Yeah, did we live together, because my college roommate delivered and he would stop home to get high and then go back on his way (and deliver us the orders put in that nobody picked up).

I had that first one, it was great. $5 or whatever for 20 plus songs was definitely doable (although I think mine may have been a throw in from a mail order I did with Lookout) and was the main appeal to a lot of these.

Look at Mr. Money Bags here getting flown to concerts as a kid.

Replace Surge with cocaine in that sentence and that's my 1997 too.

Nah, fuck the people that act like they were born in a leather jacket with liberty spikes.

I had that one, might still have it laying around. Had a pretty great Tilt song on it if I recall. That one was in pretty heavy rotation. Good Diesel Boy cut too maybe.

Great band. No shame.

Rockford's own! They were kind of big regionally and were on just about every "big" bill at The Pit in Rockford back in the day.

NBT are one of the best live bands I've ever seen. Just insane.

Those first two Punk-O-Rama comps, the first one especially, turned me on to a ton of stuff I never would have heard in the small town Upper Midwest environment I was living in. I think those of us who used them as a launching pad into a scene instead of as background music might think differently than the author of…

That first Boot comp is still my go to on the first warm day of Spring. There are some clunkers, but a lot of good one offs of street punk and more traditional ska sounding bands. Great comp.

Now I need to go down to the gift shop downstairs in my building and see if they have these.

I don't think Schon can comment on Valory's bona fides since they, you know, started the band together.

Most of it was super annoying, but there was some good stuff hidden in there in my opinion. Specifically the stuff Hellcat and Moon Records were pumping out.

We're the same age. My daily routine was usually some combination of "drink, smoke, work, try to fuck". Yours may have been too. Not necessarily in that order.

Yep, ours too. You could get fries and a shake. It was awesome.

I was hammered, playing cards with some other people at a summer college party, eyeing up a young blonde across the way when the news hit. I really hit it off with that blonde that night. I continued to drink heavily, as was my forte at the time, yet still come off charming. About midnight her boyfriend, whose…

I tried to watch some of that Attitude era stuff on the network recently. It's pretty awful. I was kind of a WCW mark back then anyway, basically because they had cruiserweights that put on fun matches and even then the weird sexuality and just male aggro shit that WWF was pumping out at that point never sat right…

Nice overview. I remember at least bits and pieces of all of these, although most had little impact on me at the time because of where I was in life. I'm looking forward to this week.

I can one up that, I didn't even know they were a couple, let alone married for almost a decade. That's what I get for using the self check out aisle at the story, I miss the headlines in the gossip rags.