Welcome to Before You Were Punk, an interview feature here on Punks in Vegas where we ask your favorite musicians and music biz aficionados one simple question: what made you the music fan you are today?
Our first installment comes from Nick Woods, singer and guitarist for party punks Direct Hit!, who recently released their debut full length on Kind of Like Records. Curious to know what blew Woods’ mind when he was a kid? We’ll give you a hint. It had a whole lot to do with the f-word:
I got into punk rock for the first time when I was 9 years old. At the time, I was going totally steady with a heady combo of Michael Jackson and Alanis Morissette, but my cousin Mike, who was a few years older than me and the coolest guy on the planet as far as I was concerned, played Dookie for me once while my family was visiting his in Chicago. Longview specifically. Hearing someone on a CD use the f-word kind of short-circuited my brain. So the next time my Mom took me to the music store, that was the first thing I bought. I don’t even remember if I liked the music all that much the first time. But I thought I was in some exclusive club because I had an album with bad words on it.
The next time I went down to visit Mike, he had the good sense to play me both The Bollweevils (who I don’t really like anymore), and Hatebreed (who’re still pretty hilarious after all these years), and those were the first records I bought when I went to the store with my allowance the next week. At that point my Mom put two and two together, and wouldn’t let me buy any music that my cousin had shown me anymore. I assume the dudes who worked at the record store thought it was funny that a 9-year-old was buying hardcore albums though, because they started showing me stuff like Earth Crisis and Metallica – the latter of which I instantly became obsessed with.
That was probably to my detriment though, because I went from being obsessed with Green Day to being obsessed with Marilyn Manson, Korn, Limp Bizkit, and Jnco Jeans within the space of like 18 months. And I didn’t get back into punk rock until my sophomore year of high school when a friend of mine played me Strung Out and New Found Glory for the first time, and told me how stupid I looked in black pants with 32″ cuffs. Pop punk has sorta been my thing though since then, even though I went off and listened to other stuff, there’ve always been a few groups that have stuck with me.
-Nick Woods sings and plays guitar in Direct Hit!. You can pick up their album Domesplitter from Kind of Like Records.
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