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. “’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. “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. It also offers a lesson into the evolution of the then-fledgling band, Aukerman said. The 18-track album is made up of the band’s earliest songs written between 1977-80 and includes re-recordings of the songs from their 1979 debut single “Ride the Wild”/“It’s a Hectic World” and a cover of the Dave Clark Five’s “Glad All Over.” The new album, named after the practice space, was recorded over two time periods, 20, and was released July 23. “Personally, I never even saw 9th & Walnut,” added Aukerman. “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. The band, which has gone through several lineup changes over its 40-plus year 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.īut 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.
Other members have done their own projects on and off as well. 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 County.Īukerman joined the Descendents in 1980 but left after the release of “Milo Goes to College” to attend college and study molecular biology before returning to front the band on and off again over the last four decades.
The Descendents’ Milo Aukerman will be performing songs from the band’s new album “9th & Walnut,” an 18-track made up of the band’s earliest songs written between 1977-80 that were never released until now. 21 for a show featuring the current Descendents lineup that also includes Karl Alvarez on bass, Stephen Egerton on guitar and drummer and founding member Bill Stevenson. The band will perform songs from the new album and others from the group’s long career at FivePoint Amphitheatre in Irvine on Aug. 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. “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 and Walnut.” Milo Aukerman wasn’t yet part of the band in the late 1970s when pioneering punk band the Descendents practiced in the garage of a home on the corner of 9th and Walnut in Long Beach.īut during the height of the coronavirus pandemic, the band’s frontman got to travel back in time and record songs that preceded the band’s 1982 breakthrough punk album “Milo Goes to College,” but had never been released until this summer.