DS Interview: Bill Stevenson Talks “Enjoy!,” The Descendents’ Most Underrated Album

Despite featuring some classic Descendents songs, their 1986 album, Enjoy!, is not most fans’ favorite album. Their third release, following seminal classics like Milo Goes to College and I Don’t Wanna Grow Up, sees the band at their most experimental. While that may have to do with fewer lineup changes and more with the band’s growing interest in New Wave, the finished product resulted in the most divisive work the band put out in its decades-long career.

Regardless of the highlights and perceived sins some fans feel this record has, Enjoy! is this weird little record in the middle of a nearly perfect run of a band’s discography. Bill Stevenson was kind enough to talk about ALL things Enjoy!, musical influences, and an unexpected way to reunite members of Black Flag.

(Edited for clarity)

Hey, Bill, how are you doing?

Doing well. It’s so funny. Every time I use Zoom, I think I’m not doing it right or something. I’m gonna have to be dragged kicking and screaming into the modern age.

I got you. Before I started doing this, I had no clue how to use any of this. I left it to the Jetsons.

 My son is kind of my Jetson. Like if I have a technical thing, he’ll get me hooked up.

My wife does that for me.  

What medium is this for: print, audio, or visual? 

Print.

Okay, in that case. (Picks nose and grins big.) Have we interviewed before?

Yeah, we interviewed back in August when you guys re-released Milo Goes to College.

Oh, okay, because you look super familiar to me.  

I write these anniversary articles about records, and they’re not necessarily the popular ones. I always felt like Enjoy! kind of gets the short end of the stick when it comes to Descendents records.

Oh, does it? 

When I got into you guys, I listened to Liveage first. So, all of the songs feel like Descendents to me. There was no difference between Milo Goes to College and Enjoy! and all because the songs are all mixed in between each other.

Oh yeah, I guess. It’s hard for me to comment on it. It’s hard to critique your own thing. I will say that Enjoy! is very much us kind of under the influence of a lot of the first wave of New Wave, talking like Oingo Boingo, Billy Idol’s solo stuff, maybe a little Devo in there.

I don’t know what it was exactly. The drums are loud, and the guitars are not very loud. I like some things about it. I think it’s pretty cool. Like it has its moments. I kind of feel that way about most records. I think you’re lucky if you like four songs on an album. Is that fair to say? Like in your record collection, how many albums do you like more than half of the record?

A lot of the older punk ones I do, but that’s probably being young and just like getting into everything and just, you know, being a sponge. You know what I mean?

Yeah, I guess that’s true. You kind of listened to the whole album in order to get to know the artists, you know, to get to know them. I know the radio song, but what are they really like? Possibly one of my favorite albums of all time: Black Sabbath, Paranoid. I only like four songs. I’m trying to think, what’s an album where you like every song on it? Not when you were young, but right now.

Holdovers from when I was a kid, or like recently?

No, anything. I don’t care if it’s Kesha. I don’t give a shit.

Pet Sounds. I got really into Pet Sounds when I was in my mid-twenties for a lot of different reasons. I know it’s one of those records that everybody says that to… It just hit me at the right time.

That’s a tall order. I mean, I respect the hell out of Pet Sounds, but I don’t listen to it top to bottom so much. I love the Beach Boys. They were a big part of my life at two different times. One time, when I was eleven in Hermosa Beach, the same beach they went to. It was like I could relate to everything they’re saying because that’s what I did today.

When I got older, what really did it for me was maybe fifteen years ago, I got a hold of some a cappella vocals of Beach Boys songs and it blew my brains out. It ripped my brain right out of my skull because I was just like, “Oh my God, I had no idea that was all happening in there.” Then I realized the Beach Boys weren’t just about girls, cars, and fun. The Beach Boys had one of America’s true musical geniuses behind the wheel.

I had the great fortune about eight years ago to see it. I got six free tickets. I don’t remember; somebody just handed them to me. It was Brian Wilson doing Pet Sounds, and I got to see this live. There are all these piece-of-crap versions of the Beach Boys touring around. I’m like, I’ve got to see this. It’s in a really nice theater, and I go in there. He’s got about nine people up there; he’s got a person on every post.

He’s got a Mike Love guy. He’s got a Brian Wilson guy because he’s too old to hit that falsetto anymore. He’s got everybody up there to make everything how it always was, including all those Wrecking Crew sort of people. He does like fifteen of the Beach Boys’ biggest hits: you know, “I Get Around,” “Surfin’ Safari,” and “Catch a Wave.”

That’s a lot of music. 

