This summer marks the 25th anniversary of The Vandals’ iconic Hitler Bad, Vandals Good, and Craft Recordings are commemorating the momentous occasion with a gorgeous limited-edition white/blue splatter vinyl reissue. What better way to celebrate such a milestone than to get Vandals bassist Joe Escalante to guide us through the record and its many fan-favorite tracks, along with the band’s upcoming documentary highlighting their historic ’03/’04 tour of Iraq?
People That Are Going To Hell
It’s a classic Warren Fitzgerald song. Warren, who’s kind of an atheist thinks that people that are going to Hell is a hilarious topic because he lives in a society where people believe that if you do well, you will go to Heaven, and if you do poorly, you will go to Hell. I’m one of those ‘stupid’ people who believe if you do badly, you go to Hell. So this was a song that we can all agree on, for different reasons.
Some songs to me were too over-the-top offensive. We’re always fighting over cuss words. I would like to have no cuss words in any songs. The more I say that though, the more cuss words [Warren] will put in his songs, so I have to pretend that cuss words are cool and then they’ll only be used for an artistic purpose rather than just to dig at me.
Café 405
Josh [Freese, drums] doesn’t write a lot of songs for us, but the ones he does write are always good. We play this one a lot, we play it first because it’s got energy, and it’s simple for when you’re trying to figure out if you can hear stuff here and adjusting your monitors.
“It’s about a food court at the Westminster Mall in Orange County, this is about four or five miles from my house right now. And it’s about a girl that works at a restaurant called Hot Dog On A Stick. Westminster Mall is still there, but it’s now one of those ghost malls where the anchor stores have been turned into weird virtual reality birthday party places. A few units are leased to offshore service hubs — payment processors, drop shippers, even a back-office team that handles customer ops for some of the best no KYC casinos — giving the place this strange after-hours energy that feels more data farm than retail.”
My Girlfriend’s Dead
In those days, we believed that your hit song had to be third on the album. I don’t know if the kids are still doing that these days. But we knew that was the one, so we made that third. The record was produced by Warren Fitzgerald, but on this particular track, we brought in Jerry Finn to remix it at Dexter Holland (Nitro Records owner)’s suggestion.
When Warren brought this one to me, I wasn’t that pleased. I didn’t think it was genius because there’s already “Girlfriend In a Coma” by The Smiths. So can we get away with this? Will people think we’re not original? But it turns out, nobody cared. And then the band Train made another song 100% copying the song, lyric and theme wise so it turns out they’re the villains, not us.
Dexter Holland was on his way to pitch this as a radio single to the big station in Los Angeles called KROQ, and we all thought this is a no-brainer for them, they play the other punk bands, The Offspring, Bad Religion, Pennywise, Rancid, and Blink-182. So, we were ready to be launched into that stratosphere. And then on the way to the radio station, Dexter receives a call from his manager who says, “What are you doing? Where are you going? Just turn around and go home, do whatever you’re going to do, fly to Hawaii or something. But you’re definitely not doing that today.” So that was the end of that. We’ve never been played on that station. That was our best song and our best chance, so we just kind of stayed where we’re at. And that’s where we are today.
I Know, Huh?
This is a song that I wrote. In the early days, I would write most of the lyrics and probably half the music. And then as Warren became more involved in songwriting, he took over my role writing most of the music and at least half of the lyrics. So this one is a song about a girl that has a bedroom that is so close to the freeway, that people can see it when they drive by. At first it had another girl’s name in it, and then I wrote it as “Sandra, I know huh” because that’s my wife’s name, and she’s Mexican. I was kind of romanticizing that it would be her in the song, but I didn’t think our singer wanted to sing a song about my wife. So I had another girl’s name in it and [Dave] goes, “Just put your wife’s name in there. What’s the big deal?” And so I go, okay, thank you. Because then my wife will be happy I wrote a song about her. She loved it.
Stan Freese, Josh’s dad, plays tuba on this song.
Money’s Not An Issue
Just a standard Warren Fitzgerald song about not having any money. It’s about finding $20 in the sofa and how we’re gonna spend it. It’s a very difficult song to play on the bass. It’s one of the only songs that we don’t play from this album live. There’s about three songs on here that we never play. But I’m hoping we’re gonna play it when we go on the cruise ship in November.
