Filmage: The Story of Descendents\All Page #8

KIM SHATTUCK:
He's built like

a wolf with all that hair.

STEPHEN:
He can be

very intimidating.

BILL:
"You f***ing shut up! I'll

f***ing kick your face in!"

"What's the deal here? I don't

record you when you talk.

What's the deal?" "Yeah, because

I'm not Bill Stevenson."

"You're not f***ing

filming me, are you?"

ROBERT:
He's the greatest

drummer on Earth!

GROHL:
He's a legend. He's

a f***ing drumming legend.

DAVE:
The great drummers are the

ones who have their own signature:

Keith Moon, Stewart

Copeland, Neil Peart.

And you can put Bill

Stevenson in that category.

GROHL:
Watching Bill Stevenson play the

drums, he's in his own f***ing world, man.

MIKE:
That kind of drummer

ain't that common.

GROHL:
I f***ing

worship that dude.

CHUCK DUKOWSKI:
He's really a great player,

both an inventor and absorber of ideas.

CHRIS:
You can always see the

hamster wheel going up top.

STEPHEN:
Remember in The

Terminator movies how if you're

looking at something from the

perspective of the Terminator?

That's what I think happens in Bill's brain.

You say something to him, and he goes...

and he starts thinking about all the

various ways that might impact everything.

And so during that time,

he may be doing this...

KARL:
But, man, the stuff he expresses

through music has always moved me.

He's more reliably delivered goosebumps

to me than almost any songwriter.

He will not bow

under to be clever.

He will not bow under to

making a cheap rhyme scheme.

And he will take the trouble of making you very

uncomfortable in the name of making you feel something.

BILL:
I don't know a lot about politics. I don't

know a lot about important socio-economic things.

I just don't. I feel like it's my job to

only write something if it really matters.

Even if it only matters to me.

STEPHEN:
The great thing about

his songs, everything must

absolutely be tied to a real

experience in his life.

BILL:
I don't ever have a

guitar on when I write a song.

Right when I wake up in the morning, the first

30 seconds, the melody will come with the lyric,

something that I have been

ruminating upon in the subconscious.

For instance, "Even though you'll

never come clean you know it's true;

Those sheets are dirty

and so are you."

Okay, that was a complete thought. A

melody, lyrics, and chords in my head.

The way you hear it on the record,

I heard that when I woke up.

I didn't strum around or plink around. It was

just like, "Oh that's "Clean Sheets". Done."

BILL:
The song has to come out of me in

order for me to be healed or to stop,

grieving or that kind of thing.

The last song I wrote that was

murderous was "One More Day."

CAMERA GUY:
Do you want to talk

about your dad a little bit?

BILL:
Ugh, I'll try. I get very upset.

Eh, I don't wanna talk about it.

CAMERA GUY:
That's alright.

BILL:
I don't want to

talk about my dad.

STEPHEN:
His father was a

complicated man in many respects,

and I think they had a very

complicated relationship.

BILL:
I was born when my father was 50, so

when Milo Goes To College came out he was 69.

He was a good man, but he

was very cruel, very cold.

He would sleep for one hour in the

morning when he got home from work,

and then he

would go to his other job.

And then he would sleep for one hour in the evening

after giving me dinner to go to his night job.

So he would sleep for two hours a day, one

hour in the morning and one at night.

He did that for a lot of years.

My mom put us into financial ruination,

because she was an alcoholic.

So he had to catch up, and he

stepped up to the plate and

did what had to be done so

we wouldn't lose our house.

I had so much admiration

for him because of that,

but at the same,

he was such a cold man.

And that made it really to have

a father-son relationship.

STEPHEN:
There's no questions

that his father did his best.

But he was very demanding. He

had high expectations of Bill.

BILL:
He had a good plan for

me, and I think it worked,

but he about killed me trying

to implement the plan.

STEPHEN:
At a certain point,

Bill figured out there was

anything in the world that he

couldn't figure out how to do.

He embraced the grassroots, build

it from the ground, DIY ethos.

He lives, eats and

breathes that.

There's certainly some parts of his

upbringing that bring him to that place.

STEPHEN:
When his dad got really sick, he

brought him out from California to Colorado,

and their relationship

unfortunately didn't end well.

BILL:
We never had a good relationship, and I

tried to take care of him when he was sick.

I would carry him

to the bathroom.

I would have to roll him over to change

positions to sleep, because he couldn't move.

You know, carry him

and all this stuff.

You know, I did that the last

year and a half of his life,

and he hated me every single

second I was doing it.

STEPHEN:
They moved him to a nursing

home, and he died within a couple days.

Now, I've always felt that it was pretty likely

that Steve didn't want to die in front of Bill.

So "One More Day" was just...

His relationship with his

father was so complicated.

BILL:
The song offered me

closure, but it took a few years.

Time heals all wounds I

guess is what it is.

BILL:
Everyone at some point in their life wakes

up and goes, "Ugh, I gotta get a real job."

At the point where we were opening up

for Pennywise making $300 a night,

it was like, "Hey guess

what-we need a new plan."

STEPHEN:
Bill was married. I was

married. Karl was becoming unmarried.

KARL:
I had just been divorced, you

see, so it didn't matter to me.

It's like, "Oh, we got a big, empty

hall to play to. Big f***ing deal."

BILL:
We were trying to figure out how

to pay the bills and still be in a band,

and we had children

coming along.

Once you have kids, the priorities

immediately just reshuffle themselves.

KIDS:
Our dad smells.

He farts a lot.

He's awesome. And he kicks

my butt at basketball.

He doesn't care what people think

of him, which is a good thing.

BILL:
"I already had a pretty good foot in

the door in terms of producing records,

so I started saying yes

to more production work.

STEPHEN:
There was no intentional

hiatus. It became kind of impractical.

And maybe that would've changed,

but I decided to move to Tulsa.

My inlaws were here, and I wanted my

family to have extended family close-by.

Descendents or ALL? Descendents!

Descendents!

KARL:
When we started the band, none of us

really expected to make a dime out of it,

and we were just happy to be able to afford the

burrito the next day and gas to get the next town.

Hit a point where people have wives and

children and they start having expectations.

Suddenly I had no wife and no band. Two things that I

thought were permanent factors of my life were gone.

STEPHEN:
I sent songs to Bill. Said,

"Hey, here's a bunch of new stuff."

The way I saw it, if nothing else

we could still make records.

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