Welcome to Four Records! Each episode, we feature one guest as they discuss the four records that helped shape them at four different times in their life. This week our guest is Adam Davis of Omnigone and Link 80. Omnigone recently released their latest album Turn Up The Fear on Bad Time Records. Catch them on the road:

w/ School Drugs

11/6/2026 – Programme Skate & Sound – Fullerton, CA

11/7/2026 – Pine & Palm Brewing – Fresno,CA

11/8/2026 – The Planetarium – Richmond, CA

w/ Big D and The Kids’ Table

1/7/2027 – Three Links Deep Ellum – Dallas, TX

1/8/2027 – Radio/East – Austin, TX

1/92027 – Paper Tiger – San Antonio, TX

1/10/2027 – The End – Houston, TX

1/11/2027 – The Courtyard Brewery – New Orleans, LA 

1/12/2027 – Handlebar – Pensacola, FL

1/13/2027 – The Bark – Tallahassee, FL

1/14/2027 – Kona Skate Park – Jacksonville, FL

1/15/2027 – Las Rosas – Miami, FL

1/16/2027 – New World Brewery – Tampa, FL

1/17/2027 – Will’s Pub

Adam Davis’s Four Records:

Teens: Track Star- Sometimes What’s the Difference?

Twenties: Three Mile Pilot- Another Desert, Another Sea

Thirties: Big Kids- Hoop Dreams

Forties: Vantana Row- 4ourIVer

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Email: fourrecordspodcast@gmail.com

www.DyingScene.com

Opening song: Rad Skulls – Loud as Shit

Closing song: Lucas Perea – Underneath Ashes

This is the third benefit compilation from the record label, following Not In Our City and Not In Our City ||, which collectively raised more than $1,500. With “Trans Riot!”, the label is providing a platform for underground artists to showcase their talents, perspectives, and frustrations while supporting organizations working directly with transgender communities. Uniting 23 participating bands, the compilation celebrates the voices and creativity of trans artists within the independent punk scene with an aggressive, fast, and hardcore sound.

Ahead of its November 20th release, Knifetwister Records has shared five featured tracks from the album to give listeners a preview!

Anarchicks – “No Freedom Under Fascist Rules”

BODY FARM – “TRANS DAY OF VENGEANCE”

MEDIC! – “The Damage You’ve Done (I Don’t Wanna Go Anywhere Anymore)”

Eevie Echoes & The Locations – “I JUST WANNA PEE”

Maiden Mother Crone – “Blind Obsession”

Knifetwister Records continues to demonstrate the power of independent music communities and what they can accomplish when they come together for a shared cause. Trans artists are revitalizing the punk scene all around the world, now more than ever. Through their angsty, deep, or sappy lyrics, onstage presence, ignorance of conformity, or euphoric gender expression, these artists are so deeply important in our community. “Trans Riot!” is proof that the scene’s longstanding traditions of resistance, inclusivity, and solidarity in action are very much alive.

Cover Art:  Rose Harrington

Disc Art: Lukretia Vichnis 

Insert Art: Harper Copeland

Step 2 This took on opening duties for the tour, bringing the full force of their hardcore sound to the stage. Their intense performance quickly fired up the crowd, building the energy and proving they were more than ready to share the bill with two heavyweight names in hardcore punk.

Agnostic Front returned to Miami for the first time in a year, once again delivering the raw energy and intensity that have defined the band throughout their career. Backed by a devoted and passionate crowd, the New York hardcore legends treated fans to a powerful performance as the audience sang along to every song and embraced every moment of their set.

Angel Du$t brought a dose of Baltimore energy to South Florida, delivering a set that highlighted the best of the band’s catalog so far. Their performance showcased how their distinctive musical approach continues to earn them greater recognition while building a dedicated and growing fanbase within the hardcore scene.

Check out the full gallery of the show!

Ruffian Book’s newest tome, Anarchy in the Studio: Punk Music 1970-1979 – The Rise of Punk Rock written by Tim Stegall is just that thing. On the surface this book may look like your typical book regurgitating the same five facts you know about the same twenty or so bands. However, Stegall has done the ground work to deliver a fantastic collection of records and their stories.  Given that the spectrum of what is considered punk rock has widened in the last couple of decades, Stegall’s definition of the genre is not the most traditional, but it will make more sense as you read on. (edited for clarity)

Tim Stegall: Is this Forrest?

Dying Scene: This is Forrest. How are you doing, Tim?

Tim Stegall: Doing just fine. I’m working on my next Substack, which is going to be about when Bob Seger started to suck and the fact that basically the reason why his later records sucked was that he forgot that initially he wanted to be Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels. The classic 60s Bob Seger garage band records are incredible. It’s all based on Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels, to be honest. I’ve come to the conclusion Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels are the entire square root of Detroit Rock N Roll. 

I mean, think about this for a second. The Stooges, that’s the Detroit Wheels plus Psychosis. The MC5, that’s the Detroit Wheels with big fucking amps, radical politics, and free jazz. Ted Nugent, he’s Jim McCurdy, the Detroit Wheels guitarist; if he only played in one key, had really shitty taste and shitty politics. You can go down the line. Alice Cooper, that’s the Detroit Wheels in a Hammer Horror film. Grand Funk Railroad, that’s the Detroit Wheels if they had big fucking amps and they sucked. I’d be kind of hilariously and intentionally reductivist here, but I am that maniac about Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels. Starting with that name, that’s the greatest band name ever in the history of rock ‘ n ‘ roll. I’m telling you, Elvis wished his band was called Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels. You might notice, if you’ve read my stuff in the past, that I get very enthusiastic about things, and that’s when my writing starts to really take off; when I get really enthusiastic.

Dying Scene: This book is massive in size. Is it even considered a coffee table book? I feel like you can protect your house with this book.

Tim Stegall: I always advise people who order it: lift with your knees. It’s somewhere between a coffee table and one of those damn Taschen books, that’s about half photos and half text, except I hope I’m not as academic as those damn Taschen books. It was kind of Mike Shea’s vision to begin with. This thing morphed several times over the creation of it. When it started out, the contract I signed was supposed to be finished in two months’ time. It was supposed to be one hundred fifty punk rock album covers. I chose the albums, you know, spanning the 70s. And I would write two hundred fifty-word blurbs for each one. Then, about midway through writing that first draft, Mike Shea suddenly says, well, wait a minute, Tim, you’re a writer, and you’re a punk historian, so just write. It ended up becoming Encyclopedia Punktanica, basically. 

Mike Shea (Ruffian Books) has always been like that. He’s always been the one that sees the potential in any given situation. I’ve been working with this guy for 35 years or so. At the time that he and I first met, I went up on a field trip to Cleveland. I was still writing for Flipside and Your Flesh and all of that. I was very, very early in my career. Alternative Press at that time was a fanzine itself. We were both from this world, and Mike was wanting to basically transition Alt Press into a newsstand publication at that time. He’d already transitioned it into being roughly the size of Spin and Rolling Stone. He gave it a glossy four-color cover at that point. I happened to have this interview I had just done with Steve Jones of the Sex Pistols nobody wanted to run. It was covering his entire history. Steve even detailed every single heist that he pulled off to get equipment for the Sex Pistols. Very bold-facedly telling me about all of this. When he wrote his autobiography, he started to kind of backtrack a little bit. I had this interview, and Mike said, “Well, I’ll run it.”

