Boy, the hits just keep on coming this week. First there was the Social D tour cancellation/Mike Ness cancer treatment story, and now this… Longtime Alkaline Trio drummer Derek Grant announced yesterday via social media that his time behind the kit has come to a close. Here’s the full statement… The band followed with a […]
Longtime Alkaline Trio drummer Derek Grant announced yesterday via social media that his time behind the kit has come to a close. Here’s the full statement…
The band followed with a statement of their own:
In light of Derek’s decision to step down as a member of the band, we’d like to send our love and thanks for everything he contributed. It’s impossible to put into words all he’s done, but we are endlessly proud of what we have accomplished with one another.
The 46-year-old Grant was by far the Trio’s longest-running drummer, having joined the band after the departure of Mike Felumlee (Smoking Popes) back in 2001. He also released a really great solo record of his own, Breakdown, back in 2015.
Boy, just one bummer story after another lately, but today’s will hopefully at least have a happy ending. If you were like us here at Dying Scene headquarters, you were probably getting yourself psyched up for the upcoming Social Distortion summer tour (with our new friends The BellRays in tow). Unfortunately, that tour – and […]
Boy, just one bummer story after another lately, but today’s will hopefully at least have a happy ending. If you were like us here at Dying Scene headquarters, you were probably getting yourself psyched up for the upcoming Social Distortion summer tour (with our new friends The BellRays in tow). Unfortunately, that tour – and the new album that was FINALLY slated to follow, have been put on the shelf for now, as iconic Social D frontman Mike Ness is dealing with a recent cancer diagnosis.
Here’s the statement as posted to Social D’s social media:
We think that life is going to go according to our plan, but it has a way of saying “I don’t think so!”
In the midst of pre-production, I was diagnosed with stage one tonsil cancer. I was feeling well enough to continue with recording in the studio up until the very day before surgery. The band and I were so inspired and excited to lay down these tracks, which by the way sound f-ing AWESOME!
The recovery from surgery is a day-by-day process and in three weeks we start radiation and that should be the last therapy I need. The team of doctors are certain that once finished with this course, I will be able to start the healing and recovery process. We expect a full recovery enabling me to live a long and productive life.
It breaks my heart to postpone the Summer Tour, and this album release, but time is required to heal. I can’t thank our loyal fans enough who have been waiting so patiently for this. While it will take a little longer-I promise you that it will be delivered and it will exceed your expectations.
I want you all to know that this has opened my eyes to a whole new struggle. I know it’s one that many of you or your loved ones have personally endured, and my heart goes out to you-because I now know what it’s like from this heavy experience.
I’m surrounded by love and support from my friends and family ESPECIALLY my lovely wife and incredible boys (oh and don’t forget my 3 dogs and kitty) THANK YOU ALL in advance to our unbelievable fans for YOUR love and support right now.
We WILL get through this….
This would have been the Social Distortion’s first US tour to come East of the Mississippi since the year before Covid. Their last studio album was Hard Times And Nursery Rhymes, which came out like the week I started writing for Dying Scene…in January 2011! Keep Mike and his family in your thoughts if you’re into that sort of thing. We’re sure he’ll be back out on the road before long!
Happy Wednesday, comrades! Another super rad Dying Scene exclusive for your eyeballs today. It comes to us from Atlanta-based punks The Carolyn. It’s for a track from the band’s new EP, Harmful History, which is due out this coming Friday (6/9 – nice) on 59x Records and it’s a track that should sound familiar especially […]
Happy Wednesday, comrades! Another super rad Dying Scene exclusive for your eyeballs today. It comes to us from Atlanta-based punks The Carolyn. It’s for a track from the band’s new EP, Harmful History, which is due out this coming Friday (6/9 – nice) on 59x Records and it’s a track that should sound familiar especially if you’re, like some of us, “of a certain age.” Yes, it’s a cover of none other than The Cranberries classic “Salvation,” which, for my money, is the best Cranberries song that you’re allowed to cover; “Zombie” is off-limits because it’s perfect and because, if you’re a dude, you’re going to get it wrong. ANYWAY, here’s what the band had to say about covering the track:
“We always enjoy capturing a bunch of b roll and tour happenings when possible, and we came back from our last European tour with a ton. Recording this cover was some of the most fun we’ve ever had in the studio, and it made sense for us to capture that.”
Check out the video for “Salvation” below, and order your very own copy of Harmful History right here!
Thanks to everyone who has checked out all of the new content we’ve been cranking out since the relaunch of Dying Scene! We’re stoked to be back, and we’re even more stoked that you’ve been checking in! Because we have an awful lot of material from the old site in the Archive, we thought it […]
Thanks to everyone who has checked out all of the new content we’ve been cranking out since the relaunch of Dying Scene! We’re stoked to be back, and we’re even more stoked that you’ve been checking in! Because we have an awful lot of material from the old site in the Archive, we thought it would be cool to take a look back at some of the posts from our past.
It’s a bit of a bittersweet installment of From The DS Vault this time out. Word broke this afternoon that Philippe “Phil” Marcade passed away earlier this week after a relatively brief battle with pancreatic cancer. Here’s the news as relayed on his social media:
With great sadness we share the news that our friend Philippe Marcade has left us.
Phil, who thrilled audiences as the lead singer of The Senders and authored the memoir Punk Avenue, succumbed peacefully among loved ones in Paris on June 5, 2023, following a brief struggle with pancreatic cancer. He was 68 years old.
From 1976 through his final performances in 2017, Philippe remained true to the music and scene he loved, delivering a frenzied mix of rock and roll / R&B intensity and deft, inventive songwriting to audiences of both The Senders and The Backbones.
Those fortunate enough to see him perform know that Philippe Marcade was a rare individual who had true business being a LEAD SINGER. From the late- ‘70s NYC Punk scene onward, Phil would take the stage without the protection of a guitar, grab the microphone, and for an hour or so he’d croon, scream, dance, joke, blow harp and take audiences on a wild ride with easy assurance. No matter where or when, Phil always turned it on.
Phil and I chatted over the phone a few years ago when he was doing press for his dynamite book Punk Avenue: Inside The New York City Underground 1972 – 1982. He was living in Italy so it was very much a long-distance call (remember those!?!) and it was super fun. Phil was funny and engaging and still seemed to display a sense of awe and wonderment about some of the obviously chaotic but certainly legendary times that he was privy to in and around New York’s Lower East Side half a century ago. We stayed in contact via Facebook a few times, and he was always inspiring and interested in what was going on. When I was reading the book and doing research for our talk, I found out that a friend of mine ran in the same circle as Phil in NYC back in the 1970s, and they shared a bunch of mutual acquaintances. In a weird twist of fate, cancer has claimed both of them this calendar year. I miss them both. So without further ado, here’s my chat with Phil from May 2017.
If we were running down a list of the most famous, and infamous, figures from the epicenter of the fledgling punk rock scene in New York City’s Lower East Side in the mid-1970’s, we’d have to scroll pretty deep into the annals to find the name Phillipe Marcade. Marcade fronted the high-energy blues punk band The Senders that were staples at such legendary venues as CBGBs and Max’s Kansas City for the bulk of the late 1970s and early 1980s, and yet neither the man nor the band really got the credit that they deserved outside a twelve-block radius.
Yet Marcade was every bit as entrenched in the 1970s Lower East Side as any of the Ramones or Debbie Harry or Johnny Thunders or Legs McNeil or any of the others whose names come more easily to mind. In fact, to hear one-and-only McNeil tell it in the Foreward to Marcade’s brand-new book, Punk Avenue: Inside The New York City Underground 1972 – 1982, Marcade, “while not a household name, was friends with everyone at CBGB and Max’s Kansas City, and a bona fide member, in good-standing of the New York Punk Rock Scene.”
We caught up with Marcade over the phone from his home in Italy to discuss Punk Avenue and the early NYC punk scene in more detail. Still the purveyor of a heavy Parisian accent, Marcade is equal parts humble and engaging. That he ended up with this particular story to tell is the result of a series of profoundly fascinating circumstances. A native of France, Marcade took a trip to Amsterdam as a teenager that led to a chance encounter with a American traveler named Bruce, which, in turn, eventually resulted in Marcade spending several decades in the Lower East Side, but not before stopovers in Boston, a longer stay in Amsterdam, a hog farm in New Mexico, and…his eighteenth birthday “party” in a Federal Penitentiary in Florence, Arizona. It seems that even in the 1970s, the feds frowned on shipping large quantities of straight hash across state lines…
Marcade might have ended up in the gritty, tough-as-nails Lower East Side in the early 1970s by happy accident, and yet that’s not an entirely bad way to describe the foundation of the scene itself. Given the transient, underground nature of the close-knit, artistic community that found itself magnetically pulled to that neighborhood at that time, it’s not a stretch to say that punk music as we came to know and love it would not — could not — have started anywhere else and come out the same. The thing about living and thriving in the geographical center of a once-in-a-generation social and cultural and artistic movement is that you don’t realize you’re there until you’re gone and the moment has passed. That’s especially true when you’re viewing said geographic center from the wide eyes of an outsider. “I thought it was so magical and exciting,” says Marcade, quickly adding on that he “thought that was probably because I was new in New York, and to everybody else I thought it had always been like that. Only years later did I realize that no, that was a true revolution going on at the time!“
While perhaps unaware of the importance of the movement that he was a direct witness to at the time, Marcade did, at least, recognize sheer talent when he saw it. “I think that the first very important band of the movement, without being in the movement really, was Dr. Feelgood in England. They really changed things around.” Once the music moved toward this side of the pond, the cream quickly rose to the top. Says Marcade: “The Ramones and the Heartbreakers and The Cramps were just amazing groups. I’m so glad I got to see them.” And see them, he did. Especially The Ramones, whom he estimates he saw roughly “a hundred times.” When asked of his insider’s perspective on whether or not Ramones were, indeed, worthy of what’s become iconic, almost mythological status, Marcade answers an emphatic yes. “They were just amazing! They were so good. I never went to a Ramones show and left thinking “eh, that wasn’t that great.” They never ceased to amaze me!”
