Descendents bring their coffee-fuelled tour to town
Veteran punk band Descendents uses coffee to maintain youthful verve
It can’t be helped that any conversation with Bill Stevenson of punk legends Descendents will devolve into a conversation on coffee.
That’s part of the lore of the band, which started back in 1977 as a couple of California teens strumming on acoustic guitars before they wrangled a rhythm section, with neighbourhood kid Stevenson joining on drums as a 15-year-old a year later. Stevenson is the last remaining member of that particular version of Descendents, which moved through a few different lineup changes before settling on the current, long running one, which features bassist Karl Alvarez, guitarist Stephen Egerton, and vocalist Milo Aukerman.
While the now 53-year-old Stevenson is the de facto leader of the band, Aukerman is the linchpin; Descendents gigs have always been dependent on the time that he’s been able to take away from his job as a research scientist. As alluded to in many of Descendents early albums, like 1982’s Milo Goes to College, Aukerman’s juggling of his degrees in biochemistry and occasional forays back into the world of punk rock have moulded the band. Interim periods have seen members working on other projects; for Stevenson that includes time spent in the ’80s with hardcore masters Black Flag, as well as ALL, a band that subs in vocalist Chad Price for Aukerman but keeps the same rhythm section as Descendents. He also works as a producer and recording engineer for bands that make it to his studio in Fort Collins, Colorado.
Now that Aukerman has decided to ditch the world of science and make Descendents his full-time occupation, the four veteran punks have kicked into high gear, taking their latest effort, the coffee-themed Hypercaffium Spazzinate, on the road for more than just a weekend here and there. We spoke with Stevenson from his Fort Collins home about a life spent in punk, and coffee.
How are you juggling your other jobs now that you’ve gotten Descendents off the ground as a full-time project?
Well, I’ve definitely been doing more concerts than audio engineering or producing, which I think suits me better. I stay more active that way; engineering can be a bit like a desk job, and I prefer to be physical, which might help me in keeping me farther away from my next big health problem.
Health problems?
Oh, man, I’ve had two brain surgeries, one open lung, and one open heart surgery. (Laughs) The more active I stay the more I feel like I maybe can postpone whatever poor health with befall me.
Well, playing Descendents music would sure qualify as a workout.
The tempos tend to be on the quick side, yeah. We have this very deliberate 8th note approach to things, and we drink a lot of coffee before we play, which helps. Sometimes you play ‘em a little too fast because of the coffee, but that’s the blueprint for our sound. It’s something we largely created when we were teenagers, and I hope we postpone my feeble old age by trying to manage those tempos.
Speaking of coffee, I’ve heard rumours that you like to down something like 10 shots of espresso before hitting the stage. Is that true?
Yeah. I feel like I need that much in order to do it right. It’s kind of a common misconception that espresso has more caffeine than regular coffee. The ratio is something like 2 to 1, and I need the equivalent of, like, three or four cups of coffee before I play, which is eight or 10 espressos. It’s lower in volume, which I like. I guess that begs the question “why not take speed or caffeine pills?” With my compulsive behaviour being what it is, if I started down that road I wouldn’t survive very long.
Do you guys take a good coffee maker on the road with you the way that They Might Be Giants do?
We don’t. I mean, we talk about it every time we’re in this situation where we can’t find decent coffee, but we’re not snobs about it. Since we’re not touring in a bus it doesn’t make sense to. We do these fly in shows, so it would be one more thing to drag along. I guess we’ve just never really gotten it together. You know, they do make this thing called an Aero press, and it’s quite small. Similar to a French press, but constructed differently. It makes a very good cup of coffee.
We’re talking an awful lot about coffee.
I don’t think that’s so wrong when you’re discussing the Descendents. We can talk about music if you want.
Point taken, especially since coffee is a mainstay for the band; it’s been a constant topic throughout the band’s career, and you’ve even put your name on a coffee flavoured pale ale. You’ve also changed, though, going from teenage concerns like I’m Not a Punk and Parents to addressing aging in rock music, like Comeback Kid from Hypercaffium Spazzinate.
You have to be honest to what you are, right? You have to grow, and while I’m not angry about
the things I was angry about as a kid, I might be angry about, oh, my country dropping bombs on a country that hasn’t done anything to us. You think that you mellow when you get older, but maybe you don’t. But we’re growing. Bands can evolve gracefully; some don’t, and sometimes it takes a growing pains kind of album that maybe didn’t sell well to do it. Maybe fans didn’t like it at the time but it was a necessary step to jump to the next place. It can sometimes be awkward, but it’s necessary to grow.
Are you thinking of a particular Descendents album?
I don’t know if you’d say that the Descendents had one like that, but if you look at Black Flag, we did some records that were almost like reactionary statements against the records before. I believe reactionary is valid in terms of being useful in art, but sometimes the results aren’t always divine.
You’re talking about Black Flag records like My War and Family Man, where you started to go off the beaten path?
Yeah, there could have been a couple albums in between Damaged (1981) and My War (1984) that would explain a little about what we were doing, but the problem was that we couldn’t release anything for two or three years because of legal problems. In that time we changed so much that when we put out My War people were asking “what the hell is this?”
There was no precedent for it in your catalogue, and I remember that the music press were just as bewildered when you guys slowed down and went into a Black Sabbath direction. That probably had an effect on how punk fans viewed the band at the time.
There was something Karl (Alvarez) said the other day. He basically said that if you could effectively communicate the experience of music by talking or writing about it, then we wouldn’t have a need for music. But you can’t talk about music. You can, but you’re kind of wasting your breath. It’s pointless. If it’s used to entice someone to check out a new record then cool, but to be honest, when someone recommends something to me I want to listen to it with them. Don’t just tell me about why you like it. I want to watch you while I’m listening, and check out your face reactions to see what it means to you.