As Samiam’s Astray celebrates its 25th birthday—it is just a month away from playing the record in its entirety at Riot Fest, as part of 20 bands playing 20 full album sets for the 20th anniversary of Riot Fest—it is worth a look back at the Samiam album that bridged the ’90s and welcomed in the aughts of punk rock. As the years unfolded, Samiam matured in the depth of their songwriting, capturing raw, firsthand experiences that resonated with their audience. If new to the audience, or recently discovering Astray, here is a recap.
First, an extremely brief history of this almost 40-year-old band includes an esthetic they devised without a map. Their approach to punk rock was less about fitting into a specific mold and more about forging an identity grounded in authenticity. In the early 1990s, their East Bay childhood was the compass, shaping albums like Soar and Billy. Later in the mid ‘90s, Clumsy and You Are Freaking Me Out filled in the major label years. They shuffled in Sean Kennerly to play bass after Aaron Rubin quit in 1997. Kennerly, a close friend of Loobkoff’s, became “the new guy,” and joined the band for a tour of Japan with Green Day. Kennerly is the current guitarist and shares some singing duties, the new guy indeed.
They toured in support of You Are Freaking Me Out for a couple of years. During that time, they wrote new material for what would become Astray. By 2000, Astray was set for release in August of that year. They kept their true north through the evolving landscape of punk. There are a lot of names to mention including James Brogan who was part of Astray. After Astray there are albums, Whatever’s Got You Down and Trips that followed. “80 West” and “El Dorado” from Trips are still rotated in the band’s recent set lists. The latest album, Stowaway, Samiam’s current reality spins like a tornado out of the speakers.
They made the most of their time in small clubs like Gilman, growing their point of view and cementing their style — honesty before genre. Everyone in Samiam’s orbit gave a little bit in some way to their history. While the compass has led the band, its members past and present, in many different personal directions, Samiam have become the roots of a whole lot of bands who they influenced. It’s an aesthetic Sergie Loobkoff explains like this, “We did a lot of things that a band like ours, which is basically like a garage band. When people ask me, I usually say that Samiam is an international garage band. There’s a lot of bands that maybe could go around the world, and they’re known a little bit around the world, draw 500 people in Berlin. They’re not doing the same thing that Green Day’s doing.”
“There’s not a whole bunch of commerce around it. They really are a garage band. The only difference is most garage bands have three fans, which is the parents, or the girlfriends of the members of the band, or boyfriends of the members of the band. Whereas a band like Samiam, it’s still a pretty much a garage band, but there’s thousands of people around the world that are interested in it. So, when we got signed to Atlantic, the fact that we got signed to Atlantic and the fact that we played a little professional for a couple of years, really did take away the fact that we felt like a garage band, and we thought we were a garage band.”
Importantly, pulling Astray out of the past and putting the focus on it, the music marks a transition for Samiam. The band had grown up a little. They moved away from the childhood sentiment on Clumsy and You Are Freaking Me Out. On Jason Beebout’s mind was a short-lived separation from his wife. He began to write about it. Jason Beebout speaks of its autobiographical nature, “I had just begun to break up with my wife, who I’m together with again. I have two kids with. We separated for a couple of years. A lot of the songs on that record were about that.”
Drilling down, Samiam began preproduction around 1999 for Hopeless Records/Burning Heart Records. The timeline of Astray began with a six-song demo, they brought on producer Tim O’Heir and chose to record in Sausalito, CA at The Record Plant known as “The Plant.” Beebout, Loobkoff, and all Samiam’s truth was about to be encapsulated by their 2000 release and held on to forever in the grooves of Astray.
Day one of recording begins with a series of events that Kennerly described as, “intense and fucked up.” Kennerly sets the opening scene of the recording of Astray. The record began at guitarist Sergie Loobkoff’s house in El Sobrante, CA. “We got there early in the morning to get all the equipment into the van to drive it over to this awesome studio. Sergie had a chow pit bull mix named Cosmo, and it was an awesome dog, but a little bit untamable. I guess it had bitten a couple of people and just didn’t really listen to you.”
