Skip to content
Before I get into my staff pick this week, I want to note that Friday evening (Feb 13) I’ll once again be a guest on Mike from Analog Attack’s YouTube channel, where his What Are You Listening To? podcast meets (most) every Friday. I’ve been on several times, and this time I’m appearing alongside a couple of esteemed guests: Tony Pence from Celebrated Summer Records, Jeff Bolt from Swearin’ and Stupid Bag Records, and of course Mike will host as usual. I’ve been thinking about my picks and wondering if anyone else will have something to say about the weird-ass shit I listen to. You can watch it on YouTube after it airs, but it’s a lot more fun to watch live and interact with the show as it’s happening through the chat.
As I’m sure you know, the Descendents are remastering and reissuing their SST-era catalog on Org Music. So far they’ve done two titles: Milo Goes to College and I Don’t Want to Grow Up (available with either the original artwork or the new Punk Note edition). Milo Goes to College is an all-timer for me… a record I’ve listened to a million times and love to the bottom of my heart. At some point I wisely invested in an original New Alliance Records pressing (which sounds significantly better than the SST represses), so that reissue came and went with little effect on my listening habits. However, the reissue of I Don’t Want to Grow Up has hit me pretty hard. I’ve known the record since I was in high school. In fact, I remember ordering it from the SST mail-order catalog (the little ones that they used to include in copies of every release) on CD along with a t-shirt of the album art. I only wore the t-shirt a couple of times before I realized yellow shirts are not a good match for my complexion, so I cut it up and it became my very first back patch. I still have it sewn onto an old hoodie, but I don’t break it out too often. I stopped wearing hoodies a few years ago after someone pointed out what a marker of our times they are, and how in the future everyone will be able to tell instantly that a photo is from the 2010s or 2020s by the flaccid ballsack hanging off the back of pretty much everyone’s necks. It’s been crewnecks all the way for me since I heard that quip.
Anyway, I listened to that CD of I Don’t Want to Grow Up for many years, and it fueled many a late-night drive over the decades, but I don’t think I ever really understood or appreciated its context. I always knew that Milo Goes to College stood apart from the rest of the Descendents catalog in terms of both production and songwriting, and of course the vibe completely changes when they came back in the 90s (another benefit of being my age and getting into the Descendents as a teenager: I got to see them play an incredible show in a dilapidated movie theatre in Norfolk, Virginia on the Everything Suckstour). But the middle-era SST albums were just kind of an undifferentiated mass to me. Pre-Discogs it was hard to even tell what order they came in, and since LIveage! and Somery did such a good job of collecting the best songs from those albums, I didn’t really spend much time with them individually. This reissue campaign is a great opportunity to rectify that.
I Don’t Want to Grow Up was the Descendents’ second album, originally released in 1985, three years after Milo Goes to College. A lot happened in the interim, but I Don’t Want to Grow Up still feels like a continuation of Milo Goes to College. Original Descendents guitarist Frank Navetta was out, replaced by Ray Cooper, but the rest of the lineup carries over from Milo. Of course Bill Stevenson and Milo are mainstays and it’s not the Descendents without them, but having original bass player Tony Lombardo still on board is huge. I love Tony Lombardo’s playing. I hate when bass players get noodly… I’d way rather they just stay locked in, holding down the rhythm and playing mostly root notes. But Lombardo crafts these perfect lines that are sturdy as bedrock, yet often pull against the rest of the song rhythmically and melodically in a way that’s subtle but significant. Often, Lombardo’s bass line is at the heart of the song… the all-time classic bass line form “Myage” is probably the definitive example, but “Rockstar” from I Don’t Want to Grow Up definitely fits in that category too. Actually, now that I’m looking at the songwriting credits, Lombardo composed the music for the first four tracks on this LP (as well as “Theme” and “GCF”), so his writing really sets the tone for the record. I Don’t Want to Grow Up is the last Descendents with Lombardo on bass, and I feel like they were never the same afterward. (Side note: looking around on Discogs just now I ran across the Tonyall record on Cruz from 1991… I may need to investigate this further.)
While 3/4 of the Milo lineup continued on to I Don’t Want to Grow Up, the change in the guitar chair is significant. Original guitarist Frank Navetta had a distinctive style, with a lot of note-y parts that almost sound more like bass lines than guitar lines, which would weave around Lombardo’s bass in fascinating ways… the interplay between those two is one of my favorite parts of Milo Goes to College. Ray Cooper is a more conventional guitarist. He has more of a traditional “rock” sound with lots of power chords and more familiar, sometimes even slightly metallic, fills and flourishes (interestingly, Cooper also played guitar for a time in Chuck Dukowski’s band SWA… I think concurrently with this time in Descendents? I’d have to listen back to the relevant You Don’t Know Mojackepisodes to be sure). Cooper’s style is totally different from both Navetta and his eventual replacement Stephen Egerton, and while it never really stuck out to me in my first couple of decades listening to I Don’t Want to Grow Up, I have really been digging it as I’ve revisited the album over the past couple of weeks. There are so many parts on I Don’t Want to Grow Up where, had Stephen Egerton composed the guitar parts, they’d be full of weird jazz chords and dissonance… I don’t hate Stephen’s playing (one would be hard-pressed to deny his virtuosity), but I think it’s sometimes too clever for its own good. Ray Cooper is much better at getting out of the way and letting the song shine. The chunky power chords on “Descendents” sound great, and anything more would be trying too hard… better to just keep it kind of a dumb, simple song. Particularly on Lombardo’s compositions, it’s almost like the guitar and bass switch roles, with Cooper’s guitars holding down the rhythm and locking in with the drums while Lombardo’s bass is a little looser and more melodic. I love it when bands do that.
