IWasBored
Blue Crack Supplier
- Joined
- Nov 8, 2002
- Messages
- 36,783
I'm going to be perfectly honest here: there's a very good chance I never would have discovered 75% of my favorite bands, had it not been for the Rolling Stone article on Rancid from when ...And Out Come the Wolves. I know I'm supposed to claim some improbable thing like how I was listening to The Clash in the womb or something when it comes to establishing some mythical punk rock credibility. But I was born two years after Combat Rock came out, so that's just ridiculous. I don't have any badass older siblings or cousins or anyone who would have introduced me to anything other than shit I could have heard on the radio myself. The simple fact is that when I was 14 a friend gave me a copy of RS containing that article (she'd recently raided her uncle's old magazine pile when he cleaned his garage, album came out in 1995 so that issue was 3 years old then) on the assumption that if I wasn't already a huge fan of the band, it was only because I'd never heard them. I hadn't (although ruby soho sounded somewhat familiar). I read the article, and in some teenage sense that I wasn't able to really recapture when I found the article in a desk drawer I was cleaning before moving a few years ago, I just thought Tim Armstrong sounded like the coolest motherfucker alive. Lars too, but something about Armstrong in that article connected with me in a way that screamed "go get this album NOW (well, once you have 13 bucks)." I don't remember having any idea what they might sound like, or what my expectations were, but 15 years later it's still an album I listen to pretty frequently. Given the amount of time that's gone by, I'm sure it's not exactly how I remember it, but I want to say I remember going to Newbury Comics after I turned 15 (hooray for birthday money) and buying the album. I also am fairly certain I remember exactly what shirt I was wearing when I bought the Clash's self titled album a little while later--and that the reason when I walked past it in the used record store, I stopped because I thought wait, I should check that out, I'm supposed to know their stuff. Without "The War's End," it would have been much longer before I'd checked out Billy Bragg. Bad Religion, Dropkick Murphys, anyone that was ever on HellCat/Epitaph, the Ramones, Cocksparrer, Stiff Little Fingers, Sham 69 on a trip through punk history, branching off toward NYHC past and present to those random, insurgence records s.h.a.r.p. bands that I never heard from again after like 2003 or so. And we won't even discuss the ska. For me, it started with Rancid.
Rancid - "Collision Course," "Honor Is All We Know," & "Evil's My Friend" - YouTube
It's fucking good.
Rancid - "Collision Course," "Honor Is All We Know," & "Evil's My Friend" - YouTube
It's fucking good.
