My best friend wrote a book last year.
I suppose it would be more accurate to say he spent years writing a book that came out last year. He bet everything he had on it, self-published it, and crossed his fingers. It sold out of two printings and is now on a third.
The friend in question, Justin “Scarred” Willits, is a YouTuber. He’s been at it for over a decade now and has developed an incredible following. Once upon a time, I was his YouTubing sidekick, but that’s another tale for another day.
When I met Justin, he was the frontman for a band called the Scarred. They were touring on the back of their album No Solution. Our small town had developed an impressive enough music scene that bands like the Queers, the Soda Pop Kids and the Pink Spiders all came through.
The Scarred were the first big act through the door, though, and the most beloved.
When Justin finished his book, he asked me to edit it. After finishing my edit, he asked if I would write the introduction. Naturally, I wrote about that first Scarred show.
I loved No Solution when it came out, but I never would have guessed it would literally change the shape of my life.
…
The Review
The Scarred
No Solution
2006
I’ve never heard another record like No Solution.
Something about it feels deep-rooted in the dangerous parts of California. It’s raw and passionate, visceral and angry, while still being fun and lightly polished. I liken it to walking through a seedy carnival, knowing that someone has released a live rattlesnake somewhere on the premises.
Lyrically, No Solution is wildly intelligent and ferocious, almost like having a conversation with your own anxiety.
The record draws from the best of its influences while still creating something wholly original. One listen will tell you that there’s not only a genuine love of the ‘70s British punk scene, but you might also pick up hints that they spent some time in the ‘90s listening to Lookout Records cassettes. The result is something dark, political, anthemic, and yet somehow layered and bright.
It’s hard not to love something that can have a hard-driving punk commentary on authority and police like “Bastards” and then turn on a dime to present the listener with the pure poppy fun of “Drone.” All the while, they utilize blistering yet understated guitar solos that feel like they were conceived on an all-night drive through the California desert.
No Solution builds tension with wrathful riffs that ultimately build into a crescendo of gang-vocal sing-alongs.
Particularly shining moments come in the form of the title track, “No Solution,” “Rotting,” and “Sick City.” There’s something to be said for songs that invite you along for the rough ride of their introspection, almost sneaking into your cerebellum while you’re too busy pumping your fist to notice. The listener might very well want to buy a ticket to Sick City and see it for themselves.
After all, that’s exactly what I did.
…
The Tale
When I was 17, I went on tour with a punk band from Los Angeles as a writer for Loud Fast Rules Magazine.
It was the summer before my senior year of high school. My friend Brad and I had been invited to go on that year’s Clampdown Tour with the Scarred, him as a fill-in drummer and me as a roadie/journalist. It was a chance to see the world outside of our small town and maybe even have the adventure of a lifetime.
Just to get ahead of it, yes, it is more or less the exact plot of the movie Almost Famous.
I had begun writing for Loud Fast Rules in my junior year, with my first submission being an interview with Monte Melnick, the Ramones former tour manager. For those unfamiliar with LFR, I always liken it to a spiritual sibling of Creem Magazine, but for a mostly punk audience. There could not have been a better training ground to put in your 10,000 hours.
Writing for Loud Fast Rules was a dream.
In 2006, I was a literal kid who had just been kicked off his high school’s newspaper staff for flipping off a basketball coach. LFR was a much better home for me. Let’s face it, I was never going to be a good fit for the yearbook committee anyway.
I met the Scarred that spring.
Anyone who attended one of the high schools in our county remembers the Scarred coming through that first time. You couldn’t move through town without seeing Scarred merch for months. Year later, on my college campus, a total stranger spotted my Scarred t-shirt and correctly guessed where I was from.
No Solution had been a smash hit in our growing scene, so much so that when the Scarred came through on that tour, about 200 people came. The show was held at the Trade and Convention Center up on the mountain, the only appropriate venue for shows that size. They were rock stars to us, and when they played, it was incendiary.
I offered to let the band crash at my Dad’s house.
Their drummer signed my yearbook. The bass player, Monkey, rode with me to my grandparent’s house to pick something up. I’ll never forget walking into the den to see him, enormous black mohawk and sleeves of tattoos, talking to my sweet Southern grandmother about California. They got along famously; I wish I had a picture of it.
The band and I got along so well that they even invited me to ride with them to their next show in Savannah when they came back through around Labor Day. I remember the sun was starting to set beneath the skyscrapers as we rode through Atlanta. We were eating donuts and making jokes. It felt like I had leapt off the dock onto a pirate ship and was finally headed towards my true destiny.
It was the next summer that Brad was asked to play fill-in drums on the Clampdown Tour, and they invited me along to roadie for them. I pitched it as a story to Loud Fast Rules, who green-lit it immediately. One day we were sitting in our high school cafeteria, Brad at the end of his senior year and me at the end of my junior year, dreaming about what was to come.
A few days later, we were on a plane to Los Angeles.
For me and Brad, it might as well have been space exploration. We had both been on field trips and a handful of economy-priced family vacations, but nothing like this. This was California, the one from movies and TV.
Getting off that plane felt like coming home.