On the other hand, perhaps not as worthy of her iconic, mythologized status was Nancy Spungen. Marcade knew knew Spungen prior to, and in fact had a hand in encouraging, her fateful 1976 move to London. “I always thought Nancy was kind of a sad soul, a lonely girl,” says Marcade with a hint of sadness present in his voice for the first time in our conversation. “Everybody was so fucking mean to her,” a fact that led to her leaving her heroin-addicted cat (“Oh, that fucking cat!”) with Marcade and heading to London, where she’d eventually, infamously, cross stars with the Sex Pistols’ Sid Vicious. “I think a lot of people misjudged her because of the way she carried herself, and because of the whole heroin thing. But knowing her before, she was a sweet girl. She was as much a victim as Sid. She was not that “evil woman” that turned poor Sid Vicious on to drugs… I don’t subscribe to that theory!”
There are no shortage of memorable characters and stories and moments peppered throughout Punk Avenue. Truth be told, the four-page glossary of supporting characters is almost overwhelming (and would probably better serve the reader if it appeared as a reference index to refer back to). That Marcade can recall such a large volume of names and faces and coincidences is no small feat in and of itself. “It’s funny,” says Marcade, “because I seem to have a very, very good visual memory, and when I think back to an anecdote like that, I can really remember it well.” As the project neared completion, he fact-checked and cross-referenced some of the stories and their corresponding dates with some of his surviving companions, though most stories required only little tweaks.
Yet the real noteworthy feat is not simply remembering stories, but weaving them together in a way that is fun and funny and sad and personal and gripping, whether you’re a fan of early the early NYC punk scene or not. Marcade not only does exactly that in expert fashion with Punk Avenue, but he does it in a language that’s not his first. It is perhaps that wide-eyed outsider’s perspective that keeps everything fresh and exciting and new and real to the reader, especially when the stories involve such Herculean figures. Aside, maybe, from Please Kill Me, it’s hands-down the best read about the Who, What, When, Where, Why and, especially, the How of the origins of the punk rock scene as we know it. Punk Avenue is out now, and you can pick it up at Amazon or Barnes & Noble or Target but hopefully at an independent bookseller near you!
Head below to read the text of our full half-hour conversation with Marcade. Aside from what’s touched on above, we cover a lot of ground, including the changes (read as: gentrification) in the Lower East Side in the forty years since the dawn of punk civilization, which bands from the scene got unfortunately overlooked, and which more recent bands have carried the torch most surprisingly. The results may surprise you!
Dying Scene (Jay Stone): Thank you very much for this – I consider it an honor to be able to talk to you. And congratulations on the book. I’ve read it cover-to-cover twice now and I’m now on my third time through because…
Phil Marcade (author, Punk Avenue): You’re joking!
No, I’m not joking at all. I got it in the mail shortly after the holidays and read through it pretty quickly, and then I wanted to read it again to get a little deeper knowing that we might be talking one day. I find it to be raw and uncomfortable sometimes, but you’ve got such a positive and humorous way of writing and talking about things that I find it to be a very fun and compelling read.
Well thank you very much. I’m very touched by that. Thank you!
You’ve obviously had these stories kicking around for a long time…what was the impetus for compiling everything and writing the book in 2017?
Well, what happened is that the idea was kind of turning around in my head for a few years that I wanted to do it. I started by taking a little notebook in my pocket everywhere I went, and I made little notes whenever a funny anecdote would come to mind so I could remember it. I wanted to see if I would have enough to fill up a book, so I just made a whole list of anecdotes, and then I just let time pass by. I wasn’t sure when to start (writing the book). And then, actually, I got motivated by my nephew. His name is Pierre, and he lives in France, and he was asking me questions over email about Max’s and CBGB’s and was very interested by that whole scene. So I started to write a few chapters and sent them to him. He loved them! So having an audience really helped me with getting the work done. I would write about thirty pages and send it to him, and the whole book went like this. It kept me going for about four months.
I was wondering how you were able to — I don’t even want to say recall all of those stories, but there is so much detail and there are so many people involved. The copy that I received has the glossary of who’s who, but I almost wish it had a proper index so I could go back and figure out where everybody overlapped. But I’m glad that you brought up that you started with the notebook, because I was curious how you could possibly recall all of those stories and the people that you came across. It was not just impressive but really staggering.
Thank you! It’s funny, because I seem to have a very, very good visual memory, and when I think back to an anecdote like that, I can really remember it well. The part that I find the most difficult is to put it in the exact time. It was a good job for me to verify all that on the internet afterward. For example, I say at one point that we stopped at the inauguration of Richard Nixon, so I’m checking the dates and yup! I was right. Sometimes I questioned my memory, but it seems that everything that I remembered was right. Little by little I made corrections, or I remembered something slightly wrong. It was really fun to do.
Did you reach out to any of the other people that were involved to verify some of your dates or some of your memories, or see if you got things correct?
Yes, as a matter of fact, there’s a funny incident that happened. One of the main characters is Bruce, my friend that I met in Amsterdam. I wrote the whole thing without talking to him, and since he’s in the book so much and we talk about some stuff that’s…illegal…I wanted his permission. So I called him up on the phone and I told him I wrote this book and he said “that’s fabulous! Read me a little of it!” I didn’t know where to begin, so I just started with the very first page. I read to him that it was my eighteenth birthday and I was transferred from the jail to this other penitentiary in Tempe, Arizona. And he cut me off and said “is this going to be published?” So I thought “uh oh…” I said “yes, why?” And he said “are you out of your mind?” I said “oh, you don’t want me to talk about that we were busted?” And he said “oh no, that’s fine, but the jail was in the town of Florence!” (*both laugh*) I was very relieved that he was fine with the book, and very happy that he had corrected a terrible mistake I made in the third line of the book! (*both laugh*) I talked also to my ex-wife about it and I talked to a few other people who were in the book about it and they were all very happy. I was glad they could confirm some of my stories, so that was cool.
The ‘70s in Manhattan, specifically the Lower East Side, was obviously the epicenter of such a large social and cultural movement, and we really haven’t had a movement like that since then except for maybe Seattle. I’m always curious to hear people that were there, and when they exactly realized that they were in the middle of something that was really interesting and compelling and not like something going on anywhere else. Is that a thing that you were conscious of at the time, or was it not until months or years later…
Not at all! Not at all, and I’ll tell you why. I was not conscious of it because I had just arrived in the States, especially in New York. I thought it was so magical and exciting, but I thought that was probably because I was new in New York, and to everybody else I thought it had always been like that. Only years later did I realize that no, that was a true revolution going on at the time! But since I was brand new to the scene, I was brand new and I didn’t really realize it. But indeed, it was quite incredible, and thinking back on it, what made it so special is that it was such a small scene. Everybody knew each other’s name. There might have been two hundred people, at most, at Max’s and CB’s. It was a small scene of locals. So no, I didn’t realize there was anything revolutionary going on while it was going on…I thought it was just (revolutionary) for me!
One of the things that really comes across in the book is how small but I guess how diverse the scene was. I wasn’t born until the very end of the 1970s so I obviously wasn’t around, but I think we have this romanticized view of that scene and how it revolved around bands that sound like Ramones or like The Dead Boys, but it was really more diverse than just those “punk” punk bands.
Yes absolutely! I totally agree with you!
That is something that really comes across that I think gets overlooked otherwise. The Senders, for example, are not a traditional “punk rock band” by any stretch of the imagination, but you were right there in the middle of the whole scene.
