Stevenson says that he’d always planned for Aukerman to add vocals, but the project was still in limbo as of 2008, when Navetta died at age 46 after falling into a diabetic coma. The tracks they put down lay dormant for almost two decades. “They were our first songs,” the drummer says. Stevenson says that while they occasionally consulted old practice tapes when rehearsing, for the most part, the material came back to them effortlessly. I was so proud of those guys, ’cause they were out of the loop, but they both really did a good job.” Then at the end of that two-week period, we played that little show at Stockage, and it was fun. We tried to just leave them how they really were back in the day. We tried not to upgrade them or make them fancier than they were. We just practiced and practiced, and we got all up to speed. “‘Cause we were all still best friends there was never any bad blood in the band. “They came and stayed with me at my house,” Stevenson recalls of the ’02 sessions with Navetta and Lombardo. Afterward, they played the same material live at Stockage, a Fort Collins fest built around All, with Navetta and Lombardo each singing lead on the songs they wrote. The trio recorded new versions of the first 17 songs they ever wrote and played together, plus a cover of the Dave Clark Five’s upbeat British Invasion classic “Glad All Over,” an early band favorite that they used to perform back in the day. (Meanwhile, the Descendents’ influence spread to a generation of era-defining musicians, from Dave Grohl to Blink-182, whose Mark Hoppus has likened the band to a “punk-rock Beach Boys.”)īut in 2002, six years after cameo-ing on the Descendents’ excellent 1996 comeback LP, Everything Sucks, Navetta and Lombardo reconvened with Stevenson at the Blasting Room, his studio in Fort Collins, Colorado. Stevenson continued on with various lineups of the Descendents and its Milo-less alter ego band All. Navetta moved to Oregon, where his family lived Lombardo parted ways with the Descendents after appearing on their second album, I Don’t Want to Grow Up, and before a 1985 tour, feeling weighed down by the pressures of adult life. The Milo Goes to College lineup dissolved by 1983, following Aukerman’s real-life departure for college. “If you were to listen to the Fat EP and go, ‘Hey, what’d they do before ?’ and you go to ‘Ride the Wild’ and you go, ‘What the hell?! They’re like two separate bands,'” says the famously bespectacled singer, “that’s where this record can help bridge some of this hardcore stuff with the basically Sixties songs that were being done by Frank back in that time.”ĭescendents’ early era was brief. A history lesson for Aukerman, the project will be even more so for fans, who have never before had the chance to chart how the Descendents progressed from the jangly, New Wave–influenced sound of their 1979 debut single (“Ride the Wild” b/w “It’s a Hectic World,” recorded by the trio of guitarist Frank Navetta, bassist Tony Lombardo, and drummer Bill Stevenson) to the caffeinated melodic hardcore of their first releases with Aukerman, 1981’s Fat EP and 1982’s Milo Goes to College. Last year, in the middle of pandemic lockdown, Milo Aukerman got a unique opportunity: the chance to sing a handful of songs that he never even knew existed from the back catalog of the Descendents, the pioneering California punk outfit he’s fronted on and off for more than 40 years.ĭating from the first few years after the band’s 1977 formation, the songs - along with many that Aukerman did perform after he joined in 1980 - will finally see release this summer on 9th & Walnut, a newly completed album named after the Long Beach intersection where they practiced early on.
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