And it all sounds fantastic. It’s so funny you called up to talk about Enjoy! We covered “Wendy” cause when I was a little kid it was my favorite. I don’t know what my deal is. I’ve always been a sucker for those kind of “poor beaten down guy that was treated bad by a woman” songs. I mean I was twelve. No woman ever talked to me. It took both Descendents and Black Flag getting popular before any girl would ever talk to me. It’s kind of weird; when I was really young, like six, my favorite song, still one of my all-time favorite songs, was called “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love To Town.”

ALL covered that song, right?

We did, but not very well. It’s such a sad song. Even when I was 6 years old, I was like, “I love how sad this is making me feel,” and I think that those things had an influence on me later because, like, “Clean Sheets” or, you know, that’s just jealousy. You know, all these girls I wanted to hang out with, they were out hanging out with different guys than me. I don’t really write from that perspective anymore but I sure do remember it. Man, that song is so sad.

 What was the status of the band between I Don’t Wanna Grow Up and Enjoy!?

We made I Don’t Wanna Grow Up kind of fresh on the heels of me leaving Black Flag cause everybody had songs. Tony (Lombardo) and Ray (Cooper) and my friend Greg Cameron had been playing. They were calling themselves the Ascendants and they had worked up quite a few of Tony’s new songs. I had four or five and Milo had four or five. So, everybody had songs and we recorded it. Then we toured on it. Enjoy! came pretty closely after. Like what? A year and a half.

So there was a kind of new lineup because Ray was kind of like a bridge from the old lineup to the new lineup. We did shows with Ray where he was the lead vocalist and shows as a five-piece. It was Frank (Navetta) and Ray on guitar and Milo singing. Ray was in pretty early. When Tony couldn’t tour, we got Doug (Carrion). Doug went to our high school, though. He was like part of the family already. He was in my classes. It was Doug, Ray, and I, and that was just a really different band than, say, Tony, Frank, and I. It’s certainly also a really different band than Karl, Stephen, and I. It’s weird. I kind of had to rebuild the band twice. We were listening to The Psychedelic Furs, Oingo Boingo, and XTC. Everything had kind of a sharp, linear, kind of anal retentive, sort of sound to it.

Were there any studio limitations or quirks that ended up shaping the sound of the record?

I mean, Richard probably did, the engineer. He didn’t come from punk rock. He’s so funny. We’d be collecting farts with a boombox. We had a cassette called “Farts,” and whenever somebody had a good one, we’d take out whatever was in there, put in the fart cassette, and record it. Richard came from that R&B revival that was in the 80s, like Janet Jackson or George Michael. He came from that scene. He would call us damaged white people. I mean, it’s true. We all have punk rock damage, and that’s why I love all of us.

He was looking at it from outside of it a little bit, so it was an interesting thing. He’d have real-world ideas about how things would sound or how things would be played, that kind of thing. So, I think he had a decent amount of influence even though he wasn’t there for any of the pre-production. When you’re an engineer and you’re recording a band, it’s like, if I have an idea, I share it with the band. The engineer always has a big role, I think.

What was your approach to arranging songs? How did it evolve? I mean, outside of what you said about listening to more new wave stuff, how do you feel you were applying that differently? 

It’s hard to quantify. I’m not sure. It’s so funny. Like, I’m 62. It’s all been one kind of real big fluency. There weren’t any like, “Okay, on this album, we’re gonna go this way.” It’s just whatever our life was. We were always sleeping on the floor of our practice rooms. So, you wake up, your guys are just there next to you, and whatever’s in the boombox. When you’re living like that, that shit’s gonna end up on the records, the influences of it. It’s really abstract. It’s not easy to put your finger on it.

Everybody was bringing songs, and it’s always been that way. Every lineup, everybody’s always like, like the first album that Karl and Stephen played on, the blue record (ALL). The first song on it, Karl wrote. He’s brand new in the band, and he wrote the first song on the record, “Coolidge.” We’ve just always been that way. There are an awful lot of moving parts; it’s hard for me to put my finger on it.

When we spoke last time, you mentioned how much you were into Billy Idol’s solo albums. This time around when I listened to Enjoy! I can hear it.

You hear it most on “Green” and “Sour Grapes.” I mean that we were really trying to get that feeling. Like on “80’s Girl,” you hear the Oingo Boingo influence in there. That makes it also, but also Oingo Boingo, but like with John Doe and Exene singing a couple harmonies. If X isn’t your favorite band, you’re lying, you know?

What about “Days Are Blood?” That always felt like a kind of unused Black Flag song.