It’s true. I think that at the time when I first heard the term “punk” was through Punk Magazine, so to me, it kinda meant underground, New York, maybe if there was a style it was short hair and not very professional, not very polished, not very skilled musicians. That’s all it meant. Nobody was in the same style as another band. Nobody really knew who was “punk.” I think that all became clearer after the punk wave in England. Then, it was like “yeah, that’s punk.” But the Ramones had Beatles haircuts. Nobody thought of them as being “punk”…or at least I didn’t. And then you had stuff like Talking Heads, or Blondie…that wasn’t “punk” at all. So it was very mixed indeed. A lot of different styles at the same time. But now, when I hear the term punk, I think 70s or early 80s New York or London, but it took a lot of years to define that image. It didn’t feel like that back then to me at all. It’s funny, because when punk became more popular, in the ‘80s, I hated the term. It had become so overly commercial. Everybody had safety pins on! (*laughs*) As time has passed, I love the term again, but for a while it was just kinda lame! (*both laugh*)
Were there other bands at CB’s or at Max’s that, for whatever reason, never took off the way that Ramones or Talking Heads or Blondie did that you were always sort of curious about why they never got bigger than they were? I think that The Senders would certainly qualify as one of those bands, but are there others that while you were watching them, you were confused about why they never got big?
Oh yes, so many. There were so many bands that I admired so much that never got anywhere. The first thing that came to mind was Buzz And The Flyers. They were tremendous! They were an incredibly good rockabilly band and I thought they would be huge. Also, a lot of bands like The Victims. In the late 70s, there were so many that were great but that never got mentioned or that have been forgotten but were truly great.
Have you been back to the Lower East Side much in recent years? I know that obviously CB’s shut down and Max’s shut down, but what are your thoughts on the gentrification of that area? Even Alphabet City is not what Alphabet City used to be!
Yeah, to say the least! (*laughs*) It’s amazing. I never go to that neighborhood much anymore. Before I left, a friend from Europe came to visit me, and I took them to Avenue B and I couldn’t believe it! It was all yuppie restaurants and stuff. The last time I had been down there, it was very dangerous! There was nothing to do there but cop heroin. It was not a place to put a restaurant! (*laughs*) It’s amazing how much it’s changed, and I find it a bit sad. It seems to me that so many cool people got pushed out of the Lower East Side and moved to Brooklyn or Queens. Like myself, I lived in Queens for fifteen years because my rent became too much. I was living between Avenue A and Avenue B for twenty years or so, and I had to move out. All my friends too. It improved, maybe, the quality of life, but it lost a lot of the artistic life. All of the musicians and artists moved out, which is a shame, because there was such a cool community there before. Everybody was within three or four blocks of each other and that really made a cool scene, but I guess they all went to Brooklyn now! (*both laugh*) You’ve got to be very rich now to live in Manhattan. It’s crazy.
Right. And I’m calling from just outside Boston, and we’ve gone through the same thing. The Rat, which you reference early on in the book, got turned into a luxury hotel years ago…
…No…
Yeah. And whatever was left of that part of the Boston scene has long since gone away.
Oh man. I didn’t know that The Rat was gone.
Yeah, that building got sold to Boston University and they basically leveled the whole block and turned it into a luxury hotel.
I haven’t thought about that place in a while. I’m really sad to hear that. And you know, it’s the exact same thing on the Lower East Side. NYU bought most of the buildings and turned them into expensive rent for students that have rich parents! (*both laugh*) That’s nice for them, but not for us!
Yeah, and I honestly have mixed feelings about it. Like you said, the art and the community and the grit are gone, and yet, the city (Boston) itself is much safer. You can walk around at all hours of the day and night and not take your life into your hands in some of those old neighborhoods, so it’s a double-edged sword.
Exactly! It’s good and bad. It’s too bad it wasn’t safe like that when we were living there. But now, all my friends moved to Brooklyn — to Williamsburg — and that’s alright. It’s less dangerous than it was in 1980. But it’s a shame. It’s beautiful! It’s very nice, but it’s impossible to afford! Not when you’re a chick playing in a band or a painter or something!
One of the characters that I find most compelling in the book — well, she’s not a character, she’s a real person — was Nancy Spungen. She and her relationship with Sid have obviously been mythologized over the last forty years, but you knew her at a very different time. I was really fascinated by the way that she wove in and out of the early third of the book. You knew her differently than the public does now, and you even took over her heroin-addicted cat! That’s fascinating!
(*laughs*) That fucking cat! (*both laugh*) It’s funny, because I always thought Nancy was kind of a sad soul, a lonely girl. She wasn’t that pretty. Everybody was so fucking mean to her. And then, I read an interview with Johnny Rotten saying “ah, she worked as a prostitute and she was ugly.” And I thought, ‘what’s the matter with him? He’s supposed to be the king of punk rockers and he’s putting her down for not being pretty?’ I mean, come on! (*laughs*) What, you have to be a top model to be a punk rocker? But yes, I think a lot of people misjudged her because of the way she carried herself, and because of the whole heroin thing. But knowing her before, she was a sweet girl. She was as much a victim. She was not that “evil woman” that turned poor Sid Vicious on to drugs… I don’t subscribe to that theory! (*laughs*) She was really, very nice.
And I think the thing that we lose sight of is that she was twenty years old when she died. So it’s not like she had this whole long history and legend…she was still in many ways a child.
Exactly. It all just went so quick.
The whole mythological thing that a lot of them — the Ramones, the Sex Pistols, bands like that — developed over the years, does some of that seem a little bizarre to you? Or were bands like that mythologized for good reason? Were they really just THAT compelling?
The Sex Pistols I couldn’t tell you so much because I never saw them. I did meet Sid, but the most I actually saw of the Sex Pistols was on TV. The Ramones however I saw a hundred times. With the years that have passed, I think that their notoriety is totally deserved. They were just amazing! They were so good! The only thing I thing that I think people kind of reproached the Ramones about in America after a while was that it was a bit too much repetition. It was always a bit the same. But what a trip! I never went to a Ramones show and left thinking “eh, that wasn’t that great.” They never ceased to amaze me. And so indeed, they deserve that notoriety. Joey Ramone deserves a street named after him, totally! And I saw things change. I think that the first very important band of the movement, without being in the movement really, was Dr. Feelgood in England. They really changed things around. Then the Ramones and the Heartbreakers and The Cramps were just amazing groups. I’m so glad I got to see them.
Are there bands or scenes that you’ve come across over the last, let’s say twenty years, that remind you of the old days? A new scene that you’ve noticed burgeoning somewhere else or bands that carried on the legacy of the Lower East Side in the 70s, or is that gone?
Well that depends. In a way, I feel that I’m a bit out of touch, but hey…I’m 62! I think it’s god that I’m out of touch! (*both laugh*) I’m sure that there are some kids, some teenagers now some place doing something that’s completely unknown that will be known and great. But in more recent years, bands that I’ve seen more recently, I really love Daddy Long Legs. They’re a great band. I also really liked about ten years ago — shit, I forgot their name — that band from Sweden. Shit…they really, really followed the spirit…they had that hit “Don’t Say I Told You So” or something like that?
Oh…damnit…is it The Hives?
Yes! Of course! The Hives! I thought they were fabulous, and I thought they were very much in the spirit of the old scene. They totally got it.
Wow…that was a great song and a great album and I think I forgot about them for about half a decade until right now.
Thanks for remembering! That would have driven me crazy all night!
They had a sort of mod, British look to them, so I think I forgot they were Swedish, but you’re exactly right. I don’t want to take up too much of your evening — my afternoon — but thank you so much for talking. I could probably pick your brain for hours. Have you gotten a lot of positive feedback about the book yet? I know it’s not out yet, and there are the obvious quotes on the back of the book, but have you heard other cool feedback from people about it yet?
Yes, so far it’s been all good. Which is good, because it’s pretty terrifying. You don’t know if you’re going to put something out and have people hate it and think it’s crap. It’s very encouraging, what I’ve heard from friends to far. But again, they’re friends, so you never know if they’re just saying it to be nice. But people that I don’t know have given it positive reviews as well, so I’m very enthusiastic about that. I hope it stays like that for a while! Probably not, but… (*laughs*)
Happy Monday, comrades! Behold, it’s Punk In The Park lineup announcement day! This year’s installment of Punk In The Park, or as I like to call it, P in the P, takes place November 4th and 5th at Oak Canyon Park in Orange County, CA. The lineup is certainly one that’s worthy of the SoCal […]
Happy Monday, comrades!
Behold, it’s Punk In The Park lineup announcement day! This year’s installment of Punk In The Park, or as I like to call it, P in the P, takes place November 4th and 5th at Oak Canyon Park in Orange County, CA. The lineup is certainly one that’s worthy of the SoCal environs:
Happy Friday, comrades! Dying Scene is stoked to get to bring you yet another kick-ass video debut today. It’s from Boston-based progressive post-punks Trailer Swift, and it’s for a track called “Cross My Heart,” which is slated to appear on their upcoming album Variant. The video was filmed at the Midway Cafe, one of the […]
Trailer Swift!
Happy Friday, comrades!
