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youspoketome · 6 years ago

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SQUAD FIVE-O - BOMBS OVER BROADWAY (2000)

I don't remember when I first heard Squad Five-O, or I would definitely have written about them sooner. It was probably around when my older brother got a job at Northwestern bookstore that he started buying a bunch of CDs, which I would then dub into cassettes. Some were by Tooth and Nail bands like the OC Supertones and Value Pac that I had heard on comps anyway, but also some bands from other labels like Kosmos Express, Five Iron Frenzy, and most importantly to me, Squad Five-O.

Somewhere in between MxPx changing my life and discovering The Ataris, I discovered Squad's WHAT I BELIEVE and when it was released, FIGHT THE SYSTEM and I was obsessed in a whole new way to me. I started modeling my entire life after that band. I started bleaching my hair because Jeff Squad bleached his hair, I started only wearing my hoodies zipped up about 2/3 of the way because Johnny Five wore his hoodie like that on a tour poster I had, I set my default font on AOL Instant Messenger to neon green with black background to match their logo on FIGHT THE SYSTEM (which they stole from Poison), I got in trouble in algebra class for writing the lyrics to "Fight The System" on my shared graphing calculator at the end of class and leaving it there for the next person. If you read the installment about Me First and The Gimme Gimmes you might remember my camo shorts with knee high argyle socks. I was wearing that because of Squad Five-O. To this day I have one single tattoo, and it's a tattoo I first saw on Jeff Squad and decided I wanted when I was about 15.

I'm pretty sure my first real rock and roll show (meaning not DC Talk at the Target Center or a Billy Graham crusade) was Squad Five-O. They were the perfect band for a Christian music venue like the New Union. Christan venues were notorious for not letting you have fun in the crowd. You can jump up and down, you can move around, but you can't jump into another person or touch someone else while you are moving around. So moshing and crowd surfing were right out. The beauty of Squad though, was since all their songs constantly switched back and forth between ska parts and punk parts, no one got in trouble. The heavier punk parts would play and the crowd would freak out, but before anyone could get pulled from the crowd, the ska part would kick in and everyone would stop moshing and start skanking. Those shows were some of the most fun I ever had in a pit (and I use that term very, very loosely).

So anyway, fast forward to 2000. I've discovered The Ataris and secular music, but I'm still a Tooth and Nail kid at heart. I've started taking classes at community college through PSEO, and so I'm using their computer lab. (I still distinctly remember this.) I go to toothandnail dot com and before the normal home screen loads, there's a page with a giant picture of Squad Five-O announcing their new addition to the Tooth and Nail family. I didn't even hit the continue to home page link, I opened a new window to get to my email and I literally emailed everyone in my address book (95% of whom had never heard of Squad Five-O or couldn't have cared less about them if they had) to let them know that SFO had signed to Tooth and Nail Records. I think I got two responses to that email, one telling me I was a huge nerd and one telling me this was old news and he already knew about it.

Over the ensuing months demos from the new album would show up in a couple different T&N compilation CDs. They were definitely different, but not bad, and I was going to give them the benefit of the doubt. I continued to excitedly wait for the new album.

Squad Five-O had always had a thing for 80's metal. As I mentioned earlier, they completely stole the Poison logo for their own logo on FIGHT THE SYSTEM. The first time I saw them, every single shirt they had at their merch table was a spoof of Guns N' Roses, Judas Priest, Stryper or some other metal band. But on BOMBS OVER BROADWAY they just went for it. The producer they worked with on this album had previously worked on albums by Cinderella, LA Guns and Ozzy. Gone was the punk/ska hybrid I loved. Gone was the raw energy I soaked up. Gone were the bratty kids shouting anthems. They were replaced by big hair, aviator sunglasses, sleeveless t-shirts and rambling guitar solos.

I still bought it. I still bought a poster and multiple t-shirts (I want to say I had three shirts from this era). I still went to see them (with The Juliana Theory, who I hadn't even discovered yet). But that was the end for me. I didn't buy their next, self-titled album, and to this day I've not listened to their major label album after that. The magic was gone.

I recently listened to a podcast about this album and period for the band, and it sounds like Brandon from T&N heard the demos, knew it wasn't right, and begged them to stick with their previous sound. Even Jeff expressed regret that the producer had made them slow all the songs down and sapped the energy that was there in their live shows and even on the demos.

The thing with BOMBS OVER BROADWAY was until that album I don't think I had figured out yet that bands could change for the worse. Everything I had listened to to that point had just been on an upward trajectory. I had stopped listening to DC Talk and Audio Adrenaline by this time, not because they changed, but because I had. Ghoti Hook's TWO YEARS TO NEVER came out around the same time, and I actually heard the first demo from that album on the same comp as one of the Squad demos, but that one doesn't stand out to me as much. Conrad had quit Ghoti Hook and I think I just assumed they wouldn't be as good anymore without him. Squad Five-O had added members and signed to my favorite record label, who could have imagined they'd get worse? It was kind of an eye opening album for me.

Coda (or: I'm not sure when else I'll get to tell this story, so I'm going to tack it on the end here):

BOMBS OVER BROADWAY obviously had a lot of imagery of planes and destruction and New York City (the lyrics to the titular song literally go "Midnight, New York City/Broadway, going up in flames/Ground zero, big city/Big Apple swallowed by the flames."). At the time it was about vanity and American consumerism, but after 9-11 it became much more real and tasteless. On September 12 or 13, 2001, I got up and got dressed went about my day. While waiting in line for lunch my friend Kara (one of the two respondees of my excited email) kind of looked at my t-shirt and gave me a weird look. I glanced down and said "Squad Five-O. They're a band," and didn't think any more of it. After school I went to work (I was working at Hot Topic by this point, we'll get there pretty soon) where I wore a hoodie most of the night, but after the mall closed and we were cleaning up, they'd turn off the air and it would get really hot and stuffy. So after I got too warm I took off my hoodie and for the first time in the day really took notice of the shirt I'd been wearing all day: a Squad Five-O t-shirt that above the logo featured the Twin Towers falling over with a mushroom cloud coming up between them. I suddenly realized why Kara had been looking at my shirt so strangely, and never wore it again.

#you spoke to me #Squad Five-O #bombs over broadway

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