Growing up is no fun.
I’m taking a sick day from work. I wish I could say that I was playing hookie, but this sick day is unfortunately staying true to its name. I’ve been waiting for my doctor to call me for a tele-health appointment. You gotta love a tele-health doctor visit; it’s most of the benefits with only some of the hassle.
While killing time, I decided to pull my guitar from its case and tune it up for the first time in a while. It’s a 1978 Martin D-28, the only nice thing I’ve ever bought myself. Pressing “purchase” on this guitar nearly made me vomit, but boy does it play like a dream.
I started playing through some old songs, some great covers and some wonderfully mediocre originals. At some point I got lost enough in it that I started playing the warm-up scales I learned when I originally started trying to make sense of my first guitar.
That immediately took me back to the euphorically exciting arrogance of youth.
When you’re a kid, it doesn’t matter if you don’t know how to play; you’re still going to be a rock star. The Ramones taught us that all it took was a cool leather jacket and a whole lot of balls. Girls would surely line up to see us barely play our instruments, right? RIGHT?!
The best part of building your arsenal in those days was discovering who you wanted to sound like. I always tended to gravitate towards fun punk bands with a sense of humor. One of my favorites was the Huntingtons.
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The Review
Huntingtons
High School Rock
1998
High School Rock is the perfect snapshot of a young band finding their winning combination.
I feel like the Huntingtons are one of those bands that the punk world just criminally missed. They have a stack of records, all of them solid, with a comfortable consistency that rarely bleeds over into stagnation. Obviously, they have their fan base, but I put it to you that they never quite got their flowers.
When I interviewed Huntingtons’ guitar player Cliffy many years ago, he told me that they could either be considered the biggest of the small bands from that era, or the smallest of the big bands. That quote always stuck with me. It’s accurate, sure, but also strangely moving if you’re willing to wax philosophical.
If you’re familiar with the band, you know it’s nearly impossible to get from one end of a conversation about them to the other without an obligatory Ramones mention. They released two Ramones covers albums, played with Joey Ramone at CBGB’s, and obviously have a strikingly similar sound. For all the Ramones disciple bands out there, though, the Huntingtons are best in breed.
This is an album that bounces off the walls with a dumb-fun energy that isn’t afraid to repeatedly punch you in the face with a melodic chorus. It’s obvious from the jump that they’re aiming for a record with no filler tracks, and the result is the sonic equivalent of speed dating. A myriad of ideas and personalities are on display, but all individual songs (as well as their transitions) are tighter than my pants after Thanksgiving.
The album was their first release through Tooth & Nail Records. I don’t know much about Tooth & Nail, other than their description as a “Christian rock” label and that they had some success with Underoath and MxPx. Maybe it’s not the most punk rock mindset, but I don’t mind a Christian label or even a Christian rock band. Music is music; if it’s cool it’s cool. Plus, you can’t tell me that the idea of a bunch of youth group kids starting a punk band together isn’t so wholesome it’s rad.
High School Rock doesn’t sound like the product of youth group kids dreaming away in a church basement, though. Don’t get me wrong, it does sound like that a little, but to me it sounds more like a rag-tag group of underdog misfits who got picked last for dodgeball banding together and absolutely dominating their high school talent show. John Bender wouldn’t have this record in his collection, but Brian the Brain would. At the end of the day, in the simplest terms and most convenient definitions, isn’t that so much cooler?
From anthemic speaker blasters like “We Don’t Care,” to attitude heavy punk traditionals like “Dies Sought,” to pop culture heavy nostalgia bombs like “1985” and cheeky anti-love songs like “How Can I Miss You Won’t Go Away?” the album is 17 tracks and 34 minutes of pure 90s pop punk excellence. It feels like hanging out and having laughs with your friends at your old cafeteria lunch table.