Dying Scene is stoked to get to bring you yet another kick-ass video debut today. It’s from Boston-based progressive post-punks Trailer Swift, and it’s for a track called “Cross My Heart,” which is slated to appear on their upcoming album Variant. The video was filmed at the Midway Cafe, one of the last great dive bar venues in their rapidly-gentrifying hometown and a place that’ll always occupy a special place in yours truly’s cold, dead heart.
Here’s what the band has to say about the clip:
“Cross My Heart” was shot at our favorite local club/watering hole in Boston. The idea behind the video was simple, make the viewer think we are the band, but then sit at the bar and ignore what’s going on, complain about life, and underappreciate the younger band getting label attention. Basically, to poke a little fun at ourselves and the way the music we grew up on (and love to write) is finding a new audience, but maybe, it’s not finding us.”
“A little meta, a little humor, and a lot of sarcasm. At one point in the video, you can clearly see that we might be changing our minds, but that moment quickly passes as we make fun of our own logo and cringe.”
There’s a thing that happens when you grow up in a music-appreciating household and then you reach middle school or junior high or whatever you call it in your neck of the woods and discover a new band or a scene that becomes YOURS. They’re generally a generation or so older than you – or […]
There’s a thing that happens when you grow up in a music-appreciating household and then you reach middle school or junior high or whatever you call it in your neck of the woods and discover a new band or a scene that becomes YOURS. They’re generally a generation or so older than you – or at least 10-ish years or so but it just SEEMS like a generation when you’re 13. They’re not your parents’ music – and in fact are probably a rebellion to your parents’ music – and they aren’t little kid music or cheesy pop music, but they become YOURS and they teach you about life and growing up and all sorts of things that seem so cool and almost mystical when you’re a youngster and they serve as the riverbed for whatever scene’s waters you end up dipping your toes into.
But then there’s another thing that happens when you’re in, say, your mid-twenties and you discover a new band. They’re still maybe a handful of years older than you, and they somehow take the musical influences of your parents – which really weren’t that bad or worthy of rebelling against at all – and some of those musical influences from the first bands that you fell in love with and it becomes something that’s new and different and it impacts you on a personal level because they provide a roadmap for a lot of the things that you have been through and will go through in this thing called “adulthood,” and so you have similar experiences and reference points. For the duration of my adulthood, the alpha and the omega of that latter phenomenon has consisted of two bands (with, coincidentally, an overlapping band member in their collective history): Lucero and The Hold Steady. The former celebrated their 25th birthday last month, and the latter are in the midst of celebrating two decades as a band throughout this year with a series of one-offs and weekenders at a variety of locations both at home and abroad.
The two- and three- and four-day weekender that’s been part and parcel of the last half-dozen years of The Hold Steady’s touring schedule was eschewed for the Boston stop on this particular “run.” Instead, the six-piece (frontman and occasional guitarist Craig Finn, dueling lead guitarists Tad Kubler and Steve Selvidge, keyboard/multi-instrumentalist Franz Nicolay, bass player Galen Polivka and drummer Bobby Drake) chose to use this stop for what I’m pretty sure is their largest one-day area headliner to date. It was held at the sparkly new Roadrunner music hall in Boston’s Brighton neighborhood (more specifically in the newly-christened Boston Landing neighborhood, which is also home to the sparkly-new practice facilities for the Bruins and the Celtics and a sparkly-new and giant New Balance flagship building). The sweet part of the city it’s not, necessarily; but obvious grievances about gentrification and the loss of smaller and especially independent music venues in a theoretically world-class music city aside…Roadrunner is a pretty sweet venue. Still, that’s all a topic for another time.
Set to the musical backdrop of the thematically-appropriate Boston classic, “Rock And Roll Band,” the band took to the stage at Roadrunner at about quarter-til-ten and, after a brief introduction, ripped right into the opening chords of “Constructive Summer” from their 2008 album Stay Positive, which happens to be the album that vaulted THS into my own personal stratosphere. The song and its theme of hope and of collective positivity served as an ideal segue into the festivities that would come over the next hour-and-forty-five-minutes or so. Two dozen songs followed, representing seven of the band’s nine studio albums – no love for the underrated duo of hiatus bookend albums, Heaven Is Whenever (2010) and Teeth Dreams (2014)on this particular night.
It would be a little too on-the-nose to say that a Hold Steady headlining performance is what a resurrection feels like, but I’m not sure the fact that the reference is on-the-nose makes it untrue. When the band launches into the familiar opening notes of longtime crowd favorites like “Sequestered In Memphis” or “Your Little Hoodrat Friend” or “Massive Nights,” the crowd takes on a celebratory, almost spiritual tone, a sort of mutual catharsis, really. Enigmatic Craig Finn leads the show in his traditional, chaotic manner that evokes notes of both a hardcore band frontman and an exuberant preacher leading the flock during a Sunday sermon. Nicolay and Kubler flank the stage adorned in shirts and ties and jackets and, in the former’s case, a bowler hat that I can only describe as “spiffy.” Selvidge and Polivka both ooze a sort of rock and roll that combines 70s swagger with mid-Gen X shrug. Bobby Drake is about as rock-steady and, for my money, underrated as you can get behind the drum set in this scene, effortlessly bracing the changing tempos and swirling guitars and keys and extended, celebratory jams.
The Hold Steady released their ninth album, The Price Of Progress, earlier this year, and the new tracks that found their respective ways into the setlist for this gig were equally well-received, particularly “Carlos Is Crying,” which is a song that I think I called “the most Hold Steadyish song on the record” when I reviewed the album back in March. While I’d certainly call The Hold Steady a rock-and-roll band for lack of a better and more finely-tuned descriptor, it’s easy to tell that many of the bands members grew up on the punk rock and hardcore scenes of the 1980s (and not just when Mosh Pit Josh assumes co-frontman duties for the breakdown of “Stay Positive,” the main set’s penultimate song).
The four-song encore was a compilation of a bunch of old-school THS songs that continued the revelatory nature of the evening. Lead guitarist (co-lead guitarist?) Tad Kubler brought out the double-neck Gibson SG that you see pictured there on the right for “Lord, I’m Discouraged” and the first verse of “Banging Camp” before trading it out for his more traditional 345. “Chips Ahoy” and of course “Killer Parties” closed out the evening, the latter with an extended jam that seemed to indicate a reluctance to actually leave the stage and bring the celebration to a close. On this night, as with on many nights dating back over the course of the last twenty years, we were, indeed, all the Hold Steady.
Massachusetts’-own alternative rock legends Dinosaur Jr. served played a 75-minute direct support set. THS frontman Craig Finn, who was notably raised in Minnesota but was born a stone’s throw from Roadrunner at St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center and returned to the area for four years as a student at Boston College in nearby Brookline, told a story of mountain biking down to Newbury comics to by Dino’s 1991 classic Green Mind the day it came out, so it made perfect sense for the local trio to play an extended support spot on such an occasion. The trio opened with “Thumb” from that very same Green Mind album and proceeded to steamroll through a sixteen-song set that represented most-if-not-all corners of their nearly 40-year career as a band. A Dinosaur Jr. set really is a sonic assault in the best possible way, a tsunami of sound emanating from frontman J Mascis’ wall of Marshall full stack cabinets adorned in vintage Marshall Super Bass and Hiwatt heads.
Somehow Lou Barlow’s ‘lead bass’ attack still finds a way to carve out its own space in the mix, which is no easy feat. Murph’s razor-sharp drumming provides at least a semblance of structure to the whole onslaught, particularly useful during Mascis’ epic, fuzzed-out solo wanderings. Getting J and Lou to switch instruments and have the latter take over both guitar and lead vocal duties for “Garden” from 2021’s Sweep It Into Space was a particular highlight of the three songs that the four or five of us in the spacious photo pit got to shoot to kick off the set. A later highlight occurred when the trio was joined by Scott Helland on bass for a “cover” of the Deep Wound song “Training Ground.” For the uninitiated, Deep Wound was a pre-Dino (so, very early 80s) western Massachusetts hardcore band that featured Mascis on drums, Barlow on guitar, Helland on bass and Charlie Nakajima on vocals.
Apologies go out to Come, the local alternative rock icons who played the role of lead opener on the three-band bill on this night. Due to a combination of Mother’s Day festivities, traffic, and being unfamiliar with the area, we missed the photo-pit portion of the band’s set. Check out more shots from the Dino and THS sets below!
If you search back through the annals of Dying Scene history, there exists the very real possibility that Frank Turner and The Interrupters and Chuck Ragan would each individually rank pretty high on a retrospective “top ten most photographed artists” list. I’m pretty sure I’ve shot them a collective two-dozen times myself. And so obviously […]
If you search back through the annals of Dying Scene history, there exists the very real possibility that Frank Turner and The Interrupters and Chuck Ragan would each individually rank pretty high on a retrospective “top ten most photographed artists” list. I’m pretty sure I’ve shot them a collective two-dozen times myself. And so obviously when it was announced that the trio would not only be touring together but that that tour would find its way to Boston’s MGM Fenway Music Hall on a Sunday night, of course yours truly would be there! (Editor’s note: Laura Jane Grace was slated to appear on this bill as well but had to bail semi last-minute. Jesse Malin was a late add as a replacement and an even later cancellation due to an unexpected injury.) Unexpectedly chaotic traffic-related issues aside (seriously…not entirely sure who made the executive decision to sync up the ending time of Northeastern University’s graduation ceremony inside Fenway Park with the doors-open time at the MGM outside Fenway Park, but that person should be fired into the sun), the evening was about as enjoyable and high energy as you’d expect.