No, no, no, real organic, that one. Doug had that bass riff, which kind of sounded like a Joy Division or Sisters of Mercy sort of a situation. I’m trying to think of a couple of those other more moody British bands. They’re not coming to me right now. We just started jamming it. We got home from a really long tour, like ninety days in the winter. In the ice, in the snow, making like, three hundred bucks per show. Just enough for gas. What do you do if the transmission blows up?

When you’re on tour that long and you don’t have anywhere to sleep, plus you can’t sleep because you have to drive, you don’t even have enough money for each guy to get a burger, fries, and a Coke each day. That’s all the money you have. When you go a lot of days without sleeping a full night’s sleep, you lose days. It just becomes one big thing. The days started just going into one another.

So, it was his analysis of what it’s like to be on a really long tour like that, where you’re all using each other’s legs for a pillow or whatever. There’s no room, you know, you’re sardines, and you’re just in there, and you don’t get enough sleep. You start to get loopy and stuff. Does it even matter? So, “Days Are Blood” was really, like, really heartfelt, really organic. 

Enjoy! has the reputation of being the most juvenile Descendents record, leaning into the humor. Was it conscious that you guys were just going to put farts on it? 

A lot of that, honestly, was Doug. Doug brought that out of us. I mean, I was the huge farter of the band. Milo took over about ten or fifteen years ago. He is the huge farter now. I’m like second place, but for like three decades, I was the main farter. Doug was… I swear to God, Doug’s the funniest person I’ve ever known in my life. 

I mean, it was like being with a comedian. He would find humor in every single thing. So, we just became really silly and playful. When Doug joined the band, he, Ray, and I were just living on bunk beds in the back of something smaller than a walk-in closet with no shower and no hot water. We just got loopier, more and more juvenile. Kind of like summer camp where you’re farting or you know, when you put the flashlight on your balls and look at it on the ceiling. They call it monkey brains. We were doing monkey brains, but we’re 25 year old men.

That’s just how we were then. It wasn’t like, “Oh, let’s lean into the fart humor. That’s gonna be the next big thing.” It was just, “We have to do this because this is what we do every day.” Doug had a slang for everything. I really love Doug. I had so much fun with that lineup. It was all fun all the time.

(Points to a picture above his drum set) Do you see up in the corner? The little framed thing? Yeah. Who would I have a framed picture of above my drum set?

 Let me see if I can. Punk drummer? 

Yes, it is.

It doesn’t look like it’s not a Ramone. 

It’s Robo. He’s always been like my hero. I learned my style. I ripped off everything Robo and Mark Laff from Generation X. I love that Idol stuff, but man, that Generation X album is so good. Me and Karl and Stephen do this. Like 40 minutes before we’re gonna go on, we put that Gen X album on. Stephen’s the best air drummer. He can air drum. He’s a really good drummer. He can air drum every single part on that Generation X album. He knows every note, every chord, every bass note, every word to every song on that first Generation X album. He’s the one that really got me into that album.

There’s a band called The Middle Class, and they have a song called “Out of Vogue.”

I’ve heard Middle Class. I’m from Orange County.

“Out of Vogue” predates anybody’s anything that’s that sound. I loved TSOL a lot. At the time, you know, there was in-scene jealousy between the bands and stuff. So, yeah, I couldn’t like them completely, you know, I couldn’t like the Circle Jerks completely, but boy, they’re both great bands..

Tony called him “professional pogoers.” When the professional pogoers showed up, and by that, I mean, the OC, HB punks. They brought a lot of violence to the punk rock scene and made it scary. I quit going into pits because I got beat up by them more than once just trying to watch Fear or something. Just get beat, get pushed on the ground, and get kicked by a bunch of people’s boots. One year prior, it wasn’t like that.

I think at a certain point, the hardcore scene notwithstanding, that’s a little different. All the really aggressive people that just want to go there to beat the shit out of everyone ended up at the Slayer shows. They’re not at the X shows or the Descendents shows.  

When’s the last time you listened to Enjoy!? I mean, I know you play songs off of it, but have you listened to these records as a whole as you’ve been re-releasing them?

I listened, but I was studying the masters. I was doing quality control. It’s almost impossible for me to listen to one of our records as if I were a listener. I don’t know. I put it all into making it, and then that’s it. That was my relationship with it, and then you get that big cathartic dump. It’s hard to then be a listener, having been a creator. At least for me, I get too inside of it. I get too personal with it. If I’m biased, like, say, when that song came out and some chick was breaking up with me, I can’t be objective. It’s not possible.

I gotcha.