He promised me that they paid seventy-five bucks per article or whatever. Two days later, Joe Banks, the editor at the time, called me up. I was still living at home in Alice, still going to college. Joe asked, “Did Mike promise you money? I’m sick of him doing that.  I’m going to make sure you get paid.” I ended up being the very first paid freelancer for AP. Mike saw when he had me and Jason Pettigrew on the staff that he had a couple of writers who could write serious, meaty articles. Somewhere along the lines of like Creem or something like that in its heyday. So, he was able to start transitioning it into the newsstand publication that it became.

Years later, after he’d sold the magazine to the Madden Brothers from Good Charlotte, I ended up being the last man standing from the original AP staff. I didn’t last because they wanted to just take things into a different direction. Mike called me up and said he was starting up a small press and wanted to launch it with a book by Tim Stegall. It ended up being this massive thing that I don’t think any of us envisioned that it would become. I think I became a better writer over the course of working on this thing myself.

Dying Scene: You hear about all the crazy shit they would do on stage and off, but never anything really inside. Where do you go after you’ve told all the legends and the myths?

Tim Stegall: I did definitely want to shatter some myths there. First of all, the etymology of the term “punk rock.” For the longest time, Dave Marsh got away with telling the world,he invented that term punk rock used it in a piece he wrote about Question Mark and the Mysterians in Creem in 1971. Wrong. The year before, almost a year to the day, Ed Sanders of the Fugs was being interviewed. He was promoting his solo album at the time, a country record, believe it or not, called Sanders’ Truck Stop. He calls his album Punk Rock in that article.

Six to eight months later, Lester Bangs published his massive three-part review of the Stooges’ Fun House album, Of Pop & Pies & Fun. You can find it in the collection of Lester’s work, Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung. He calls the Stooges a punk rock band in the first part of that review. Two or three weeks later, Suicide, playing their very first shows, and post a flyer using that phrase, punk rock, that they read in Lester Bangs’s reviews. This all happens a good six to eight months before Dave Marsh publishes that Looney Tunes column about going to see Question Mark and the Mysterians.

From there, it just becomes the general term for what we now know as 60s garage rock or garage punk. Obviously, Lenny Kaye used it in the liner notes to the Nuggets album. Later on, in about ‘76, it could have been Legs McNeil uttering it, or it could have been Caroline Coon in Melody Maker; although I think she got the idea from reading Punk magazine. There’s a lot of things like that that I’m trying to dispel.

The other thing is the whole myth that punk began with the Ramones at CBGB’s. They’re certainly important to the story, but really, if you want to look at this, punk is a viral outbreak that happens internationally. In 1975, people in these far-flung corners all over the world were local freaks who are buying Stooges records, New York Dolls records, Velvet Underground records, Flamin’ Groovies, MC5, whatever. They start forming bands because they’re not hearing the music inside their heads in the outside world.

They’re going to start that band, and they don’t care if anybody else has the same idea. People all over the world have this same idea. It just goes pandemic in ‘76. They start looking around. Those guys over in Cleveland called the Dead Boys don’t sound dissimilar to us. Hey, look at that band up in Boston called DMZ. I think the ultimate proof of all of this is The Saints’ “I’m Stranded”  single. That is, to me, if a Martian lands and comes up to me and asks me, “What is punk rock?” I would play that one single. It came out three months after the first Ramones album was released. It was recorded a month later. These guys were in Brisbane developing this very same idea. There’s no way that they heard the Ramones before they started playing like this. They already were playing this way.

It was just an idea that was in the air, and a lot of people had it. The Ramones basically offered a very distilled, very graspable way of playing and looking a certain way. Not to take anything away from them, but a lot of people deserve credit as much as they do. It’s not that punk began in one place, unless you want to point to Detroit in 1969. The other thing that I was trying to get across was kind of destroying the great man theory of punk rock. Yeah, I love the Sex Pistols. I love the Clash. I love the Ramones. I’m writing about all those bands, but it was originally supposed to be kind of a level playing field.

I try to give the same importance and weight to the Weirdos or DMZ or the Saints or the Avengers or that I would  with the Sex Pistols or any of those bands, you know? I’m enthusiastic about all of that. That was kind of the way growing up in a small Texas town in the late 70s and early 80s that I kind of received all this. It kind of just made me when I finally got out of there and moved out in the world. I saw that there were all these geographical rivalries; even rivalries within the scenes. It’s like, “Come on, I thought we were supposed to be all in this together.” It felt like at the time there was like a million records coming out every week and they were all great, and it wasn’t Fleetwood fucking Mac. That’s the way I received all this information, and I’m hoping I’m imparting some of that in the way I wrote this book.

Dying Scene: When you’re putting this together, did you start with the records that you felt were more of the punk records and work backwards, or did you start with the older records and move forwards?

Tim Stegall: Oh, we did this exactly the way the book is, in chronological order. That’s the other thing.  I wanted to treat what we call proto-punk as if it was punk rock. It was deliberately concentrated on the 70s. It began in 1970 with Back in the U.S.A. and Fun House, end it with London Calling and the first Pretenders album. We began with a list of records that I compiled, and then I bounced it off of Mike Shea and as well as my editor, Paige Owens, who was also another Trouser Press alumnus. They would tell me, “What about this? What about that?” Even after I finished writing. I think the second draft, I came back and said, “OK, I want to bring in this. I want to bring in that.”

There were considerations brought to me; we need to make sure this is inclusive. I had to point out to them, OG Punk Rock was inclusive. You had Kid Congo Powers and Alice Bag; both told me when I interviewed them for the Bonus Interviews book that it wasn’t that you were gay or you were Mexican or you were black or whatever. You were a punk rocker. None of this stuff is supposed to matter. It’s like there were a lot more black punk bands than the Bad Brains, you know? We’ve all discovered Death years and years later, and Pure Hell, as well.

I remember seeing photos of Pure Hell in Rock Scene magazine when I was a little kid. God, they seemed like the freakiest band ever. It was important for me to emphasize to them, and, in some ways, hardcore kind of bleached out everything. I think the ultra-violent aspects of hardcore ended up chasing away a lot of women and a lot of sensitive artistic souls. It ended up being this white suburban sausage party in so many ways, but you don’t have punk rock without the slits, Penelope Houston, Gay Advert, Kleenex out of Switzerland. All these different things. 

