“Our histories, our futures, our foundations, are hope. It’s a way to never forget.”
Most punks will have read, or even expressed, words about how history is often deceptive and manipulative, if not completely false. And, if history can be ephemeral and volitile, certianly, so is identity. I had a conversation with a friend yesterday who talked about his friend cycling through punk stereotypes throughout his adolesence – there was the ska phase, followed by the mohawk phase, followed by the tough-guy mosh-metal phase, and so on, until he finally settled into himself in his mid-twenties. If you’re reading this, you probably went through the same thing, or are in the process of going through it. So, just like history, for punks, identity is something that changes often, maybe to the point of meaninglessness, and is both embraced and mistrusted. This makes it pretty hard to begin both the task of writing a history of a band, or to talk about what a band is whether its in terms of genre, politics, or anything else.
Is Defiance, Ohio about three friends hanging out every day and playing music, or is it about six people, seperated by geography and living very seperate lives coming together to write songs and go on tour? Is Defiance, Ohio about Columbus, Ohio or Bloomington, Indiana or Athens, Georgia or Humbolt County, California? Is Defiance, Ohio about the simplicity of acoustic instruments sharing sounds around a drunken circle on a lawn or is it about the complexity of digital audio files being shared across the expanse of global computer networks? Is Defiance, Ohio about a few hundred hand-made, screenprinted or photocopied CD covers, the new CD/LP packaging professionally printed and mass-produced, or the thousands upon thousands of free downloads of our songs from our website? Is Defiance, Ohio about the musical virtuosity of some of its members, or the lack thereof of others? Is Defiance, Ohio about playing to a dozen close friends in a freezing basement, or a kitchen, or tours to far off continents? Is Defiance, Ohio about a strict adherence to a dogma of cheap, all-ages shows, to do-it-yourself ethics or is it about feeling an uncertain, changing path through the decisions of making and sharing music? Is Defiance, Ohio about frustration, cynicism, and realism, or inspiration and hopefulness? Maybe we can think that its all these things, all at once – that it always has been, and with hope, always will be.
“Even on the best days in September”
Defiance, Ohio started in the later summer of 2002 in Columbus, Ohio. I was about to start my last year of college and just about to move out of a house that I lived in with Will and some other folks that I had met through campus activism. Will had returned from a summer of traveling and had already moved into a house around the corner where Ryan lived. Through Will, I started hanging out with Ryan and we started making a short video that would involve many of the folks who were really supportive and influential to the band in its early days (including Will’s mom!). In working on that project, and hanging out a lot, Will, Ryan, and I came up with the idea of starting a pop-punk band. We started with a pretty conventional lineup of electric guitar, electric bass, and drums. But, after a few practices, Ryan decided he wanted to start playing his upright bass, and I didn’t have an electric guitar of my own, but I did have my brother’s acoustic guitar, so I started playing that. We played in the basement of Ryan and WIll’s house almost every day, to the total dismay of the other housemates. In December of 2003, we played our first show to about a dozen people in our friend’s kitchen.
“We could take this weekend, drive out past city limits”
A month later, we recorded a demo in the basement of Ryan’s parents’ house and left for our first tour with Ryan’s sister Stuse driving our van and touring with the Good Good, a band including Ryan’s brother Pete. We also played some shows with The Devil is Electric. Our second show ever was a well-attended show as part of a New Year’s celebration in Little Rock. I was terrified. There seemed like so many people and I didn’t know anyone. Someone who was at that second show later told me that we “looked so scared” when we played.
In the winter, after we got back from tour, we played a few shows in Columbus and around the Midwest. One day, we were playing in the basement and Bz, who was a friend of friends, but who none of us knew very well, showed up at practice with her violin and told us that she was going to play with us. We didn’t know quite what to think, but we kept playing together, recorded some new songs and put out the first version of the “Share What Ya’ Got” CD. Oover spring break, went on our second tour.
“This time, this year”
The spring of 2003, in my memory at least, was an awesome time to be in Columbus. Maybe it was because lots of people had thoughts of leaving after the summer and it was a last hurrah of sorts, or maybe it was just awesome. A bunch of people were hanging out all the time, making food together or sitting out on porches or front lawns, some folks restarted Food Not Bombs servings, others organized weekly Monday-night bike rides through different parts of Columbus. It felt like lots of people were doing things they had never done before or doing things they hadn’t had the energy or desire to do in a long time. It was in the middle of all this that we got to know Sherri through Critical Mass or the Monday night bike rides. We found out she played cello and she started playing with us. We recorded 3 more songs which were going to be on a split with Kiwi, who we toured with that summer, but never came out. By the end of the summer, it seemed like, for many, the spring’s energy had been expended. Ryan and I moved to Bloomington. Will traveled around a bit, eventually ending up in Hawaii. Bz and Sherri stayed in Columbus to finish school.