Accompanied on pedal steel by long-time wingman Todd Beene (of Glossary and Lucero and Tim Barry fame), Chuck Ragan got the evening’s festivities started off in fine fashion. When an event is co-headlined by not one but two high-energy, full-band acts, particularly when it’s a venue as cavernous as the shiny new 5500-capacity MGM Fenway, you never really know how well an acoustic-based opener is going to translate. Rest assured, Ragan’s trademark road-worn growl was more than enough to not only grab the attention of the decent-sized crowd that showed up so early but to shake the sparkly new building to the rafters.
The bulk of Ragan’s ten-song set was culled from his 2011 release Covering Ground and its 2014 follow-up, Till Midnight, both of which included Beene on pedal steel and backing vocals as a member of The Camaraderie. Coupled with a holler that could raise the dead, Ragan plays his trusty Martin acoustic with the ferocity of John Henry’s hammer, so the subtleties and soaring notes of the pedal steel make for a unique sonic balance. The one “cover” in the set was of the Ragan-penned Hot Water Music staple “State Of Grace,” a nod to the Hot Water fans in the crowd and to the band’s thirtieth anniversary, which will be coming next year!
The Interrupters stormed the stage next for their co-headlining slot on the bill. They kicked off their set with “Take Back The Power,” the biggest single from their self-titled 2014 debut full-length, and spent the course of the next seventy-five minutes in a constant barrage of frenetic energy and positive vibes. The band’s dynamic lead vocalist, Aimee Interrupter, rarely spent a full verse in the same place, instead dancing her way back and forth across the width of the stage, engaging with – and feeding off – the joyous crowd every step of the way.
Not to be outdone, guitarist Kevin Bivona and his bass-playing younger brother Justin frequently danced their respective ways back and forth across the stage and spent as much time airborne as they did with their feet planted to the ground. Jesse Bivona is about as rock-steady a drummer as you’ll find in the scene, serving as the band’s gas pedal and providing harmonies-on-harmonies-on-haronies with his brothers. Touring “fifth Interrupter” and pride of Dover, NH, Billy Kottage amps up the band’s live presence and coolness factor on keys and trumpet.
Spreading the love for the band’s four studio releases pretty evenly throughout their sixteen-song set, there’s the sense that the band could have easily played twice as long and still kept the audience in the palms of their collective hands. In spite of the high-energy nature of the band’s set, a particularly high note was their performance of “Alien,” from last year’s In The Wild album. The down-tempo song is a bit of a sonic outlier, and is also probably the most personal song on an immensely personal album, and so there are those among us who wondered aloud if it would make it into the band’s set. Yet Aimee’s voice not only never faltered but soared to new heights by the time the song reached its sonic crescendo.
And then it was time for the evening’s closing act, the inimitable Frank Turner and the Sleeping Souls. Obviously Boston is not a hometown show for the Wessex boy himself, but at the very least Boston has become a home-away-from-home over the course of the last decade-plus, as many a US tour have started or ended – or both – in the city proper or in other nearby New England cities. Wielding a Gibson SG as his main axe on this run, Turner and crew (longtime sidemen Tarrant Anderson on bass, Matt Nasir on keys and Ben Lloyd on guitar now joined by Callum Green on drums) immediately ripped into “Punches” from last year’s FTHC album, a clear sign that this was very much going to be a high octane rock-and-roll set.
Turner and crew have played their fair share of epic long shows or, on numerous occasions played two-a-days like a high school football team in the dog days of summer, so being able to play a 75-minute, 17-song headlining set allows them to condense all of that energy into a solid, blistering set. As a result of the countless miles together, the band has long been one of the most locked-in groups around, and that was on full display at MGM. It is probably tempting for some bands to play “just the hits” in such a situation, but The Sleeping Souls did a pretty solid job of featuring the more punk-rock-tinged FTHC (including a scorching rendition of “Non Serviam”) amidst a setlist that featured tracks from eight of his nine studio albums spanning back to 2007’s Sleep Is For The Week. Sorry No Man’s Land…maybe next time.
Check out more photo galleries from the three killer performances below!
If ever there was a band that exemplified how the changes in the music business since the dawn of the Covid pandemic both giveth and taketh away, you could reasonably make the argument that that band is UltraBomb. Since the band is still in its relative infancy with a grand total of one live show […]
If ever there was a band that exemplified how the changes in the music business since the dawn of the Covid pandemic both giveth and taketh away, you could reasonably make the argument that that band is UltraBomb. Since the band is still in its relative infancy with a grand total of one live show and one album that is almost officially released in all the current formats of the day, we’ll give you the so-called twenty-five-cent version first.
UltraBomb is a three-piece international supergroup, and I know the term supergroup gets thrown around somewhat liberally from time to time, but this one checks whatever boxes you need it to check for that term to apply. The band consists of Dublin-by-way-of-Canada based Mahones frontman Finny McConnell on vocal and guitar duties, Jamie Oliver (the one from UK Subs and SNFU, not the chef, though they’re both based in the UK so you can’t be 100% sure of that I suppose) on the drums and none other than Minnesota icon Greg Norton of Husker Du fame holding down the low-end.
We were lucky enough to catch up with Norton for a super fun phone call about how the project came together, and the story is an interesting combination of a sign of the 21st century digital times and good, old-fashioned punk rock. After about a decade-and-a-half away from the music world altogether post-Husker Du, Norton dipped his toes in the water and eventually started playing in Minneapolis-based three piece band Porcupine. Eventually, Porcupine’s bandleader decided to change direction, leaving Norton again without an active band. Enter: the magic of Facebook. “Finny and I had been Facebook friends for quite a while. (He) is a huge Husker fan,” Norton explains. Once Finny saw that Norton was bandless, “he sent me a message and he’s like “well, I’ve got this idea. I know the greatest punk rock drummer on the planet, Jamie Oliver. He drums for the UK Subs, and I think we should put a band together.”
As it turns out, this may have been news to none other than Jamie Oliver, save for a little behind-the-scenes finagling. “At the same time (he was messaging me,” Norton explains, “Finny messaged Jamie and said “hey, let’s put a band together with Greg Norton!” And Jamie’s like “I’m in!” With step one – the lineup – now set, the band got to work on the other important early band decisions. “We were trying to figure out a name for the band, and a friend of Jamie’s suggested UltraBomb.” Boom, step two: complete. “I had a photo of my daughter Coco with the lollipop and sunglasses, and a friend of mine locally here in Red Wing took that photo and put the atomic bomb in the background, and I’m like “holy crap, I’ve got the album cover!” I slapped “UltraBomb” on that picture and sent it over to Jamie and Finny and they’re like “That’s it!”
With a band lineup and name and album cover all squared away in relatively short order in August 2021, there came the came somewhat superfluous next steps of A) actually meeting each other and B) actually working on music. Turns out, Finny had a plan for that too. The following month, the Mahones frontman was playing a series of solo shows in Europe, and just so happened to have some time booked at a studio in Berlin. Jamie, as fate would have it, was also going to be in Berlin. All they needed was Greg. As he tells it, “Finny mentions to me that he’s got four days booked in a studio, and all of a sudden it’s like “well, I should go to Berlin…” I had never met these guys. I book a flight, fly to Berlin, Jamie picks me up at the airport, and that’s the first time we meet face-to-face. The next morning, we’re in the studio getting set up, and Finny shows up, and that’s the first time we had ever met face to face too. It was the first time the three of us had been in a room together. We get set up, Finny had been writing riffs for the band, and that first day we wrote four songs. The second day we wrote the following six.”
The result of that whirlwind, four-day session, is Time To Burn. It’s ten originals plus a Norton-fronted cover of the Dead Boys’ classic “Sonic Reducer,” all banged out in less time than it took me to transcribe our conversation (below). It’s got a raw, throwback vibe, as you might expect from an album that was essentially written on the fly in the studio and grew out of a collection of basic riffs Finny had stored up and a volume of lyrics that Norton just happened to have with him that weren’t initially set to any real music. And while the band essentially got together over Facebook Messenger and the album essentially came together over the course of a long weekend, getting to the point where there was a physical album available for the general public to get its respective grubby little mitts on AND getting to the point where the multi-national trio could play shows together has been a grind of epic proportions.
There were tour dates canceled due to the waxes and wanes of Covid restrictions. There were production hold-ups because, as you might have heard, Adele and Taylor Swift and Beyonce released albums on vinyl and gummed up the works. And then, last summer, there was the most serious hold-up yet, when Norton was diagnosed with prostate cancer.