When I was a kid, other than the lunch table, there was nothing that I loved more than playing music with my friends, which leads us to this week’s tale …
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The Tale
There’s a magical moment in your youth when everything is so much bigger because the world is so much smaller. Every passing crush has the potential to be the greatest love story ever told, which makes every rejection or breakup a true tragedy. Every late-night run to a drive-thru feels like an epic adventure because, compared to the monotony of suburbia, it is. No matter the size of your hometown, there’s a time when it feels as big as a state.
From August of 2003 through May of 2004, I was in the 8th grade.
My relationship with punk hadn’t yet become serious, but I could feel in my bones that we were ready to go steady. It had started with being gifted Hey! Ho! Let’s Go: The Anthology by the Ramones shortly after my 11th birthday. From there, an older student at my karate class turned me onto the Mailorder Is Fun! compilation from Asian Man Records and gave me a box full of Punk-O-Rama CDs. Finally, my friend Brad from the neighborhood had introduced me to Screeching Weasel, Operation Ivy, and the Huntingtons.
Brad and I spent countless hours in his parent’s basement listening to CDs and talking about nothing. We were kids, and the world was smaller, so nothing really felt like something, although I’m sure it was likely asinine and mind-numbing. It was over one of these nothing conversations that I would wind up agreeing to play my first show.
“If you can play guitar, you can play bass,” Brad had said to me as I fumbled my way through the chords of “Hey Suburbia.”
Brad and his friend Jeffrey had started playing music together under the name All Systems Fail, or ASF, as they always called it. Even back then, I don’t think they were planning to storm the world with ASF; I think it was always meant to be the band that led to the next, better band. Which is probably why they didn’t mind rolling the dice on me playing bass. Brad was a year older than me, already a freshman in high school, so the fact that I didn’t know how to play bass (and barely knew my way around a guitar) wasn’t enough to risk me looking like a dork.
I said yes.
ASF had a show coming up at El Miami South Beach, a club in town that also hosted quinceaneras and apparently the occasional punk show. We practiced in Brad’s parent’s basement, and if you’ve ever seen any piece of media that takes place in the 1990s, you have a pretty good idea of what it looked like. There was a bedroom, full bathroom, a couch and a TV. Even with all of that, there was still plenty of room for a drum kit, guitars, amps, and mics. I always loved the duality of that experience, the irreverent and inexplicably angry suburban punks yelling into microphones about the government (or whatever) while Brad’s mom baked banana bread upstairs.
It was in this white-walled basement, banana bread wafting through the air, that I met Jeffrey. Jeffrey was the third prong in the ASF trident. He was 13 or 14, in the 8th grade like me, but had the deep baritone voice of a middle-aged man and an all-encompassing laugh that was so ferocious and loud that you felt like he might die. I loved him instantly, and just over 20 years later, I still do.
Jeffrey was a proper bass player, still the best one I’ve ever met in person. He ran through the songs with me using what I’m sure was all his patience, and even tried to show me how to utilize additional flourishes that (lord help us) just wouldn’t take. I would go home between practices and play those songs until my fingers were too sore to continue, and then I would immediately pick it back up the next morning.
By our final practice, I can proudly say that I had gotten barely good enough that the other two ceased flashing each other quizzical looks whenever I started playing. I was, at the very least, tuned correctly, in the right key, and playing more or less in time. They were good, and I was good enough. It was time to take the Tolkien-esque journey into the unknown and accomplish my week-long dream of being a punk rock bass player.
El Miami looked like if you took all the tables out of a Mexican restaurant and called it a dance club. There was a subtle whiff of danger in the air, like they might have just finished taking down the crime scene tape. It felt wild and charged, while simultaneously subdued and quiet, like a wild jungle cat stalking its unsuspecting prey.
It was the perfect spot for my punk rock baptism.
These were the days before everyone had a cellphone. I was probably only five miles from my childhood bedroom, but I might as well have been on the moon. It was one of the first times that I felt free, like I was figuring out the man I wanted to become. All while the scene elders were no doubt clutching beers and talking about how out of place we were, if they even noticed us at all.