We arrived at the Scarred HQ in Anaheim, in a rundown apartment complex called the Belinda. I haven’t been there in almost 20 years, but if you dropped me off in front of it today, I could still walk straight to their front door. Justin and his wife at the time had a newborn son and a roommate named David who worked early mornings for a company that installed doors and windows.
Brad and I took turns switching between sleeping on the couch and the floor. We were asked to leave the kitchen light on for David, so he could find his way around in the mornings, but we rarely did. David needed the light, and we needed the dark, and since we were still self-possessed teenagers, our needs won out.
The Belinda was home base, but we didn’t spend much time there. One night we watched Rebel Without a Cause, which was one of David’s favorites. I remember being on the phone with my girlfriend back home on the outside stairway another night when I overheard a man in an apartment below get into an explosive argument with his family only to speed off into the night.
Most of our time was spent at Monkey’s house, where the band had a practice shed. We spent long hours in that shed every day for a week. There was no air conditioning; it definitely wasn’t up to any city codes, and it was full of black widows. We didn’t care, though; we were there to drink Newcastle and soak in the experience. It wasn’t long before things started to gel with the new lineup.
This was an exhilarating moment in time for the Scarred, brewing long before we arrived.
They were working on songs for a new record, at that time called Secret Weapon FM, and there were some whispers that it might be the release that saw them finally break. One song in particular, “Anaheim,” sounded operatic in its own way. The tour we were training for was to be headlined by Cheap Sex, who were one of the biggest punk acts operating at that time.
Brad had spent years playing in basements, and this was what it had all been leading towards. I was going to have a featured piece of tour correspondence for a nationally circulated magazine. The Scarred, road warriors who had spent a career being rode hard and put away wet, were poised to move one rung up the ladder of success.
I’ll never forget that final practice.
The band might as well have been playing a stadium for all the energy they were putting into those songs. Everyone in the house and in the yard packed their way into that tiny shed to see the spectacle. They launched into their closer, a cover of Cock Sparrer’s “Take ‘Em All,” and we were all screaming along.
I remember making eye contact with Monkey’s brother Nate as the song reached its final chorus. We were singing it to each other, ear-to-ear smiles plastered on our teenage faces. As the final chords rang out, Justin hopped off the drum riser and onto an amp head case.
His foot went straight through, breaking his ankle.
What happened next is a blur. There was a panic, shouting, and Justin was whisked away to an emergency room down the block. It was close enough that Brad and I walked there, on a cold and windy California night, to assess the damage with everyone else. I was tasked with calling Justin’s wife, who at first thought I was joking.
Hours later, after lots of pacing and handwringing, we found out that the tour was cancelled.
This was literally on the night we were supposed to leave. After that practice we were going to load up the van, drive to San Diego, and meet up with Cheap Sex. Instead, we sat in an Anaheim emergency room while Justin was put into a cast.
There weren’t any flights back to Georgia we could jump on for another week. As Brad put it when I reached out to him about this column, “It felt like hanging out at your girlfriend’s house after a breakup.”
They tried to make the best of it for us, though, which we always appreciated. We went to Hollywood to see Amoeba Records and try to find Billy Idol’s house. There was lots of Carl’s Junior hamburgers and attempts at jokes. Things were bleak, but we tried to pretend they weren’t.
Brad wouldn’t be living out his touring dream. I wouldn’t be writing anything if I didn’t have an ending. The Scarred wouldn’t be going on the tour that might have changed their stars.
It wasn’t what it was supposed to be, but in an ironic and tangible way, it ultimately did become the tour that changed everything.
…
The Aftermath
Before I met the Scarred, I had their poster on my wall.
How insane is it to look back and be able to say that you became friends with the guys from the poster on your wall? I rode in their van. I hung out in their practice space. I slept in their houses!
About five years later, I would go on another, even more disastrous tour with them that ended with matching tattoos.
I said in the intro that No Solution changed the shape of my life, and it undeniably did. Just look at the timeline: I met the Scarred on the No Solution tour; they invited me on the next leg of the journey, and a friendship started. I flew out to tour with them in 2007 and then again in 2012. From that insane 2012 tour would come an unbreakable bond that saw me moving to California the following year.
Moreover, meeting that band made me feel like I could hack it as a writer. They invited me in; they trusted me with their stories and we ended up with something really special. Even if no one read what I wrote about it in 2007, you’re reading about it now, and that ain’t nothing.
Brad would go on to make a record and tour with his own band. I went to college for journalism and wrote a piece about the 2012 tour that was nominated for a Hearst Award. Justin didn’t make it big as a musician, but he found a different calling for his creativity and became immensely successful.
This is normally the part in Tales From the Underground where I would try to jam in a moral.
In this case, I had so much luck on my side. It was insanely lucky that I had a dad who trusted me enough to let me fly across the country and tour with a punk band from Los Angeles when I was 17. The fact that my high school best friend happened to be a good enough drummer that the Scarred would take us both on tour was another brilliant stroke of luck. Justin taking an interest in me and forming a friendship is perhaps the luckiest part of all.
If there is a moral, I guess it’s this: Take a chance when a weird and wonderful opportunity stumbles into your life. You never know where it might lead.
