What was it like singing these songs? I imagine a lot of them you probably hadn’t listened to in a really long time, but they probably sounded strangely familiar from playing them with a band or hearing them early on. So it’s an odd kind of fits and spurts-songs written in the ’70s then recorded in the 2000s and now I’m finishing the recording in 2020, basically. Then during COVID, I thought, “Well, this is a good time to just spend a lot of time in the recording studio.” We’ve been recording lots of new songs, but I thought the time was right for me to start tackling these songs on 9th & Walnut. At the time I was a scientist and I thought, “OK, well maybe at some point I could record these.” I kept going with my science career, but in 2011 I started playing with the band quite a bit more, and then in 2016 kind of said sayonara to science. He recorded with Frank and Tony, and then he told me about it that year. I was like, ‘Why did you guys ever stop playing these?’ They sounded like a whole side of the Descendents that I never even knew existed.” “When I heard the versions that Bill had put down in 2002, I was just blown away. Since they were out there, Bill said, “Let’s record all these lost songs from that period of 19.” Now fast forward to 2002 and Bill’s got Tony and Frank out in Fort Collins and they’re doing this thing called Stockage, which was a live performance where it was the original lineup of Bill, Frank, and Tony. When I first joined about half of these songs were still being played by the band, but they never made it onto Milo Goes to College or Fat EP or anything, they kind of got phased out of the set. Could you talk a little bit about the timeline and how it all came together?Īll the songs themselves were written in 19, before I even joined the band.
The songs on 9th & Walnut were written in the late-’70s, recorded in 2002, and are being released now.
So strong that Aukerman assures us that new music is currently in the works.
We caught up with Aukerman to talk about his first time singing with the band, the way Black Flag (which Stevenson also played drums for) supported him early on, and how the band’s early members contributed to the unique Descendents sound, which is still going strong. The result, 9th & Walnut, is a collection of tracks that bridge the gap between the band’s earliest recordings and their 1982 debut Milo Goes to College -and it shows that even in middle-age, the ferocity of these songs hasn’t waned. However six years prior, the original core of the band met up at Stevenson’s Blasting Room studio in Fort Collins, Colorado, to record some of the band’s earliest songs, over which the band’s longtime vocalist Milo Aukerman finally tracked his vocals during the pandemic. While the band experienced something of a renaissance in the ’90s with Everything Sucks, and more recently with their 2016 album Hypercaffium Spazzinate, many fans would switch to decaf to see the band’s original lineup of drummer Bill Stevenson, guitarist/vocalist Frank Navetta, and bassist/vocalist Tony Lombardo. For over 40 years, the Descendents have been one of the most celebrated acts in punk as they’ve combined melody, technical prowess, and lyrical introspection into a unique amalgam all their own.
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