My favorite band that I interviewed for the book, and they were the only complete band that I talked to, was the Dishrags out of Vancouver. Oh, my God, they were so much fun, and their music is just great. They had a really unique take on things. I mean, writing breakup songs from a very, very sort of feminist point of view in a way. “Past is Past,” Oh, my God. I mean, that’s as catchy and as beautiful as any Ramones or Undertones record, and as raw as anything. Probably from the fact that they weren’t terribly skilled, but that lyrical viewpoint, you know, is just really incredible and really unique to them, I feel.

Dying Scene: In the last ten years, there has been a revisionist version of what constitutes “punk” or “proto-punk. I got into Elvis Costello in my mid-twenties, and nobody was considering him punk, but recently it feels like This Year’s Model is considered a punk rock record.

Tim Stegall: I kind of wrestled with that a little bit myself. It’s not exactly as hard as Rocket to Russia, but ultimately, I had to think. At the time, he was considered a punk artist, and This Year’s Model is very much of an intelligent garage punk record. Right down to that Vox Organ sound that Steve Nieve puts all over the record. My actual favorite Elvis Costello song, “Big Tears,” which was a B-side, features Mick Jones on guitar. Clash fans need to look up that record if they’ve ever heard it.

Dying Scene: He wrote it while listening to the Clash’s first record. He talks about being influenced by the Clash and coffee.

Tim Stegall: The Clash and coffee; That’s a good combination there, Elvis. I’ve never forgiven him for taking the first name of my first rock and roll hero. It’s hard to deny the power of those early records. Although I’ve got to say the demo that he did with the Attractions of “Watching the Detectives” is better than the officially released version. The only place I’d ever heard that was on this tape that the NME attached to the cover of one issue that came out during Punk’s 10th anniversary called Pogo a Gogo. I really wish the NME would re-release that either on vinyl or on CD or whatever, because it was a really good collection of stuff. 

Dying Scene: My Elvis Costello favorite rarity has always been the Mersey version of “Every Day I Write the Book,” but I have to dig out my CD whenever I want to hear that version or pull it up on YouTube. I don’t always want to do that. 

Tim Stegall: You might have noticed that I kind of adhered to the broader version definition of the term punk rock, and that’s because I hated that as 1977 went along, suddenly there’s a style manual and list of rules of what is and isn’t punk rock. I prefer that broader definition. Let’s sit here and just name some random punk bands. Suicide, The Stranglers, The Cramps, The Dead Boys, The Clash, The Ramones, The Sex Pistols, The Buzzcocks. Okay, what do these bands have in common? Do they sound alike? They do not, but they probably all have very similar record collections; they just have a very, very different take on how they play this style.

Dying Scene: For the bands from the 1970s through 1975, what do you feel like they have in common?

Tim Stegall: Well, they aren’t James Taylor. They aren’t Melanie. They aren’t the crap that was on the radio at the time. I mean, it was what they have in common.  They remembered when rock and roll was dangerous, something that was simple without being simplistic, easy to grasp, and had a certain excitement. They also all pretty much grew up on 50s and 60s top 40 radio. Three-chord, two-minute-thirty-second songs. They had that kind of aesthetic, and it was when those were the parameters you could just come in.  That’s why I think that the 45 is the best medium for punk rock because you come in with your best song, your best ideas. You threw them on there, you got in, you got out, mastered the damn thing. That’s the best sort of presentation. That was one of the great things about the 60s stuff.

If you put Jeff Beck in the Yardbirds in service to a two minute thirty seconds song, he doesn’t get too excessive. He could experiment all over the place, being as innovative as he can be, but it’s only going to be within twelve bars or eight bars. It’s not taking over the entire song.

Dying Scene: I love that whole introduction to the other musicians in history who were kind of the outliers. The country, rockabilly, and glam artists that were kind of punk rock before the term was coined. You make the case that blues artists and the jazz women from the 1920s through the 1940s had proto-punk credibility? I’ve been saying that for a while. They were going up against the norms of what white people were doing?

Tim Stegall: I think I know what you’re trying to, what you’re trying to get to. Take a look at “Strange Fruit” by Billie Holiday. I think I talked about that, if I remember correctly, in the intro. That strange fruit hanging from a hollow tree. Those were black people getting lynched. I mean, how punk rock is that? She got that song over on the radio and it sold how many copies? That’s total punk rock right there. Anytime that you subvert the norm like that and deliver a message effectively, you’re seeing punk rock in action.

Dying Scene: You’re just seeing Iggy Pop or Mike Watt or Lee Ving. It’s these artists who have been playing for thirty or forty years. Mike Watt plays in like four or five bands right now.

Tim Stegall: If you really want to compare punk to jazz, are the Sex Pistols and the Ramones ragtime or like Louis Armstrong or something like that? And something like H09909 and Soul Glo- is that, you know, free jazz?

Dying Scene: I would be thinking that maybe Iggy would be considered the ragtime, but that’s weird to call Iggy ragtime.

Tim Stegall: It’s kind of a similar trajectory. I mean, jazz just continued evolving and morphing. The same thing has happened with punk. You get these incredible things. There’sThere are acts that experiment with industrial elements and hip hop elements.  I really enjoy a lot of that stuff. I saw this band opening for the Sex Pistols on my 61st birthday called Panic Shack out of Wales. It felt to me like, you know, maybe every city has a band like Die Spitz now. That’s not necessarily a bad thing at all but, you also got things that are very much traditional punk rock that’s very good.

I absolutely love the Sleeveenes. They’re my favorite band right now. A band I’m as obsessed with as I was with the New York Dolls or the Clash growing up. I think Stef Murphy is such an incredible songwriter. He’s as good as somebody like Townes Van Zandt, and the band plays his songs like they’re Clash songs. Two albums so far. The first one is a self-titled one that’s out on Dirt Nap. Goner Records put out the second one just this summer. It’s called National Anthem. The fact that those two labels put out their product should tell you a little bit about this band.

Dying Scene: Which smaller band was most important for you to include? You’ve gone over a couple of them, but which one was most important for you to include?

Tim Stegall: Like I said, I wanted to treat proto-punk as if it was punk rock. They just didn’t have the name for it yet. That’s why in my mind, the New York Dolls are a punk rock band. Third World War comes to mind. The Hollywood Brats, for sure. There are bands that I grew to appreciate more. The Boys definitely come to mind. I became a bigger fan of them after I wrote this book. Same with Teenage Head. I became a bigger fan just from writing this book of those things. Believe it or not, it was important to me to include Plastic Bertrand.

Dying Scene: I appreciated that. My son, for whatever reason, when he was about ten, loved that album. I grew an appreciation for it. 

Tim Stegall: It’s understandable. It’s catchy as hell. I dug up his story, and it’s just a ridiculous story about how that song came together and everything. It turns out that Plastic Bertrand himself was basically the Milli Vanilli of punk rock. Then you find out everybody under the sun has recorded that fucking song. Richard Thompson did an acoustic version. Metallica; You should find the clip. It’s Metallica covering it in Belgium. They get the entire stadium singing along. It’s hysterical. It’s hysterical. You know, I wasn’t surprised Billy Childish recorded it because he’s recorded everything; it feels like at this point.

