Azy Relph is best known for his time in Bridge Nine / Boston Hardcore greats, Panic. Prior to that, he was in the original lineup of American Nightmare, playing on their 1999 4 Song Demo. But before all of that, Azy was cutting his teeth in a small town in Northern California called Redding.
The largest city north of the state’s capital of Sacramento, Redding’s population has never quite broken the 100,000 mark. One wonders how something like the magic of hardcore reaches a place like Redding, where opportunities to make anything musical outside of sitting in with your uncle’s bluegrass band are even possible.
Azy was one of those kids who touched that magic in the '90s and it wound up taking him to the genre’s mecca. This is the story of how it all began for him, playing guitar in the hardcore bands Cut Short and Falling Action.
So somehow in the late '90s/early '00s, Redding fell into the alternative music explosion at the time. There were hardcore bands like Falling Action, After the Fall, and Some Still believe – emo bands like Basai, Hand Over Fist, and The Mercy Mile, and even skate punk bands like JimmiRig. Can you take us back to what was happening before this and how Redding got to have bands like this?
I am pretty sure my first show in Redding was in the Fall of 1994, and I moved to Boston in February of 1999–that’s less than 5 years. It feels wild how formative those years were, but a lot happens to everyone from ages 14-19!
When I entered that scene, it was pretty much an all-encompassing punk scene. There weren’t enough kids or bands to have broken off subsets. It was a great way to dip your toes into music and find out what moved you. Honestly, I am glad that was what we had. I think my friends who came up in big East Coast scenes,where they basically only saw hardcore shows, or even just straight edge hardcore shows–I think they missed out. That scene in Redding was pretty small, but it was really eclectic and filled with really amazing people with huge personalities, and some awesome bands.
From what I gather, there had been a strong rock/punk scene in Redding in the early '90s. There were legends of an Operation Ivy show at the Plumbers Hall, but I have no idea if that even really happened! By the time I started going to shows, the older heads from that scene had some awesome bands. A lot of punk, some ska, some crusties, some pop-punk, some more like indie rock types–there were a bunch, but this band, 3 Out Of 4, was a Redding staple that I still listen to and consider a nearly perfect punk band.
There were two brothers who both sang and played guitar. I think they and the other members had all been friends or playing in bands together for years and they had fantastic chemistry. Snotty, poppy, but aggressive punk, played perfectly loose. Their onstage banter was funny. They had great artwork–just an awesome band to get to see for years on end. If they had wanted to, I think they could have been big. Maybe they didn’t want to though, I have no idea.
I think Redding can kind of drag people and bands down a bit. Maybe it’s the 100+ degree summer weather, but it can demotivate and trap you. Also promoters, labels, and kids in big cities didn’t always take us cow town kids seriously.
It’s worth noting that when I came into the scene there was only one hardcore-ish band in Redding. They were called No Common Sense. They covered Negative Approach. Their fans were kind of these aggressive drunks who could often be intimidating and/or irritating – one dude used to go around the circle pit just doing a hand motion like he was jerking off into the faces of everyone in the crowd, daring them to mosh with him. That is still one of the funniest moves of all time. Anyhow, their drummer, Jesse Van Diest, was one of like two straight edge people in the scene and we went on to be in a bunch of bands together, including American Nightmare and Panic in Boston.
Also, there was like this three-year long saga of 7 Seconds being booked for shows that were fully flyered, canceled, rebooked,and then, canceled again. They eventually played in I think 1996 and I have a scar on my knee from that gig. Also, AFI and Screw 32 played at some point too but I was grounded for making some kind of explosive device in my backyard. So there were occasionally bigger hardcore-ish things happening.
How did you get involved in going to shows in Redding?
I had gotten a bunch of punk tapes in middle school from a dude I skated with. So I had been listening to Bad Religion and Fugazi in addition to all the big alt rock stuff from the time, like Soundgarden and Rage Against the Machine, but I didn’t really know anyone else who liked that kind of music.
Then in the summer before high school (at football try outs actually), I met a bunch of kids from other middle schools who skated and liked punk or whatever, and more or less that became our crew right then and there. We swapped and copied tapes and CDs and basically combined our fractured understandings of punk.
Around then, I started hearing about shows at a local pizza parlor called Rico’s, and saw a few flyers but never worked it out to get to one of them. We would actually call up the local skate shop, Johnny Rad’s (the longest running skate shop north of the Bay Area, which closed after 27 years, in 2016), where some of the No Common Sense guys worked, and ask if they knew of any shows coming up. Sometimes they’d give us good info. Sometimes they’d just fuck with us.
But eventually I had a flyer for a random show and decided to jump in. The show was at the Millville Grange Hall, which is like the most country place you can imagine. It was next to a feed store, and definitely had a horse hitch out front. I had definitely been to a square dancing thing there with my grandpa when I was little. I have no idea how I convinced my dad to drive me and pick me up from it, but I went to the show completely by myself and was terrified.
There were some bands from like Stockton or Fresno or something, which felt like a big deal! I remember it being so loud that framed photos of farmers were falling off the walls. But really, the only band I remember was this band called SCU (maybe it stood for Shasta County Underground?), that was kind of hardcore. Their bass player was this huge skinhead, Jason Woods, who went on to play in Lars Fredrickson and the Bastards.