This is kind of a long story, but the payoff is great. I got an email from Nickelodeon. They were going to do a thing where Patrick was going to have an evil alter ego. When Patrick became his evil alter ego, we were going to play this evil Patrick song. It’s kind of like a punk rock song. We would like you to play drums on it. Fuck. I’ll do anything for SpongeBob. Are you kidding me?

I’ll play drums on it. Yeah, twist my arm. We’ll give you 500 bucks for studio time. I already have it. (Points to the room he’s in) This isn’t even my studio. That’s just my basement. So they send me the prelay. It’s like a click track with a guide guitar, a guide bass, a guide vocal, and a metronome. And so I start recording my drum parts. My son is engineering me. I go, “Hey, give me a little more of the vocal in the monitor, give me a little more click.” After I ran through it about three times, I go, “Hey, Miles, will you do me a favor? Will you solo that vocal up?”

He soloed it up. I’m like, “That’s Henry.” The next day, Dezo (Dez Cadena) calls me and he goes, “I got this weird call from Nickelodeon and they want me to play guitar on this SpongeBob thing. They said you’re playing on it, and I wasn’t sure if it was legit.” I’m like, “Yes, Dezo, it’s legit.” I didn’t tell them what was really happening there. They sent it to Kira (Roessler) too. So, like, this guy reunited Black Flag because everyone was like, “Hell yeah, SpongeBob.”

They didn’t tell anyone about the other people. You know, he thought if anything, that would cause some kind of rift or whatever. So much bullshit around Black Flag. That is, I’d say, how do you get Black Flag back together? You do it for the sake of SpongeBob. That’s how.

I watched SpongeBob when my kids were little. I haven’t watched it, but I mean, it exists. It’s just so funny that everyone was like, “Oh, great, SpongeBob, five hundred bucks, hell yeah.” I would have done it for free. I would have paid you to do it.

(Looks at questions) Okay, let me get through some of these. I’m having a great time. I have a few more of these, and I just want to make sure we cover those real quick.

I think me and you did this last time, right? We just talked about whatever bullshit.

Towards the end of it, we did, yeah, because you talked to me about the Beatles.

Holy hell. What songwriters, Christ. 

Do you think any of Enjoy! aged well at all?  

It’s a really good time capsule. It might be the best time capsule for capturing a two-year period in our lives, not because of any one song, but because what has aged really well is “Get the Time,” which is always one of everyone’s favorite songs. “Sour Grapes” and “Cheer” are always in our set list. For us to play several songs from an album, since we have so many, I think that means there was some quality there.

More to me, Enjoy! captured a certain time in my life better than maybe some of the other records did. Milo Goes to College was almost the culmination of three and a half years’ worth of stuff. That captured my whole adolescence, but Enjoy! captured a time period.

Something I observed, I’m sure it wasn’t on purpose, is that the previous album is called I Don’t Want to Grow Up, and then you immediately start your next album with a song about farting.

It’s definitely not, definitely not. Because, I mean, yeah, like Milo wrote the lyrics to “Enjoy” and Tony wrote the lyrics to “I Don’t Want to Grow Up,” coming from really different places. Because what we didn’t know at the time, Tony never told us how old he was until years after he had left the band.

Oh, really? I thought that was just a thing you guys knew.

He did it with us the way he did it in the real world. Tony looked so young that he literally told everyone he was 10 years younger than he was, and no one ever questioned him. So when Tony wrote “I Don’t Wanna Grow Up,” he was like 40. I’m saying, he really didn’t want to grow up. He was really feeling like, “Fuck, I don’t want to be an old guy. I’m not old, you know, I’m young spirited.” He wrote it from a real different kind of place than like us doing the fart thing.

Is there anything on the record that feels strange or foreign to you now?

Most of the time, my lyrics are super cringe. If I listen back to them, almost always, I don’t mean on any one album. I mean, in general, I just look back very dismissively on my own lyrics as just being like trite high school poetry. I mean, I didn’t quite learn how to really put a lyric together until it was too late. That’s just my little world.

Just something that feels foreign now, like strange. Like it’s not that you just don’t like it. 

“”80s Girl.” I try never to write anything that will be dated, you know? And that’s dated as fuck. That was only a thing in 1985; Making fun of all these kind of the fucking throngs of Molly Ringwald wannabes and all this sort of thing.

Enjoy! came out in 1986. Everything Sucks came out in 1996. Hypercaffium Spazzinate came out in 2016. Almost every decade with a year ending in a six, Descendents come out with a record. Is that just a coincidence, or do you feel something aligns around that time?

