Happy 40th Anniversary to Descendents’ second studio album I Don’t Want To Grow Up, originally released May 15, 1985.
It all started with something decidedly un-rock ‘n’ roll: fishing. In the late ’70s, Bill Stevenson was a chubby kid known to ride a too-small bike around Hermosa Beach, and go fishing for hours. At age 14, his bottomless passion for fishing led him to take a job at the Hermosa Tackle Box, owned by Keith Morris’ father. Keith, a member of Black Flag and, later, the Circle Jerks, was eight years older and a lot cooler, and Bill, despite riding a tiny, dorky bike, was savvy enough to figure out that Keith had some wisdom to impart.
“My recollection is him asking me, ‘Keith, what music should I be listening to?,’” Morris recalls. “Billy just struck me as that goofy kid who maybe needed some guidance, maybe he needed somebody to point him in the right direction. I guess I was giving him a list of things to lead him to freakdom or whatever.”
Sparked by his admiration of Keith, Bill began seeking out other punks around town. There was an electric kind of energy gathering in the neighborhood. The teens and twentysomethings of Hermosa Beach were living in what they perceived to be a Top 40 hellscape of mellow soft-rock like Fleetwood Mac and the Doobie Brothers, and so they were in relentless search of something harder and faster. They found that in local band The Last, started by brothers Joe and Dave Nolte.
It was through The Last’s rabid local fandom that Bill met Frank Navetta, a teen with a distinctive, high-pitched voice and a curly mop of hair who seemed to be brimming with bitter resentment—in a good way. Frank and Dave Nolte had first met in the sixth grade and started playing guitar around the same time. The two decided to start a band, calling themselves the Descendents.
Soon, Bill began making himself a regular fixture over at the Noltes’ house, even though he suspected that Dave thought he was annoying. Bill didn’t care. He was willing to make himself a nuisance just to see what Frank and Dave were doing with the Descendents. After many months of this, Frank gave Bill a copy of a demo they’d recorded, and Bill took the risk of overstepping by recording his own backing vocals over it. It sounded fabulous. And, thus, Bill was finally invited to join the Descendents.
Frank and Bill began bonding over going fishing every day, and Frank would play his acoustic guitar, strumming hard on all six strings like Johnny Ramone. Frank’s world-weary resentment soaked all of his songs with envy, rage, and annoyance like gasoline, lighting them on fire. “It was just really inspiring to just be around someone that hated everything that much,” Stevenson says with total sincerity. “It was just great.”
Though Bill was the Descendents’ drummer, he discovered a bass guitar sticking out of a neighbor’s trash can one day and became intrigued. He fished the bass out of the garbage and decided he’d try his hand at writing some songs. “Well, Frank can write songs, so fuck it, I can write songs,” he thought. With a dash of pride, he called his first song “Myage.”
Several years later in 1987, the zine Suburban Voice would ask Descendents’ frontman Milo Aukerman why so many of the band’s songs ended in the suffix “-age.” “There are a certain amount of words, like sewage, marriage, that end with an ‘-age’ and, somewhere along the line, it was a joke that Billy, when he was in high school, would walk around and add ‘age’ to everything, like ‘Look at that guitarage, go get me a pencilage,’” Aukerman explained. "‘Myage’ was called that because it's his song, it's ‘my’ song, so it's ‘Myage.’ Stupid things like that.”
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Even though Bill had begun using the bass to write songs, he was still dedicated to the drums, which meant the Descendents needed a full-time bass player. (It had become clear that Dave Nolte’s true loyalty was with his band The Last.) Then, by kismet one afternoon when Frank and Bill were practicing, they heard glorious bass playing wafting through the alley. They came upon a guy practicing in his garage.
The guy looked a little older than they were, but he seemed cool, so they asked him to jam. “Let’s see, I was in the band when it was ’79,” recalls Tony Lombardo, who’s still very youthful looking decades later. “I was 34 years old when I started the Descendents. And they were 15.” He laughs to himself, and then mutters what he’s sure we’re all thinking: “Oh my god, this guy’s a fucking freak.”