In the middle of their set, a fight broke out, and Jason just dropped his bass, hopped into the crowd and took care of business, then hopped back on stage and kept playing. I don’t remember the band being any good, but I distinctly remember that sense of danger, like anything could happen in there. That continued to excite me and draw me to shows. So, I saw sketchy shit. It enticed me and it changed the course of my life permanently.
What was your access level to hardcore in a rural place like Redding? Was there a record store that carried stuff that was popular at the time or were you already travelling to out of town shows to seek that stuff out?
It was very limited. You had to be dedicated and resourceful and I think a lot of people’s entire identities were just based on the random chance of what they had access to. I knew a guy who had a Judge CD and that imprinted really early on me. If ska had come first, my life would look a lot different. (For full transparency–I did eventually end up briefly playing trombone in a ska band).
There were a handful of spots that would occasionally have some good stuff. There was a snowboarding shop that stocked stuff from Epitaph and Revelation so you could get lucky there. The used record store would occasionally have something good if the right person ran out of money and sold their collection.
I got into stuff pre-internet. So what my friends and I mostly did was mailorder stuff. From the back of MRR or from ads in Thrasher. Once we figured out how to order from Revelation, we basically filled all of the gaps to become full on hardcore kids. Eventually we started ordering from Very and getting whatever we wanted and generally knowing what was currently happening.
By the time I could drive, we were also going into Sacramento, San Francisco, and the East Bay a lot for shows, and would always hit up record stores like Amoeba or Rasputin and come home with stacks of new shit. We didn’t really care about rare records or collecting for collecting’s sake. We’d always copy records for each other, so while it took a little while, I think we weren’t really missing out on much, but we put in the legwork.
READ MORE: Revelation Records Collectors Roundtable Discussion
How did Falling Action start and what informed the band’s taste when you were getting started?
Falling Action was actually our second band. Before that we had a hardcore band called Cut Short, that was active from like '95-'97. We started out really early and that band kind of evolved as we got more into hardcore. I sang for that band. My dad had a little recording studio at his house, so we actually recorded like three demo sessions, and more than 20 songs.
We started out trying to be Minor Threat, then we aped more NYHC/Youth Crew, then towards the end we were a bit more early screamo. We had gotten into a lot of Ebullition, Gravity, Three One G type of stuff and mixed that in. I think our love of Unbroken was the tie that bound us, but we were all over the place.
We actually played a lot, including shows in the Bay Area, which was kind of unheard of for bands from Redding at the time. Our second demo had these handmade booklets, full of our art, political essays and pictures of us with sideburns. It was pretty fucking '90s.
So, that band was all over the place and I think Falling Action started when the members of Cut Short all wanted to be more deliberate, but couldn’t agree on a direction (in like '97 or '98). Some members were really into metalcore and wanted to go that way. That just felt so removed from punk to me. I didn’t want to do anything metal at all.
So Cut Short got shelved, and we kind of split into two bands; Falling Action and After the Fall. Unfortunate name similarity and shared members aside, we were very opposite bands.
After the Fall was a screamo/metal band, and they were awesome. I didn’t want to play that style, but I can appreciate it and also know when it is a good or bad version of it, and they were good. They were super talented and thoughtful, not corny like a lot of '90s metal shit.
If they had wanted to, they could have been big and they were by far the better band. They recorded an EP that never got a proper release (until 2021, it was released by New Knee Records), but I think it is floating around on the internet and is worth looking for.
Falling Action was intended to be a more traditional, fast, straight edge hardcore band. People would use “old school” or “Youth Crew” to describe that style back then, which just felt a tad reductive and annoying, but I guess it fit. I played guitar and wrote songs that I could jump around and play with a tight haircut and Xs on my hands, and that felt cool. We did eventually have clean tone parts, and some heavier breakdowns, which I don’t recall Project X ever doing, but whatever, it was the '90s!
The cool part was, now there were two hardcore bands in our town! And since Cut Short had been playing for a few years, a bunch more kids got into hardcore and sometimes even started other hardcore bands. I started booking shows around then as well. I always tried to keep the bills mixed like the ones that I’d first been introduced to, but I definitely increased the hardcore presence.
We got a lot of younger kids at our shows too. They were all ages and I think the straight edge thing was probably an easier sell to parents. I was bringing out of town hardcore bands into Redding. I got other California bands like Hoods, Built to Last, Powerhouse, Second Coming, Towards an End, and Model American to come up. I booked Kill Your Idols and In My Eyes shows in our bass player’s garage.
I even booked an E.Town Concrete show where like 12 people showed up. We were all hanging outside of a Taco Bell after, and this dipshit from my high school drove up and started talking shit and making fun of us for being vegetarians or whatever, and then he saw the E.Town guys and was like “uhhhh” and he instantly got worked through his car window and sped off probably very confused. It was a special moment.
What did the band do while you were together–recordings, tours, any memorable shows?