Oh, where we were making a record on what seemed like a schedule?

Not like a schedule.

Oh, weird. Oh, and we’re going to do that again now, right?

Is the new record gonna come out this year?

I mean, we have a lot of stuff recorded, but maybe we won’t. Maybe we’ll break the spell, I think, in 2027. I keep pushing it back. I’m too hypercritical of songs in general, and my songs in particular. I’m too hypercritical of myself. Just three nights ago, I re-watched the movie De-Lovely, which is the Cole Porter movie.

 Kevin Kline, right? 

Oh God, and Ashley Judd. I’ve watched that movie twenty times, probably. Every time I watch it, I cry more and more. It’s been almost 20 years, I think, since I watched it the first time. I saw it in the theater, but now I think I’m crying for a different reason. I’m disappointed that I’ve never been able to write a lyric or a chord progression where, if Cole were alive, he would be like, “Yeah, Bill, you did a really good job with that. That’s a really clever lyric. That’s a great chord progression.” Just something that Cole would be proud of. I’ve never been able to do it.

I consider that probably my biggest failure as, I’m not going to say artist. I’m not a fucking artist and I’m just a dude. There were no artists, musicians, or geniuses in the Stevenson heritage. I’m blue collar. I just work. As soon as I got exposed to Cole Porter, I was like, “I’m going to write songs that are that good.” It’s not enough to want to do it. You have to be special. Yeah, I thought I could just try my best and work hard at it, but you actually have to be one in a million, and I’m not.

Tons of people love your band, dude. I went to Scott and Chad this weekend at one of those shows-

How was it? 

Oh, dude, I was at the Long Beach one. It was at a coffee shop, and it was fantastic. It was the smallest venue, but the best venue to see them in.

What I love about Chad is for a while he just started playing in pretty small venues. No PA. He sings so loudly that he doesn’t need a PA. When he was doing that, I was like, “Oh, man, this is just the real item. This is like Chad up in your face, like in your living room. So great.”.

And Scott, isn’t it weird how fortunate I’ve been to have been able to be in a band with Mean, Greg, Dukowski, Tony, Frank, Karl, Stefan, Scott, Chad, Dave Smalley? Like, what did I do to be that fortunate, to just be surrounded by utter geniuses?

You’re not counting yourself in there, dude. You’ve got some good songs. How many people cite you as their favorite drummer, too?

I can’t talk about that. I can talk about all the guys. When you mentioned Chad and Scott, I’m standing at attention. Scott’s one of the most musically talented people I’ve ever known in my life. Chad was just given the voice that every rock singer wishes they had. Chad’s got it.

The guy who owned the shop was a big fan and had a sign that said “Kids On Coffee” on it. They mostly play jazz, blues, and bluegrass there.

I love going to see bluegrass stuff. I feel like there’s a lot of ball shredding. Shredding total ass in bluegrass. No style of music has that many dudes that can just play fifty times faster than anyone else. All the same with a smile on their face. Not making these artificial cum faces. That’s what was so cool about Billy Zoom. Billy Zoom would just stand up there and smile.

The first show that I went to, X played. It’s the only time I’ve seen them.

Who was it?

It was when Dennis Danell died. It was Social Distortion, Offspring, Pennywise, X, and TSOL.

Where was this? 

Irvine Meadows in like 2000. They had a big benefit for him.

Wait, wait. Irvine Meadows.

Yeah.

When I was really young, I saw Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. I think it was right when their second album came out. Yeah, it was cool. My dad bought me the tickets; he got one for himself and one for me to bring a friend. I had just kind of become friends with Frank. Frank, my dad, and I saw Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. That was my second big concert, with KISS being my first.

We won tickets on the radio, my buddy and I in ninth grade. It was at Magic Mountain. It was for the filming of the movie Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park. So, if you watch it, my little blonde-haired friend and I are right up there in the audience in the second row. I mean, everyone’s standing up, but you totally see me a few times in it. When did you first start going to shows?

That one for Dennis Dannell was my first.

That was your first time going to shows at all. How old are you? 

I am forty-three.

You look thirty-five to me, but then you’re talking like you’re an old punker. I’m like, how old is this guy?

My parents were young when I was born, so they listened to some of the New Wave stuff. My mom liked The English Beat and Oingo Boingo.

I’ve ripped off a few things from the English Beat. Listen to “Paper Tiger” (from ALLROY Sez).

That makes sense now. Hearing it in my brain, now. 

Like the rest of the records released, a special punk note version of the album is available from Org Music, but the best place to get it is your local record store.