Nowadays, a guy in his mid-thirties jamming with teenagers probably wouldn’t fly, but it was the ’70s and no one cared and, anyway, it all worked out fine. Tony wasn’t a freak—just a young-at-heart dude who saw his chance to be at the vanguard of West Coast punk.
As the ’70s turned into 1980 and the Descendents started playing out, they soon attracted a bespectacled teenage superfan named Milo Aukerman. Milo began attending the band’s practices just so he could sit and listen. Then one day, Frank suddenly got the idea that Milo should sing. “I can’t sing,” Milo said. “Just fucking sing!” Frank screeched. And so Milo walked up to the mic and belted out “It’s A Hectic World.” He was fantastic.
Though it came as a bit of a shock, Frank’s hunch was spot-on: Milo as frontman worked. The thing about Milo was that there wasn’t anything rockstar-ish about him. In fact, with his glasses and his oft-declared love of science, he was even a little bit nerdy. On stage, he would simply stick his hand in his back pocket, lean into the microphone, and project his voice. Yet the audience adored him.
“Most other singers were macho or whatever, or put on some vibe like, ‘I’m a fucking weirdo.’ But it wasn’t that way, so kids could relate to it,” observes Dave Grohl. “I did. None of us were fucking getting laid—we were listening to hardcore, you know? Milo was our spokesperson.”
As the Descendents started to jell as a four-piece, they began developing their own little idiosyncrasies—in the same vein as their use of “-age” as a suffix—that would further add to the band’s allure. First was their love of coffee. Bill and Frank had started working in commercial fishing and would stay out on the water late into the night. To stay awake, Frank and their friend Pat would take amphetamines, but Bill didn’t want to do that, so he invented what he called “The Bonus Cup,” which involved dumping as much instant coffee and sugar as possible into a cup of hot water.
“The thing you’ve got to remember [is] espresso was not really readily available, and there was no Starbucks,” says Stevenson. “If you wanted to get espresso, you had to go in and sit down at a legit Italian restaurant.” The Bonus Cup soon became a band staple, so much so that the Descendents would soon become one of the first bands to offer a coffee cup as merch.
Around the same time they began their love affair with coffee, the Descendents also started writing songs about food, to the point that they were initially described as “food punk.” Their 1981 EP Fat featured a song called “I Like Food,” as well as a ditty called “Wienerschnitzel” about frequenting a German fast-food restaurant. "The fact of the matter is that I was 250 pounds and obsessed with chili burgers,” Stevenson told Filter. “And Frank was a little overweight at the time, too. So we were embracing our gluttony.”
Their maximalist approach to coffee and food, as well as their intense approach to fishing, were reflected in a band philosophy—another little quirk—that the Descendents christened “All.” Sam Sunderland of Exclaim! summed it up thusly: “All represents the pinnacle of everything, a balance of achievement with satisfaction. There is All and there is None, and the Descendents make the decision to live their lives in the pursuit of All: ‘Betterment, morement, allment.” “All” became so pivotal to the Descendents’ ideology that they would eventually release an album titled All, and form an offshoot band (minus Aukerman) also titled All.
The band’s 1982 debut album Milo Goes To College would yield the pièce de resistance in the catalog of Descendents’ signature quirks: Milo the cartoon character. It had started back in high school when Roger Duerlein, a friend of the band, used to good-naturedly taunt Milo by sketching him as a nerdy cartoon. For the album cover, however, Bill recruited another friend, Jeff “Rat” Atkins, to draw a cleaner-lined, less rudimentary Milo.
“I drew the Milo with a tie, because he goes to college,” Atkins recalls. “And he [Bill] goes, ‘Oh, beautiful, that’s it.’”
