5 Questions With S.W. Lauden

The "Mark Twain of power pop" stops by to talk about Popsicko, drumming, and all things music.

Photo: Courtesy of S.W. Lauden

Good morning!

Today we’re talking with author, musician, and power pop historian S.W. Lauden

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Author…Musician…Power Pop historian…Raconteur?

S.W. Lauden wears a lot of hats.

His knowledge -and love- for power pop is unparalleled. Scrolling through his Instagram or Twitter feeds can feel like a masterclass in the genre, with old sounds and future classics alike. You‘re just as likely to find Lauden talking up a band like Shoes as you are up-and-comers the Shang Hi Los. His books weave themes and subtexts involving specific tracks into the main plot points.

We first connected a couple of years ago when I found myself editing an article of his. Since that time, he has written multiple books, started the

Remember The Lightning

Substack (which you should totally subscribe to if you like Power Pop), and more.

That initial project was an article marking the passing of his close friend Keith Brown and how that meant the death of Brown’s band Popsicko. In many ways, his passing also marked the end of Lauden’s youth. It was an endearing, captivating read- a refreshing change from much of what was landing in the submission queue at the time.

That article was an early part of what would eventually become an oral history of the band. The band burned bright but fast, releasing one LP before their untimely end. First released in 1994, Big Stir Records is reissuing the band’s Off To A Bad Start record. The label is also making the album available on vinyl for the first time.

Included is a 48-page oral history the label describes as a heartfelt remembrance of the band's history and Brown, from writer and SB scene veteran S.W. Lauden and featuring remembrances from the surviving band members, is part of the lovingly-assembled reissue.

I recently caught up with Lauden via email. Our chat has been lightly edited for clarity/flow.

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You’re an author but also a drummer. Can you give a brief recap of the bands you’ve been in? I’ve got Ridel High, Tsar, and The Brothers Steve. Am I missing any?

Hey, man. Thanks for having me at On Repeat.

I started playing drums in my early teens, and music became my life for a couple of decades. There were some pretty ridiculous band names along the way—The Elephant Men, Humpty Pumpkin, Dune Buggy & The Eighteen Wheelers. Most of those high school and college bands played at parties and recorded cheap demos.

Things got a little more serious when I joined a Hollywood trio called Ridel High in the mid-‘90s. That band’s singer/songwriter, Kevin Ridel, grew up playing in heavy metal bands with Rivers Cuomo from Weezer, so we were part of the LA scene that formed in the wake of the Blue Album’s success. Ridel High made one record for a Santa Barbara punk label called My Records that A&M Records later rereleased.

I left Ridel High to join the glam punk band Tsar that released two albums in the early 2000s. I also made a couple self-released Americana albums with Ken Layne & The Corvids before I started a family, sobered up, and basically “retired” from drumming.

Tsar briefly reunited for an EP in 2012, but that was short-lived. Then a couple of the guys from Tsar got me behind the drums again in 2018 to make two albums with a garage/power pop band called The Brothers Steve. Good times.

How many books total have you written? I know most of the music titles but not the mystery or other genres.

I started publishing crime fiction in 2015 with the first Greg Salem punk rock PI novel, Bad Citizen Corporation. There are three books in that series. I also published two power pop-themed crime fiction novellas, That’ll Be The Day and Good Girls Don’t. Plus, many crime/mystery short stories for various publications and anthologies.

I’ve mostly been focused on music non-fiction in the last few years, including the essay collection Forbidden Beat: Perspectives on Punk Drumming.

Returning to the beginning, what was the scene in Santa Barbara like? Isolated? Cooperative? It’s just far enough from LA to be its own ecosystem but seems close enough that people would go back & forth.

My experience with the Santa Barbara music scene was interesting because my high school band, The Wonderfuls, moved up there for college. We mostly played backyard keg parties, but also did some shows at all-ages clubs downtown where the local bands played.

Early on, we connected with a high school glam punk band called Lost Kittenz (featuring future members of Nerf Herder, Sugarcult, and Foo Fighters). Members of those two bands, along with many other musicians, ended up trading LA/SB shows under countless band names and in various configurations for the next decade or so. A lot of great music came out of Santa Barbara in the ‘90s by bands like Lagwagon, Popsicko, and Summercamp, among many others.

In the early 90s, there was a real tendency to look sideways at any band that dared be ambitious. The phrase “sell out” was used as a four-letter word. Popsicko was really pushing for a bigger stage. Was there any similar sentiment in SoCal, or was this more a Portland thing?

I mean, the “sell out” thing was pretty universal in the ‘80s/‘90s, especially if you came out of a purist punk scene, but there were also plenty of bands with more commercial aspirations—especially in LA. The cliché of musicians moving to Hollywood to get signed by major record labels was still very real back then. Who knows, it might still be true today!

Popsicko was a Santa Barbara band, but the lead singer, Keith Brown, was one of the guys I moved up there with in our high school/college band. We grew up in the SoCal neighborhoods where Black Flag, Descendents, Redd Kross, etc. were from, so we experienced a lot of that punk culture later on—Keith was even the original lead singer for the SoCal hardcore band Pennywise.

By the time Keith started Popsicko he wanted to make music a career, so he found a group of talented Santa Barbara musicians who shared his vision and ambition. Grunge, alternative rock and pop punk were already going mainstream at that point.

We first connected when you submitted an article about Popsicko to The Riff. A lot of submissions come through there, but very few stopped me in my tracks; this one did. I’m paraphrasing here, but there was a line that said something like, “It was the end of my youth.” and a second one read, “We were 26 years old that day. I am twice as old now.”

