ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT, JULY 6, 2000
Some bands try hard to capture in their music the beauty of love, the power of romance, the mystery of enchantment. Not All, though. The veteran punk rockers have a song on their new CD, Problematic, called “She Broke My Dick”. “Getting it on with [bleeped out],” bellows vocalist Chad Price, “I swear this really happened/I pulled my trick maneuver, that’s when I heard it snappin’/She broke my dick, ooowwwwww, she goddamn broke my dick!” All drummer Bill Stevenson wrote the lyrics to that wince-inducing little ditty, so when I reach him at his home in Fort Collins, Colorado, the first thing I say is that I hope the tune isn’t autobiographical.
“No, it is autobiographical!” says the 36-year-old rocker. “My dick’s broken, yeah. I mean, eh-heh…I won’t go into too much detail, but yeah, I broke it a while ago, and I had to get cortisone shots in it and use this heating pad for a long time. And it seems like if I use it even a little bit vigorously it breaks again, so I have to watch it.”
While Stevenson’s busted-boner anthem makes for lively conversation, it is only one of 18 rowdy numbers on Problematic, which he coproduced with guitarist Stephen Egerton at the group’s own Blasting Room Studio. One might wonder how a band with a relatively small following could afford its own recording facility, but it turns out the quartet made quite a killing a few years back, when the music biz was all gaga over the pop-punk fad.
“You had Green Day at Number 1 on the Billboard charts,” Stevenson points out, “Offspring Number 2, Soul Asylum Number 3. All of them were heavily influenced by various incarnations of this band over the years, so it was easy for us to get a ridiculous amount of money from [All’s former label] Interscope at that particular point in time. You know, we got a million dollars for one record, basically, so it is with that money that we built the Blasting Room.”
The All members chose an apt name for their recording studio, because their brand of music is the kind that blasts out of your speakers at full bore. They haven’t altered their ear-bustin’ approach much in the last dozen years, but that’s okay with them. And it should be all right with most of the punk-rock freaks who’ll see the band play the Starfish Room on Tuesday (July 11).
“When you’ve been together as long as we have,” states Stevenson, “you don’t find schizophrenic changes album to album, like you do with a younger band, where they’re goin’ through personality crises every 18 months. With All, we don’t make the same record over and over again—because we’re totally not into that—but there is definitely some consistency in sound, just because we know what we like out of our band, and we also know what we’re good at and not good at. We know how far we can stretch our boundaries at any given time without sounding like we’re dabbling in this or that.”