Dying Scene: Were you surprised that any of the bands hadn’t received more attention at the time?

Tim Stegall: Oh, God. Yeah, The Boys, for sure.  I think pretty much any of the bands that I just named off was important for me to get in. I’m shocked that they didn’t become bigger than they were. DMZ, The Weirdos. So much of this stuff was just important for me to get this in there and give their stories as much love and attention as I did the story of Never Mind the Bullocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols.

Dying Scene: Do you feel like these bands were appreciated in their respective areas? 

Tim Stegall: Not in Third World War’s day at all. They went nowhere. They sank immediately without a trace. They were not appreciated at all. The Hollywood Brats, as well. It was only over time that these bands found their fame or their cult or whatever. I just want to give all those things the same love.

Dying Scene: What positive qualities do you think the 1976 through 1979 bands inherited from the earlier bands mentioned in the book?

Tim Stegall: Everything. I think that the punk bands, the proper punk bands, got more pronounced with hardcore. I think I wrote a little bit about how the attitude was, “Oh, so you’re not going to sign us? You’re not going to put us on the radio? Well, fuck you. We’ll build our own world.” I think there was some of that maverick intensity and complete rejection of the status quo. There was some of that prevalent in early punk, but all those bands honestly thought that they were going to get signed to CBS Records. I joke with the Ramones; the Ramones thought they were going to be the Beatles in A Hard Day’s Night. That did not happen. What they got was something that was a little bit more lasting and a more substantial than that in so many ways. 

10,000 people bought the first Ramones album? I think every one of those people formed a band. The old thing that everybody quotes from Brian Eno: only 6,000 people bought the first Velvet Underground album, but every one of them started a band. I think that’s incredibly true. It spawned successive waves, and then those waves spawned other waves. I mean, it really is the butterfly effect here.

Dying Scene:  Do you think any of the later bands fundamentally misunderstood the earlier artists that influenced them?

Tim Stegall: I don’t think so. Everybody took what they took from those earlier bands. And it’s basically it’s like those handwriting books that you get when you enter first grade, and it shows you how to draw these shapes. These shapes become your handwriting. That’s why it’s important to go and copy “Johnny B. Goode.” You’re not going to end up playing it just like Chuck Berry, but you’re going to learn some fundamentals. You’re going to end up putting your own style upon it. Hopefully they learn something, but there were a lot of bands that also just copied the Sex Pistols and didn’t add anything to it. It was crass. Not the band. I have my own ideas about Crass. I did include them in the book. Even though I’m not necessarily a fan, I have to admit, at least the politics of punk rock actually all come from Crass rather than the Clash. To be honest,  musically, they all sounded to me like a bunch of people who could not play, copying Hawkwind; that’s not necessarily a bad thing.  I do enjoy some of that Crass stuff.

If I’m going to put on a record, I’m going to put on L.A.M.F. I’m just saying there were a lot of opportunists and charlatans that did get in on this because maybe their careers playing Deep Purple covers at the local pub weren’t panning out at that point because the climate had changed. I don’t know if anybody necessarily got anything wrong. It’s just they were just trying to play to the best of their abilities. Maybe this is what comes out, you know.

Dying Scene: Radio Birdman never gets enough love.

Tim Stegall: Never. Probably the Saints even less. I interviewed both Ed Cooper of the Saints and Deniz Tek of Radio Birdman for like three hours apiece for the interviews book. The Dils don’t get enough love; that was important.  I love Australia’s take on punk rock, and I wanted to include as much of that as I could.  This is a problem when you’re writing punk rock history books. I mean, we did specifically concentrate on the 70s, but most of the time when people, like John Savage or somebody, write a book, they end up cutting it off with Sid Vicious dying. It’s as if hardcore never happened. As if grunge never happened.  I’m hoping to encompass all of that as we go along. 

Dying Scene: Were there any revelations that surprised you during your research or any of your reviews?

Tim Stegall: Oh, man. Yeah, Danny Fields corrected a lot of stuff that he was involved with. He gave me the straight-ahead account of how the MC5 and the Stooges both got signed to Elektra through him. He corrected a lot of the legends that Iggy Pop himself perpetrated about the night he met David Bowie. There were certain things that got said to me during some of those interviews. Hilarious shit like Derwood Andrews from Generation X. At one point he says something to me like, ” You want to know why I always looked miserable when we were on Top of the Pops? It’s because I fucking hated Billy Idol and Tony James. I fucking hated playing with them. You know, they never listen to my ideas, blah, blah, blah. That’s me up there basically thinking, God, I wish I was in Joy Division.

I was just amazed. It’s like, how miserable were Billy and Tony making Derwood that he wants to be in the most notoriously miserable band in post-punk history? You know, that was just hilarious. Wreckless Eric telling his entire story. I mean, that guy’s got this incredible, self-deprecating, deadpan sense of humor. He recorded his demo that he presented to Stiff Records over a copy of Eric Clapton’s Rainbow Concert. You know, he did that thing that we used to do over the lug hole, and he recorded it. As he put it, well, he only had about twenty minutes of material left, so I sat in silence for the rest of the tape. 

Then his whole tale about how he presented the demo at the Stiff Records offices. He was so nervous and shy that he had to get a couple of pints down in him in order to get the courage up. And then he said I walked past this tatty little storefront once or twice because I was expecting this big high-rise, and no, turns out Stiff Records is in this little storefront. Apparently he walked in and announced, “I’m one of these cunts that walks into record companies with a tape.” He said this huge lumberjack with a beard approaches me; it turned out to be Huey Lewis. He was there recording the first Elvis Costello album with his band Clover. He said there were all these psychotic delinquents sitting around in the room as well. That turned out to be the damned.

He said that Nick Lowe was just so amused with this little spectacle after he went running out that Nick went and got the tape from Huey Lewis. He goes back to where the boombox is and puts it on. The first song he hears is “Whole Wide World,” and  said Nick immediately went looking for Jake Riviera. Jake has the same reaction that Nick has. It took them days to locate him because apparently, he just ran off and was already gone by the time they heard the song.

Eric claimed that for two or three days, the payphone at his boarding house was ringing and he didn’t pick it up because he didn’t think anybody wanted to call him. It was Jake Riviera trying to find Wreckless Eric so that they could record “Whole Wide World.” I mean, so many of these people, they tell their stories, and it sounds like the punk rock version of that movie, That Thing You Do.

Dying Scene: Were there any commonly accepted punk narratives that fell apart when you looked into them a little closer?

Tim Stegall: Like I said, Danny Fields told a very, very different version of how David Bowie met Iggy Pop. It’s not terribly different, but just different enough. Tracing the etymology of the term punk rock itself, that was like the big revelation for me. I certainly wanted to destroy the whole myth that Malcolm McLaren created everything that had to do with the Sex Pistols. That has pissed me off for years. Let’s face it,  Malcolm McLaren could not play guitar like Steve Jones. 

