Life sentences

>>Drawing its members from the ranks of
Black Flag, Descendents, Good Riddance
and Converge, Only Crime adds up to
more than the sum of its parts

DOING TIME: Only Crime

by JOHNSON CUMMINS

In 1995, when the lumbering behemoth known as the Vans Warped Tour first hit the road, the Offspring were proving that punk rock could be a viable career path, but at the time, their meteoric success had yet to trickle down. One had to look no further than the Warped Tour’s designated artist parking lot for the true sign of the times. Judging by the rickety, rusted-out tour vans clogging up the lot, punk rock’s mainstream success could’ve easily been just a fleeting fad.

Flash-forward 12 years later and the Warped Tour continues to beat previous gate records annually, and it has more sponsors than ever trying to get their foot in the youth-culture market door. Further proving its place in mainstream culture, the current artists’ parking lot will feature lavish tour buses parked side by side with current-model vans pimped out with all the fixins.

For the Montreal date this year, Only Crime’s truck will be sticking out like an eyesore when it sidles up next to these suites-on-wheels, but if there were ever a vehicle that perfectly defined its inhabitants, it would be the band’s 1995 converted refrigerator truck. It feasts insatiably on diesel fuel, coughs and spurts, has worn out its odometer, possesses the power to repair itself and is as ugly as sin. Probably most telling is that despite its aversion to high speeds, it can climb any hill, no matter how steep, or bulldoze through a wall if need be.

Only Crime are seasoned vets on the punk rock circuit, and have been stuck with the tag of being a supergroup of sorts. Understandably so—members include Bill Stevenson of Black Flag, Descendents and All, Russ Rankin of Good Riddance, Aaron Dalbec of Converge and Bane, Doni Blair of Hagfish and Only Crime’s most recent recruit, Matt Hoffman, who’s replacing Zach Blair of Gwar and Rise Against. Initially using early Black Flag as their touchstone, Only Crime definitely do pack in the ferocity of that band’s vintage material, but on their second effort, Virulence, more risks are taken. Although their previous bands are musically namechecked—namely Black Flag, Descendents and Good Riddance—they have managed to avoid any musical baggage and have carved out a true signature sound. “I think with the first record,” says drummer Stevenson, “a lot of people became interested in us because of the personalities in the band. But now that we have been touring more, and with the second record, people are starting to realize we aren’t just a side project.”

Reprogrammed

Only Crime are hardly the young men they were when they first hit the road, and so they don’t hit it as hard as they did with their previous bands. Add to that the fact that members reside across the American map, in Baton Rouge, Fort Collins, Amarillo, Santa Cruz and Iowa, and it’s hard to resist thinking of them as a side project. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth—this is hardly a half-hearted display, but rather is rife with pulverizing power. These pedigreed punkers actually add up to more than the sum of their parts.

At 44 years old, Stevenson will certainly stick out from the featherweights backstage at this year’s Warped Tour. Although he maintains the same scatological fascinations that he once wrote about in his Descendents lyrics, he now seems a bit more comfortable in his surroundings, and far less the misanthrope that once sat behind the traps in Black Flag. He owns what is widely known as the biggest punk rock recording studio, the Blasting Room in Fort Collins, Colorado—many bands on this Warped Tour have recorded there. Stevenson once wrote, while in Descendents, that he “didn’t want to grow up,” but whether Stevenson likes it or not, this father of two most definitely has.

“We’re not really the kind of people that can go out and tour for four months straight anymore,” says Stevenson. “If you’ve travelled as much as I have, though, it somehow gets in your blood and you develop wanderlust. But at the same time, I don’t want to be an absentee parent. Before I had kids, I thought the whole world revolved around me, and now that I have kids, I realize I’m just a small piece of gum under somebody’s shoe. I’ve definitely changed as far as the road is concerned too. I used to not really enjoy touring that much, except for the one hour I got to just play, and now I am really enjoying the journey as much as the conquest. My father died the same year my son was born, and that just kind of reprogrammed me.”

Played to get laid

Given Only Crime’s line-up, one would think the whole thing sprang from the feverish imagination of a record-company exec, but the evidence shows that the assembling of the band happened quite organically.

“Good Riddance were on tour with Bane and one night in Ottawa, I just went up to [guitarist] Aaron while we were loading out, and said we should join a band,” says singer Rankin, “and he said he had been waiting two weeks for me to ask him that. That provided the initial spark. Aaron and I wanted to do a heavy band without any metal influences, kind of a Slip It In, My War-era Black Flag, and when I was going over details with Bill about recording at the Blasting Room with Good Riddance at the time, he just asked me what else I was up to. I mentioned that I was forming this band but we didn’t have a drummer. Bill said right away he wanted to play drums, and I almost dropped the phone. I mean, the guy is the best drummer I have ever seen or heard.”

