Bad Copy

Here is a blast from the past, a blow from long ago, a deep dive from 2005.

It’s hard to believe that Love Songs (pre- THE Love Songs, pre- LoveSong of the Month) survived the early 2000s. Literally, I am surprised that the humans that comprised our band are still alive after having played almost exclusively Hardcore shows and bar Rock shows during that stretch.

Our unbridled compulsion to make fun of our surroundings (and ourselves) often left us playing to crossed arms and disapproving scowls. Many a show ended with someone incredulously asking us, “How’d you get on this show??” We played too slow and sappy for the Hardcore kids, and we played too fast and angry for the bar crowd. The basements of Reno and the house shows of LA were always very supportive of us, but those shows were few and far between back then.

We finally met our match in toughness in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho.

And no matter which venue we were playing few people seemed to appreciate our songs about shaving our testicles or how there is no “L” in the word “fool”. Imagine going to see your favorite floor-punching toughs, or chatting up some potential love interest at a bar, and then we set up and assault you with this chestnut.

Jackson and me sullying the Good Stage Gilman with our own couch, plant, lamp, table, candles, tea, beards, and turtlenecks.

Even when we tried to fit in, it was useless. One show comes to mind where the opening band yelled from the stage, “Shirts off, motherfuckers!” and the seething mass of windmilling kickboxers dutifully stripped off their shirts and Wall-Of-Death‘ed each other as soon as the next breakdown hit. Yet when we said the exact same thing a half hour later we got a very different reaction. A hostile reaction, if I’m being honest. (It probably didn’t help that Jackson said “Shirts off, motherfuckers” like he was trying to seduce the audience, rather than incite them). But however you sliced it, those dancers and our band were just two different kinds of crowdkillers, though I would argue that we had more nudity in one van ride to Davis than that whole room of shirtless mosh bros.

You might never notice how clean hardcore kids are until you put Jackson in between them.

While our influences varied we ultimately just liked playing what could loosely be described as Skate Rock. You could find an element of RKL, D.I., or SNFU in just about every song we wrote, we just missed the most opportune time to play these riffs by about 20 years.

True to form, the fact that we couldn’t skate very well didn’t stop us from doing that either. And why not bring our Skate Rock Gone Wrong vibe to an actual skatepark to make the point more obvious?

So, back in 2005, Carl “The Neck” Cordova spent an entire morning capturing our prowess on film at the Alameda Skatepark, in the city of Alameda, in the county of Alameda. (As I recall, Carl also could not skate yet also had a closet full of skate wear). Josh and Max from Scholastic Deth joined us to provide their counter to our point.

Once we committed enough injuries to tape we set up cameras elsewhere on the Alameda Naval Base (in the city of Alameda, in the county of Alameda) and got sunburns where the sun normally never shone.

Come for the terrible skating, stay for the nudity: