SACRAMENTO — Young Joey Hopkins was forced to listen to volumes five, seven, and eight of his father’s Epitaph Punk-O-Rama compilation collection in their entirety after stealing them from the basement to impress his teen friends.
“Joey and his friends have been all hopped up on that new Machine Gun Kelly record, and he thought they might be ready to get into some real punk from my youth,” explained an irate Danny “Stick” Hopkins, father of Joey and former punk. “They by-passed Green Day altogether and went straight for the Guy Smiley deep cuts. I’ve warned him so many times about going through my stuff, hopefully this puts a stop to it. This hurts me more than it hurts him, but he has to learn somehow that he can’t just dabble in the non-embarrassing stuff.”
While Joey and his friends enjoyed the pop punk tracks by the likes of Pulley, and The Bouncing Souls, they were a bit taken aback by the compilations’ more hardcore offerings from Refused, Madball, and Death by Stereo.
“There’s no question about it, we just weren’t ready,” admitted Joey’s friend Shaky Darryl. “I mean, those Rancid guys might look scary, but their music was so fun it didn’t matter. But for the life of me I can’t figure out why those Swedish dudes in Refused are so flipping angry. Don’t they have universal health care?”
Epitaph Records founder and Bad Religion guitarist Brett Gurewitz commented on the rising issue of teens discovering their parents’ punk roots.
“It’s true, [they] should be a bit more responsible with their punk paraphernalia, although I think Punk-O-Rama is as good an entry point as any if you are looking for a safe, yet intriguing, introduction into the world. The biting social commentary of early 2000s Bad Religion especially offers an exceedingly prescient view into our current geo-political situation, illuminating the threat of international U.S. imperialism all the while ignoring domestic turmoil at an alarming rate…,” said Gurewitz, trailing off and looking up from a thesaurus. “Did I use enough big words? Greg will get mad at me if I sound dumb.”
Despite the embarrassment of his punk phase resurfacing, Hopkins eventually decided he is actually looking forward to connecting with his son through their newly found shared interests, stating that he might “break out the old Rock Against Bush comps and we can really have some fun.”