Before I get into full-on raving about the songs I like, let’s pause for a moment and talk about a few of the things I don’t like about I Don’t Want to Grow Up. The first is a relatively minor quibble, and that’s the production. If you’re a fan of 80s SST releases, it’s something you’ve learned to live with. It’s amazing that, despite using numerous studios, engineers, and producers, so many of the records from that first spurt of releases on SST sound so lackluster. I Don’t Want to Grow Up must have been one of Bill Stevenson’s first production jobs (he’s credited as co-producer alongside David Tarling, who was also the engineer and worked on many other SST releases from this era). Thankfully I Don’t Want to Grow Up isn’t over-produced, but I always thought it sounded kind of thin and flat. This new mastering job for the Org Music reissue attacks that problem by boosting the low end-frequencies and adding some crispness in the high end that was missing on the SST CD I grew up with. But man… as with so many SST releases, I can’t help but wonder what this album would sound like with a really great recording.
The other thing that bums me out about I Don’t Want to Grow Up is the casual misogyny you hear in some lyrics. There’s a distinct incel vibe to a lot of the early Descendents lyrics. The most egregious example on this album is “No FB” (which stands for “No Fat Beaver”), which bums me out every time I hear it… all the more so since I really like the music, which feels like a callback to the Fat EP. “Pervert” also feels kind of weird, but I guess it’s defensible in principle… of course it’s fine to like sex. However, I feel like even the “love” songs have this way of flattening the object of the narrator’s affections in this way that feels not just immature, but slightly violent. Like I said… incel vibes. I think some songs on Milo Goes to College are even more guilty of that than I Don’t Want to Grow Up, but I should also note that some of my feelings might be colored by hearing stories from old Raleigh heads about when the Descendents played here on the tour supporting Grow Up. Apparently they came off as major creeps who were only interested in scamming on girls. I assume they’ve long grown out of that, but it’s something that always comes to mind when I listen to these songs.
Back to the actual album. For me, I Don’t Want to Grow Up is a record of two sides. Side one, starting with those four Lombardo compositions and with the fifth, Milo’s “No FB,” also calling back to the band’s earlier era, feels like a bridge from the old to the new. But then side two just takes off. In fact, I think the B-side of I Don’t Want To Grow Up is the best and most consistent side of vinyl the Descendents ever put out. Two of the tracks—“Silly Girl” and “Good Good Things”—almost aren’t even worth talking about at length because they have been so thoroughly canonized as classic Descendents tracks. Surely any die-hard Descendents fan would count them among their favorites, and both appear on Somery. But the other three tracks are excellent too. I’ve really fallen in love with “In Love This Way” during this recent spate of listening. It’s a Milo song with jangly, countrified guitar and some great walking bass from Tony… it wouldn’t be out of place on a Replacements album, and its chorus is divine. “Christmas Vacation” is right up there with “Silly Girl” and “Good Good Things…” just a classic Descendents tune with driving verses (kudos on the simple, chugging palm muted part Ray!) and a super melodic chorus with vocal harmonies that I can’t resist singing along with. And then “Ace” ends the album on this kind of mysterious, atmospheric note. I love Ray Cooper’s arpeggios, the chorus’s haunting melody, and the way the song veers briefly into the super-melodic with the “with all of your mind / and all of your soul” part (is this a bridge? I don’t know about songwriting LOL…), but then retreats back into the unsettling and mysterious when it moves back to the chorus. The song feels like a series of counterintuitive moves, but it just works. It’s one of those closing tracks that makes you want to just sit in the dark for a minute and ponder what you’ve heard rather than immediately throwing on another record.
Holy shit, I did not know I was going to write so much about this record. But, like I said, I’ve been listening to it a lot, and I had lots of thoughts. I’m looking forward to sitting down with Enjoy! when that comes out (presumably it’ll be the next in the series). I know “Wendy,” “Sour Grapes,” and “Get the Time,” but I don’t think I’ve ever owned Enjoy! and certainly haven’t spent much time with it. Maybe it’s the toilet paper roll on the cover, but I always assumed it was weighed down by too much goofiness. But we shall see. If it moves me maybe I’ll crap out another couple thousand words for a future staff pick.