I’ll never forget that first stale wave of cigarette smoke hitting me as we walked in the door.
There are moments in life where you stumble across something for which you had no idea you were always searching. For some people, it’s how they know they’ve found their soulmate. For others, it’s landing their dream job. For me, it was how I knew that punk was my new religion, and I was a true believer.
We were opening for a metal band called Disturbio whose lead singer Chucho had a liberty spike mohawk that in my memory was bright red and two feet tall. I remember thinking at that moment in my young life that he was the most intimidating human being I had ever seen, but honestly, he could not have been sweeter. He was explaining to Jeffrey and I that the microphones were barely working, and if we wanted to be heard, we would have to really scream into them. Jeffrey took note and was figuring out how to adapt to it. I wasn’t worried because I knew immediately that I would be too nervous to get anywhere near a mic.
And at last, it was time.
We took the stage fully intending to rock the half-interested small crowd of crusties out of their dirty socks. We counted off, sprung into it, and we were … sloppy. I was a chubby 8th grader in an ill-fitting t-shirt who was so concentrated on not forgetting the chord progressions that I could not have looked more awkward on stage. Brad, a more serious musician than us, was frustrated that we weren’t playing better as a unit. Jeffrey, as he always did and always does, was having an absolute blast.
I don’t remember much about our set, other than it took less than 20 minutes, start to finish. I know we played “Numbers” by the Adicts, “Ultra Violence” by Lower Class Brats, “Knowledge” by Operation Ivy, “Judy is a Punk” by the Ramones and “No Pool Party Tonight” by the Huntingtions. Honestly, looking back, that might have been all of them. It may not have been a triumph of rock, but it was a schizophrenic, genre-blasting medley of adrenaline.
We finished to a small smattering of polite applause and then started breaking down our equipment. There were no slaps on the back or words of congratulations, but I don’t think we would have known what to do with them anyway. We were kids from a town that had no structure for what we wanted to do, but we went out and did it. That alone was a victory. Not for nothing, but I got to talking to a girl from the audience outside and wound up having my first kiss. As far as nights from that transitory time between middle school and high school go, that one was cinematic.
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The Aftermath
That was not my last dalliance with live music; it wasn’t even my last time playing with ASF that summer.
Playing with those guys that night started a fire in my belly that burned hot and bright for many years to come. I was in several bands throughout high school and even one in college. Even now, as a grown-up plucking around on my guitar (an instrument I was able to find my way around much better due to the massive down time of the pandemic), I find myself having live music pangs. On some level, don’t we all want to run away and join the circus?
I’m not one who believes in living in the past. I do, however, believe in allowing yourself to carry the good parts of the past around with you.
Those stupid endless summers with my friends getting into trouble were some of the best times of my life. As an adult, I like to chase that feeling. I like to remember the chubby, awkward punk rock kid in my soul who was so hungry to discover everything around him, when things were fresh and new. It’s good to keep him around; every once in a while he keeps me from getting too jaded. He helps me remember not to take anything too seriously, to live my life, and, most importantly, to give the middle finger to authority when I need to.
I said at the beginning of this that growing up is no fun. That’s true, and to keep it on theme, it’s also the title of a song and best-of compilation by the Huntingtons. Parts of being a grown up can be pretty cool, though. I can buy my own beer, stay up as late as I want, play my music loud, and eat Oreos for dinner if that’s what I choose. Rent, bills, and having a job are no fun. Having the theoretical freedom to turn your life into whatever you want it to look like is amazing.
Maybe tonight I’ll go for a long drive. I might listen to the songs from that old set list, perhaps even call Brad and Jeffrey, because it’s definitely been a while. Maybe I’ll watch Parks and Recreation, eat some vegan nonsense, and go to sleep at 9. I think, even if just for tonight, I’ll let that awkward punk kid take the wheel and see where we end up.
