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Real words
Wes Eisold and Tripp Underwood get booked
BY CHRIS RUCKER
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It’s time for a reality check. This week, everybody’s going to be talking about the Rumble — who won, or who should’ve won, the usual battle-of-the-bands nonsense — but you won’t hear anything about bands who put their noses to the grindstone and just Get. Things. Done. So let’s talk for a second about Wes Eisold and Tripp Underwood. Both have been battling in the hardcore and punk trenches; Eisold’s latest band, Some Girls, have signed to Epitaph, and Underwood’s long-running the Unseen are preparing to release their first album for the Epitaph offshoot Hellcat. What’s more, both are branching out into publishing: Underwood is penning a memoir covering the first dozen years of the Unseen’s career and Eisold is readying Death Beds, a collection of lyrics and related writings that spans his history in the beloved Boston hardcore band American Nightmare (who at the end of their career were forced to change their name to Give Up the Ghost). Underwood, the Unseen’s co-founder and bass player, says he wanted to write a book not only to give fans the stories behind the music but also to provide a realistic look at the life of a hard-working, long-struggling independent band. "In one way or another," he writes in a draft of the book’s introduction, the Unseen "has shaped every relationship and major decision I have made since I was 16 years old. It has dictated how serious I got with girls and who would become my closest friends. . . . It also was the reason I left my full-time job as a teacher, a job which I truly enjoyed and worked hard to become qualified for by balancing the band, school, and part-time work to help pay for it all. In some regards I resent the band for controlling my life with such an iron grip. Essentially it has ruled my life for years, and I sometimes feel like I have little to show for it. But then again I don’t know what else I could’ve done with myself career-wise or socially that wouldn’t have bored me to death after a few years." The book is also the band’s answer to the biographical quickie DVDs that seem to have become de rigueur for punk bands these days. "For the first time in my life I feel like I have the free time to reflect on everything we’ve done over the past 12-odd years," Underwood tells me via e-mail. "And when I look back at it all, I’m just now realizing how much funny and interesting stuff there is to talk about." The way things are going, the book may have a happy ending: Epitaph honcho Brett Gurewitz himself mixed the Unseen’s upcoming State of Discontent, the album’s first video was shot with Blood for Blood’s Ian McFarland directing (and with much the same crew that worked on the Explosion’s major-label video for "Here I Am"), and the band will spend the summer playing battles of the bands. Just kidding: they’ll spend a month on the Warped Tour. "All the outside help we’ve received lately has really pushed us to get to the next level," Underwood says. As for the book, "My biggest problem isn’t going to be writing all the stories down, it’s going to be knowing when to say ‘enough is enough’ and just work on publishing the damn thing." Wes Eisold has gotten used to the idea of being in print: he’s now the music editor for the West Coast metal and hardcore label-turned-magazine Law of Inertia. But he envisioned Death Beds not as the first step in a new career but as a farewell to his previous band. "American Nightmare was an eccentric and unpredictable time in my life, and this book serves as the final chapter, putting the last nail in the coffin and moving on. In short: goodbye." Of course, he hasn’t even come close to leaving music: in Some Girls, he fronts a supergroup who include members of the Locust, Plot To Blow Up the Eiffel Tower, and Over My Dead Body. The book will come out on Converge’s Deathwish, Inc. imprint (which also released a Some Girls discography CD), with artwork by Converge frontman Jake Bannon, and will be available in an initial edition of only 1000. "It’s by no means meant to summon a dead ghost or to rehash the past, and I don’t care for gimmicks or [want] to relive anything that’s been done and dead," Eisold says. "It’s simple, really: if the band or words meant something to people, this should too." Chris Rucker is the host of New England Product, which airs Sundays from 9 to 10 p.m. on WFNX 101.7 FM.
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