They existed as a band of sorts called the Swankers before Malcolm agreed to start managing them. He did introduce them to John Lydon, who Bernie Rhodes discovered, actually. Malcolm tried to claim a lot of credit for that band, but no, they were not this prefab Monkees-style band that everybody thinks they were. They were writing those songs. Nevermind The Bullocks… is such an explosive, perfectly recorded rock and roll record, honestly.

Dying Scene: What chapter was what of these bands was the hardest one to research?

Tim Stegall: The hardest one to research, probably Third World War. Honestly, there’s just not a lot out there. 

Dying Scene: Which record in the book do you feel has aged the best?

Tim Stegall: Well, I don’t think any of them sound dated to me. You know, to be honest, because there’s just a vitality and excitement to this music, obviously. There’s a number of them that just still sound fresh to me. Raw Power by Iggy and the Stooges. First New York Dolls album. The Saints, I’m Stranded. The second one, too. The first Saints album is just so mind-blowing to me. I mean, there’s not a bad cut in the entire thing. It feels perfectly recorded. Everything about it is perfect to me. Yeah, there’s quite a few, you know. But like I said to me, all this stuff just has a vitality that never grows old.

Dying Scene: What records in this book deserve the biggest reassessment, either positive or negative?

Tim Stegall:  I think the first DMZ album does. Everybody talks about the production being bad, but I think it actually suffered from the same disease that afflicted the Heartbreakers LAMF album. It was poorly mastered. I think the mastering is bad on a lot of these things. Same thing with the Rich Kids album, Ghosts of Princes and Towers.  Glenn Matlock, when I brought this up to him, said he thoroughly agreed with me that the mastering was bad. He and Rusty Egan went and remixed that debut Rich Kids album for Record Store Day. And I got that after he told me about it. It’s like somebody lifted a wet blanket off of this off of this record suddenly. There’s a few of them like that that should probably be reassessed. Those immediately come to mind.

Dying Scene: Were there any records that got cut from this book?

Tim Stegall: Lots got cut for space, unfortunately. Slaughter and the Dogs, Do It Dog Style. The Heartbreakers Live at Max’s. Some of these, I’ve actually taken those excised entries, and I’ve run them at my Substack. The Ramones It’s Alive. There’s lots of things that got cut, and I didn’t get any Austin or Texas bands into it. That’s simply because no Texas bands put out an album back in the 1970s. There’s a lot of bands that we included, like the Weirdos or whatever. We went to compilations because they didn’t put out albums either. They put out tons of demos and a few singles or something like that. Those later got collected into an album, but we don’t really have anything like that: The Skunks here in Austin or The Nervebreakers in Dallas. Unfortunately, we couldn’t get anybody like that from my home state.

Dying Scene: If someone who reads this book discovers one new artist, who do you hope it is?

Tim Stegall: The Dishrags or the Boys or the Saints. There’s tons that I hope that they discover from this. I’ve said a few times that this is the book I wish I had when I was fifteen and just walked out of seeing The Clash at the Armadillo and deciding this is what I wanted to do with my life. It’s the book I wished I had back then. I’m hoping that this serves that function for some fifteen-year-old who’s deciding they want to discover punk rock.

I hope I’m giving them enough of the cultural signifiers. Like what movies these people were watching or what books they were reading or whatever. Talking about things like fanzines and squatting and just different aspects of this life. You know, DIY record production, things like that. Yeah, I would love for that to be, you know, some sort of guidebook, if possible.

Tim Stegall’s Anarchy in the Studio: Punk Music 1970-1979 – The Rise of Punk Rock is available through Ruffian Books. You can keep up with Tim and his writing at his Substack.

Monk – Without Words b/w Get Lost (Dine Alone Records)

There’s a holiday for everything, now. October 16th was Edge Day and Los Angeles based hardcore band Monk celebrated by releasing a couple of covers by Boston, MA’s very own Stop and Think. Lead singer Frank Bach explains:

“We did these Stop and Think covers because the songs rock and I’ve always felt like they never got the recognition they deserved. Their early 2000s Boston sound is straightforward hardcore, and I wanted to bring some of that energy to the West Coast. Releasing these on Edge Day felt like a good way to shine a light on a band we love. Get lost!”

Monk has some shows coming up:

November 6 – Los Angeles, CA @ The Slipper Clutch

November 13 – Santa Rosa, CA @ The Arlene Francis Center

November 14 – San Francisco, CA @ Kilowatt Bar

Cliffhanger – Brain Bleed (Self-Released)

Chicago pop punk veterans, Cliffhanger, have released, Brain Bleed. Boasting four songs, this latest EP should be a good preview of their LP being released in 2027. Check out their video for the song “Tripped (Into Madness)” below:

Check them out if you’re in the area

November 14 – Cobra Lounge – Chicago, IL

Alma – Chosen to Divide (Self-Released)

The French female fronted hardcore band Alma released their latest EP, Chosen to Divide on October 19th. Full of the aggression and speed expected, track “Leave Behind” is exactly what you’re looking for in hardcore from France. Check it out below:

Andy Frasco & the UN – Homesick (songs for a younger me)

When Andy Frasco isn’t hosting his World Saving Podcast, he’s busy making music with his band Andy Frasco and the UN. Their latest EP is a love letter to Andy’s younger years and the 2000s pop punk he grew up on. Homesick (songs for a younger me) is full of acoustic guitars, palm mutes, and feelings in the best way. Here’s the video for “Better Bad Ideas” from the Homesick EP:

That’s it for this week. If you have record or a music video you want to get some eyes on, please contact us at the Dying Scene Discord or email us at DyingSceneMusic@gmail.com 

Chuck Klosterman’s fictitious rock & roll timeline poses the question: what if the Beatles had only developed a cult following while the Velvet Underground emerged as the most popular band in the world? One little thing can change a trajectory, and this is one trajectory that definitely changes. However, it is this contrast of Klosterman’s multi-versed version that highlights the truths we know about our own rock & roll history. 

The music nerd extraordinaire conjectures a decidedly different rock & roll history. First, it connects the rock & roll of the era to the Velvet Underground’s 1967 self-titled record and how it influenced music going forward. This sets up some different timelines in which some musicians lived beyond their deaths in our timeline. In this reality, Elvis Presley is still alive into the 2000s, allowing Klosterman to imagine projects and collaborations that would be impossible in our timeline. This book throws more pop culture references at you than Ready Player One did, but here it is done much better due to its remixing and repurposing of the context. 

Klosterman’s recounting of Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground’s formation is complete, but direct. This is a music world designed by Lou Reed, not Lennon and McCartney. While they exist in the timeline Klosterman postulates, they may as well not even exist. Weird events in this rock history include Lou Reed’s murder in 1983 and the phenomenon of Velvetmania in 1967, which was a completely different approach altogether. The concept of Velvetmania indifference was a direct inverse of Beatlemania chaos. In this world, Altamont was the big successful music festival, and Woodstock was the disaster, exposed after Peter Jackson made a Get Back-style documentary about the upstate New York Festival. There are other examples, but this book is better experienced than explained.  

