“No future!”
That line from Sex Pistols’ “God Save the Queen” has been the nihilistic credo of teenage punks worldwide for four decades. But despite their snarling, there is indeed a future, and it’s here: The teenage punks of the late ’70s and early ’80s are eligible for their AARP cards. For Descendents drummer-producer-songwriter Bill Stevenson, now 54 years old and the most consistent member throughout the band’s career, that means reckoning with a catalog that includes youth-rage standards like “My Dad Sucks” and “I Don’t Want to Grow Up.”
“I think we still have the same approach,” Stevenson says. “We started it for the right reason, which is to have fun.”
Stevenson’s bandmates in the current lineup of the much-loved punk group are singer Milo Aukerman, guitar whiz Stephen Egerton and bassist Karl Alvarez, who’ve been the (mostly) steady roster since 1986. When Aukerman periodically had to take leave to pursue his career in biochemistry, the other three performed as All, fronted in different eras by Chad Price of Drag the River, Descendents buddy Scott Reynolds, and Dave Smalley of DYS and Dag Nasty fame.
“When you’ve been in the same band for 39 years,” says Stevenson, “and you’ve been with the same people for 32 or 33 years, you do change and you do evolve, and you do look at things differently.”
Though the Descendents are now spread across Delaware, Oklahoma and Colorado, the group got its start in 1977 (Stevenson joined at the end of 1978) in Manhattan Beach, Calif., southwest of Los Angeles and just north of Black Flag birthplace Hermosa Beach. The Descendents are just a little bit younger than Black Flag and other genre-defining groups, and Stevenson says he and his bandmates always thought of themselves as part of a second wave of Southern California hardcore punk bands.
“As far as Descendents and its importance or relevance, I don’t put us in the same category as The Germs, or X or The Weirdos,” Stevenson says. “They were there first, and they kind of paved the way. In that sense, I think we always feel like the little-brother band.”
But while many of the early L.A. punks flamed out quickly, Stevenson has continued to have success playing and recording music. His reverence for the early punks hasn’t been tainted by his four decades in the music business.
“That doesn’t change,” he says. “It’s weird if we end up on a show with The Dickies or Adolescents, if they have to open for us. That’s always strange, because we consider them to be very important to us.”
Kid brothers or not, in recent years, the middle-aged incarnation of the Descendents has had to take a hard look at how their teenage worldview fits into in the modern era. Recent tours have seen the band shed some material from the set list that they no longer stand behind lyrically. You won’t find Milo singing the words to the mildly predatory “Pervert” or the homophobic lines of “I’m Not a Loser” in 2018.
“We never even thought that anyone would ever listen to our band,” Stevenson says. “So a lot of the stuff we say, or the shit we talk, or even just some of the distasteful humor or points of view handed down to us by our suburban, white fathers — we never thought anyone would ever even hear any of it. … It just doesn’t hold any water today at all. And might even be offensive to everyone. We don’t need to do that. We don’t need to carry that around with us.”
What fans find instead is a better expression of who the band is today. “Who We Are” — a 2017 digital single whose proceeds benefit the ACLU, the Southern Poverty Law Center and Planned Parenthood — is the official decree regarding where the Descendents stand. The hyper-melodic song was produced and mixed by Stevenson at his Colorado studio The Blasting Room. The artwork, which also appears on the physical 7-inch released in April for Record Store Day, runs counter to the usual Descendents aesthetic. Rather than the cartoon depiction of Aukerman that’s become the band’s icon, or a drawing of a toilet paper roll, it features the lyrics printed boldly on the front. Anyone flipping through a box of singles will know exactly what these guys are about: “We won’t let sexism or bigotry stand,” ends the song’s last verse, before a final chant-along chorus that proclaims that standing up against racism and fascism is part of the Descendents’ identity.
Stevenson sees the band adapting constantly, re-expressing itself to represent who the members have become as they’ve matured.
“We write about things that are important to us at the time,” he says. “But the thing is ... which things happen to be important to us — that’s something that keeps evolving.”
