The way we found new bands in the late 90s, part 1 - Epitaph

I took last night off from my unsolicited album talky talk, and i'm sure you all felt a tiny pang in the place where your liver should be. Mostly i was tired and went to bed early, but i also didn't have an album in mind and i wasn't feeling like forcing it. Great news! I've got a hankering to share my woefully small, but authentically collected compilation albums from small semi-independent punk labels.

Shocking as it may seem, there was a time when "the internet" didn't exist, and us music aficionados combed through bins of albums and picked out what to buy without knowing what it sounded like (unless you heard it from an actual friend or from radio singles or whatever).

Luckily, indie labels and labels with non-mainstream bands put out massive compilations for cheap and they were a real time and money saver. I don't mean like K-Tel or Kids Bop other hit re-publishers, i mean small labels with real dive bar bands collecting the best songs and saying "if we could afford radio payola, this is what you'd be hearing after rush hour programming is over."

It was and still is the medium of choice for punk rock, but i've got a couple ambient/acid-house comps as well. Let's take a stroll down the vomit lined alleys of the underground, should be fun (probably not in the order they are stacked in the photo).

Let's kick it off with inarguably the biggest of these labels, Epitaph. I bought my aunt Suz Bad Religion's Stranger Than Fiction as a Christmas present, she said she already had it so i got to keep it, i then became a die hard Bad Religion fan, and it turned out this IS Brett Gurewitz's label. Thus, i acquired Punk-O-Rama vols. 2 (1996) and 3 (1998), and they were my real introduction to punk in the late 90s. Bad Religion, NOFX, Rancid, Me First and the Gimme Gimmes, Pennywise, Descendents, and on and on and on and on.

These are great albums, in part because this is the cream of the crop. I don't mean that as a slight to any of the lesser known or shorter lived bands, i simply mean that Brett and Epitaph were shelling out the dough to push this stuff into record stores as far as the nowhere that Oklahoma City really is. Unlike a lot of the other  albums i'll talk about in the coming days, you could walk back into the same store you picked this comp up in and actually find albums from these bands in stock (no internet, remember). You didn't have to ask a minimum wage cashier to check the database and pay shipping or wait two weeks. That was a big deal.

These are designed to sell more records, the albums the songs came from are listed right on the track list. You'd get little catalogues to order more obscure stuff inside. Like this? Well it's what we do, we have so much more, and we will send it in the mail to you! That's the kind of business i can respect. It says we care about this stuff and we want to make more of it happen into your ears.

Regardless, if you can't find something you like on these albums then you're just not trying. In reality, this is the world from which Offspring and Green Day catapulted into mainstream consciousness, so go learn some late century history and find some new old punk rock revival to love.

All these albums are on youtube, so go listen to what it sounded like at a stop light next to my van....

Part 2