Filmage: The Story of Descendents\All Page #7

up his songwriting. He just killed it.

SCOTT:
I can't say enough about

what's upstairs with that guy.

CHAD:
He just has this

huge bank of knowledge.

TONY:
I consider Karl a

better bass player than me.

MIKE:
A little more out of the

box. A little more out there.

DONI:
This guy's killing it

night after night after night.

TIM:
Just him playing, making

every other bass player just cry.

KARL:
I mean, f***, I've

been doing this a long time.

ZACH:
Stephen Egerton is a

guitar player's guitar player.

TIM:
To see the chords

that he pulls off.

DAVE:
He plays these really

cool, demonic-sounding leads.

STEPHEN:
What I do is filtered

through a lack of true

knowledge of music, just

an incredible love for it.

DAVE:
He's a genuine

sweetheart of a guy.

SCOTT:
I used to call him Poppy, because if I

had a problem, I could go talk to Stephen.

MARK:
It's really gratifying when you

meet people that are your heroes

and they're actually as cool and

friendly as you hope they're gonna be.

Especially Stephen.

JOEY:
He's also very smart.

Runs very deep.

It's weird that all those

guys are in one band.

It's almost unfair.

MIKE:
It seemed like they were

embraced by the punk community again.

JIM LINDERG:
Descendents were just

total heroes to us growing up.

I literally had the tennis racket,

pretending to be in the Descendents.

And then our band got really

popular in the second wave,

along with Offspring, Rancid,

NoFX, and Green Day.

KARL:
This was an interesting thing

because it was a convergence

of pop culture and what Descendents

had always been doing.

DAVE:
That's when you really

saw people appreciate

the Descendents the

way they should be.

BRETT:
Milo is a great, integral

part of what the Descendents are.

TIM:
He's the anti-frontman.

He's the underdog. The nerd.

MILO:
A lot of the stuff

that we do with our music is based on

having people throw

food at you in high school.

Those are the people we address

a lot of our songs about,

saying you may think I'm a loser,

but you're the loser, really.

TIM:
He's the antithesis of Axl

Rose or Bono fronting a band.

BRIAN BAKER:
He's seminal. He's a

seminal American punk rock singer.

BILL:
It was one year of fury and then he

wanted to resume back into his science stuff.

MARK:
Why won't the singer of my

favorite band sing in my favorite band?

What are you f***ing talking about you're

not gonna sing in the Descendents?

You'd rather go off and

do smart sh*t somewhere?

Why would you do that to me? It's

hard for people to understand.

GREG GRAGGIN:
When you

study biology and

you go on to pursue other things,

you don't leave punk rock behind.

But then again, you do change

your worldview a little bit.

STEPHEN:
At that point we just

dove right back into it with Chad.

CHRIS:
Mass Nerder was a

huge, huge album for them,

because it was coming hot off the

heels of "Everything Sucks."

ROGER MANGANELLI: If it had

said "Descendents Mass Nerder"

on it, it would have been

"Everything Sucks" all over again.

The songs were so strong.

BILL:
Well, on Mass Nerder we decided to

take a little bit of a different course,

and we started opening for bands instead

of doing our own headlining shows.

We thought we'll suck it up and see if we

can play to some of these younger kids,

because there aren't that

many people 40-year-olds that

are gonna come out and see

us because they have kids.

They're at home watching

"Mad About You."

So we thought if we could get in front of

some of the younger kids they might like us.

It might postpone

our obsolescence.

CHRIS DEMAKER:
Our band was the

ska punk thing of the late '90s,

and we were riding that new

band, young band popularity,

and here we have ALL opening for us and going

out musically and crushing us every night.

But our fans, some of them got it, but

a lot of them just didn't get it.

BRETT:
ALL never had the commercial success

of Descendents. They just never did.

Even though, as a label, we did the exact

same thing for one as we did for the other.

STEPHEN:
I think by Problematic we

could see the shows were shrinking.

They were smaller

and smaller crowds.

CHAD:
It is frustrating. You want to just keep getting

bigger and bigger and bigger. You just gotta deal with it.

JOEY:
I think that you never really get

past when a band changes to something else.

CHRIS:
Yeah and that's

all the power of a name.

BILL:
We all know that ALL is the band

guilty of not being the Descendents.

SCOTT:
Forever people have been saying, "I

like the Descendents, and I don't like ALL."

And to me, I get that. I absolutely get that.

I don't give a sh*t, I'm not angry about it.

But the point is that I'm in

the middle of it and I agree.

CHAD:
I don't look at it that way.

Musically it is this THING.

And whether it's ALL or

Descendents it's the same thing.

KARL:
Very simply to me it's a different singer.

But I'm not the guy buying the records.

STEPHEN:
Milo really connects to an

audience. It's very peculiar to watch.

DAVE:
Milo is Milo and you can't replace

him. The great singers you can't replace.

MILO:
"People have kind of idealized

that whole period in th early 80's,

and I think that

explains a lot of it."

Bill's my best friend and it just bums when these

things that he did that I thought were amazing

and world-changing didn't explode into the stratosphere

and make his band as big as it should have been.

GROHL:
"Believe me, it's hard to be in a

really big band and then start another band."

It's a weird position to be in. You

do it for the love of playing music.

You don't do it because you want to be

better than the last band you were in.

You just want to keep playing.

"So for a band like ALL, it was

just never gonna be easy."

BILL:
But so what? Who cares? If 50 people

like your band then 50 people like your band.

There's nothing wrong with that.

That's not shameful.

Where is it said that every band has to be huge

like Michael Jackson? Where was that written?

BILL:
"When you quest ALL you're

questing something much grander

and greater than getting up and

going to work at Winchell's."

BRETT:
If you took the Stooges

"Raw Power" and did it with a kid

who was raised on "Help Me Rhonda"

what would that sound like?

BRIAN:
It would sound like Bill.

Exactly.

RICHARD:
You know it's Bill.

Bill was...

DAVE:
I'm sure that every person who gets interviewed

for this movie is gonna say the same f***ing thing.

JOEY:
Bill, I think,

is a true anomaly.

CHRIS:
He's a conundrum. He's

totally a mystery to most people.

GROHL:
Oh God, Bill's so weird.

BILL:
"He is Bill Stevenson.

We can rebuild him."

CHRIS:
Dude, you wrote all these amazing songs.

They're so insightful and you're so brilliant.

Why are you talking

like a homeless man?

BILL:
"Do you like to eat

dogs?" "Yeah, I do."

"How come I never see

you eating them then?"

KARL:
A mathematician brain

trapped in a caveman's body.

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