For as strange as this book is, eventually it became like a puzzle of figuring out what rules exist in this Velvet Underground-tinged world. It’s this weird amalgamation of the essays that gained him notoriety and his underappreciated fiction writing. That being said, some genuinely laugh-out-loud moments border on Spinal Tap genius. However, Klosterman includes some things to intentionally mess with readers. In his world, the Beatles, as a group, last longer, but Yoko Ono is eventually added as the fifth Beatle. Things like this are spoken as if they’re facts.

Fans of Klosterman’s earlier work may want something closer to his anthologized books rather than this weird mash-up of his previous work and Marvel Comics’ ongoing comic series What If…, but this is an interesting approach to talk about fandom. In spots, it’s directly contradictory, just to be, which can be weird.

It’s hard for me as a comic nerd to not see The Watchmen all over this. It’s an alternate history with guitars, rock stars, and pop culture. It’s not bad; it’s just weird, especially for music fans who know their facts or know just enough. Hopefully people will get the concept because it is a fun and genius way to look at music. Like Watchmen, the alternate history becomes a way of examining the reality it diverges from.

Whatever your opinions are on Klosterman, this book probably won’t help them. His remix of rock & roll history is head-scratchingly genius. This alternate universe makes sense and feels natural while at the same time bringing forth some of the biggest and blasphemous alternatives to rock and American History. It’s definitely one to experience for yourself.

Chuck Klosterman’s Rock*: A Mainstream Alternative History Of Alternative Mainstream Music is published by Da Capo Press.

Mightier Than the Sword is the story of four English professors at different stages in life’s struggles who decide to rob a college textbook store to throw money at the problems plaguing them. While there are differences from Ruland’s previous novel, Make It Stop, Ruland’s newest novel speaks to the deterioration of society and the disillusionment with the American Dream. Below, Jim talks about where this idea came from and how he executed it.

Dying Scene (Forrest Gaddis): Where did you come up with this idea for a heist story involving college professors?

Jim Ruland: When I was a graduate student in Flagstaff, Arizona, in 1993, I was in a situation that’s very similar to the teachers in Mightier Than the Sword. There were four of us crammed into an office, we were always bumping into each other, and in each other’s business and trying not to interrupt our conversations with students. One of my colleagues knew that I was a big fan of crime novels, and one day he said, “Hey, let’s go rob a bank. Who would suspect us? We’re English teachers.” That idea kind of rattled around in my head for thirty years and eventually took the shape of this novel.

Dying Scene: As it’s rattling around in there, did it go through different iterations before you committed it to paper?

Jim Ruland: I love heist stories. I love stories where people find a bunch of money or people who are unlikely detectives. Whenever I see one of these types of movies, I’m always thinking about I might do with the format. That idea just had been there for a while. Not too long after I finished the final edits of my previous novel (Make It Stop), I started this one.

Dying Scene: When you were thinking of the heist, what heist stories or movies came to mind?

Jim Ruland: The Killing was one; obviously, that’s referenced in Mightier Than The Sword. That’s a classic that I always go back to. One thing that Mightier Than the Sword has in common with Make It Stop is these kinds of ensemble casts. There’s a large group of people who come together to do this very irregular thing. In the previous novel, it was addicts who come together to fight back against the corporate healthcare system; kind of healthcare vigilantes. It’s English teachers who decided to rob a bookstore. A movie that kind of got me thinking about it a lot was Bullet Train.

I think that was the movie that lit the spark. It’s not a heist movie by any stretch, but it does take a group of people in a claustrophobic space and puts them all together. Then sees, “What’s going to happen when you put these personalities together?” I like stuff like that regardless of what the format is.

Dying Scene: The four characters are Colt, the frustrated writer; DJ, the poet; Mallory, the punk; and Max, the gambler. Do you create characters as a reflection of what you see around you or what you’ve seen yourself?

Jim Ruland: I think probably both. I don’t want to say too much about which characters are based on people I knew and which aren’t; other than that, they’re mostly composites. The house where Colt lives is the house where I lived when I was in one of the houses where I lived in Flagstaff, but I also lived with several people there. I didn’t just live there by myself.

There’s a lot of stuff that I draw from. My own experience of being that age. I set this in 1993, I think, maybe as a reaction to the previous novel, which was in the near future. I wrote a near-future novel and took so long to write it that the present kept catching up with the future that I was imagining. By setting it in the past, I had a little bit more control over the events and the time. There’s not gonna be some new technology invented that I now have to contend with.

Dying Scene: How did you differentiate the motivations of the characters so the crime feels more character-driven than plot-driven?

Jim Ruland: I think back to when I was a graduate student, and I have a lot of memories of friendships and experiences I had, but my situation was I was always broke. I was always short on money and always having to work at least one job.  I knew that part of it was that because I’d already been in the Navy, so of course I’m going to work. I wasn’t afraid to work, but I just didn’t want to take out loans. I wanted everything to be paid for. I didn’t want to go deeper into debt. I think that there were times when I was like, “Well, shit.” 

I was still a young person, still irresponsible in ways. I would make my rent and then be like, “Wow, how am I going to pay for food?” or “I don’t have gas for the next few days for a car.” Whatever it is just always having to do without in a way that was borderline desperate. The main character, Colt, grows up with a single mom. He didn’t really realize that other people have it different. He just thinks that “From time to time, people sell their things to make money, or they raid the coin jar to turn it into groceries, or they turn over their record collection in order to buy clothes or buy shoes. It’s something that you need.

That kind of thing becomes normal because when you’re a starving student, you’re working jobs. All the people around you are that way too. I remember towards the end of my undergraduate, which again, I did after I had been in the Navy, I had this job where I was a midnight cook, and I kept getting fired and rehired. A very toxic job and toxic bosses. I wasn’t always the most subservient employee, to put it nicely, but I was also sober. I wasn’t drinking or partying. A lot of my coworkers couldn’t always say that.

I remember at the end of my senior year, just kind of working at this restaurant, working from 10pm until the sun goes up. I just kind of stopped hanging out with people that I knew from school, and I was hanging out with the people that I worked with. It just kind of flipped the way that I saw things. People working at a Hardee’s fast food restaurant became the more dominant reality than going to college, which always felt like a fake reality. I really liked that idea of someone who is caught in between realities.

Dying Scene: The story is set in 1993. Why was that the right year for the story? Was there a moment in higher education or American culture that shaped that?

Jim Ruland: It was the year that I went to grad school; that was a big part of it. I knew exactly where I was; I could pinpoint everything. I also think it was kind of near the beginning of that kind of exploitation of graduate students. I still think that the school I went to was fairly generous and that they completely waived out-of-state tuition and paid people, but the pay was not nearly enough. Granted, we were part-timers, but when you’re going to grad school, you don’t have a lot of extra time anyway.