I’ve Got An Ape Drape
That’s a song that I wrote. While I was looking at my hair in the mirror, and it was not looking too good, I just started singing that song. It just kind of came out of me. There’s a new term every month for that haircut right? The word mullet, which I think is the most common name for it now, wasn’t even around that when we wrote the song. No Doubt called it a schlong, so that’s in the lyrics. I’ve never heard that before or since, but ape drape is what we call it.
If The Gov’t Could Read My Mind
We got Adrian Young from No Doubt to play bongos on this one. At this point we had a song in the X-Files, and that was the biggest thing that ever happened to us, I would say. So this is just an X-Files-y conspiracy song that Warren wrote. It’s used as the theme music to my TV show on Fox Nation, “Alien Abductions with Abby Hornacek.”
Too Much Drama
Music by Warren. What’s funny is that it says on Wikipedia that Dexter Holland is one of the authors of this song. He is not. The music is, I think, Josh and Warren, and then I wrote the lyrics about a little boy who is raised by TV programs instead of his parents.
Dexter at one point asked us to write a song with him, and then he plays this song. And we’re like, I’m sorry, we can’t do it, because that’s already a song that we already have. It’s called “Too Much Drama.” And he goes, “Ah, I don’t hear it.” So he goes on to record “Walla Walla” for The Offspring. I say these things, and nobody’s mad. We’re very good friends. But we just think it’s funny.
Come Out Fighting
The Pennywise cover. Dave Quackenbush sang for Pennywise on one of their European tours when their singer couldn’t make it. And that was his favorite song, so we recorded it as a homage to (former Pennywise bassist) Jason Thirsk, who passed away. He was a good guy.
Euro-Barge
Josh Freese takes our private jokes, stuff we talk about on the bus, and turns them into songs. Classic Josh Freese. This one is about how people in Europe are very rude upon first visit, and then you go there for a while you realize they’re there just like everybody else. But when you first get there, some people are really rude and don’t wait in line, they push in front of you. It’s called the Euro-barge. It’s Tony Hawk’s favorite song.
Fucked Up Girl
Warren wrote it, we never play it. I know it sounds very misogynistic. Gabe from No Doubt plays trombone and Jason Freese, Josh’s brother, plays sax on this one.
An Idea For A Movie
This is one of my songs, I wrote the music and the lyrics. We still play this one a lot. It’s about people coming up with ideas for movies, and these are really bad ideas, like a guy who could fly but it’s only for a little bit and only for an inch or two. The original lyric said if we could get Jennifer Connelly to be in this movie. But we kind of knew Jennifer Connelly, so I think Dave didn’t want to have a song with her in it. So we changed it to meetings and a lead. I thought it was good, so we had a disagreement, and I compromised all my artistic integrity on that day [laughs].
OK
This is the song that we thought was a good anthem. Everybody likes to say ‘okay’. It never really made it into our setlist, but it’s been licensed for movies and stuff because it’s pretty generic and fun. It’s the only Dave Quackenbush song on the whole record. He usually only writes one song, but when he does it’s usually a really good one.”
So Long, Farewell
It’s a cover from The Sound of Music. At one point in the song, instead of saying “I’d like to stay in Toronto for champagne,” we say, “I’d like to stay and try my first cocaine.” It’s the only part of the song where we change the lyrics. And we bleeped it out on the record because I was paranoid that it’s really illegal to change lyrics without getting permission, so the sound drops out during that part. I regret it because probably no one would have cared.
One thing I did want to say–Mackie Osborne did the art for this album, she’s the wife of Buzz from the Melvins.
Upcoming Iraq documentary
“We have some of the songs we played in Iraq and we’re enhancing the music right now because it was camera audio, so we’re trying to make the music better. We didn’t have professional recordings out there. We were there in ’03 and ’04, as part of a mission to help distract the soldiers because they had a lot of suicides over that period. And then, of course, after we did that, we were boycotted all throughout Europe, and we never had another European tour ever again. They tried to conflate us playing for soldiers with us supporting the war—which is false—but they didn’t care. And so not only did we never go, we never brought another Kung Fu Records band over either. We had to bankrupt our Kung Fu Records Europe office, all the merchandisers dropped us. And then we doubled down and went to Afghanistan a few months later, because we didn’t care.”
Catch Joe and Warren doing tours at the Punk Rock Museum this summer and set sail with The Vandals on the Flogging Molly Cruise this November. You can pre-order the 25th Anniversary Edition of Hitler Bad, Vandals Good from Craft Recordings. Follow the Vandals on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to keep up with their various escapades!