That was a dark period in my life. Keith and I stopped playing together midway through college but stayed close friends. So, I had a front-row seat when Popsicko built a fanbase all around California and started getting noticed by the music press. They self-released one album, Off to a Bad Start, but it really seemed like it was only a matter of time before they signed with a major label.

Unfortunately, Keith got strung out, so the band went on hiatus. He died tragically young in a car accident in November 1995. It absolutely devastated many of us from the LA and SB music scenes. I can’t speak for anybody else, but living through that experience forced me to grow up very suddenly in my mid-20s.

Why is preserving Popsicko’s oral history so important?

Most of us from those LA and SB music scenes went on to have music careers of various shapes and sizes, but we never forgot about Keith or Popsicko. I was always a writer, even when I played drums full-time, so I knew I wanted to tell that story someday.

Amid the pandemic, I reached out to Popsicko’s bassist, Marko DeSantis (later in Sugarcult and Bad Astronaut), to ask if he’d participate in an oral history about the band. I also interviewed the other two surviving members, Tim Cullen (Summercamp) and Mick Flowers (The Rentals), as well as members of Lagwagon, Pennywise, Foo Fighters, Nerf Herder, and Baby Lemonade, among many others. I originally published that oral history in the Santa Barbara Independent.

That was the beginning of what would ultimately lead to a vinyl reissue of the band’s “Off To A Bad Start” LP later this month.

Included with the record is a complete oral history. For a lot of people, this will be their onramp to the band. What do you hope they’ll hear? What do you want them to take away from the book?

You listen to as much modern music as I do (maybe even more than I do!), so you know that ‘90s alternative rock is back. I hear plenty of ‘90s influences in fantastic modern bands/artists like Dazy, Supercrush, Extra Arms, Liquid Mike, Mo Troper, The Beths, The Whiffs, and many others. So, the reissue is actually kind of timely, in a weird way.

It has been beautiful to see music fans of all ages embrace Popsicko. Keith was a really important figure in my young life, so more than anything, I want to keep his memory and Popsicko’s music alive.

Shifting gears: you write a lot about Power Pop. Your Substack “Remember The Lightning” is named after a song by the band 20/20. Reading ahead of this, I found a quote by Popsicko bassist Marko DeSantis in one of your articles, where he said, "Power pop might be the most inconvenient genre in rock ‘n’ roll.” Why do you think that is?

I believe that quote was originally from Marko’s essay “Surrender” in Go All The Way: A Literary Appreciation of Power Pop, the essay collection I co-edited with Paul Myers. He was specifically writing about how his band Sugarcult looked and sounded kind of power pop (big hooks; skinny ties) but spent a lot of time trying to dodge that label because it has historically been seen as a commercial kiss of death for new bands (think “Knacklash”).

And Sugarcult definitely wasn’t alone. Even power pop legends like Marshall Crenshaw and members of Teenage Fanclub have been known to shun the power pop descriptor for their music. That thread has run throughout the genre's history and continues to this day.

I interview a lot of modern bands, and several of them have told me that the power pop genre is simply too confining, although plenty of others proudly fly the power pop flag.

It all gets kind of exhausting at a certain point, which is why I mostly use “guitar pop” as a catchall for power pop, indie rock, alternative, pop punk, etc.

Besides the Popsicko oral history, you’ve just kicked off a guitar-pop journal. What can people expect from this latest project?

I’ve co-edited two power pop essay collections (Go All The Way and Go Further), and both were fun and gratifying projects—but there’s a long lead time to publishing books. I started my Remember The Lightning Substack to write about many of the same artists and music but focus more on what’s happening in real-time.

The new semi-annual journal attempts to combine the writerly approach of the two essay collections with the immediacy of my Substack.

I’m really proud of Remember The Lightning: A Guitar Pop Journal, Volume 1. It includes great essays by talented modern artists like James Goodson (Dazy), Rob Nesbitt (The Suitesixteen), Mike Randle (Baby Lemonade/Love), and Mo Troper. We also have amazing music writers like Annie Zaleski writing about The Beths, John M. Borack on a teenage pop artist named Juniper, Mary E. Donnelly gushing about Sloan’s last few albums, David Laing exploring the connection between country music and power pop, and a Paul Myers article about Tinted Windows.

I wrote an essay about The Whiffs and commissioned a cover drawing of the band by legendary punk zine artist Brian Walsby. It was a lot of fun putting that collection together, so I plan to do another one later this year. We’ll see what happens after that!

You can connect with Lauden and check out his work in the following places:

Substack | Amazon | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | Big Stir Records

Go deep: Lauden and Popsicko bassist Marko DeSantis also recently appeared on the Abandoned Albums podcast to discuss the project. Click here to listen to the episode.

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5 Questions:

1. Describe your musical taste in one sentence.

Raised on heavy metal, fell for punk, rode the alternative rock wave, landed on guitar pop.

2. What music was playing in your house(s) growing up?

My parents weren’t big on rock music, but my two older brothers were really into late ‘70s/early ‘80s hard rock and metal, so that was my musical baptism.

3. What are you listening to these days?

There are a bunch of great bands playing hooky rock and roll these days, like The Whiffs, 2^nd Grade, The Beths, Mo Troper, Radio Days, Dazy, Uni Boys, The Speedways—the list goes on and on.

4. What are your 5 Desert Island Discs?

This changes all the time, but right now I’ll go with:

·  The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars by David Bowie

·  Sorry Me, Forgot To Take Out The Trash by The Replacements

·  Southeastern by Jason Isbell

·  Los Angeles by X

·  20/20 by 20/20

5. If you could collaborate with any artist/band, who would it be?

If I’m allowed a time machine, Kurt Vonnegut.

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Thanks to S.W. Lauden for stopping by, and thank you for being here,

Kevin—