Routine bloodwork revealed a possible diagnosis and a referral to a urologist, and from there, things escalated quickly. “They do an MRI, they do a biopsy, they kind of map out everything that they want to look at, and then you get on the surgery schedule,” says Norton. While the band did have to cancel a run of England tour dates as a result, they were able to squeeze in a one-off show – their first ever – in Minneapolis last July. Four days later, Norton was on the operating table. “I was in the hospital for one night,” Norton explains. “They want you to get up and walk around and be active and get back to your regular normal life as quick as possible.”
Norton is quick to point out that his follow-up appointments and his margins after the operation are all A-OK, so he can finally get back to that “regular normal life” of a touring musician. Not only are physical copies of the record FINALLY just about available (with a little help from DC-Jam Records) tonight, May 11th, UltraBomb will play not only their second-ever show when they hit the stage at the Turf Club in St. Paul, Minnesota, but it’ll mark the beginning of a tour that’ll keep them on the road for the rest of the month. They’re teaming up with Bar Stool Preachers for a run of eighteen shows in twenty days – the longest run Norton will have been on since the last real Husker run decades ago. It’s a run that Norton and the crew are excited to finally be undertaking. “I’m sure nostalgically I look back on those (lengthy van-based Husker Du tour) days and remember them fondly. But the reality is I’m sure we’ll be in the van and going like “how many more hours do we have to go? I have to pee!”
The UltraBomb/Bar Stool Preachers “It’s Got Legs Tour” runs from May 11th in St. Paul to May 31st in Denver, making stops in places like Memphis and St. Louis and Phoenix and LA and, of course, Punk Rock Bowling, along the way. Check out the full rundown here! You can stream Time To Burn below on Spotify and, most importantly, scroll down for our full chat, complete with lots of goodies about the Husker Du days, his fourteen-year-absence from even touching a bass, his entries into the free jazz movement, and much more!
Oddly enough, yes, the following Q&A is condensed for clarity and content purposes.
Dying Scene (Jay Stone): Thanks for doing this! I consider this an honor and a privilege, man. As a fan for a long, long time, it’s really cool to be able to get to chat with you, so thanks!
Greg Norton: You bet! So you’re in Massachusetts?
Yeah, I live just north of Boston.
Ok! I loved playing Boston back in the day. Some epic, epic fun times.
So, I’m in my mid-40s and that makes me the right age to have not been old enough to see Husker Du live…where would Husker have played in Boston? I’m trying to think of what was around for venues back in the day…The Channel probably? Or The Rat?
We played The Rat several times, we played The Channel several times. I can’t recall the venue that we played there towards the end, after The Channel (Editor’s note: it was Paradise in 1986 with Soul Asylum opening or it was The Orpheum Theater in 1987 with The Feelies opening. I know, right? Here’s a link to a sweet Husker database I found after we spoke.) Boston was on our very first trip East, and I remember coming into town and we were thinking that we were going to have to rebuild a fanbase and grow it from the ground up like we did out West. And we got to Boston, and the show was packed, and it’s like “oh, there’s this thing called college radio now, and there’s a lot of colleges in Boston!”
And a lot of music colleges specifically!
Right! For sure! Probably a year and a half after that (editor’s note: 3/22/84), REM called and asked us if we wanted to open for them at the Harvard Fieldhouse. We were like “hell yeah!” So we tacked on a couple extra shows and drove out there. Playing with Mission of Burma out there was great. A lot of really great memories of Boston.
As someone who was born at the very end of the 70…
So you were just a wee lad during the Husker years!
I know! I’ve been in and around the scene in this area for a long time now. I grew up in New Hampshire, but we were close enough to Boston that depending on the conversation, you could call yourself part of the Boston scene. But the scene was so different in the mid-80s than it was in the mid-90s and it’s almost unrecognizable now from either of those times, but that’s a scene that I wish I had been born a little bit earlier into.
Yup, that was a great one.
So anyway, yeah, thanks for chatting about this new UltraBomb record. It’s super fun, and I have to say that when I first read the press release maybe a year-and-a-half ago now, during that initial announcement that you and Finny and Jamie were putting a band together, I remember thinking “wow, that seems like something born out of Quarantine.” Where you guys are all physically located and the way it came together, that just sounds like it would be a perfect project for a bunch of guys who had nothing to do for nine months or whatever so they put a band together. Is that at all close to accurate?
Well, the getting it together over the internet part is accurate. Finny and I had been Facebook friends for quite a while. Finny is a huge Husker fan. Mahones covered a Husker tune. I had been playing with a band in Minneapolis called Porcupine. That just didn’t ultimately work out. I loved playing with those guys, but the guy that was the band leader – it was his band and he decided he wanted to change directions, so then I was no longer playing with Porcupine. Finny saw that and sent me a message and he’s like “well, I’ve got this idea. I know the greatest punk rock drummer on the planet, Jamie Oliver. He drums for the UK Subs, and I think we should put a band together.” At the same time, he messaged Jamie and said “hey, let’s put a band together with Greg Norton!” (*both laugh*) And Jamie’s like “I’m in!”
That’s awesome.
That’s really how UltraBomb became a thing. Then we were trying to figure out a name for the band, and a friend of Jamie’s suggested UltraBomb. I had a photo of my daughter Coco with the lollipop and sunglasses, and a friend of mine locally here in Red Wing, when that was first up as a family Facebook post, took that photo and put the atomic bomb in the background, and I’m like “holy crap, I’ve got the album cover!” I slapped “UltraBomb” on that picture and sent it over to Jamie and Finny and they’re like “That’s it!” This is all in August of 2021. Skip forward a month and Finny is in Berlin doing a solo tour and Jamie just happens to be in Berlin. Finny mentions to me that he’s got four days booked in a studio, and all of a sudden it’s like “well, I should go to Berlin…” I had never met these guys. I book a flight, fly to Berlin, Jamie picks me up at the airport, and that’s the first time we meet face-to-face. The next morning, we’re in the studio getting set up, and Finny shows up, and that’s the first time we had ever met face to face too. It was the first time the three of us had been in a room together. We get set up, Finny had been writing riffs for the band, and that first day we wrote four songs. The second day we wrote the following six…
So wait, you guys weren’t trading ideas over Zoom or whatever in this whole process? It was really like “pick the lineup and the name and the cover art and then go write a record in the studio?” That’s fascinating!
Yeah pretty much! We wrote in the studio. Finny would play us a riff and we’d be like “okay, let’s do that” and we’d hammer it into an arrangement. Once we were comfortable with it, we’d tell the engineer “hit record on this one!” Almost everything at that point was recorded either on the first or second take. Jamie had to leave the third day, because he had to play a gig, so that day, Finny and I were in the studio just cleaning up some guitar parts, adding rhythm guitar parts, stuff like that. And I said “well, I’ve got all these lyrics…” so I pulled out like 2000 sets of lyrics. Finny sits down and looks at them and he’s like “well, I’ve got the whole record figured out.” The next morning, Sunday morning, Jamie is back with us. Finny goes in and sings the entire record. We did some on-the-fly pencil edits on the lyrics just to make them flow a little bit better, but I was blown away with how well Finny took my lyrics – which weren’t written to his music – and made them fit perfectly.
That’s really wild.
We got done and Finny’s like “there it is, bruvs. We created a masterpiece!” At dinner on the second night, we talked about covering something just for fun. We decided on “Sonic Reducer,” so at the end of recording all the vocals on Sunday, the three of us knocked out “Sonic Reducer.” It was the first time Finny and I had ever played “Sonic Reducer” with a band, and I sang it! That’s the one song that I sing on the record. It just turned out so fantastic. Jamie did the mix in London, and it just turned out so awesome. I love it.
I think that “Sonic Reducer” is the first song that I remember hearing as a kid that I identified as being a ‘punk rock’ song. Moreso than The Ramones – I mean, I knew who the Ramones were obviously as a kid, but there’s a different feel obviously about “Sonic Reducer,” there’s a different feel about Dead Boys than there is about the Ramones. That’s the first song I remember hearing and going “THAT’s a punk rock song. I need to know more about what this is!”
There’s a ferocity and an urgency to that song, right from the downbeat.
It’s really sort of wild to me that, aside from meeting over Facebook and getting to know each other over social media, this is otherwise a throwback, “punk rock” record, and I mean that in like the most ideal way. That’s not necessarily what I was expecting because of the way that so many people were writing music over Zoom and trading song parts and files over Dropbox. It’s really sort of refreshing that even though the band came together on social media, the album was written with just three guys in the studiofor four days. That doesn’t happen enough in this scene anymore.
Yeah, I would agree with that. It was written in the moment. It came together so naturally. It felt like the three of us had been playing together for years. Finny and Jamie are such great guys that I feel like they’ve been my best buds for decades. The engineer couldn’t believe that we were writing these on the spot, but it’s that urgent, in-the-moment feel. The record captures the feel of what went down in the studio and obviously, we all have our backgrounds in punk, and there is somewhat of a nostalgic feel to it, but it also is fresh and sounds like it’s made for today.
