The two best bands ever: Rancid v. H2O

A little high school nostalgia...

Back when I was a lad, there was a period of about a year where, as far as I was concerned, every band except two could have stopped making music and I would have been a-OK.

This post exists as a tribute to those two bands, the two bands that made punk relevant to people born after the mid-'70, two bands that I've seen a combined 13 times, and the two bands that were represented on the right and left sleeves of my army surplus parka in grade 11 and 12.

That's right, I'm talking about H2O and Rancid, the two best bands EVAR!

The Main Event

In the red corner, from Albany, California, a band that really, really wishes they could be The Clash... RANCID!

Rancid were formed in 1991 from the ashes of another really important American punk band called Operation Ivy. Op Ivy ran from 1987 to 1989 and featured Rancid bassist Matt Freeman and guitarist/vocalist Tim Armstrong. The band broke up just as they were starting to flirt with mainstream success. Tim responded to the death of the band by taking the borderline alcoholism he'd had since his teens and making it a full time occupation, drinking like a maniac until he wound up homeless.

In '91, Matt suggested to his wreck of a former bandmate that they give music another try. Matt's since said that he only started Rancid to keep Tim from drinking himself to death. They recruited a drummer (Brett Reed) and later added a second guitarist (Lars Frederiksen, who had just finished a brief stint filling in with the UK Subs) and the rest was basically history.

In their 18-year career, Rancid have experimented with pretty much every punk sub-genre. They've released a couple of streetpunk-type albums (their self-titled debut and breakout hit Let's Go), a ska album (...And Out Come the Wolves, my personal favourite), a pop-punky sort of album (Indestructible), a hardcore album (their other self-titled album) and a weird sort of experimental new wave-meets-dub reggae sort of album that I'm fairly convinced no one liked but me (Life Won't Wait).

They also broke-up, got back together, spawned a couple fairly awesome side projects (Lars Frederiksen and the Bastards and The Transplants), and Tim Armstrong engaged in the time-honoured rock n' roll tradition of age inappropriate marriage when he married Brody Dalle of The Distillers, who was like 12 at the time.

(She later left him for one of the douches from Queens of the Stone age, like the worthless little Aussie whore she is.)

Here's the video for "Time Bomb."


The Competition

In the blue corner, from New York's Lower East Side, the most successful band ever started by another band's roadie, H2O!

H20 was founded in 1994 by Sick of it All roadie Toby Morse. In the early '90s, Toby had started getting on stage with the band during encores, and was so well received that he started a band of his own. He recruited a bunch of his buddies with band experience to back him up and started playing shows in New York, New Jersey and New England.

As with pretty much every '90s punk band, they released a couple albums on Epitaph, had one (middling) major label album, broke up and re-formed as mature men. Their story is pretty interchangeable with the stories of several of their NYHC contemporaries, particularly Madball, who they've toured with about seven hundred zillion times.

What's important about H2O is how they fit into my personal narrative. No band helped ease the transitions from hip-hop kid who dabbled in punk to punker who dabbled in hip-hop and back again more than H2O. Guitars aside, there's very little that separates H2O from, say, the Wu-Tang Clan. They both sing about the same topics: loyalty to your friends, standing up for your 'hood, holding it down, and kicking asses. H2O even covered an Ice Cube song and had a hip-hop style beef with another artist. (That would be Ray "Of Today" Cappo, of 1980s Straight Edge outfit Youth of Today and '90s Krishnacore bands Shelter and Better Than a Thousand.)

Like Rancid, H2O's hiatus at the dawn of the millennium allowed them to be in a bunch of side projects. Toby formed Hazen St. with members of Madball and, inexplicably, the non-Blink member of Boxcar Racer. His brother Todd joined Juliette Lewis and the Licks, and Rusty Pistachio (rhythm guitar) was in a band called And a Pizza Place.

Here's the video for "What Happened," off their 2008 comeback album Nothing to Prove. It has Michael Rapaport in it, who's sort of a hero of mine.



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