Chapter 2: “Petroleum Distillation” by Fifteen

Having spent the last 14 or so years playing in punk bands, I’ve heard people tell a million stories about their favorite bands, their first shows, their best (and worst) performances, and quite often, some variation of how punk rock shaped who they are as individuals. I could probably tell a lot of these same stories if I wasn’t cursed with an insanely bad memory, and if I actually thought most of them were worth recalling in the first place!

There are, of course, a handful of events that left an imprint in my mind like the mark of a branding iron. One such instance was early in college, when I was reintroduced to punk rock and instantly excited by the prospects of exploring everything possible. I found tons of new music and record labels to check out, but at the time I was still generally turned off by the kinds of bands who just screamed and played music as fast and/or abrasively as possible. Interestingly, I came to realize that a lot of those bands were the ones singing about real issues and the kinds of topics that were becoming increasingly important to me as I had just started college and was getting interested in learning about things that were definitely not part of my education in high school. But while I liked the idea of punk bands that had something substantial (or simply angry) to say about what was going on in the world, a lot of their music just didn’t do it for me. Fortunately, my best friend introduced me to his roommate, Chad, who convinced me that if I liked catchy punk songs, then I was crazy for not listening to more bands from the East Bay scene in Berkeley, California—the home of Green Day, as well as many other great punk acts that were mostly new to me. In particular, he told me that I absolutely needed to check out the band Fifteen. And so I did. And it was one of the pivotal moments in my punk autobiography.