A18 "Los Angeles" T-Shirt (click image for details)
A18 "All For You" T-Shirt (click image for details)
A18"Los Angeles" T-Shirt (click image for details)
A18"Dueling Samurais" T-Shirt (click image for details)
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Reincarnation, rebirth, zombie apocalypse, or a bad dream? Call it what you want just dont call it regression or imperceptive, because A18 have been called every name in the book and still seem to find the gall to say Fuck you, were plugging in!
Founding members Mike Hartsfield and Isaac Golub formed A18 in the late 90s in a public storage unit in Huntington Beach, on the same streets where they paved the now industrious Southern California Hardcore ethos. Their main focus: To show that the old guys still got it. While all the kids are practicing kung fu dance moves and sharing make up tips, their parents are two-stepping to the geriatric but albeit still pertinent sounds of real So. Cal. Hardcore. Many have walked the road and tasted success, but never were able to fill the shoes.
A18 was well rounded by sturdy and some not so sturdy past members, but the positive and negative seemed to balance each other out. Especially on their last Victory release, "Dear Furious". A pounding anthem of personal triumph and tragedy, and knife to the neck of hardcore nay sayers. Three Lps later, various mix matched tours, and inner band strife A18 reemerge. Now fixed with Illinois transplants Matt and Nicholas Lynch and Colin Duckmonton of Evenscore fame, the A18 train seems to continue where it never ended; Still unapologetically straightedge, still adamantly DIY, and still here.
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Reading the right book at the right age can shape who you are. When I was sixteen, I was reading Hemingway when I should have been reading Kerouac. That's just the luck of the draw. Conversely I think hearing the right song or seeing the right band at the right time can have the same effect. That ever sought after feeling of "seeing something". That inexplicable lurch in your guts when you realize that you and everyone else in the room are sharing an experience that can never be repeated. Knowing that the influence of such a moment will turn a page in your life forever. I can remember the four times in my life where I felt like I was absolutely in the right place at the right time.
The first time was in 1984 when I saw Uniform Choice for the first time and had never seen or heard of straight edge and felt like I had been saved when I realized I had found my calling. Then again in the summer of 1985, when kids had been whispering for two months that the Bad Brains were coming. Then when they played The Farm on their "Return To Heaven" tour. I'd never seen a seething anger put into 45 minutes of explosive emotion like that before or since. It would be years later when "hardcore" had lost it's sense of exclusiveness, it wasn't just MY favorite toy anymore and sharing it with squares seemed like a reason to leave. At the time, it seemed watered down through years and years of exposure, by these kids who didn't bleed for it like I did, didn't get beat up for it, like we had had to, and most of all didn't NEED it the way we did. That was when Inside Out, and Zach, and the brilliance of knowing how to expand on your anger by backing it with knowledge showed me and my peers that a new relevance had been added to our curriculum, that there was still more to be done, and we listened. I've long said that sincerity far out ways talent on "our" playing field. It doesn't sell radio hits, but when you see it, you know it's true.
The first time I went to see A18, it was more to say hello to my old friends Mike, Regis and Isaac, then to witness anything. As with most bands in their formulative stages, they were packed with sincerity, but had yet to "arrive", and that brings me to my fourth experience. Driving to this crummy town called Chico a few years later, to see my friends band again. When I arrived there were the obligatory eye-liner kids, and the black shirts with creepy cutlery that had become the status quo for the scene, and I was about as unenthused as I could be. I was late and as I sauntered into the building, I could hear Isaac saying something about "still being here", then as I got with in eyeshot of the band, they started into "With Kind Regards" and I felt a weird ache in my guts, like when I was a kid, and when they launched into the chorus, no one cared, no one was paying a bit of attention to a band without the bullshit blue-print of what hardcore had come to epitomize, no one except me, and they crushed and I felt a weird sense of giddiness at being surprised by my friends band, at the fact that true hardcore played by the believers still made me feel this feeling. And when thirty three year old Mike Hartsfield, a kid who had been there even before me, cut his fucking head open on his guitar, and started bleeding all over everything, bleeding the blood of a "kid" who still loves the things he holds dear, the edge and hardcore and his friend Isaac and the music. I realized I had at last seen "something" again. I was embarrassed cause I felt like crying, and you can roll your eyes, and laugh a laugh to make yourself feel unaffected and dismiss it, but it mattered. It matters. Believe it.
" I wanted to be the one to give this to you"
SABATINI.STILLHERE.2004.
