Suburban Struggle

Joe Escalante, head of Kung Fu Records, remembers the first time he spotted the Kansas City/Lawrence-based quartet mi6's demo lying on his wife's desk. It made an instant impression, albeit not one the band might prefer. "I said, 'That looks kinda funny -- I bet it sucks. We should throw it away right now,'" Escalante recalls. "My wife came into my office later and said, 'You know that one you were making fun of? It's pretty good. You should listen to it.' I listened to them and said, 'This is amazing. How could this happen? How could they come from The Get Up Kids' land and play music that must be the most uncool style of music in Lawrence right now?'"

Escalante promptly flew into town, caught a show and a rehearsal, and signed the group to his label. It's a standard story these days: fun-loving punk group attracts a hometown following, packages its material to independent labels, catches someone's ear and gets a deal. But in the early '80s, when Escalante's band The Vandals released such witty melodic nuggets as "Anarchy Burger," "Wanna Be Manor" and "Urban Struggle," underground groups had no such hope of making a breakthrough. Today, with Blink-182 having cleared the path for lighthearted guitar pop played by bad-boy types, a group shaped like the early Vandals -- young, photogenic, witty, rebellious -- might incite a major-label feeding frenzy. Instead, the original band fizzled out after a few seminal releases and a pivotal cameo in Wayne's World director Penelope Scheeris' tragicomic Suburbia.

"We got into a style of music where there was no hope for any of that kind of success, so we never tried," Escalante says. "Today, there is hope for that kind of success, so the bands have to keep it at least in the back of their minds, even if they're really punk. If you make a song like this or play a bunch of free radio shows, you could be huge. Today, it's hard to tell who the real punk kids are and who are the kids who like punk but are really trying to become rock stars."

When The Vandals resurfaced in the early '90s, Escalante, formerly the band's drummer, manned the bass as the initial lineup's only holdover. Joining him were flamboyant guitarist Warren Fitzgerald, late of Oingo Boingo; Dave Quackenbush, a vocalist with a smug, talk-show-host-style delivery; and Josh Freese, an amazingly talented drummer who's also recorded with Chris Cornell, Devo, Guns n' Roses and dozens more. After testing the waters with Fear of a Punk Planet, a disc best known for a thrashy send-up of Grease's "Summer Lovin'," The Vandals' revamped squad assailed the work of its predecessors, more than doubling the already swift tempos of the band's standards on the live disc Sweatin' to the Oldies. Fitzgerald showcases his improv comedy skills on that disc, and even during abbreviated Warped Tour sets, he'll riff for a good five minutes over a muted rhythm-section backdrop. (Three years ago in Lawrence, he transformed his shorts into a diaper-style thong, explaining, "I'm putting the ass in Kans-ass.") However, old-school fans won't hear a set list filled with early gems on this year's Warped Tour. And they have only a rowdy segment of their own subsect to blame.

"Some people would come to our shows that wouldn't buy any of our new stuff and weren't interested in it," Escalante explains. "If you're a musician, you're much more excited and inspired by an audience that cares about your newer music. When you see a guy who's forty years old with a mohawk and a moustache punching kids in the slam pit, yelling 'Pat Brown! Pat Brown!' [the early Vandals' signature song], you go, 'Hey, I've got an idea, let's not play the song that guy's asking for, and maybe he'll go away.'"

The newer Vandals played no part in creating those early tunes, which would seem to make it easier to eliminate the songs from consideration, but Escalante says he too feels no real attachment to the discarded material. "Distancing is an understatement," he says. "We're trying to build a giant wall in addition to the distancing. The stuff that we write now is a lot better than 99 percent of the old stuff, but the old stuff has memories attached to it for some people, which isn't our problem."

Under new membership, The Vandals underwent a massive stylistic change, rendering fruitless any real comparison of its output from the different time periods. The band's early songs were vaguely melodic without harmonies or knockout hooks, embodying the essence of early West Coast punk. When the band resurfaced, The Vandals had injected a curious dose of country into their formula, weaving Western-style guitar lines over Freese's hyperspeed bluegrass drumbeats to create an instantly recognizable bumpkin-punk hybrid. (The group released a straight country album titled Slippery When Ill in 1988. Out of print for several years, it reappeared on Kung Fu bearing the new title The Vandals Play Really Bad Original Country Tunes in 1999.)

The group's wit remained constant, although its targets grew more specific. Early numbers poked fun at wanna-be cowboys and eccentric pedophile photographers -- esoteric subjects to be sure, but no proper names were used. By contrast, later works included "N.I.M.B.Y.," the amusing fictional tale about how concerned citizens rallied to keep Saturday Night Live vet and "Hall and Oates reject" G.E. Smith from moving into their neighborhood, and "Aging Orange," a viciously funny song directed at the band Agent Orange, which accused The Offspring of swiping one of its riffs. (The Offspring's Dexter Holland co-owns Nitro Records, The Vandals' current home). Recent favorites include "My Girlfriend's Dead," in which Quackenbush claims his ex passed on from "leukemia, or sometimes bulimia" to avoid talking about their breakup, and last year's "The New You," in which he laments, Whatever happened to the girl I knew/She was just like you, but way more into me.