“Sometimes Motion is the only thing that keeps us alive”
Without Will, we went on an unamplified tour with Madeline; Gal & Lad; and Dinosaurs, Baseball, and Hopscotch. We played a few shows with a rotating cast of fill-in drummers. That winter (2004), jobless and with no reason to stay in the freezing house we shared with a rotating group of folks, Ryan and I left on an unplanned tour with Life Rocks which was fun, but from a musical perspective, a lowpoint for Defiance, Ohio. That spring, we went on a 2-month long tour which basically circled the entire US, starting with our friend Spoonboy playing drums and meeting up with Will in Hawaii halfway through the tour. It seemed like some kind of accomplishment to travel to so many places and to be away from home for what seemed like a really long time. But, as a result of the length or strain of that tour, or for whatever other reasons, we haven’t been on a tour of that length since. By the end of the summer, we recorded some more songs that would end up on a split CD and split 7″, played some shows in the midwest, some benefit shows, and went on a tour with Soophie Nun Squad. Will ended up living in California. Bz finished college and moved to Bloomington.
In the fall, Theo; who had known the band since Will met him at the second-ever show that New Year’s in Little Rock, and had helped us with shows in his hometown of Athens, and even gone on tour with us; moved to Bloomington and into the house with Ryan and me. At some point, as it was getting harder and harder for Will to play shows, Theo got asked to join the band as a sixth member. Since then, he’s been playing drums on tour when Will isn’t around and switching off between drums and an additional guitar when WIll can go on tour.
The following year, 2005, brought Sherri moving to Bloomington and more touring, with the most interesting tours being a month-long tour of parts of Europe (where some kind folks from France had receently released a version of the “Share What Ya’ Got” CD) and a month-long, haphazard tour of the Eastern half of the US with about 30 others in a schoolbus. In the middle of all that, we wrote recorded the first half of a new record.
“When it comes March, will we march together?”
Since that summer, Theo has moved back to Athens, Will has started school in California, and those of us in Bloomington are putting down more roots and aquiring more responsibilities in this town and are becoming involved in things that expand time and focus beyond the band. I started volunteering a lot with a non-profit bookstore and books to prisoner project. Ryan and Sherri started an art gallery and record store. Being away on tour so much the first year and a half Ryan and I lived in Bloomington, we often were teased that we didn’t actually live there. For whatever that’s worth, we don’t hear that so much anymore. Despite things expanding, both in terms of geography and personal priorities, we still managed to convene to play a few short tours and finish writing and recording songs for our second full length record, “The Great Depression”.
So, really, the story is people started a band, played some shows, made some records, some of them moved, some people joined the band, … – pretty boring stuff. If there is anything about the band that, in four years, four releases, and hundreds of shows, seems remarkable, its not so much that folks beyond the dozen or so people who did everything together in Columbus find some relevence in the things we make, but that the band continues to be relevent to the six of us who are a part of it. Its somewhat remarkable that despite freak-outs and changes in lifestyle, playing music, going on tour, and making records is something that we still choose to do, together. And, its remarkable that we can do it in a way where nearly everyone in the band is involved in writing songs. Though we may slog through and argue about how those songs end up sounding, or the politics involved with sharing them with others, all those things end up as something that we can live for.
About “The Great Depression”
I think that most of the songs that were recorded for “Share What Ya’ Got” and many of the songs that were recorded for the subsequent split releases expressed a certain optimism – that even if you lived in a place that felt dreary or stagnant, or if you were coming from months of uncertainty or sadness, there were things that you could build, people that you could love, and places where you could place hope – and that this optimism could be the momentum that could carry us all forward.
And that momentum did carry us forward, but not neccessarily to places that were more solid, clear, or edifying. In fact, many of our lives felt more confused, maybe even with a little bit of dispair. The title “The Great Depression” came from thinking about WIll’s lyrics in the second verse of “Grandma Song”, a song on the new record. These words talk about his grandmother’s memories of depression era-America. For me, they conjure up thoughts of decay, loss, and impermanence. It was strange, though, how such sad ideas, could be told so beautifully.
The songs on “The Great Depression” come from a less optimistic place, one that reflects loss, confusion, and frustration. Many of them reflect a political climate that has exposed what might have always been the truth – that the world is often a cruel, unjust place with no clear resolution to either cruelty or injustice. Yet, simultaneous with all the visibly bad things in the world, there are no fewer examples of “great” things. There are still inspired people who make inspired things, there are still examples of compassion and humanity, and there are still reasons to keep doing some of the things that seem like they matter. I’d like to think that the songs on the new record reflect this ambiguos reality.
But what does it sound like?
Defiance, Ohio, if it was conceived as anything, was started as a pop-punk band. I think this is still largely the case. One early revue of the band, intending to be negative, described the band as “just power chords with some violin over it”. When we read this, we thought, “well yeah, that is what we are”.
Prior to being in Defiance, Ohio various members of the band were in ska-punk bands, screamo bands, emo bands, metal bands, free-form hardcore-ish bands, school orchestras, and snotty teenage punk bands. Does that influence the way Defiance, Ohio sounds? I have no idea.
A note on folk-punk
Defiance, Ohio is often spoken of in connection with a genre of music referred to as folk-punk. What Defiance, Ohio shares with what is traditionally referred to as “folk” music is that we write simple, sing-along songs about the reality of peoples’ experiences or the world around them. Of course, by that definition, most punk music is folk music. While Defiance, Ohio also shares some instrumentation with some “traditional” music, the addition of amplification and loud drums deviates from such music. Ultimately I’d say that Defiance, Ohio doesn’t follow the focus on musical virtuosity, individual songwriting, or adherence to music tradition that mark a lot of bands or performers that adopt the folk-punk label.
– Geoff 4/05/2006