7 Years and Worth the Wait

IT FINALLY CAME

It’s been a long long long time coming. I pre-ordered it sometime in May and was hoping to have it before the actual release date (as is the custom with pre-ordering), but because of pressing delays (excuses excuses) I didn’t get it until last Monday (I thinkI need just one more set of parentheses in this sentence). I got it on white vinyl. I believe it’s number 736 out of 800.

So the cool stuff….My favorite first. On Side A the picture is from like 1995. They are all crazy crazy young. Toby doesn’t have his parental wisdom face lines yet, Todd Morse hasn’t moved to hollywood and become all fashioned-out, Rusty doesn’t have sleeves or gray hair, Adam looks like I did when I was 22 (meaning 16 (damn parentheses again!)), and Todd Friend looks exactly like he does today, which I think is awesome.

The second sweet thing about this record is the insert. Usually these are made up of pictures of the band at different shows, press pictures, etc, etc. This insert as you can see is mostly made up of pictures of the band members and their families. “Life after Hardcore” is not something that a lot of bands in this genre survive long enough to experience together. It’s pretty much what the entire record is about. It screams, “Look at us. We’re grown up, we have families, we have real jobs, we’re RESPONSIBLE citizens. WHAT?! WHAT?! WHAT YOU GONNA SAY?!” It’s something a lot of “real” hardcore kids say they never want or that they can’t achieve for whatever reason (throat tattoos, inability to hold down a job, poor parental upbringing). Anyway, the point I’m trying to make is that a lot of hardcore wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for DMS and NYHC, and almost all of those guys found something outside of hardcore to sustain themselves. All the kids out there that think this is selling out, they got it wrong. This is the real world and you can’t be broke forever. It’s OK to grow up a little bit. If you don’t have kids and support them the way you’re supposed to then you can’t have kids like Max. You can’t take them to shows and show them everything that was (is) awesome about hardcore and the community. A lot of kids that are my age just barely caught the end of the era when it meant something that you listened to hardcore. Anyway, I’m rambling on and on and on and on and on. It could get ugly quick if I don’t stop myself. I obviously love H2O and have since the first time I saw them in 1997. I’m starting to think about an H2O tattoo. It’s gonna be sweet.