CHAOS THEORY
Interview with Civil Evacuation
Covina, Calif.
Drive down a residential street in Covina and you'd never know in the backyard of one house is the nerve center for one of the most beloved, under-the-radar bands. Oxymoron, right?
But before getting into all of that, first things first: They’re beyond polite from asking if a guest wants water to making sure the billows of smoke that got thicker as the night wore on didn't blow into anyone's face.
“We’re humble anarchists,” says lead singer Skunk when someone muses over their manners.
Civil Evacuation—made up of Skunk, A.J. on guitar, Lil' Red on bass, drummer Joseph Quintana and Scruffy Mugruffs also on vocals—has had a loud, raucous history that's very much like their music. The band originally formed in 2007, disbanded, came back last year and then had a very brief hiatus. They’ve gone through a number of lineup changes—so many it’s hard to keep up with who is there, who has left and who has returned—but the five are confident the players this time around will stick.
Last February they released the EP "Smash The System, Smash The Hate." They're now working on a new album due out as early as November and finalizing the stops on a West Coast tour.
Fast doesn't even begin to describe their style. Each song is an assault on the ears. It's a beating, set off with the thunderous crash of the drums. And then the layers come in with the guitar and bass, all of which is cut through with vocals so raw, you have no choice but to let them seep into your brain. It's a relentless pounding from the start until the end of songs that range from "Wage Slave" and "Drone Attack" to older material in the vein of "Televised Mindfuck."
“It’s hard to keep writing songs," Skunk said. "There’s people out there in real life there to judge you, especially in the punk rock scene. They’re so quick to say that you fucking suck, you know what I mean? I can get really into it and that seems to piss the majority of people off.”
He's referring to getting into topics that skew from abortion to living on the streets or punks that have been provided for versus street punks.
“It brings things out of people and they don’t want to hear that shit sometimes," he said. "So I have to be really choosy about what I say and I’ve noticed that about putting my music out there.”
Skunk writes much of the lyrical content and, in fact, the band's name comes from his song "Civil Evacuation" that went unfinished up until last year and is expected to be out on the Civil Evacuation LP.
"The meaning of the name is really what you make it out to be," A.J. said. "It's like art. What does it make you think?"
But to really understand Civil Evacuation is to know their story from the beginning, which would seem a disjointed mess of spats and opposing ideologies. That they’ve continued to claw their way back through all of that drama and minor in-fighting, speaks to something there.
To avoid confusion, we’ll stick with the basics.
The core members from the beginning met at Fairvalley High, a continuation school, where Scruffy began the conversation, asking Skunk if he wanted to be the bassist in a band. A.J. was supposed to be on drums, while his girlfriend at the time was on guitar.
The first practice, in the converted garage where this interview with three-fifths of Civil Evacuation took place, didn’t go as easily as the band’s formation. They rejiggered the lineup and everything was set to go off without a hitch for the very first show in a San Bernardino backyard.
“And then tragedy fucking strikes, dude,” explained Skunk, who has a knack for telling stories.
“Our guitar player doesn’t show up, my friend doesn’t show up. So at the last minute, I ended up playing guitar, he [Skunk] ended up singing and my sister played drums for that first show,” A.J. said.
“You’re missing the whole point,” Skunk said, breaking in. “Let me explain what really fucking happened. He’s not telling you the good stuff maybe ‘cause this actually happened to him and he wants to forget it or something. Alright, this is what fucking happened, dude.”
What really happened is A.J. was attacked by a group of kids hoping to get into a tag crew. The band went to go find the group of attackers and ended up getting themselves cornered and outnumbered.
“It was like [an] ambush," Skunk said. "We started going down real quick and then one of them pulls out a knife. We tried to book it. Angel [A.J.] falls on the floor. They all were on top of him.”
A.J. got stabbed in the sternum. He was hospitalized, had to get stitches and ended up on drums for that first show because it would have been too painful to play the guitar.
Despite all that, there is some good at the end of that story.
“We had a really good first show,” Skunk said. “That’s how I knew this band—people don’t usually respond, not right away. The response was ridiculous, dude. The kids, you could just tell they were waiting for it.”
The problem was, at 16 or 17, band practices turned into drinking sessions with friends, girlfriends sometimes got in the way, Skunk—in foster care at the time—was in the midst of losing his home and the band eventually fizzled out. A disbanding came in 2008.
“When we started in the beginning it was a really positive thing,” Skunk said. “After the band broke up, a lot of [the kids] kind of retreated. [A lot of them] became super addicted to tweak and meth and kids who used to come to our shows and looked up to us, now they’re all fucked off and kind of got caught up in that street life. At the time we broke up, we didn’t actually realize [the band] was a really positive thing.”
The question now is whether they can maintain.
There’s still headbutting that happens, including last year’s disagreement about the band's involvement in the Vans Warped Tour. Scruffy wanted to do it but Skunk didn’t for ideological reasons.
“Warped Tour, to me, is a company-sponsored show selling live bands and, meanwhile, in order to get paid, you’ve got to sell these tickets and I was like ‘Why am I going to sell these tickets?’ That’s not what I do. It goes against everything I’ve written [in the songs],” Skunk said.
He ultimately agreed to do it with the intent of sabotaging the set, but when Scruffy caught wind of that, he ended up taking over the vocals. The rest of the band got caught in the cross-hairs of the disagreement.
“We did what we had to do,” A.J. said. “Honestly, I was really in the middle because we were just getting out there [again]. On one hand, I was on [Skunk's] side because I agreed with everything he said. But on the other, I was more like it gives us a chance to show them what punk really is, maybe bring it to new kids that don’t know what the fuck it is.”
The band went on hiatus very briefly and in the meantime, advanced to the second round and then third round finals of the Warped Tour Battle of the Bands at the House of Blues. They never showed.
“To me, that's when I really realized that we don’t need them,” A.J. said of larger platforms like the Warped Tour.
They’re currently setting up a West Coast tour that will kick off in January, organized completely on their own and spearheaded by their newest and youngest member Lil' Red.
Their plan is to hit San Jose, San Francisco, Oakland, Seattle, Las Vegas, Colorado, Texas and Arizona before coming back down to play in Riverside and Long Beach.
It’s Lil' Red who is also making videos—skate DVDs, complete with a menu of chapters, he explained proudly.
Less than six months prior Red and Skunk were homeless, living in an abandoned car dealership just down the street from where they’re currently renting space.
They’re not looking for fame or money or to carve out a living on this—not unlike their peers in the scene.
“This is for life,” A.J. said. “ Personally, I love playing music and then the kids, I like seeing the feedback—especially when you see the kids go ‘Oh my god.’ They get excited for the song or I see them shaking their heads or nodding their heads. It’s a great feeling.”
“We just want to play,” Lil' Red said.
Continuous clawing. The many reincarnations of Civil Evacuation. There’s something that’s keeping the band around.
“A lot of bands come and go and it really sucks because a lot of bands that have really good songs [and] a lot of talent, they just disappear," A.J. said. "I don’t want to be one of those bands. I want to keep going 'til we can’t play anymore. Every week. I want to play ‘til I’m fucking old, ‘til I can’t move my fingers.”
News, Show Updates: Facebook
Instagram @civil_evacuation
Music: Bandcamp
Demo/Older Material: Myspace