The thing is, Milo actually did go to college after that record. “Bill’s known me since high school and he knows that I’ve just got this whole dichotomy of desires,” Aukerman says. “I want to rock out and be a punk-rock guy, but I also have this really strong ambition to be a scientist.”
Stevenson concurs. “There was never an idea of Milo not being a scientist and staying in the band,” he says. “He was always real clear about being into his science first.”
While Milo was in college, Bill began drumming for Black Flag. Because Milo would eventually devote even more time to school beyond his bachelor’s (he’d eventually earn his PhD in molecular biology and become a plant researcher), Stevenson and the rest of the Descendents decided to form All with a separate singer, and then make albums as the Descendents whenever Aukerman was able to take a break from science.
During the first of these breaks in 1985, Milo returned from UC San Diego, and the Descendents built on themes they’d developed on the first album, veering away from coffee-fueled songs about food in favor of melodic pop songs about girls. “Bill was recording with Black Flag and he invited me to do backing vocals,” Aukerman recalls. “And he pulled me aside and was like, ‘Hey, I got these songs, but they’re not Black Flag songs, they’re really more Descendents songs.’ I said ‘Hey, let me hear them.’ And he sang ‘Silly Girl’ to me, and I was like, ‘Whoa!’”
Not long after recording the Descendents’ first album, Frank Navetta gathered his musical equipment into a pile, set it on fire, and promptly moved to Oregon. It was odd, but not all that surprising—that was just Frank. So, back in California, the band recruited guitarist Ray Cooper to take Navetta’s place, and got to work on their sophomore album I Don’t Want To Grow Up.
Where I lived in the mid-’80s —gray, rainy Cold War Germany—was about as opposite of California as you could get. However, skateboarding had made its way from the states to our American army base, and my brother was obsessed. So on many a Saturday, he, I, my friends, and several members of his skate crew (many of them significantly older than we were) would pile into my parents’ VW van and make the hour-long drive to Tropica, an indoor skatepark with a palm-tree theme that, no doubt, was supposed to make you squint hard and pretend you were in California.
Despite that cheesiness, it was an awesome place, featuring a monster halfpipe, a roller rink, a mechanical bull, and several huge trampolines. That none of us ever died there is a miracle (like most ’80s kids, we never wore helmets). That my dad never had a heart attack watching us fly off the mechanical bull or fling ourselves into the flimsy trampoline nets is an even greater one.
As part of my dad’s effort to be “the cool dad” on these trips to Tropica, he even let us bogart the VW’s tape deck. Typically, he’d subject me and my brother to his vast catalog of ’50s and ’60s rock ‘n’ roll, but for whatever reason he let us choose the music on these excursions. Which is how I ended up first hearing I Don’t Want To Grow Up when a scruffy pink-haired teenager named Mike popped it in the tape deck. I still remember my dad bopping his head appreciatively to the melody.
“I feel it totally accurate to say that the Descendents are the next Beach Boys,” journalist Troy Taroy declared in 1987 in the Los Angeles Times. And that was the vibe that had my surf rock-loving dad bopping that day. It was the same element that had made him love the Ramones when we discovered that band together after renting Rock N Roll High School in the earlier ’80s. The best punk had that savory flavor of early rock ‘n’ roll.
After getting into the Descendents on that late-’80s Tropica afternoon, their music would follow me into my own teenage years when, in Pump Up The Volume, Christian Slater’s character introduced “Wienerschnitzel” by declaring, “This is a song for the ’90s by my buddies the Descendents.” It would follow me, too, into my later teens when my boyfriend Frankie would put songs like “Silly Girl” or “Christmas Vacation” on the stereo while we made out in his bedroom.