It kind of defined our reality to be going to school and teaching and then just scraping by on this little bit of money. I would then see that became the dominant way of higher education, using this underclass of contract employees and to do the bulk of the teaching.

Dying Scene: Why was it important to speak about the deterioration of education and the drastic lengths these professors go to?

Jim Ruland: I think they’re desperate. Not everybody will find themselves short of money and be like, “I know I’ll rob a bookstore or rob a bank,” but some people will. If there’s enough of you and you’re desperate enough, then you will. That’s why I picked these different people. Each has their different circumstances. One guy’s a gambler and finds himself in over his head with his debts. Another guy is going through a divorce and now suddenly has to come up with money for a lawyer, that kind of thing. In very unique situations where you gotta come up with some money, here’s a supposedly easy way out, right? I mean, these are not professional criminals, but they are professional students of narrative.

Dying Scene: Was there a play on the sentiment of the professors robbing a store that supplies their students with tools that help pass their class?

Jim Ruland: When I’m writing these fantastic stories, I may be overly concerned with the verisimilitude;  like, could this really happen? In the case of bookstores, textbooks are such a scam that I just felt like it was an easy target. Like, no one’s going to feel bad for the textbook companies being ripped off or a privately owned bookstore that exploits the students.

Dying Scene: What do you feel like fiction allowed you to say about academia that nonfiction couldn’t?

Jim Ruland: It’s funny cause I didn’t set out to write a takedown of academia. In the sense of Make It Stop, I didn’t set out to write a takedown of healthcare. It did dawn on me as I was getting deeper into this novel that it’s about class, right? That these universities, they dangle a carrot: “Hey, come to our school. We’ll waive your tuition, and you can get a free education. You just got to teach a little bit.” That’s going to be appealing to a certain kind of person. That’s someone who is willing to take risks and take chances, but it also comes from a place of financial insecurity. To me, it became pretty obvious that this was a book about class. I don’t want to say anything about the ending, but that rings all the way through the novel.

I also want to say that crime is one of the few places where we do talk about class. I mean, there are so many novels that you read where you never really find out how these characters get their money. They have a job, or they have a place, but where do they come from? Was there ever any insecurity? How do they achieve this stuff? I think that when you grow up with that insecurity or have lived with it, that becomes a really defining feature of the experience. I think you see that in crime more than you’ll see that in other genres, which I appreciate.

Dying Scene: It seems, in general, Make It Stop and Mightier Than The Sword comment on how institutions, whether academic or government, just erode trust eventually.

Jim Ruland: I think that erosion of trust is definitely there. I went to grad school. It was not an MFA program. It was just a master’s program in English. You could either have an emphasis on literature or creative writing. I actually started in literature and finished in creative writing, but at the end of the day, you’ve got a master’s in English. It was not a terminal degree. It was kind of like a stepping stone if you wanted to get a PhD. 

I was using it as a stepping stone to somewhere else, but I didn’t really know where. I moved to California to go to grad school and follow that path, but then I realized how competitive it was and how ill-prepared I was both financially and in terms of my academic rigor. I went into the Navy after high school for a reason, and I went into the only school that took me for a reason. I was not exactly a desirable candidate for the life of a scholar. So I made adjustments, and this was one of them. During that process is when I was like, “This may not be all that it’s cracked up to be.”

Once you begin to suspect things, you look at things through a different lens. You see the cracks. You have to buy into it in order to make it work for you, and if you’re not willing to do that, then you see where the problems are.

Dying Scene: What inspired Colt’s father’s golden pen?

Jim Ruland: That’s harder to say; that was very organic. It kind of started out as a little bit of a MacGuffin that kind of traveled around. It was just a way to kind of highlight different characters. If you read a lot of crime fiction and genre fiction and you realize that there are no rules, you can do whatever you want. If you want to introduce a new character, two hundred pages in, you can. Genre fiction does that all the time. I thought that the pen kind of did that a little bit in terms of the lore around it; that’s what I was really attracted to.

The thing I love about genre is the lore. When I’m watching a samurai movie, I’m totally invested in all of the dynamics of the court, the army, and the disgrace of this samurai and his revenge against this person who dishonored. If I’m watching like a Chinese gangster movie or something with a Yakuza, I am in it. That guy betrayed this person, and now they’re getting their revenge, but they’re doing it by falling in love with this person’s daughter; it’s not really his son. That’s the literary element in the story. Colt’s father is this pulp cowboy novelist who’s disappeared. There’s this legacy of these forgotten fictions that kind of hangs over everything that I was really enamored with.

Dying Scene: What was the hardest part of keeping the humor, danger, and absurdity in balance?

Jim Ruland: There were no hard parts. I wrote this novel’s first draft in about six months. When I wasn’t doing other things. I always could not wait to get back to it. I remember being at a conference, and as soon as a speaker was done, I whooped out my notebook and was taking notes on something I had thought about during the conversation. It was just so much fun to write and very heartening for me. The two previous novels I’d written were pretty big and started out big and ambitious. Then I kind of had to pull them in because they weren’t working to the extent that I wanted them to, and made them a little bit less ambitious. Something that I could wrap my head around and actually write successfully. This just felt, everything I learned from that previous novel, I was able to directly apply to that one.

I had a really great editor at Rare Bird named Guy Intoci. He edited both of these novels. The edits were outstanding in the sense of helping me understand what I was doing in a new way to make it more dynamic. I think when I finished Make It Stop, with Guy’s help with that final edit that went into the book, I was so jazzed that I went on a writing tear after that. It was just fun to do this work again. It was just really exciting.

Dying Scene: Both books move really well. It very much feels like an old crime pulp novel, just set in the nineties. 

Jim Ruland: There’s elements of Richard Stark’s Parker novels in there. There’s elements of these over the top neo-noirs. Many of those were adaptations of pulp novels from the thirties, forties, fifties, and sixties. In the nineties, I was reading all of those and then seeing them kind of be brought to life in a different form. That was a very exciting time for me in the nineties in terms of all my interests aligning in terms of fiction and the film. Then it kind of went away. After 9/11, there was like a seriousness to things. I just kind of felt I’d outgrown it until ten years ago; maybe a little bit more. I just started rediscovering all those old stories and things like that again.

I remember being a kid and reading Louie Lamour novels that my dad had laying around. He was a big fan of Westerns, but he was in the Navy, too. You need these books to pass the time. They’re great for that. They’re great characters; They take you into another world. A world very different from where you are, and where there’s a structure and order to it. I think there was something to that  in play in this book.

Dying Scene: You’ve said that there’s a connection between Melanie in Make It Stop and Mallory. 

