Various Artists
So wrong. So beautiful. - Songs from I Really Get Into It
2020 | Rock
— track 2: "(Everybody’s) Punk Rock (Now)"
Brian Bieber: The punk scene in Rapid City was also pretty vibrant in the ‘80s and ‘90s, and they have this incredible website called the Rapid City Punk Rock Archive. It’s like Wikipedia, IMDb, and, like, Spotify for the Rapid City punk rock scene. Look, there’s all kinds of interconnected resources where it tells who was in what bands, it has digitized demo tapes, and just like a scene history basically built into this really encyclopedic website. I was really jealous of that when I found it, because the scenes, you know, like ours came up in this pre-digital age, so there’s no real record of this stuff on the internet, and so it’s just whoever happens to have certain 7-inches or demo tapes shoved in a closet somewhere, you know, in their parents’ house or, you know, in a storage space in their house. And so I thought, “Well, it’d be great to try to something like this for the Sioux Falls scene.” So I started a website called I Really Get Into It where I was just digitizing tapes. I would kind of put a call out to friends and acquaintances as say, “If you have stuff I’ll digitize it. I’ll put it on the site and I’ll give it back to you so we could at least have some sort of record and start cataloging these things." As that project went on, and I would meet someone for a beer to grab their stack of 7-inches... we would end up talking and telling stories about the scene, talking about people who came out of it, and I really started to notice a pattern where every person I talked to was pretty interesting and doing cool things with their lives. And so I thought, “Well, maybe I’ll write a book. Maybe I’ll do like an oral history of the Sioux Falls punk scene and I’ll call people up and do interviews.” And then as someone who put out a book a few years ago, I remembered, “Oh yeah, people don’t really read books very much.” [laughs] And so, I was just like, so I’ll just make a movie. And then I bought a camera, learned how to use it, and took off and started interviewing people.
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1. Beehive Vaults — “Beg Like the Beggars”
So that was Shawn Kock who actually, I was in my first ever band with him. He taught me how to play bass, basically. Like, I got into this band, Words Not Spoken, because one of my friends worked with Shawn and they were looking for a bass player and Bill [Zych] said to Shawn, “Well, my friend Brian has a bass.” So, it wasn’t that I played bass, it was just that I owned one, and I think I was actually just borrowing it from my sister’s boyfriend at the time. So then I was in the band. And so Shawn taught me how to play, and he’s gone on — He lives in Seattle now, and he’s been in a ton of great, great bands.
So in, like, ‘99 they have this band, Beehive Vaults, and it was like that kind of classic thing where they recorded and then the band broke up before they released it. And when I was putting this together Shawn just said, he’s like, he sent me just a bunch of tracks and stuff and he’s like, “If you want to use any of this stuff, any band I’m in, you can use whatever you want.” And he sent me this EP of a band that I didn’t know existed with him and, like, one of my oldest friends, and I just loved it.
2. Stickler — “(Everybody’s) Punk Rock (Now)”
So many people, when they heard I was making this said, “You know you won’t lack for a soundtrack because it’s about all these bands.” But so many of the recordings were like shitty 4-track recordings, and so there’s a lot of really good music that was really poorly recorded from those times. I have a lot of digitized cassette tape recordings of things that just weren’t good enough to put in a movie.
So I was seeking out people like Bill Erickson, who was in Stickler, who I knew kind of cared about fidelity, and who preserved a lot of their recordings. And I also was a big fan of The Sneakies, which he was in. So I just kind of went through — he had a Bandcamp, or a website that had all this stuff, and I had never heard of Stickler. So I was basically just listening to a bunch of Bill Erickson stuff, and I found this song, and I thought it was great.
3. Floodplain — “Swing Set”
I have a really specific memory about this where I heard that song on KAUR, like years and years ago, it must have been the summer of ‘94 or ‘95, I can’t remember, but this song played, and I had Floodplain’s demo and I had their 7-inch, but I had never heard that song before, and it was, like, so foreign to me at the time that you would record more songs than you released, you know? Like the idea of having additional tracks, that seemed like a very weird, big-time thing to me. And so I was like, “what is this?” And I just remember really liking it. But I asked Matt Rezac if it was cool if we used it, and he was very hesitant, because the reason they didn’t release it was he didn’t like the lyrics, he said he didn’t really ever have a chance to finish them to his liking. And I told him my opinion on that stuff was: it’s just cool that we were teenagers writing and recording music, and I think we should give our teenage selves a break, creatively. The fact that we were making art as young people is impressive no matter what. It's just pretty great that it exists. And I happen to disagree with Matt on the lyrics, I think they're just fine.
