Descendents’ Bill Stevenson: ‘What A Crazy Way To Have Spent A Life’

"When bands do that, I feel like they're jumping the shark."

Descendents(Credit: Kevin Scalon)

Always read the fine print. That’s something Bill Stevenson, legendary punk rock drummer, songwriter and producer, jokes about as he discusses Descendents’ Everything Sucks 30th anniversary Australian tour, during which, they’ll perform the seminal album in full.

“That's what I'm told,” Stevenson laughs. “I saw that they were saying, ‘Celebrating 30 years of Everything Sucks,’ but then I read the fine print and it says, ‘Artist agrees that it will play the entirety of the Everything Sucks album.’

“I'm like, ‘Wait, when you put out an album, not every song is good.’ I don't like it when bands play the whole album.”

The punk icon is being modest about the significance and brilliance of the band’s fifth album, which features classics such as I'm The One, When I Get Old and more, but shares they’ve got a plan.

“We are going to play every song on Everything Sucks, but I don't think I would want to play them in a row. That just seems so boring. When bands do that, I feel like they're jumping the shark. It means they don't have any new ideas. We have tons of new ideas. We got 22 songs recorded, new ones.”

Stevenson has not long returned from “boning up on” Everything Sucks with bandmates Milo Aukerman, Karl Alvarez, and Stephen Egerton earlier that morning, noting that there were eight songs from the record that they needed to put back into rotation, adding to an already impressive 64 songs they have on the go.

“We're going to play all the songs, but I think we're going to do it in a more creative order or something that feels fun.

“Plus, it's only 30 minutes. The album's only 30 minutes long. What do we do with the other 30 minutes?”

It’s a similar approach to how Frenzal Rhomb rolled out A Man's Not A Camel while celebrating its 25th anniversary live in recent years.

“I love those guys so much,” he shares, having produced the band’s three last albums at his studio, The Blasting Room, in Fort Collins, Colorado.

“I have had the pleasure of working with them on three albums, recording, and I love them so much. We have such a fun time.

“I can't say enough great things about those guys. And plus, they're just so funny. I can have fun, but I don't know how to make fun. They know how to make fun. I know how to have fun if there's fun to be had, but they know how to make fun.”

Stevenson has produced some of the biggest albums from the genre and beyond, including the likes of Rise Against and NOFX, admitting that the older he gets, the higher his expectations of what makes a good song become.

“When I hear bands’ demos now, I always think, ‘God, I wish these songs were better. I wish these songs were better.’ And that's not me being stuffy or being some kind of arrogant weirdo or elitist or whatever, but it's just like I think I've heard so many songs in my life that unless it's the greatest song in the whole world, I'm not interested at all.”

And that goes for his own songwriting too, revealing that he’s the one holding up the next Descendents release.

“The older I get, my expectations of what makes a good song, that expectation is rising continuously while my abilities are kind of what they've always been. If anything, maybe I'm wiser, maybe I'm not going to resort to high school poetry as the way we did when we were younger. I mean, we were kids, but so I think it's like my expectations are exceeding my abilities.

“We need some more [songs] because we don't have the right proportion of authorship. I know that sounds stupid, but our albums, it's really important that everybody writes their share of the songs. And so, a couple of us, I'm not going to mention any names – Bill Stevenson – are lagging and I haven't finished hardly any songs, and Karl too, most of the ones we've recorded are either Milo's or Stephen's or Milo and Stephen's.

“So we need to record maybe eight or 10 more and then we'll be ready to release an album.”

He adds that when they’re all contributing it gives the band “more diversity, more variety”.

“It makes it more interesting when we're all writing songs,” Stevenson says. “That's just how we like it. We've always done it that way. Even when we were a trio, everyone was writing songs.”

While the band’s songwriting has largely stayed the same over the years, their touring has evolved drastically.

The band played around 90 shows last year by Stevenson’s count, which he notes is “a lot” for “a bunch of geezers”.

“That's not a lot for when we were 20 or 30, we would do 150 shows a year sometimes. But for geezers, it seemed like it was a pretty tough year.

“We've toured on every level imaginable. We've toured in a not-very-big van with the equipment in there. No hotels, just sleeping on top of guitar cabinets or sleeping at people's houses and doing everything ourselves.

“And then we toured now where sometimes it's a tour bus. That's nice because you get your own bunk. So, we've toured where we were playing to 40 people and we've toured where we're playing to 2,000 people and everything in between.

“So, we've kind of run the full gamut of different ways to tour.”

While he doesn’t necessarily miss those days when they were sleeping on top of each other and playing to 40 people, “because it was not sustainable”, he’s adamant that he “wouldn't trade those times for anything in the world”.

“It made us strong. It made us resilient. It made us able to withstand whatever was necessary for us to withstand,” he says.

“I feel like back then, in the early '80s when we started trying to do shows, it was almost like the touring was like, ‘Okay, who among you has the fortitude to go out there and live like a dog crammed in a van like sardines? Who among you is willing to do that for five years and build an audience?’

“We've proven to be pretty stick to it. But I mean, all the bands back then, all the bands did. We would compare notes on what kind of a little loft thing we would build in the van where maybe one or two guys could crawl up there and sleep.

“That was the thing. It was what it was. In the summer, one or two guys would sleep up on top of the van, actually sleep on top of the van, lay down on it. It's all great. It was all wonderful times to me. I look back on it and just wonder, ‘Wow, what a crazy way to have spent a life.’”