.Arrested Development

The Stitches' obsession with punk's first wave has made them a fan boy's dream.

Punk, arguably, is a young person’s game. Since its inception, the
genre has remained rife with songs about adolescent fantasies and
exaggerations. While it’s been fifteen years since the release of the
Stitches’ raucous first single, “Sixteen,” and about a decade since
they were at the height of their career, the Southern California band
hasn’t strayed from punk’s debaucherous ethos, and continues to
sporadically traverse the world’s dingy bars.

The Stitches do seem to suffer from a sort of musical arrested
development. Like a lot of bands, they have a tendency to romanticize
their own adolescent dreams and look backward at the first wave of
punkers. But that doesn’t mean that their music is void of impassioned
moments.

The Stitches’ first full-length, 8 x 12, issued in 1995 by
TKO Records, is a recognized pillar of the modern punk canon. It has
been reissued several times on vinyl, necessitated by the group’s
continued popularity despite only sporadically touring beyond the West
Coast. “We started a whole revolution of mostly terrible bands, but
some were good,” recalled Johnny Witmer, the group’s guitarist and
songwriter, in an e-mail. The Stitches’ sound could very well have come
out of the late 1970s instead of Orange County in the 1990s, amid a
scene populated by skaters and drug enthusiasts. But the Stitches acted
like a conduit through which the past was filtered through to a new
generation of boozy youth. “Even kids that weren’t born in 1995 love it
today,” he continued, referring to the band’s first album, which
featured songs dealing with a variety of illicit substances — a
theme that continues through their present work.

“Ninety-five percent of the Stitches’ songs are about getting fucked
up,” said Witmer. “When we started out, we were doing tons of meth and
drinking Mickey’s 22-oz. Stingers,” he reminisced fondly. “After the
twelve-inch came out, some people started doing heroin, and we moved on
to cocaine and imported beer. It was just a natural progression when
you get paid.” But 8 x 12‘s drug fixation shifted to an equally
obsessive fascination with technology on the follow-up, 12 Imaginary
Inches
, released in 2002. “Automatic,” the album’s single,
contrasts natural human responses with robotic impulses over a
stripped-down 1980s concept of what rock in the future might sound
like.

Today, the seasoned quartet doesn’t exactly live like kings, despite
the fact that adolescent-minded collectors obsessively devour its
merchandise, frequently shelling out upwards of ten times the original
selling price of an album on eBay. “I love that our stuff goes for what
it does,” said Witmer, who’s also an avid record collector. This kind
of fanboy worship is more akin to comic-book collecting, even though
the band and its early fans are now in their thirties or forties.

As the Stitches haven’t been the most active band of late, Witmer
had time to cultivate a new project, the Crazy Squeeze, with players
from Los Angeles, including Chicago transplant Frankie Delmane, who
previously fronted an underrated power-pop group called the Teenage
Frames. Although Witmer said the impetus for the new band was to
surround himself with folks that, as he put it, “can actually play
their instruments,” the Crazy Squeeze isn’t too far removed from the
sound of the Stitches. Both bands are unquestionably linked to 1970s
punk and excitable pop tracks, except the New York Dolls quotient has
been ratcheted up a bit in the Crazy Squeeze. Whatever nuanced
differences exist between the two, though, are easily overshadowed by
their similarities.

While fans continue to troll online auction sites for the band’s old
releases, the Stitches are primed to release some new material on
seven-inch, which should be out any day now. According to Witmer, the
band also recorded a “New Wave LP of Stitches songs.” “Maybe that will
come out soon, too,” he said somewhat cryptically.

That phrasing doesn’t sound too promising, so in the meantime, fans’
best bet is to see the band when it comes through town on Saturday,
June 20, at Thee Parkside, along with the Crazy Squeeze. It’ll be an
opportunity to see a historic act, even if the set list is filled with
songs about booze and pills from a few decades ago. 

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