Bike Handlebars, when he would come to visit from far away Tampa, Florida. It was super hot in Texas, but I still had a mullet until I was 14 years old. I guarantee whatever he was playing (definitely Dead Kenedys, Too Drunk to Fuck, Police Truck, and Holiday In Cambodia), it wasn’t more important to me at the time than Kiss, Metallica, or Guns and Roses (I said Mullet).

But The first time I heard it and it mattered, the first time this relentless sound we call punk rock really mattered, and the first time my head went whip cracked and took notice (like the first time you saw a girl and said… “Wait a minute… WHAT is this, I like it?!”) I was riding in the back seat of my friend Mike Parson’s Ford LTD (The old ones that were still made of Detroit American Steel and got 8 miles to the gallon). (And) I couldn’t really tell you what I was actually listening to at the time in my life, because when Mike Parsons pushed that tape into the player and it went “CHUNK!” I was really born for the first time, that day. Myage, by the Descendents, from TWO THINGS AT ONCE, came out of the speakers and hit me like a bucket of cold water in the face.

In the first bars of the bass and drum intro, I saw and heard everything that would shape me and lead me through the next 20 years of my life, slagging out like some ancestral memory from my caveman brain! I can’t explain this without sounding cheesy, but my life was absolutely changed that day. All the way from one Suburb (Suburban HOME!!!!) to the next, and to the next, to one mall, and then to another, we listened to that tape (I’m still listening to it today, and it is as sacred to me as the Beatles or Bach and still more relevant than ever!). Those Descendent records took me through my first devastating break up with my first real girlfriend (SHE DON’T NEED NO ONE!), to my wife and happy marriage today (IF YOU DON’T GET SICK OF ME!) Those records are like a Batman Decoder Ring for my life. I’m not fully certain I could have become an adult without the lessons on I DON’T WANT TO GROW UP. When that tape finally came out of the tape deck, the Mullet was gone, I was in a band, and on my way to RIDE THE WILD, HERE IN MY VAN! Thank you Milo, Bill, Ray, Tony, Carl, Stephen, Frank, and Doug. You are the reason! These are the ALL-O-GISTICS!