In many ways, the Descendents of the ’80s were—as Hard Harry implies in Pump Up The Volume—a proto-’90s band. Their particular brand of melodic punk—and even their signature quirks—would be prophetic of the last decade of the 20th century. Pauly Shore would soon become famous for using slang like “grindage.” The growing ubiquity of Starbucks would make the quest for a strong cup of coffee a national pastime. Bart Simpson, with his spiky hair and yellow tinge, would be an almost dead-ringer for the Milo cartoon (Simpsons creator Matt Groening reviewed Milo Goes To College in 1982 while working at the Los Angeles Reader).
Meanwhile, Beavis and Butt-Head’s irreverence would harken back to some of the Descendents’ adolescent humor. And with the explosive popularity of bands like NOFX, Green Day, The Offspring, and Blink-182, melodious pop punk would soon be everywhere.
But back in the ’80s, I Don’t Want To Grow Up was just a really cool record that unflinchingly showed both the punk side and the soft side of the Descendents. The punk side is indisputably the album’s side A, which begins with “Descendents,” a proud declaration of older, more “responsible” dudes coming back together to rock: “We’re not gonna let the music die / Join us if you’ve got the energy / We’re the proud, the few Descendents / We’re the proud, the few Descendents pickin’ our butts tonight.” (Did I mention the unmistakable Beavis and Butt-Head similarity?)
The irreverence continues with the raucous “I Don’t Want To Grow Up,” written by band elder Tony Lombardo and featuring bratty vocals and childish taunts of nah-nah-nah-nah. It harnesses that resentful Frank Navetta energy, and mocks adult respectability: “Your suit can’t hide the truth / You’re a fool.”
Though we’ll eventually get ooey-gooey love songs on Side B, the Descendents counter that in advance with “Pervert” and “No FB.” “Pervert” is all about insatiable horniness—“I want to fuck you night and day”—using romance as trickery to achieve that aim. Meanwhile, “No FB” stands for “fat beaver” and refers to the female anatomy. The ’80s media called the band out on their sexism, which Aukerman had already come to feel bad about.
“In Lincoln, Nebraska, a girl came up to me and she said she was real happy to meet me but she said she almost had to cry when she listened to our album because of those two songs: "No Fat Beaver" and "Pervert,” he told Flipside. “And I spent a half hour explaining to her that when you write a song it's like a flash of something. I wrote ‘No Fat Beaver,’ it was like ‘stay away from me,’ which is what I felt about this one girl. I may have only felt that way for two minutes then two minutes later I might have felt ‘well she's not too bad looking’ or whatever.”
“Can’t Go Back” turns to the subject of regret and the downside of cynicism, while “GFC” reverses the horniness of “Pervert” and calls for some “good clean fun.” “My World” goes hard, describing introversion hidden by partying and punk-rock shows. Meanwhile, “Theme” offers a surf-rock interlude in the vein of a modern “Apache.”
Next comes a block of some gloriously romantic melodic punk. “Silly Girl” twists the theme of Little Red Riding Hood going to grandma’s house, the narrator unabashedly telling a young woman in a pink dress just how in love with her he is. Meanwhile, “In Love This Way” is exuberance and cotton candy, a roller-skate ride through infatuation.
“Christmas Vacation,” on the other hand, is about a girlfriend who’s fucked up on alcohol and drugs and possibly even suicidal; the song is so sonically warm and wistful, however, that it’s easy to get lost in the feelings without thinking too hard about the lyrics. “Good Good Things” seems to reinforce this instinct with its soaring melody and “cool and warm” feelings for someone you want to put your arms around. The album then ends with “Ace,” a driving anthem about carpe diem—“You’re thinking (now’s the time) / You keep saying (now’s the time) / But you keep standing still.”
I Don’t Want To Grow Up gives into the instinct to be a teenager in perpetuity, no matter when you actually are—or were—a teenager. It leans into that time when feelings are intense, whether that involves immature antics or loving freely and unashamedly with one’s whole heart. It’s the Descendents album that perhaps best encompasses the band’s philosophy of “All”—betterment, morement, allment—and applies that to refusing to lose one’s edge or innocence. Now’s the time, now’s the time to live.
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