RIP BRUCE

Hi, just got a minute to add to this. A lot of people who read this blog might not really know who Bruce was. Back when we were still a cool punk band we did our first real tour out of town in California. We'd just done a fake interview in Maximum RocknRoll and were benefiting from a lot of hype on the west coast. Our new best friend Scotty Karate from Tankcrimes records booked our whole tour without having ever met us, and we played a string of 3 or 4 shows in a row that still rank as some of the best and craziest Fucked Up shows that have ever been, and have a lot of our best memories as a band from that short trip. It would be quite reasonable to credit our early relationships with a lot of these people, bands like Born/Dead and Deadfall, and MRR as being formulative in what kind of band we would become. The reviews we got for our early records in MRR by people like Mike Thorn and Bruce Roehrs helped give us the riduculously arrogant sense of confidence we'd carry over to the dark side as we tried to conquer the wild world of indie rock (in the name of punk, or course). Bruce pretty much was the first guy outside of our small group of friends to really back us, and to write about us. We do a lot of press and inteviews now and when we search for record reviews at 3am on google, a lot come up, but still none were as formative or important to us as the ones Bruce was writing from day one, and continued to write for us after a lot of our early backers had moved on (to Sex Vid).

That Bruce was into our band is obviously a footnote to a footnote in the grand scheme of things, but it was helpful to us, and he was important to us as well. Six years later we would still count on seeing him every time we played in the Bay Area, and would still count on him being the most lively and vital person in the room. RIP.