Kennerly unfolds the first hours in the morning before the studio, “As we were loading up the equipment, Cosmo bolted out of the front door of Sergie’s house, across the street to where we had the van parked, and a truck’s coming down the road, hit him. Cosmo just rolled over a couple times and then just took off running, just ran up the street and wouldn’t answer the calls. I mean, he got hit hard. I was surprised that he could even stand up, but he just like took off running, and we couldn’t find him.”
The rest of the band went to the studio, while Loobkoff remained home searching for Cosmo.
Meanwhile, Kennerly realized he had left his bass behind. He explains the unfortunate day was only starting. “Jason also had this VW bug that was, like, super fucked up at the time, and we drove that over, this was pre-cell phones. We’ve gotten to the studio. I realized in the confusion and all that shit from hitting the dog, we were trying to call him, and he wasn’t answering because he was cruising around the neighborhood looking for a dog all day. I finally gave up trying to call him, I got in Jason’s car, I was like, fuck it. I’ve just got to drive back and get the bass. I drove three blocks from the studio and decided to make one last call at a pay phone.” Kennerly finally reached Loobkoff, he would bring the bass to the studio.
However, Kennerly explains, things are about to get worse. “I got back in Jason’s car, turn around, and go back. The car backfires, and the gas line goes flying off the carburetor, which is spewing gas. I was like, ‘Fuck Jason’s car is on fire.’ This guy comes out of the house across the street, and it’s like, ‘Oh man, your car is on fire.’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, I caught on fire.’ And then he was like, ‘I got a fire extinguisher.’ He brings out this old fire extinguisher that they pulled out the pin. It was so old that it just made a couple of little bubbles of whatever stuff that’s in there on the ground and didn’t do anything. The firefighters came, and they just smashed out all the windows and the car was burnt to a crisp. They just smashed the windows out and then just let the car sit there and burn. Jason lost his car, and Sergie lost the dog. It couldn’t have been a more fucked-up beginning to record.”
Loobkoff never found Cosmo, and on par with just about every song Samiam has ever written, day one was a bad day. Kennerly punctuates his thought, “After that, everything went great.” From the chaos to the point where things begin to go, as Kennerly put it, “Great,” they met Tim O’Heir at The Plant.
O’Heir shows up to record with flair, in a convertible Mustang, at the studio known for recording Fleetwood Mac in the 1970s, Prince’s first album in the late 1970s, lots of Grateful Dead and Metallica in the 1990s. It is the exact opposite of Samiam’s journey to The Plant. In addition, it’s also a transition time for O’Heir, having a reputation in Boston from the early 1990s as a “Low Fi guy” from his work with Sebadoh on albums like Bakesale. His career is on the way to doing the first All-American Rejects record featuring “Swing, Swing,” one of his biggest hits. O’Heir brings his East Coast resume west to Northern California.
Before O’Heir, Samiam’s artistic vision didn’t always appreciate outside input on their work. Kennerly explains the process from the demo to the final mix. Recording Astray involved a team. “Tim O’Hare coming out, that kind of probably our last past, active producer intervention or participation. We did a lot of rehearsing, months, and that was the normal thing. The label would be in the rehearsals with you for a month, going over the songs. The producer, and the engineer, are going to be there listening to your rehearsals. That’s painful to me now, but Tim was into it and did a good job with it.”
They are scheduled for a couple of weeks. With preproduction completed, despite the chaos—the loss of Cosmo, the fiery loss of Jason’s car—When they finally reached the studio, it was a beginning, their recording with Tim O’Heir set the stage for an album that blended autobiographical depth with Samiam’s sound, these experiences are a significant milestone in their musical progression.
Concentrating specifically on “Dull,” “Dull” tackles the suicide of one of Beebout’s childhood friends. It’s the pinnacle of storytelling on the album, a single best example of Beebout’s melancholy lyric style. ‘Dull’ is a song that carries weight across Samiam’s history.
