Popsicko: One Year Later
BOOK EXCERPT: Marko DeSantis (+ Discount Code)
It has been a year since Big Stir Records launched the Popsicko project.
What started as an idea for a blog post turned into a vinyl re-issue of the band’s only album, Off to a Bad Start, and an oral history book featuring the surviving members of Popsicko—Tim Cullen (Summercamp), Marko DeSantis (Sugarcult) and Mick Flowers (The Rentals)—along with quotes from members of Pennywise, Foo Fighters, Lagwagon, Baby Lemonade and many more. Below is Marko’s exclusive foreword from the oral history book.
⚡️💥 There Are A Handful Of Vinyl/Books Left: And we really want to get these remaining copies into the hands of people who love guitar pop, alt rock, pop punk and power pop. So, Big Stir is giving Remember The Lightning subscribers an exclusive 20% discount on the Popsicko vinyl/book. Use Code: HardToTell.
To Would Have Beens: The Official Oral History of Popsicko
Foreword by Marko DeSantis
“Memories are better than life. Nothing I’m part of is good until later. I make decisions on the basis of sensing what will produce the best memory. They’re my finest works... Everyone is the poet of their own memories... But like the best poems, they’re never really finished because they gain new meanings as time reveals them in different lights... Maybe the best ones are all the same: of being born. Or dying, or whatever it is.” —Richard Hell, Go Now
The detritus from earlier rock ‘n’ roll generations had fertilized the soil that culminated in vivid neon superblooms of 1980s excess.
Then the ‘90s arrived like the aftermath of a broken nuclear promise; the party was over, the champagne unfizzy, moussed bangs dreadlocked, and roses gone to seed. This cultural tabula rasa presented a rare opportunity for a new music revolution. We formed new bands fueled by young lust, used guitars, fresh angst, late adolescence, and nothin’ to lose. Underground bands breached daylight through cracks in the pavement. Once dismissed as weeds, they grew into magnificent forests.
Popsicko, the band I formed with Keith Brown, Tim Cullen and Mick Flowers was the one. I had a few previous bands with amps set to conquer the world, but I was just a kid. Y’know, puppy love. You go all in scrawling melodrama on graph paper during class and devising grandiose schemes to get matching stick and poke tattoos and run off come summertime. Then it all reliably falls apart one way or another. Popsicko hit different. It felt like the real thing, like it mattered. It WAS the real thing. And then Keith died. And then we grieved. And then we went on with our lives.
It’s quite startling how time passes.
Days ally with weeks and gather in secret and conspire to become years that eventually join forces as decades. “We’ve got all the time in the world,” becomes “where does the time go?” A kind of peaceful surrender confronted by anyone lucky enough to grow older. Keith lived fast and, unfortunately, died young. So now it’s up to the rest of us to show you what we did together. While he’s still gone, we’re still here...the music we made will survive us all.
We always figured we’d get around to re-releasing the songs we wrote and recorded sooner or later. So here we are now, albeit later than sooner, in the next century, finally able to share our 1995 album Off To A Bad Start in a way that it has never been experienced before; on vinyl! Black plastic spinning at 33 1⁄3 RPMs, violated by dirty needles or caressed by expensive styluses... injecting our bittersweet sounds into new hearts and old souls.
We are grateful to the loving hands at Big Stir Records (Christina Bulbenko and Rex Broome), for handling this record with care.
We are forever indebted to our singer’s best friend Steve Coulter (a.k.a. S.W. Lauden) for being the catalyst to making this entire project happen. What began as a text message: “Hey Marko, I’ve been thinking about Keith and Popsicko a lot lately. Do you think I can get a few quotes from you and the other guys, maybe some old friends, etc. and do a short Popsicko oral history thing for my blog? No rush, but it could be cool. Gun it, no don’t...” Has grown into this record (and book!) you are holding right now! Caffeine is a hell of a drug.
Friends, family, fellow bands and fans from back in our day, welcome back, we hope this rekindles wildfires of memories like it has for Mick, Tim and myself. For those who never knew Popsicko... c’mon in, beers are in the cooler! You’re welcome to use our record as a score for your respective todays and tomorrows and/or as a time-travel portal back to our scene in early ’90s California. Either way, here’s to the memory of Popsicko and Keith Brown; here’s to these songs that have stood the test of time and here’s to all the would’ve beens, should’ve beens, could’ve beens...
Marko DeSantis is a music professional best known as the lead guitarist and cofounder of Sugarcult, with whom he toured worldwide and sold over a million records since launching out of Santa Barbara, California, in 2001. Marko has also written, recorded, and toured in bands such as Bad Astronaut, Popsicko, The Ataris, Swingin Utters, and Nerf Herder. As an educator, DeSantis holds professor residencies at several colleges and music business programs. He is based in Los Angeles.