Jim Ruland: Melanie is Mallory’s niece. It’s not mentioned by name. It’s just that you would have to know that Melanie and Mallory have the same last name. I think it’s only mentioned in Make It Stop once, that her last name is Marsh, and it’s only mentioned once in Mightier Than The Sword. It’s just something that’s entertaining to me. There’s just certain things I like to have in these stories. One is a bad Irish bar. Maybe because I’m sober and they’re all bad to me now. I mean, not really, but they’re still a great place to get a good meal and have an non-alcoholic beverage or watch a game. I just like having a really seedy Irish bar in my books, and luckily they’re all over the country.  

Dying Scene: Your fiction usually deals with a lot of punks, outsiders, and underdogs. How do you feel Mightier Than the Sword extends or challenges those themes?

Jim Ruland: There are outlaws. Which goes back to the Raising Arizona quote, right at the very beginning. There’s just an idea of what makes someone an outlaw and what makes someone an outsiderSometimes it’s race. Sometimes it’s religion. Sometimes it’s class. Sometimes it’s all three of those things. Sometimes it’s sexual orientation. Sometimes it’s being in a room full of brutes and being the smart one there. I feel like we’ve read plenty of stories like that, right? Where really bright people who end up becoming writers write about their traumatic childhoods at boarding schools and things like that. I’m thinking of, like, James Joyce. I mean, it’s hard, kind of hard to imagine James Joyce running down a soccer pitch and kind of kicking ass. Right.

I just remember feeling very much like an outsider for the whole time I was an adolescent just cause I just did not fit in that feeling of that. I think that, more than anything, it makes one predisposed to punk rock. I went to Catholic school. I was raised in a Navy family. My mom was a nurse. It was a lot of structure and rules. I was the oldest of four kids, and I wanted to follow the rules. I wanted to fit in. I wanted approval. I wanted all that validation that comes with it, but I didn’t get it. 

There comes a time when you’re like, “fuck that.” If you don’t want me, then I’m just going to reject you first. Then you find this genre of music that is all about that. Like, “Goddamn, I am home.” If you’re lucky, you meet some really dangerous people who expand what’s possible in your life, and now you’re a punk rocker. 

Dying Scene: Rare Bird published both books. What makes them the right home for your work?

Jim Ruland: I think there’s a shared sensibility. That’s a better question for Rare Bird. They publish a lot of books about music, not just limited to punk rock. The singer of the Dwarves published some novels with them. Plenty of people who have done memoir projects with them. All kinds of extreme music. The publisher, Tyson Cornell, loves extreme music. I think he likes that sensibility, but also that I write other kinds of books.  

There’s an understanding that there are limits to what an independent press can do or be for a writer in 2026. It definitely feels like, as books have a diminished place in pop culture and the written word in general, you have to do these things because you love it, not because you can see dollar signs or mainstream success at the end of every project. Sometimes a project is just worth doing. It doesn’t really need to be. You hope for the best, but I think we kind of share that sensibility. 

Dying Scene: I know you’ve got a book about the movie Repo Man (The Repo Code) coming out next year in June. What’s the status on that?

Jim Ruland: We’re finishing it up right now. It’s going to have some amazing images that no one’s ever seen before. I talked to as many people as I could, from (director) Alex Cox, of course, all the way down. A lot of those people have passed on, but there’s also quite a few people who Repo Man was their first movie and went on to have long careers. So it was really great to talk to some of those people. Some are retired, some have had great success, some are still doing amazing stuff. It’s really cool. The whole book is an examination of the movie, but also the soundtrack.

Jim Ruland’s Mightier Than The Sword is available through Rare Bird. For Jim’s other works check out his website.

11/14/2026 – Louder than Words – tickets are available now

11/21/2026 – Write Idea Festival – free to attend

On top of that, she is working on her newest book, Only Punk Rock Can Save The World, and she needs your help. If you are interested, you can contact her at OPRCSTW@gmail.com 

Molly Tie’s Four Records:

0-10: Polaris – Music From the Adventures of Pete and Pete

Teen: The Clash – Sandinista!

Mid-Twenties: The Donnas – Turn 21

Recent: Sincere Engineer – Cheap Grills

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Opening song: Rad Skulls – Loud as Shit

Closing song: Lucas Perea – Underneath Ashes

The story follows Willy, a young punk rocker and drug dealer, who is counting on his best friend Brixton and his baseball skills to get out of Berkeley. Things go awry when Max, a drug dealer that Willy ratted on, is released from prison and forces him to sell his new product. Little bags of cocaine that have Val Kilmer’s hat and moustache à la his 1993 turn as Doc Holliday in Tombstone. After getting dumped by his girlfriend, Willy and Brixton meet two girls on the bus. It all goes downhill from there. While it’s not a difficult or unfamiliar web to untangle, it is an interesting story nonetheless. The characters that inhabit the world are niche to fans of Rancid and East Bay punk or punk rock in general, but are unique enough.

Willy is our narrator and guide through his punk rock world. He rides this weird line of being a drug-dealer punk-rocker teenager whose tough life seems to intersect and even ruin the others in it. Punk projects like this typically come with statements about what is or isn’t punk rock, but not here. It’s not too preachy. I think it can be hard to make a punk rock story without doing so in general. I remember multiple people saying that about SLC Punk!, and I’d like to think time has been much kinder to it. What is and isn’t punk has evolved since its inception. This story doesn’t really focus on this rather than the plot itself, which is a bit refreshing in a punk rock story.  

Kevin Mellon is a force to be reckoned with while pulling double duty as writer and artist. I’m not able to review whether this is a good adaptation, as I’ve yet to see the movie. The comic Mellon has written based on Danny Peykoff, Jamie Neese, and Jason Neese’s script works well. The art almost has an Archie and the gang style to it, if Archie and Jughead sold drugs and jumped into pits. I loved Gab Contreras’s colors on Z2’s Blues Brothers comic, and I think her game has definitely stepped up here. Given that Z2 does mostly music-related comics, Contreras pivoting to a different genre does not seem to have any bearing on her quality. Tom Williams’s letters are the perfect amount of chaos for this story.

While there are a ton of Rancid easter eggs- a term I use loosely because some of them are glaringly obvious- they don’t detract from the story. There are characters named after songs, along with direct references to the band itself. Willy has an unhealthy fixation on OG Rancid drummer Brett Reed, while a female character named Ruby has been burned by a bass player named Matt. 

Despite being a drummer, we never actually see Willy play drums. He does show up to the Ivy Room to watch a band play and jump in the pit. The scenes at the Ivy Room establish a lot more tone, characters, and essentially the catalyst of the story. In general, I’m usually disappointed in comic book adaptations of movies. Sometimes things are left out. I remember a Shaun of the Dead comic adaptation that missed the best parts of the movie, but time makes that determination. 

…And Out Comes the Wolf functions well as a story; it’s a fun ride and has nods to the East Bay, Rancid, along with the landmark record this film/comic took its title from. If you’re chomping at the bit to see what this story is about and can’t find a theater to see the film, this could hold you over. On the other hand, this may also be a great companion piece to what may be your next favorite punk rock movie.

…And Out Comes The Wolf is available through the Z2 website in a few different editions.