All for one

When Milo Aukerman left The Descendents in 1987, the remaining members weren’t ready to call it quits. Instead, they recruited ex-Dag Nasty mouthpiece Dave Smalley to fill the void, switched their name to All and adopted a poppier sound.

Smalley lasted for one album and an EP before the group recruited Scott Reynolds. The first album with Reynolds is the underground classic Allroy’s Revenge. This platter serves as the definitive template for what pop-punk could have been—a grab-bag of diverse musical influences performed with the energy of The Ramones and the musicianship of Rush. Looking back on the albums he did with All, this remains Reynolds’ favorite.

“On that record, we just threw all the songs in a pile because Smalley quit and my songs were in another band,” he says. “We didn’t know what we were gonna do, but we needed to get a record out. We got a pretty eclectic mix, and most of it is pretty accessible. For me, start to finish, it’s the most solid. As a whole, it seems like that album is gonna stand the test of time.”

In the late ’80s and early ’90s, every All album was released on SST subsidiary Cruz Records, a smaller label specializing in pop-oriented releases. At the time, the label also put out albums by L.A.’s Chemical People and the Cheap Trick-esque Costa Mesa band Big Drill Car.

Sharing the same label, All and Big Drill Car often toured together. It was a tough time to be a small band on the road, as Big Drill Car bassist Bob Thompson vividly remembers.

“[When] we went out in support of our first full-length record on Cruz, that was absolutely a nightmare,” he says. “This was before cell-phones, iPhones, computers—the whole deal. So you would call a promoter four months in advance and commit to a date and then you would show up there four months later and sometimes there wasn’t a show. You’d have five days between shows with no money. It was cheese sandwiches and Taco Bell—just scraping by.”

Though both groups experienced moderate success, neither exploded in popularity when pop-punk broke big with Green Day. All, with a new singer, went on to release one album on Interscope in 1995 that failed to catch on. Meanwhile, Big Drill Car signed with San Diego’s Headhunter Records and released a full-length in 1994 featuring a new drummer and bass player. Success eluded them, too.

But then a funny thing happened. All was invited to play a reunion show with Scott Reynolds at the Fuji Fest in Japan last year. It was so successful that it led to a handful of other reunion shows in the U.S., including an appearance at the Riot-Fest in Chicago, where All shared a bill with Big Drill Car for the first time in more than a decade.

You’d think relearning all those old songs would be a bit of a burden for both bands, but apparently it wasn’t.

“We got in this room and started playing these songs,” Thompson says. “We’d call out a song name, Danny [BDC drummer Marcroft] would click it off, and I didn’t even remember the first note of it until we started. But things just kinda come back. You play [the songs] so many times over and over again for four or five years that things just kinda come back.”

The San Diego show is the first of three SoCal stops on this mini-tour. Big Drill Car has recorded five new songs, which anchor a compilation of the band’s obscure tracks. The 20-song CD, A Never Ending Endeavor, will be available at the shows. All, Reynolds says, has no plans to release new material anytime soon.

“You gotta know All,” he says. “All is four of the biggest fucking weirdoes. I don’t even know how to describe it. We’re like half-retarded in a lot of ways—in ways that you would just go: ‘Seriously, this is how you guys are?’ [Big] Drill Car can do stuff like that ’cause they are relatively normal human beings.”

All and Big Drill Car play on Friday, July 17, at House of Blues.