Destroy, rebuild, start again
A 14-year-old Sonny Moore crashes the Pennywise state during a 2001 concert at the L.A. Memorial Coliseum. He would go to stardom as Skillex.
by Jim Lindberg
It was the summer of 2001 in the blazing hot parking lot of the L.A. Memorial Coliseum and I was about to go on stage and play to one of the biggest crowds I’d ever seen. We weren’t playing parties in backyards of the South Bay anymore, having fun with our friends and waiting for the cops to come break it up. We had record deals and merchandising contracts and we were riding around on big, expensive tour buses with corporate sponsors everywhere and it felt about as far removed from the small local punk scene where we had started out as you could possibly get.
Then I felt someone nudging me and poking me in the ribs as I stood backstage talking to too many people at once. I turned around and there was a kid standing there, couldn’t have been any more than 14 years old, blue hair, punk rock T-shirt and Chuck Taylors. He kept asking me if he could come up and sing a Ramones song with us. I always liked to bring a fan up on stage and make them sing in front of thousands of people. It broke up the monotony of playing the same show day after day. I told him ‘Sure, why not,’ never expecting to hear from him again after the burly bouncers on the side of the stage kicked him out for trying.
About half way through our set, I’m sweating and screaming away and I finish the song when I feel that same poke in the ribs from behind me. It’s the kid again. Somehow he’d made it past the bouncers and was standing there asking for the mic so he could do the Ramones song. I handed it over, the band kicked in to “Blitzkrieg Bop” and the kid tore in to the song like a seasoned vet. Ripping on his guitar the whole time, he belted out the song for all he was worth and the crowd went nuts.
That kid went on to sing for a band called From First to Last, who in a few short years would be playing to the same size crowds, if not bigger. After huge selling albums and sold out tours, things eventually went south for him and his band mates and he decided try his hand at a solo project and electronic music. That kid is Sonny Moore, better known as Skrillex, and in 2012 there’s no bigger artist in electronic music, his face is on the cover of SPIN magazine and he’s playing sold out shows around the world.
For a lot of people, the music of Skrillex, which features frenetic electronic beats and patches of paranoid voiceovers followed by deep growling bass drops is at the end of the music progress spectrum, when music becomes little more than cacophonous noise. We will have finally gotten rid of melody and structure altogether and just let some mad genius throw sound bytes at a computer to see what it spits out. I think it sounds amazing, kind of like the future of music.
On the other end of the spectrum, this last decade has also seen a welcome return to more roots based rock music and souled out pop vocals. Starting with the Hives and the White Stripes at the turn of the century, and then continuing on with artists like Adele, Arcade Fire and The Black Keys more recently, some of the best music of the past few years sounds like it could have been sung by Buddy Holly or Marianne Faithfull 40 or 50 years ago.
A few weeks ago there was a show put on by Burger Records at The Observatory in Santa Ana that featured bands like Fidlar, Wavves, Audacity, Pangea and Ty Segall, who all play a kind of lo-fi, distorted, stripped down surf/garage/punk rock hybrid. A lot of it sounds similar to The Last, a pioneering Hermosa Beach punk band of the late 70s. Burger Records is a record store out of Fullerton that releases a lot of their music on vinyl and cassette tape only. A friend of mine thought this was the height of pretentiousness. Why make it difficult for people to hear your music when the computer makes it so easy? I think some of these bands are releasing their music this way as a last chance effort to keep it pure for a while before the internet grabs it and turns it into a saleable commodity, a two minute burst of 1’s and 0’s to be downloaded, burned and shared across broadband internet connections and listened to on tiny ear buds and MP3 devices, hardly the music experience Led Zep and the Beatles were going for.
The point of all this is that I believe music progress in 2012 can go both ways, it can either blaze a path into the future and embrace all the technology the computer and internet has to offer, or it can glory in the great music of the past and put a new innovative spin on it. Either push it forward completely, or strip it back and start again. The only real enemy of progress will always be the bands and labels pushing out product and singing the empty slogans of commerce for material reward alone and not for the spirit of real music and the true inspiration that comes with it.
Jim Lindberg was a founding member of Pennywise. His current band is Black Pacific.