"I Say Maximum Rock..."

My name is Miles. I interview bands. Until recently, only over the phone, but now I make house calls. I wandered over to a house on Normal Street, one of those comely old Victorian jobs that makes Chico the picturesque college town it is, and had a sit-down over barbecued steak and cold beer with a band called Indecisive Youth. They make music. Being a functionary of the media, and an inquisitive music fan in general, I got the goods on the quartet’s new album, their plans for the future of punk and their feeling on the god of glam, Ronnie James Dio.

My steak is medium rare. To my left sits the drummer, Rob. He is fidgety (as drummers often are) and next to him is the guitarist, Nick. He tells lame jokes, and I laugh politely. To the right of him is Brian, the bassist. He greets me, "Hi my name is Brian, and I like Dio." I shook his hand.

"Hi, my name is Miles, and you like Dio."

And finally on the couch, rounding out the band as frontman is Shawn. He has a white T-shirt with flecks of engine grease stained on it. The shirt reads simply the word "PEE".

Later, I ask him "So is PEE a band, or what?"

"No" he replies "I just wanted a shirt that said PEE on it so I had my friend who works at a T-shirt shop make it for me."

"That’s punk as hell." I tell him. He just shrugs.

"I guess."

And it was a good enough answer for me considering the dude’s part of a group labeled ‘Indecisive.’

Transplanted from Carson City, Nevada the guys in Indecisive Youth had very little trouble deciding to get out of that small gambling town known more for its brothels than its burgeoning punk scene.;

"One day we were like, we need to get out of Nevada before we die with our hands crusted to a slot machine," says Brian. Then,

"Yeah, we were going to move to Sac because they didn’t think we could afford S.F. but when we went to Sacramento we said ‘This place is a fuckin’ ghetto!’" elaborates Rob. "But one day these other two were playing darts, just throwing them at a map and they hit Paradise, and I was like, ‘Hey Chico is right next to Paradise, we should move there. It’s a college town, they party up there.’ And we came up here and we loved it."

So it seemed for a band labeled Indecisive, the choice was pretty easy.

"We literally drove down Main Street and got out and went to the Underground and people were like, cool." Says Brian "People talked to us. We were all, ‘Let’s move here!’ It only took a half-hour. We drove through town and said to ourselves, ‘This is it.’"

This Thursday the band is releasing their new CD From Now On at the newly remodeled Epicenter (formerly the Zocalo Room) and they all seemed pumped at the prospect of getting their music out to the masses.

"We just hope that a lot of people in Chico buy it," says Rob. "I mean, we seem to be getting an O.K. reception so far. And mainly we just want to send this thing out to some labels and see if we can get some feedback. That’s one of our goals."

For now, though, it seems the live show circuit will be keeping them busy in getting their name out a bit more. With shows coming up almost once a week, people will be hearing a lot more from the Youth as the summer marches nearer.

In describing the sound that is their music, Rob jokes that they wanted to start a whole new genre, the conversion of glam and punk.

"We’ll call it glunk." He says as everyone laughs. But Shawn explains that their beginnings were anything but punk, saying that the others didn’t want to play the Pennywise, Bad Religion, and others he wanted them to get into. They did Metallica covers instead.

"It was mainly these two Metallica covers and a Tool song," chimes Brian, to which Rob is quick to add, "I wanted to play Rush, all the time."

"No, Dio," says Brian with a grin. Everyone rolls their eyes. Then Shawn explains.

"I hesitate to use the word punk for anything these days. I like it new wave. Like, punk… everything is punk now. I say new wave."

"I say Maximum Rock," says Rob.

But mostly they iterate that it’s their differences that add to the varied directions the band’s sound can take.

"It’s like each of us listens to all different types of music and it all converges in our [practice] shed here." Nick motions to their backyard practice area. I then ask how each person got into their respective instruments and I get the usual responses except for Shawn,

"Nick’s aunt laughed when I said I was going to sing in a band."

"That was your motivation," I ask. "Spite?"

"That’s pretty much what it was," he says, laughing. "I didn’t get any training, so yeah."

It seems perfect, I would say, for a punk band to have a vocalist with an attitude as such. And they agree. While finishing the rest of their barbecue and as Shawn alarmingly finds something swimming in the bottom of his beer, the topic turns to past gigs, bands they’ve played with and the list reads fairly astutely: Strung Out, Propaghandi, All, some Israeli punk band called Useless I.D.

"They were great too," says Rob. "What happened to them, anyway? I don’t know, but they rocked. They just didn’t speak much English."

The future of Indecisive Youth? The band is, well, still undecided on that. Wanting to get on a label that will put them on a small tour is one goal they mentioned, playing the opening set for Dio was another. But mainly they just want to play the music they love as the good friends they are. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

Check out upcoming shows and more of Nick’s lame jokes than you can shake a stick at online: indecisiveyouth.com

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