4. Jedi — “Poppyseed”
Yeah I did play bass on that one. We wrote an early version of that song when Jedi first started in, like, ‘95. And after everyone had kind of moved away we got together one weekend in Minneapolis at our guitarist’s practice space, and we wrote two brand new songs and recorded a third one which was “Poppyseed.” We kind of rewrote, rearranged this song. And I always just kind of liked that song, but we never did anything with those tracks. They sat around for 17 years then Joe [Thoen] mastered them. So I put that in. Easy to get clearance for that one [laughs].
5. The Sneakies — “Abusing Myself”
The Sneakies, I always felt like they were the sort of older guys in the scene. I mean it’s weird in retrospect, you don’t even know how old people were. It’s weird when you find out these people were like four years older than you. It feels like a generation when you’re a kid.
I just loved The Sneakies. They were so much fun, and I loved that they wrote funny songs. One thing I really liked about our scene, I feel like people took things seriously. It was a pretty political group of kids, if you cared about stuff. But I also loved that The Sneakies were there to kind of take a piss on all of that a little bit. So “Abusing Myself” is just a song about masturbation. It’s just a silly song. And I’ve always loved that song.
6. Lot Lizard — “Karen”
I didn’t just want the soundtrack to be a nostalgia piece, so basically the only prerequisite was that the bands included Sioux Falls people, or people that came out of the scene either now or then. I really like those guys [Lot Lizard]. They’re probably, I’d say, my favorite local band now. I’m not super plugged in to the music scene these days, but I like that they’ve got — just speaking to my own personal tastes — they’ve got a little bit of an edge. I like Ben’s guitar sound a lot, and they’re fun to watch live.
7. Dead History — “Pushing Friction”
This is Dead History which is a band that Matt Rezac and Brock Specht from Floodplain are in, in Minneapolis. Matt was another really, really strong supporter of the project. He provided a ton of photos, like for the cover art and things like that. Yeah, that great photo on the cover, it’s of Joe Thoen playing guitar, and the guitar strings are kind of bending. So this is Matt’s new band, or I think they’re re-formed or whatever, and he sent me the unmastered version of their album in progress, and he said, you know, I could use whatever from it. And again it was some sort of treasure trove. “Pushing Friction,” I thought, was great because it’s, like, one of the only songs from the movie that I still listen to pretty regularly [laughs], you know, because I’ve listened to these things like hundreds of times. But I feel like this song is a masterclass in playing a really great hook the exact correct number of times. It feels like they know how good the hook is in it, and they didn’t overdo it, but it’s like they give it to you one time less than you want to hear it.
8. Rich Show — “I Don’t Think About You”
So I think this is a No Direction song, but then this is a newer recording of it from his double album that came out a year or two ago. You know, Rich Show is kind of legendary. No Direction was probably the first punk band in Sioux Falls. I think early/mid ‘80s he was playing in No Direction and then Violet. The only reason I didn’t interview him for the documentary was basically just because I ended up sort of structuring it around Terry Taylor’s sort of arc as a promoter. But I definitely wanted to include Rich because No Direction and Violet — Rich seemed like even more than an older brother, he wasn’t that much older than me, but he seems, you know, more of like a Dad almost to the scene. And he is a Dad to musicians now too. So I wanted to make sure to include a Rich Show track in it because he’s important. And it’s a really great little song. It has this fun, snotty energy.
9. We All Have Hooks for Hands — “27”
So speaking of, the next song is We All Have Hooks for Hands which is Eli and Isaac Show, so those are Rich’s kids. Eli is a friend of mine and I work with his wife Angela, who also is this awesome artist. That whole family is just like a bunch of cool weirdos, essentially. We All Have Hooks for Hands, they have so many super catchy, great songs, but I do think that song “27” has a kind of particular — It has kind of a melancholy feel. I think that with Eli, there’s a lot of joy in the music that he writes, but this one feels a little bit like there’s a little something on the edges of it that is really affecting.
