Descendents - Liveage!

On July 13, 1987, the Descendents played First Avenue in Minneapolis on what everybody in the room understood to be a goodbye. The fifty-day "FinALL" tour was the band's last run before Milo Aukerman left to pursue postgraduate work in biochemistry, and the remaining three members carried on under the name All. Somebody had the sense to roll tape. That night became Liveage!, the first live Descendents album, released later that year on SST.

Bill Stevenson produced it and treated it as two things at once, a document of how ferocious the band actually was in a room and a de facto greatest hits set. Eighteen tracks on the LP, and they hit the marks: "I'm Not a Loser," "Silly Girl," "Coolidge," "Myage," "Bikeage," "Cameage," "All-O-Gistics." The lineup here is the classic one, Aukerman with Stephen Egerton on guitar, Karl Alvarez on bass, and Stevenson behind the kit, playing faster and meaner than the studio versions ever let on. Alvarez's FinALL tour illustration on the sleeve, the wild-eyed figure in a spiked crown, later got reworked into Allroy, the All mascot.

Fans complained afterward about everything the band left off, which is how Hallraker: Live! happened two years later with a completely different set drawn partly from this same show. That tells you something about the depth of the catalog they were working from at twenty-five minutes a side.

Back in print via ORG Music as part of the ongoing Descendents reissue campaign, running alongside a fresh pressing of All, the studio record this tour was supporting. Timely too, with the band playing Moody Amphitheater here in Austin on August 28.

Two things I left flexible: I did not name a vinyl color since the ORG campaign has several variants floating around, so tell me which one you're stocking and I'll add it. The distributor sheet says "graduate degree," but Milo went for a doctorate, so I wrote it as postgraduate work to stay accurate without overclaiming.