If there is any argument about the influence on the current state of punk rock that Only Crime’s previous bands have had, just take a look at the side stage during their upcoming performance at Warped, and you will see the majority of the bill clambering for space to see these legends. Just check the stats—Good Riddance, along with NOFX, could be considered one of Fat Wreck’s flagship bands, Converge completely reinvented what a hardcore band should be, and despite his modesty, Stevenson, through Descendents and All, helped pioneer the pop punk that turned bands like Green Day, the Offspring and Sum 41 into spiky-haired millionaires.

“I feel really proud when somebody tells me that something I did influenced them, but if you’re talking about Descendents, you have to look at the Buzzcocks and the Ramones. It’s funny to think of being an influence because [Descendents] were just a bunch of kids, just kind of not getting laid, and so we just wrote songs about how we were not getting laid, and thought maybe by writing these songs we could meet some girls. I was very fortunate that I was a 14-year-old kid that got to see wonderful bands like Black Flag and Fear one night, and then the next night, see the Weirdos and the Last.

“Those shows is what made us want to be part of that scene, and if kids saw any bands I was in and made them pick up a guitar or whatever, that’s great. I’m not really trying to get laid anymore, and I am a lot better with my personality, and now I just play music for music’s sake whether it’s for 14 people or 14,000. It will be interesting to see if Only Crime will become an influence on some people starting bands in the next couple of years.”

At the Vans Warped Tour at
Parc Jean-Drapeau on
Sunday, Aug. 12, noon,
$44, all ages

Let’s do the Vans
Warped again

>>Five acts to catch at the punk fest this Sunday

LONG REMAINS THE NAME: Coheed and Cambria

by ERIK LEIJON

Perusing the Warped Tour line-up is like shopping at Costco—initially, nothing looks particularly appetizing, but with so many options, you’re bound to find a few hidden treats. There are at least a dozen shades of punk being represented this year, from the Blink-182 school, frat boys with a slightly verbose side, to the currently popular Green Day approach, transitional/accessible with overt political outrage. Since there are only so many hours in the day and visiting MySpace band pages is time-consuming, here are a few acts your annoying and highly fashionable nephew won’t relate to, thereby justifying their competence:

Coheed and Cambria: we all had a good laugh air-guitaring to DragonForce last year, but truthfully, the band once known as Shabutie have been confusing the hell out of listeners with harrowing tales of fire-conjuring sorcerers since 2003’s In Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth: 3. Lead singer/guitarist Claudio Sanchez could give Geddy Lee a run in the prog-rock castrato department, if the extended guitar solos and incomprehensibly long song titles didn’t scream pretentious-rock-act loud enough. Volume two of their Good Apollo, I’m Burning Star IV series comes out later this year, so expect newer, even more over-polished material from the quartet—which is a good thing, unless you lack the stamina to enjoy eight-minute-long sci-fi epics.

k-os: The man who finally convinced the Juno Awards cartel that hip hop could be considered an acceptable genre of music will be taking on an even tougher crowd as the token alt-rap act for this year’s tour. If the increased guitar use on “Sunday Morning” and “Born to Run” is any indication, k-os might have a slight prayer against a mass of burger-flippers from the ’burbs who wouldn’t know Kurtis Blow from Tony Snow. K-os is one of the rare artists capable of writing accessible music that retains the poetic chops that made him such a fresh face on the hip hop scene in the first place.

The Matches: A typical Northern California punk band on their high-energy debut, the Matches took a dramatic turn on their second album by employing a huge team of producers to transform them into a less grating Blood Brothers. The real test will be if the band can do their adventurous new record proper justice away from the confines of the studio.

Poison the Well: Possibly the loudest and most ferocious act on the Warped Tour, Poison the Well are the consolation prize for those who would prefer the Ozzfest come to Montreal instead. They couple the intensity of angry-man rockers of choice Hatebreed with darker, more ominous guitars and drums. Singer Jeffrey Moreira gets my vote for Warped Tour singer most likely to permanently damage his vocal chords, while the rhythm section of Chris Hornbrook (drums) and Michael MacIvor (bass) play with the subtlety of a battering ram.

New Found Glory: A “when in Rome” selection more than anything else, as New Found Glory are unfairly characterized as a generic pop-punk outfit—likely because of Jordan Pundik’s nasal-whine vocals. What separates them from the pack are the surprisingly mature lyrics and consistently catchy songwriting. You’ll be subjected to many pop bands masquerading as punk, so you may as well catch the decent one.