The Proud, The Few

"The first time that I saw the Descendents, they were the fastest band I'd ever heard seen," sings NOFX's Fat Mike at the beginning of their song 13 Stitches. I've never been lucky enough to see the Descendents live, but I can tell you about the first time I heard them.

The year was 1992 and I was working nighshift at Woolworth's during the summer holidays. Anyone who remembers Woolworth's will tell you that their entertainment section was substandard and music-wise contained little more than the top 40 and a handful of other albums. A guy I worked with who was a bit of an indie rocker told me he'd found something he wanted to play for me. The two songs he played me seemed to be someone ordering at a drive through restaurant to a fast beat, and a song about liking food that was equally fast. The band was the Descendents and the songs were Weinerschnitzel and I Like Food and had a combined length of less than half a minute. I was blown away and thought they were both comical and musically brilliant. I told my workmate to play the whole album, but we never got the chance as someone else commandeered the CD player to "treat" us to Fairground Attraction. The CD was called Two Things At Once which contains their Bonus Fat EP and first long-player Milo Goes To College. I still find it unbelievable that Woolworth's stocked this.
Within a few days, a trip to my good friends at Squalid Sounds was in order to purchase this album. This was the punk rock I had been waiting to hear. I discovered that not all punk was angry and the Descendents mixed melody, fast rhythms and amusing lyrics about subjects such as fishing, adolescence and eating. I was hooked on songs like Suburban Home, Catalina and Kabuki Girl and craved more. Sadly, browsing through the shelves of Squalid's yielded nothing and in a pre-internet world, I was forced to accept that they hadn't released anything else. This assumption, like all assumptions, made an ass out of you and mption (or something).
A couple of years later, in a pub (not a place I was seen often in my youth), I happened to mention the Descendents to a friend. It turned out he was quite a fan and he asked me if I'd heard everything they'd done. "Of course," was my reply, "there's only Two Things At Once." This was a huge egg-on-face moment and he laughed as if I'd just told him that Hertz Van Rental was the Dutch prime minister. The next day he handed me a couple of cassettes (old school file sharing for those who don't know). These cassettes contained I Don't Want To Grow Up, Enjoy!, All and a live album that my cassette player steadfastly refused to play. In my usual whole-hearted way, I played these tapes on heavy rotation for a couple of weeks before moving on to something else.
I listened to these tapes every once in a while during the following years and never gave much more thought to the Descendents. I guessed they must have split up because pretty much every other punk band who were active during the 80s had done so. Yes, this was egg-on-face moment number two in this story, although it was only three years ago that I realised this. I was reading an interview (I can't remember who with, but that's not important) and the interviewee cited the Descendents' Everything Sucks as a major influence. Everything Sucks? Why had I never heard of this record?
It turned out that the band had been "on hiatus" since the All album and nine years later, in 1996, they came out of hibernation to record Everything Sucks. The sound was a lot heavier on this album; the guitars were fuzzier, but the same Descendents humour was present in abundance. This has since become my favourite album in the world ever, as regular readers of this blog (hey, you two) will already know. After discovering this masterpiece, I also found out they had recorded another album since then - 2004's Cool To Be You. This record continued where Everything Sucks left off and is definitely the last thing the band recorded (I've checked on Wikipedia and everything).
So it's now 7 years since the last album, but can we assume that a band who have only released two studio albums in the last 24 years are finished? Probably not - they're still touring and a documentary is apparently in the works.