10. Face of Decline — “Black Is In”
Face of Decline, I don’t even know what to say, they’re kind of like the classic Sioux Falls punk band. They broke up before I started going to shows, but they were one of those bands that always kind of loomed large. They had 7-inches on other people’s labels, you know, that were put out by actual record labels, so that was impressive to me.
So that was Terry Taylor, I think that was his first band. And Terry had, I think, kind of a similar experience to me in that, like, Bill and Paul Erickson, the two brothers that were in Face of Decline, they invited him to join the band. Terry probably, he might have known how to play bass better than I did when I joined my first band, but it was kind of the same thing where he said he learned, basically by playing in Face of Decline. The difference is Terry continued to play and continued to learn, and I haven’t touched a bass in 20 years [laughs].
I liked the energy of [“Black is In”], and it was pretty early in the — I think it’s one of the first songs in the movie, and I wanted to set the tone for that part of the movie. It was an exciting time, and I kind of wanted an exciting song that was sort of, like, raw, youthful energy.
11. Billy Music — “Etude”
Those guys are really, really talented musicians. They were a year or two younger than me, and they were kind of starting up right as I was leaving town for Minneapolis. I think that song is just a really nice, meditative song. That’s another one, like, I listen to a lot. When I was driving around — You know, what it’s like when you have a kid. Your best thinking, at least my best thinking is done away from my family [laughs] so if things were kind of crazy around the house then I might take a drive and I probably — I don’t know how many times I listened to that song. It sort of reminds me of some of Fugazi’s instrumentals. It feels meditative to me, so it fit for, you know, it’s towards the end of the movie when things are kind of winding down, so I put it in there.
12. ex Licks — “Old Baby”
Oh God. Our friend Walter, who was also a producer in the movie, he went and visited Shawn [Kock] and saw — this is like one of like three bands that Shawn’s in — and he went and saw him play and shot some footage of him, and he’s like “This is maybe the best band Shawn’s ever been in.” And he’s been in a lot of great bands. And then Shawn sent me their album, I don’t know, six or eight months before they released it, and it was one of those things where he’s like “I don’t know if we’re going to put this out or anything, but check it out and let me know what you think.” And I heard this shit and was like “Are you kidding me, man?” There are so many lines in it. I mean it really hits home to be, like, a 40-year-old former punk kid: “Eat too much, get fat. Drink a lot, double that. Bad habits.” I was like, “Oh my God.” It’s all the stuff you didn’t have to worry about when you were a kid. But just to have this, like, killer song — so much energy — and then these lyrics that feel like they’re just about being tired. I feel like that’s what resonates with me. We don’t talk about the exhaustion that comes with passion sometimes. But yeah, that’s maybe one of my all time favorite songs of any band ever. It’s so good.
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Ultimately, my primary audience, if I’m being totally honest, was my friends and the people in the scene that I came up with. As I was putting it together that was my main concern, “Am I doing the scene justice?” But then, as it came together, there are a lot of, sort of, universal threads that emerged from there and I think, you know, I’ve had multiple people that have watched it who are not from Sioux Falls, or were not even involved in any kind of independent music scene say, “I recognize myself and my friends in this movie.” It’s more of a story about — of people who didn’t feel like they fit in, who found a place — actually who made a place for themselves to feel accepted.
BRIAN BIEBER’S ESSENTIAL SOUTH DAKOTA ALBUMS
Lot Lizard — Lot Lizard (2018)
Floodplain — Eightpennygalvanized (1997)
The Sneakies — The Sneakies (1995)
SOURCES
Bieber, Brian. Interview. By Jon Bakken. 10 Feb. 2021.
Hult, John. “New Documentary Tells the Story of All-Ages Music Scene in Sioux Falls.” SiouxFalls.Business, 26 Oct. 2020, www.siouxfalls.business/new-documentary-tells-the-story-of-all-ages-music-scene-in-sioux-falls/..
Kelderman, Casey. “Interview with Brian Bieber (I Really Get Into It).” Back Lot 605, 6 Nov. 2020, backlot605.com/interview-with-brian-bieber-i-really-get-into-it/.
