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Aug 08, 2014 Web Exclusive By Justin Rice

False Starts is our continuing series where an artist writes about the bands they were in before their current band, the unknown early bands they got their start in before forming the current one. Justin Rice of Brooklyn, NY’s Bishop Allen wrote this installment. Bishop Allen was formed by Rice and Christian Rudder in 2003. The band’s long-awaited new album, Lights Out, their first in five years, is due out August 19th on Dead Oceans.

In high school, I was in a punk band called The Wooden Shoe Conspiracy. Extracted from the etymology of “sabotage”—early industrial workers threw wooden shoes, “sabots,” into the gears of machines to subvert production on the factory floor—the name was meant to convey solidarity with the historically oppressed. Although we went to an all-boys private school in Texas—Latin was mandatory; we wore uniforms to school everyday—we were newly minted devotees of Marx and Kropotkin, and when the revolution came, we knew we’d end up on the side of the just.

High school is a confusing time for many, but in the early ‘90s, when all the Chip Hansons suddenly gave up on Garth Brooks and started blasting Nirvana from their Jeep Wranglers, we were utterly lost, longing for music to define us against them, unsure how or where to find it. We dug up back issues of Maximum Rocknroll, and loitered at Direct Hit Records, flipping through crates and eavesdropping, gathering clues to piece together a fragmented history of punk rock. Our final show was at a squat downtown, and I remember a crusty Crass-lover looking up from a pile of blankets in a near stupor and going, “What the fuck are these kids doing here?”

By the time I got to college, my musical sensibility had been severely pummeled by repeated exposure to hundreds of hardcore records. I found fellow travelers at the Record Hospital—the rock faction of the radio station—who were brutally erudite about the history of underground music, and through rigorous study of arcane records, started to fill in knowledge gaps left by Dallas adolescence. I bonded with one fellow DJ in particular—Christian Rudder, handle “Crudder”—in the basement of Winthrop House over 40s and a mutual burgeoning love for Black Flag and The Misfits. He introduced me to skater/drummer Blake Gleason, and we started a band called The Pissed-Officers.

At the time, I believed The Pissed-Officers played anthemic punk rock in the vein of Stiff Little Fingers. The songs, I thought, were catchy, funny, and forthright. Hits included “Be Nice to Bikes” (“Cars are poopy excrement/but bikes are bmx-ellent!”), “Yellow #5” (“When I want stuff yellow to be/I’ll use a crayon or my pee”), and “Bad Checks” (“I don’t write poems/I don’t write books/I don’t write manifestos/I write bad checks!”). The one caveat, however, was that we always played as fast as possible, which given Blake’s athleticism, was insanely, brutally, inhumanly fast. Our live set consisted of 17 songs in seven minutes. It was an incredibly tight burst of white noise.

We were a hit at the Allston Co-op, the vegan-friendly grocery store with a community room that was the locus of weird Boston hardcore, and toured basements and VFW halls across the great Northeast. Highlights included Woonsocket, Worcester, and Schenectady. Once, we opened for Yo La Tengo—we played in the corner while they set up on the stage—and before they started, Ira stepped up to the mic and said, “Well… that was interesting.”

The Pissed-Officers collapsed under the weight of our second release, a split 10-inch with Gerty Farish. Blake designed a box that was scored and perforated to fold into a rocket ship, and, and in the weeks we spent hand-painting every nose cone with red house paint, glueing every box together with hot glue, silk-screening punk patches, folding map posters (“How to Get to our House and Avoid Danger Along the Way”), and stuffing envelopes with rocket decals and plastic ants (you know, to ride in the rocket), everything stopped being fun. It was serious work. It stopped making sense.

Around the same time, I discovered pop music, and by pop music, I mean a weird strain of peripheral Scottish bands—not Belle and Sebastian, but The Fire Engines, Josef K, The Yummy Fur—and Christian and I adopted the obvious line-up of two Casio keyboards and a thin, dry electric guitar. We started playing shows as Depeche Mode. The other Depeche Mode seemed long gone at the time, so we figured the name was up for grabs. For “Depeche Mode is Not For You” we took the lyrics from The Stooges “Raw Power” and substituted “Depeche Mode” for every “Raw Power” (“Depeche Mode got a healing hand/Depeche Mode can destroy a man”), but the hit was “Mustache is Berlin Wall” (“Shnurrbart ist zoot zoot/mustache is Berlin Wall!”). I still have copies of the tapes we made on cassettes we rescued from the language lab trash. We hand-painted our logo on each one. Our logo was, naturally, a French flag.

When the real Depeche Mode ended their hiatus, we started Bishop Allen.

www.bishopallen.com