Yeah, it doesn’t really sound like anything else. It’s a rock trio so it’s got that sort of “thing,” and it’s very raw. It sounds like you recorded it live and all in the same room together, which I like and appreciate, but it doesn’t really sound like anything else out there now. Did you guys even trade ideas about what direction you wanted or what kind of thing Finny had in mind or whatever, or was it really just “let’s put a band together”?
It’s funny, so when Finny first contacted me, he’s like “hey, you know, this will just be a lot of fun. Let’s play some Husker Du, let’s play some Mahones, we’ll through in some UK Subs, maybe some SNFU, and we’ll just get together and have a laugh, and maybe we’ll play some festivals. People will fuckn’ love it.” And then we were like “well, maybe we should write some of our own music too,” and then when it happened in the studio, it was like “holy crap, we just wrote an album!” We’re getting ready now to go out on this tour. Jamie is already here in Red Wing with me, Finny comes in Sunday (May 7th) and we’re getting ready. We want to start writing new material right away, and we might even try to get some recording done while we’re on the road. It’s kind of the nature of what UltraBomb is!
You’ve got what, a grand total of one show together under your belts at this point?
Yeah, one gig! Last July, in Minneapolis, after another stumble to get the band out on the road, I got diagnosed with prostate cancer. We canceled dates in England, but we had this offer from the Hook + Ladder in Minneapolis to headline a summer festival that they do, so Finny and Jamie fly in for that, we play one show, it was a total blast – the crowd went wild, there were people losing their minds, there were people crying, it was so incredible. And then five days after that, I had my prostate removed. We took the rest of last year off so I could recover. My diagnosis is good, my margins are clean, and the doctors say I should be yammering on for a few more decades here.
Hell yeah!
So that’s how we get to the It’s Got Legs tour, which starts Thursday (May 11th) in St. Paul. We’ve got eighteen shows through the end of May – we’re playing 18 shows in 21 days, and Punk Rock Bowling is the crowning moment of the tour. We’re doing two shows in Vegas, one club show where we’re going to open for The Dickies, which I’m really looking forward to. That’s a band that Husker absolutely loved back in the day. I’ve seen them numerous times. And then we’re on the main stage mid-afternoon on Monday, the last day. It’s us and then L7 and then Suicidal Tendencies and then Dropkick Murphys, so…
That’s all killer, no filler right there.
Yeah, jumping right into the deep end! (*both laugh*)
And you’re going out with Bar Stool Preachers on this run too, right?
Yup! They’re doing the entire tour with us up to Punk Rock Bowling. I think they’ve got their own shows set up for Punk Rock Bowling, and then the last tour of our run is in Denver on our way home. That’ll be without Bar Stool Preachers. Their new record is great by the way.
They’re such a fun band. They’re such a fun group to see live too. They put on a great show.
I’m looking forward to playing with them.
They can sort of play with a lot of different bands because they float between styles a little bit so they fit on a lot of different bills. I think I saw them with Bouncing Souls, and I feel like they were here with The Business and maybe Swingin Utters. Super fun band. Are you excited to get back out on the road finally?
Yeah, really excited! Porcupine did a few runs, usually just four or five shows. We did a support run with The Flesh Eaters, and that was great. Dave Alvin and John Doe and DJ Bonebrake. They were super nice guys, and it was great hanging with them for the week. We did a run of shows with Flipper with David Yow on vocals. And then Mudhoney and Built To Spill. Those were all short tours though, so this is my first full-blown tour probably since the last long Husker tour.
That’s pretty wild. Do you miss that part of the music industry? Being in a van and hitting the road for weeks at a time?
Yeah! Well, I’m sure nostalgically I look back on those days and remember them fondly. But the reality is I’m sure we’ll be in the van and going like “how many more hours do we have to go? I have to pee!” (*both laugh*)
Did that happen before, where someone would just hit you up about starting a band or joining their project? Was that a common occurrence for someone in your situation? I ask because I was just listening to your spiel with Mike Watt the other day. I don’t always listen to other shows or podcasts or things, but I love Watt and I’ve been blessed to talk to him a few times, so I used that as part of my research for talking with you, but I know he gets sent music all the time by people saying “hey, can you write with us?” or “hey, can you put bass riffs down under these tracks?” and whatnot, so was that a common occurrence where people would hit you up and ask about playing, and this time it just worked out? And I suppose, if so, why now and why Finny, because on paper it sounds like an interesting match…
You know, I dove into the restaurant world and became a chef and ran a place in Red Wing for seven years before I started my own restaurant. I went fourteen years without even picking up the bass. I thought “Well, that phase of my life is in the past now” and I just concentrated on the restaurant. It was probably early 2000s, there’s a jazz trio called The Bad Plus. Two of them are from Minneapolis, and they were playing a show and they had just released a record on Sony, These Are The Vistas, and they did a cover of “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” A friend of mine who was a regular customer and a huge music guy gave me a copy of the CD and said “hey, you should listen to this, I think you’d like it.” Right after that, they did an interview in a Minneapolis paper where Dave (King) and Reid (Anderson) were asked what their influences were. These are jazz guys, and they were like “growing up, Husker Du was a big influence on us,” and I was like “wow! That’s crazy!” I went to see them and loved the show. I wanted to introduce myself and say “hey, I really dig what you guys are doing!” and Dave immediately says “I have an idea for a band and you’d be the perfect bass player for it. So that became The Gang Font, which took maybe three years before we actually got together to play, but that was the impetus for me to get a bass amp again. I didn’t have any gear, so I bought a bass.
Had you gotten so far out of music that you even sold all your equipment?
I still had my electric basses that I played with Husker, but they hadn’t been played in a lot of years and they needed to be cleaned up and tuned up and all that. I bought a cheapy Fender ¾ acoustic bass to play on and actually that’s still a bass that I’ll take with me to go camping and stuff like that. It’s a beater bass, but it works. It sounds good. That’s what got me back into playing bass. The Gang Font is sort of a hard group to nail down as far as what we are…
That is entirely accurate. I’ve spent a little time with The Gang Font stuff on Spotify. It’s definitely tough to nail down.
We actually have another album that we recorded thirteen years ago, in 2010, and I just saw Dave a couple weeks ago and we’re FINALLY going to try to get that released. After that, Casey Virock calling up and asking if I wanted to take over the bass spot in Porcupine is the only other thing really. Although recently, I have been in the studio and recorded a long improv kind of piece with Charlie Parr. He’s on the Smithsonian label, and he is a national treasure. He’s an acoustic player, but he’s also a guy who I met and was like “oh yeah, Husker Du had a huge impact on me.” That was fun playing with Charlie too.
He’s from your area, right? He’s a Minnesota guy.
Yeah, he’s originally from Duluth I believe.
I don’t remember when the official album release date was, because it feels like a lot of that stuff has become sort of a moving target since Covid, between digital releases and then physical CD releases and then vinyl releases. It seems for a lot of bands like there are always different release dates…but does it feel different now than it did releasing a Husker album forty years ago?
Yeah, it does. And this has been frustrating. We put this record out ourselves. We ordered 500 or 600 copies, and it’s a small order. There are so many pressing plants that have closed over the last couple of decades that a small order is not a priority for a lot of plants. Then you get people like Adele putting out an album or Taylor Swift or Beyonce, and all of a sudden everybody gets put on hold so they can press up three million copies or whatever. There kept being all of these delays in getting the vinyl. The vinyl is now finally on its way to the distributor. Here in Red Wing, I just got the box of record sleeves for the pre-sale so that I can autograph them! Finny will sign them on Sunday, then we’ll get those back over to London with the guy that is collating everything together, and then he’ll get the pre-orders all shipped out. So if you pre-ordered the vinyl, it’s coming! (*both laugh*) Hold tight, I promise this is for real this time! That’s been frustrating, and then the other goofy thing is that we wanted to have the record available, so we did release it digitally last year, so now we’re trying to get people excited and press excited, and they’re like “well this record came out last year…” and we’re like “yeah but the vinyl is coming! And we’re going on our first tour!” Back in the day, when the record came out, it came out! There was a drop date and you hit it. Hopefully for our next record, things will go a lot smoother. We’re working with DC-Jam Records here in the States and they’ll put out our next album, and they’ll also be distributing this one when it finally arrives at the distributor. They also made some CDs for us, so the stuff is coming!
For a band that started, met each other and wrote and recorded an album in four days, for it to take a year-and-a-half to finally exist physically has got to be mind-numbing!
Yeah! It came together so quickly and then it was just all of these delays and it was like “oh man, this is killing us!”
If everything got pushed back because people ordered two million pressings of that Adele record, you know that 1.5 million of those are just sitting in thrift stores or the shelves at Target or Wal-Mart at this point. That was the wrong target market.
Exactly!