We recorded a demo with Mikey Hood in Sacramento. Something got fucked up and my second guitar track got lost on half of the songs, so it sounds a bit odd. I think that demo is also floating around the internet. I’m not sure it holds up, but given the context of the 1990s scene and everything discussed here it may be an interesting relic.
We played the Bay Area a few times and we played Portland once or twice, but I don’t really remember anything from any of those shows.
The best memories really were just us hanging and goofing off. Four out of the five members of the band lived together in an apartment while we were still in high school! I worked at a video store and would bring home stacks of movies and video games. A bunch of people would come over and we’d just dork out for hours.
There were absolutely zero food options for vegans in Redding in 1998, so we lived off of sourdough bread and marinara sauce and whatever candy we convinced ourselves was vegan. It was honestly as healthy and enriching of a lifestyle as being methheads, but it was fun. That straight edge boredom can create pretty wild memories. I remember getting naked, putting on a Lance Ito mask and jumping on someone’s bed while they slept and waking them up with a BB gun pointed at them.
Unfortunately, what I remember more are a bunch of fights and stupid shit that started following us around. A lot of the shows we played were actually in the town of Anderson, which was a cowboy town that made Redding look like Metropolis. There were a lot of shit kickers there. So there were a bunch of shows where people would show up just to be assholes. Rednecks punching people in the pit kind of shit.
We listened to hardcore lyrics and learned how to stick up for ourselves, so we’d get in a few fights and kick people out. Neo Nazis would come and we’d refuse to play until they left and then the whole show would just push them out to the door (and then they’d come into the video store where I worked and threaten to kill me). All kinds of fun stuff.
Why did Falling Action break up?
We started getting blamed for bringing violence into the scene. People in general seemed to really take offense to us being straight edge. We got the same shit from the cool scene kids as we got from the jocks at school.
At one point, Falling Action was playing a show (a particularly well-attended show that I was very excited about booking and playing) and this crust punk dude lit up a bowl and blew smoke on us and in my little brother’s face while we played, and it turned into a melee. In the middle of the fight, there were kids full on crying about how we were tearing the scene apart–and it kind of did, because around then, there stopped being those mixed bill shows that I loved.
This was also around the time of news stories about militant straight edge gangs or whatever. So people tried to put that shit on us too. There were literally multiple articles published in the local college newspaper about how me and my band were destroying the scene. Anyhow, the punk rock police were super annoying, but so was the violence.
The above mentioned stuff got really old. And more specifically, four of us finished high school and had to figure out what we were going to do with our lives. I think we discussed moving to the Bay Area and just being a band there, but our bass player was going to Chico State and that wasn’t far enough from Redding for me. I don’t even remember us specifically breaking up, some of us just began moving to other towns.
What prompted your move to Boston?
In high school I was pretty much only concerned with my bands, and doing school plays. I didn’t even take the SATs because I didn’t think college would help with either of those things (and because I grew up super poor). Being an actor or playwright seemed unrealistic, but I had already done a bunch of bands, recorded, booked shows, and all of that, so I felt pretty confident I could do a better job of that if I was in a place that was more accommodating.
When it was clear that the band wasn’t going to keep being active, Jesse and I decided we would move to the East Coast. My original intention had been to move to Washington DC, because my grandfather lived there and it was the only East Coast city I’d visited and was familiar with. But as I mentioned, I had booked In My Eyes, and I had stayed in touch with those dudes.
Boston obviously had an awesome scene, so I just hit them up and was like, “I think we’re gonna move out there.” Then Jesse and I loaded a U-Haul with way too much shit and drove across the country. We slept on some dudes from In My Eyes’ couch for a couple of weeks, then got an apartment and a practice space, and started bagging groceries by day and writing mosh parts by night. The first American Nightmare practice was probably like 6 months later.
READ MORE: 2017 interview with Anthony Pappalardo (In My Eyes, Ten Yard Fight)
Did you keep tabs on the Redding scene at all after you moved away?
A little. I am generally bad at keeping tabs on anyone and anything. But the great thing about hardcore is when you run into people, or go see bands, it’s like no time has passed. The first few times I came home to visit, I still had friends living in town. In fact, at some point, maybe the first Christmas after we moved, Jesse and I came back and Falling Action played a show.
Some Still Believe (named after a Falling Action lyric!) started up around then and I knew all of those guys very well (one being my brother). I kept hearing that there was this growing scene in Redding, and I’d go home and see kids with tattoos or with hardcore shirts, and I didn’t recognize them. That or I’d hear about kids doing things in the scene and I wouldn’t know their names, but would realize that they were literally children who had shown up to some of our shows and were now doing bands or booking shows. That always made me feel like some good came out of what we’d done there!
I also kept doing my part from afar, because I convinced bands like Bane and American Nightmare to play there on their tours. Then, Jesse and I came back with Panic to play at the Millville Grange Hall, where I’d seen my first show.
Those shows were amazing and the scene had tripled in size over a couple of years. I have no idea what the scene there is like now. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are some young kids doing cool shit.
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Falling Action and Cut Short are two of the bands you can listen to on my new Bandcamp page, Redding Hardcore Archive. Check them out and other Redding bands of yesteryear here.
Tagged: 90s hardcore week, cut short, falling action, panic
