Five years ago, Lagwagon and The Vandals were enjoying the first tastes of nationwide fame after releasing their most popular albums: Lagwagon's 1995 effort Hoss and their Live Fast, Diarrhea in 1996, and The Vandals' The Quickening in 1996. I had all those albums and I was constantly logging on to the Web sites of Fat Wreck Chords and Nitro Records with the expectant hope that they might come to Big D sooner or later; I didn't even have my driver's license yet, so Austin or Houston was out of the question. Then, as I got further into punk I got into the smaller genres like hardcore and emo, and as I got older, I started to listen to just about everything under the sun. So, bands like The Vandals and Lagwagon quietly moved to the back of my consciousness.
As I moved on to other things, so did the bands. Lagwagon frontman Joey Cape started his own label, appropriately called My Records, which released the first Nerf Herder album and is the current home of The Adventures of Jet. The Vandals, meanwhile, have thrown themselves into the world of television and movie production. They shot seven half-hour episodes of a teen soap opera called Fear of a Punk Planet, which is described as "Saved By The Bell set at Gilman Street"--the famous punk club that launched Operation Ivy, Rancid, and Green Day, among others. The band also scored Glory Daze, a Ben Affleck and French Stewart vehicle, and currently performs a cover of ELO's "Evil Woman" on the Saving Silverman soundtrack. Not stopping there, bassist Joe Escalante just starred in the low-budget film That Darn Punk and guitarist Warren Fitzgerald will write and star in another feature film called Selwyn's Nuts.
So having this show take place in 2001 when 1996 would have meant so much more is not unlike having the police show up five years after a crime has taken place. Sure, they can help but what can they really do when they're so damned late?