Beebout says, “It’s just one of those songs that came together pretty quickly. My friend Lucky had just died, when you’re in your 20s, it’s just such a weird time, when you get out of your teenage, high school mentality. I guess what Gilman was for me, where I’ve met a lot of people, and a new freedom that you get when you leave your parents’ house for first time. You’re just kind of a fucking wild animal, then you realize then you realize you can’t really last very long that way unless someone is footing the bill. You fall into work habits and shit and figure out who you are going to be as an adult. Then you kind of lose contact with people. It takes sometimes something like a funeral to remember, ‘Oh shit, I really care about all these people, and I’m losing touch.’”
Furthermore, Kennerly adds, he knew there was something special working on “Dull” and hearing Jason’s lyrics in preproduction. “I thought they were great. I have a lot of respect for Jason as a lyricist that I think that’s another aspect of the simplicity of, and the honesty of Samiam and why it is still a relevant band. He’s not prompting or making bullshit up, either. He has always been sincere, talking about real shit. Not just crafted to entertain you for a minute. That’s a real song about real people and real life. He was going through that and that was what was happening then.” He says, “We recorded “Dull,” one of the best songs to stand out.” By then, the team knew they had a record. There are more than a few standout tracks.
On “Mud Hill,” Loobkoff got the writing credit, Beebout explains how he perceived the song when it was first brought to him, “We were working on that record in his (Loobkoff’s) basement, garage, little jam room at his house in El Sobrante. I grew up in a really shitty town called El Sobrante, and Sergie grew up in Berkeley, which is, in my eyes, a real city, has a university and Gilman. Then when he got a little older and had some money, he bought his first house in El Sobrante and I was always like, ‘what the fuck is wrong with you?’ And he moved in right next door to the Hell’s Angels headquarters, which is also really fucking weird, but it makes things interesting. We were in his basement a lot and things were going on in his life. We were kind of in the middle of it. He was living with his girlfriend there, and that song was about his girlfriend. “Mud Hill” is an apt description of El Sobrante in general.”
Wrapping up recording Astray, Beebout, on being produced by O’Heir, says, “Tim had an effective way of guiding us in a direction or getting us to try something a little differently. Whether it’s tempo or just, like, ‘That’s really fucking slow,’ or, ‘You guys try that slower,’ just something that’s simple. It’s something that we tend to not really respect the opinion of other people in those situations a lot, stupidly, I think at times, but he had a pretty good way that it didn’t ruffle anybody’s feathers.” Beebout had a great deal of respect for what O’Heir was creating simultaneously on Hedwig and The Angry Inch. Samiam, plus Tim O’Heir, plus The Plant, all in Sausalito—the mixture of these ingredients—would add up to one of Samiam’s most complete albums.
Loobkoff gives his overall feeling on why. “I think because we were not playing music of the time, particularly we were sort of out in our own world, I don’t think it sounds that dated because it doesn’t really sound like anything that was going on in 2000.”
Finally, for these reasons, in the present, that is in 2025, looking back across all the years of Samiam’s music, Astray is a benchmark in truthful music making. Astray is important today because of the care that went into its craft. It is a time capsule of honesty, quality, and professionalism. From the playing and producing to the recording and engineering, it is a record worth spinning in order from side A to side B without skipping any tracks. Bringing it back live in the fall of 2025 will be a big moment for Samiam’s faithful listeners.
Beebout finishes his thoughts on Astray with this reflection. “Part of the problem I have with a lot of the songs on Clumsy, I wrote them from a different time; it wasn’t that far apart. Clumsy was, like, 94, 95, and then this was 2000. I wrote all the songs on Clumsy about stuff that happened to me when I was 15, 16, 17. They don’t feel very honest right now when I’m singing them, unless I’m taking the position of the shithead father.” Of the songs on Astray, he says, “They still kind of hold up pretty well.”
Beebout reenforces that point by saying, “It’s funny, it’s the record we still play most of the songs, the largest majority from any one record comes from that record. We’ve had a way of writing songs, recording them, and then never playing them ever again. In the early days, it was the same songs over and over, and then we wrote more songs. As years went along and we had a few more records and a few more songs, we’d started to taper out some of the older ones that we got tired of playing, but some records like, Whatever’s Got You Down, I think there were two songs we played off at record even a month after it was finished, but for some reason, Astray has a lot of winners on it.”
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