That drives me nuts…and I don’t have a physical product that I’m trying to release into the world. I just get mad for all of you people who are creating the art and doing the work. I really applaud people who still put out music and stick to it.
Yeah, I mean we had a lot of people who paid money on the pre-sale, and they’re still waiting…it’s crazy.
And plus, you had the whole cancer bomb dropped right in the middle of all that…
Makes for an interesting last couple of years, to say the least! (*both laugh*)
How are you now health-wise? You said before that things are good, all clear?
Yeah! Things are good. When they removed the prostate, the doctors said that it appeared that everything was contained, all of my margins were clean, all of my tests since then have come back clean, and that’s good. Actually, going down that journey, all of a sudden you start meeting all of these people that you know who go “oh yeah, I had that procedure done” or “oh I know somebody” or “oh, my dad had it done twenty years ago.” Prostate cancer is the number two cancer killer, and only because people usually don’t know they have it until it’s too late. I was lucky that something popped up on a regular blood test and it was like “you should go see a urologist.” So go out and get your prostate checked, all you men out there! (*both laugh*)
Seriously! Go to your doctor’s appointments, go to your physicals, get your bloodwork done…
Right! Get the finger stuck up your bum. It’s all good! (*both laugh*) It only takes just a couple of seconds!
For someone who hasn’t gone through that yet, how long a process is it between when something pops up in your bloodwork and when you’re on the operating table and they’re taking out your prostate?
You know, the diagnosis happened pretty quick. They do an MRI, they do a biopsy, they confirm that it’s there. They kind of map out everything that they want to look at. Getting on the surgery schedule, then, actually took some time. That was a longer wait, but then the procedure itself, I was in the hospital for one night. They want you to get up and walk around and be active and get back to your regular normal life as quick as possible.
That’s amazing. I’m glad you’re here, and I’m glad you got checked out because like you said, too many people don’t until it’s too late.
Thank you!
Since putting UltraBomb together and writing in the studio, has that prompted you to keep writing, whether it’s lyrics or other music? Do you have a lot of ideas to flesh out once you get on the road and start working together?
Oh yeah, sure. I keep writing lyrics all the time. Finny has been writing riffs for UltraBomb, so there’s a good chance that we’ll be able to get a record out – or get one recorded at least – most likely by the Fall. We’re going to even track some stuff on the road. The idea is that we might have a new single ready by the end of the tour, which is fantastic.
Well if you have twenty-one days together, that’s like a quadruple album based on the way Time To Burn came together…
Right, exactly! Jamie last night was like “what if, for each show, we came up with a new song? Then at the end of the tour, we’d have 18 songs, and that’s a double album! Let’s do it!”
That’s old school, Husker/Minutemen style!
Yeah, Watt and I were talking about Double Nickels (On The Dime)…that was going to be a single album. They had it ready to go, and then we dropped Zen Arcade and they’re like “oh, they did a double album! WE better do a double album!” (*both laugh*) They went into overdrive to write the rest of that record. Even Joe Carducci from SST wrote lyrics for that record. He wrote “Jesus & Tequila.” It was just a fun back-and-forth between us and The Minutemen. We love those guys. Miss you D. Boon!
When a guy like Watt says “we were inspired by your band to raise the bar” because Zen Arcade was obviously an iconic album and then it lead to Double Nickels… which is a legendary album…does that still feel cool to know that it was that sort of competition between you created something like that?
It is, yeah. The SST camp back then was us, the Meat Puppets, Minutemen, then Saccharine Trust and of course Black Flag. But Meat Puppets, Minutemen and Husker, the three of us, I think that was the nucleus of SST at the time and of the stamp that they left on the world. Meat Puppets are still out and playing and it’s great that Derrick (Bostrom) is back in the band. I’m excited to hopefully see them out on the road. They aren’t on the road right now – Curt (Kirkwood) lives in Austin, I think Chris and Elmo (Kirkwood) live in Phoenix – so I hope they all come out and check us out. I’d love to see those guys. And of course Watt never stops.
He’s unreal. He really kinda is. I don’t understand how he just keeps going. And he does that show all the time on top of making music, and he always puts like three hours of music on each show…
Oh yeah, yup. He said he’s been doing that show for twenty-two years. Man…that is awesome.
He’s one of a kind. They definitely broke the mold with that one.
Yeah, when you talk about going on the road, he’s like “well when ya shoving off?” and “where are you dropping anchor?”
Yeah, you really have to pay attention when he talks because he’s got so many Wattisms that take a minute to process sometimes…
Oh yeah, he’s his own pirate! (*both laugh*)
Thanks for doing this! I don’t want to take up too much of your afternoon and I try to be mindful of folks’ time. I really appreciate getting the chance to pick your brain even a little bit. As someone who grew up wanting to be a bass player for a while – and has long-since put that aside – but it was guys like you and Watt leading into guys like Ament in the “grunge” era who sorta revitalized your era’s sound, that’s what I wanted to be when I grew up. So I really enjoy getting to pick your brain!
Well thanks, I appreciate that!
And good luck on the road! I’m really excited for you guys to be able to be out there and I hope people show out for you. It’s a really good run, and a really good bill!
Yeah, I think they will! People are listening to it. If we’re coming through your town, go get your tickets! If we’re not coming through your town, follow us on Spotify or subscribe to our YouTube channel! We’re going to do a lot of content tor YouTube for this tour, maybe do some live streams, maybe do an UltraBomb travel log. Hopefully, the record will come out in stores while we’re on the road, and we’ll have copies of it on the road so people can come get it signed!
It’s got to be a pretty cool thing still to have a physical copy of it when it finally shows up, yeah?
Oh I can’t wait to put it on the turntable! Being able to hold it is super exciting.
Everybody go pick it up. Listen to UltraBomb. Like I said before, it is very much a quintessential “punk rock” record, and I mean that in the truest, most idealist sense of that term. My interest was piqued just by the original announcement…like “how are Greg Norton and Finny going to sound together…” It really does fit well. It’s really cool and really fun and hopefully you make your way to the Northeast some day.
Oh yeah, definitely. We’re planning on a lot of US tours next year. East Coast, West Coast, all over. Finny got turned on to Husker Du when he was 18. He had just moved to London and he had just missed our show and he wanted to basically try to make his way in the London music scene, and then he heard Husker Du and he was like “oh shit, maybe Minneapolis is where it’s at!” The very first song that he sang (on this record) was “Time To Burn,” and it was funny, I had to tell him “Finny, stop trying to channel Bob (Mould). You’re not Bob. Just be Finny!” He couldn’t contain himself; it was like “oh man, here I am in a band with one of my childhood idols,” you know? He’s a great guy and a fantastic writer and musician and his sense of composition is awesome. And Jamie is just fucking amazing, that’s all I can say.
He’s playing with Mahones now too, right?
Yeah, he was just out with the Mahones in France, and he’ll be doing another tour in I think mid-June or July. He’s also drumming with Anti-Nowhere League right now, so he actually is going to fly home to London from Denver because he has Anti-Nowhere League stuff coming up that first weekend in June. I plan on coming home and relaxing a little bit, and he’s going to go home and go out on another punk rock tour.
And yeah, speaking about Mahones covering “Makes No Sense At All” before, I could see that there are some hints of Husker on this record that I think people will enjoy. Not just because it’s a power rock trio, but there’s some of that feel.
It’s funny, I think a lot of that is just the way I play bass. Somebody commented after hearing it that it was like “wow, it’s cool hearing all those Husker basslines…” and it’s like, “well, no, those are Greg Norton basslines.” I play how I play, and I don’t really have a particular thing.
Did that change after fourteen years or whatever it was of not playing bass? Or was it just muscle memory when you went back to it?
There was some muscle memory. I think Gang Font was a good project for me to get back into it, because Dave’s idea was to just let me play whatever I wanted to play, or to play however I heard the music. Erik Fratzke and Dave would write the music and a lot of times they would just start playing something and I would just start playing along however I felt like. I loved it. I’ve always been a big avant-garde jazz fan, so that was fun.
Happy Friday, comrades! We’ve got another pretty sweet debut for you on this very special day. It’s the brand-spankin-new video for a song called “It’s God’s Will” from non-other than Fairvale! Now Fairvale, if you’re not familiar, is the new-ish hardcore trio featuring Chris Del Rio (Implants, ex-Ten Foot Pole) on guitar and bass, Brandon […]
Happy Friday, comrades!
We’ve got another pretty sweet debut for you on this very special day. It’s the brand-spankin-new video for a song called “It’s God’s Will” from non-other than Fairvale!
Fairvale Band Pic
Now Fairvale, if you’re not familiar, is the new-ish hardcore trio featuring Chris Del Rio (Implants, ex-Ten Foot Pole) on guitar and bass, Brandon Solis on vocals and Jessie Quinones on drums. They’ve signed to Cyber Tracks and are putting out their debut EP, Ratcore, today! Check out the video for “It’s God’s Will” below and head over to Cyber Tracks to pick up the album!
