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The Gutterpunks started playing music together probably in '97 or '98. Our first practice was like this: I, Burger, was a bass player by nature, but I dropped the bass in order to let Hartle (Pisshead) play the bass and taught myself power chords on a cheap guitar that I traded a BB gun for. Me and Hartle got together and with me on guitar and Hartle using a broken snare drum and its case for drums, played the only song I could find tab for that was simple enough for me to play: "Veronica Hates Me" by Screeching Weasel. Soon after, we recruited Jon to play the drums, which consisted of said broken snare, a big huge bass drum that we found with more tape on the head than head itself, and a metal fan grate for a cymbal. We then got Ian Indifferent to sing. That was the first complete Gutterpunk lineup. We went through a few band names, the first being "The Skadomizers", even though we didn't play ska, then "Pledge Of Defiance", P.O.D. for short, until we learned that there was some fucking stupid Christian hardcore band called P.O.D., which stood for "(something) Of Divinity". Then we were "Los Pindejos", which means "the pubic hairs" in Spanish, but that was dumb so we changed it to The Gutterpunks. Soon after, we realized that our SW cover song sucked, so we learned "Last Caress" by The Misfits, and "Sick of Me" by the Nobodys. Then one day we were at some stupid Less Than Jake show to cause trouble with the trendy idiots, and this lame pop band called Limp let us get up on stage and use their equipment to play a song because they were having difficulties with the soundboard. We played the sloppiest, punkest version of Sick of Me ever and got booed off the stage by all of the emo fags. The cute little backpack wearing fuckers couldn't appreciate fine punk rock. It was around this time that we set up our permanent practice area in Hartle's tiny bedroom in the sprawling metropolis of Mansfield, Illinois (pop. 900). After fucking around for quite some time playing the same covers, we realized that we had some problems. First, Jon didn't know how to use the kick pedal so he hunched over and hit the bass with a stick all the time, and even worse, he couldn't keep a steady beat to save his life. His tempo fluctuated wildly throughout the songs. The other problem was that Ian sung like Fat Mike, and the other three of us didn't want to sound like NOFX. So I took over the drums, Jon went to vocals, and Ian went to guitar. I found an old high-hat setup and learned to drum pretty good, and Ian sort of learned to play guitar, and anyone can sing, or so we thought. With the ability to keep a steady beat, we now wrote "Pointless Laws". We learned to play that and wrote "You Can't Tell Me". We then realized that we had another problem. Jon could never keep a beat drumming, and now he couldn't sing (yell) to the beat. But we kept writing songs and gradually overcame this problem. I got a nice new drumset, too. After we had a decent number of songs and wanted to start getting more serious, we realized that Ian wasn't quite pulling his weight. He would never practice the guitar and couldn't play very well, and he would never buy the amp he kept promising to buy, which was needed badly. And eventually he stopped coming to many of our practices. So we had to give him the boot. It was a hard decision, but he has all our love and respect for being an OG Gutterpunk. We then got Glasshead Seth on guitar. He didn't have an amp either but he assured us that he would have one really soon. He was a good guitar player and it was with him that we played our first paying gig in Rock Island, Illinois. But he never got an amp and he had lost his license and lived kinda far away form the rest of us. It was a real pain in the ass to have to shuttle him around and we still needed an amp badly, so we booted him too. (Note: We remain good friends with both Ian and Seth and there are no hard feelings with anybody.) It was at this time that our friend Dave's band I.W.D. broke up. The name stood for Infatuation With Defecation and they played really good death metal. Dave was a great guitar player, had his own stuff and a car, and liked punk and Oi!, so we recruited Death Metal Dave to play guitar. This is our current and best lineup and we have finally started to play some local shows. It turned out that the Gutterpunks were a bit to hardcore for Dave's amp, though, and we killed it. He should be getting a half stack soon, though. Yeah, right. Sounds familiar. (Just kidding Dave.)