Punk mainstays Descendents dust off a few relics from late-’70s Long Beach on their new album
Milo Aukerman wasn’t yet part of the band in the late 1970s when Descendents practiced in the garage of a home on the corner of Ninth and Walnut in Long Beach.
But during the height of the coronavirus pandemic, the pioneering punk band’s frontman got to travel back in time and record songs that preceded the band’s 1982 breakthrough album, “Milo Goes to College,” but weren’t released until this summer.
“Half these songs I sang back in the band when I first joined; the other half were songs that I’ve never even heard before, so it was a fun little thing,” Aukerman said during a phone interview from his home in Delaware to talk about the band’s latest release, “9th & Walnut.”
The singer was drinking tea to soothe his singing voice since he has been practicing a lot in preparation of a national tour with Rise Against. Descendents will perform songs from the new album and others from their long career at FivePoint Amphitheatre in Irvine on Aug. 21 in a show featuring the current lineup, which includes Karl Alvarez on bass, Stephen Egerton on guitar and drummer and founding member Bill Stevenson.
The band formed as a trio in 1977 in Manhattan Beach with Stevenson, bassist Tony Lombardo and guitarist Frank Navetta, who died in 2008, playing shows at house parties and venues around Los Angeles and Orange counties.
Aukerman joined Descendents in 1980 but left after the release of “Milo Goes to College” to, yes, attend college, studying molecular biology before returning to front the band on and off again over the next four decades. Other members have done their own projects as well.
The band, which has gone through several lineup changes over its history, has been credited with influencing modern-day pop punk and skate punk bands like Blink-182, Fall Out Boy, The All-American Rejects and Green Day.
Corner garage
But before the band changed the face of punk, Navetta and Lombardo wrote the songs on “9th & Walnut” in the Long Beach garage that belonged to Navetta’s older brother, who was in a band called The Pagan Babies.
“The Pagan Babies were using it as a practice pad so Frank said, ‘Hey bro, can I use your garage?’ and that’s where those songs were written at that practice pad,” he said. “Personally, I never even saw Ninth and Walnut.”
The new album was recorded over two periods, in 2002 and 2020, and was released July 23. It’s made up of 18 of the band’s earliest songs, written from 197780, and includes a rerecording of their 1979 debut single, “Ride the Wild”/“It’s a Hectic World,” and a cover of the Dave Clark Five’s “Glad All Over.”
It also offers a lens on the evolution of the then-fledgling band, Aukerman said.
“If someone were listening to ‘Ride the Wild’ and ‘Hectic World’ and you go listen to ‘Milo Goes to College,’ you would kind of go ‘What happened?’ ” Aukerman said.
“‘Ride the Wild,’ ‘Hectic World’ had a much more ’60s influence, more of a folky influence, even, so it might throw people off into thinking these must be two separate bands. No, it’s the same band. This stuff, the ‘9th & Walnut’ stuff, was in between those and you can hear elements of ‘Milo Goes to College,’ ” Aukerman continued.
“But then a lot of these songs sound like ‘Ride the Wild,’ too; there’s a little more ’60s influence,” he said.
But those early, unreleased songs were put on the shelf until 2002, when Stevenson, Lombardo and Navetta reunited to record the instrumental tracks.
“The initial thing was just to get versions of these songs on tape, and then Bill turned to me and said whenever I wanted to I could lay down vocals on these,” he said.
But at the time Aukerman was concentrating mostly on his science career and he put off recording.
After retiring from his science gig in 2016, he returned to his music full time, but it wasn’t until the pandemic that he finally recorded them.
“People may ask why it took so long — well, circumstances meant that it was never in our front view vision. It was always in our side vision to try to do this until COVID,” he said.
“It only hit me over the head during COVID that, hey, I got all the time in the world so we ought to be just plowing through a lot of this — if you want to call it, legacy recordings — that we have. We can’t play shows so that’s what I did during COVID,” Aukerman said.
And while he’s gone back in time to the early days of Descendents with this new album, Aukerman has yet to go to that garage where those first songs were born.
“I should go check it out, actually,” he said. “I have no idea who lives there now. I suppose I could knock on the door and say, ‘Hey have you heard of our band? We named our record after your garage,’ ” he said.