Friday Five – Favorite Bands

Welcome to the Friday Five! Each week I help you get to know me a little better through the ancient art of a Top Five list. This week we present my Favorite Bands.

The last time I actually paid for music or bought a CD was in high school when I was a member of the Sam Goody club. I’ve been downloading mp3s since before there was Napster, back when you needed to trade ftp site logins. So how do I show my love for a band? I actually pay to go see them live or buy their merch. So that’s what I based my ratings on. Yes, I know I have the musical tastes of a 16 year old girl.

1. Paramore – 2007 Warped tour, Final Riot Tour x2, Brand New Eyes Tour x2, 2010 Honda Civic Tour, bought the Final Riot Deluxe DVD – While keeled over with heat exhaustion at Warped Tour ‘07, I caught the end of their set while lying down under a tree after hearing a bunch of people talking about them. Hrmmmm, hot chick singer punk band, I’m sold. I would have no idea. I love all their stuff, it’s such high energy and they do a great live show. Though it’s a shame that they end their shows now with “Decode” from the Twilight soundtrack and all the twihards leave and don’t stick around for the encore. It’s also odd being the one 30 year old guy in a pit filled with 14 year old girls who is there by themselves and not with a daughter (That happens with most of the bands I go see). I get a lot of odd looks at shows. However, you can’t really appreciate how hot Hayley really is until you see her up close.

 

2. New Found Glory – Warped Tour 2001, 2002, 2007, Sticks and Stone Tour x2, From the Screen to Your Stereo II Tour, Not Without A Fight Tour, 2010 Honda Civic Tour, Pop Punk’s Not Dead Tour, Radio 104.5 Winterjam 2012, bought a patch for my backpack – My roommate in college turned me onto these guys, particularly through their awesome 80’s covers on From the Screen to Your Stereo. Despite the fact that this was me and my ex-girlfriend’s band we bonded over, and the stories involved from that (short version: her dad punched me in the face before Warp Tour ‘02 for a variety of reasons, but that didn’t stop me from going), I still love them and see them whenever they come around.

 

3. Green Day – y100 Feztival 98, all their albums x2 – I am of the age where I ended up buying all the albums up to Nimrod twice. Once on cassette, and then again on CD. If NFG is the band of my college years, Green Day was my high school years. I wore those tapes out till they were see through. I also spent a pretty penny buying foreign CD singles at exorbitant prices ($35 for a 3 song CD, and that’s in 1998 dollars) to get all their b-sides before the release of Shenanigans. I haven’t really been into them as much after Nimrod, and in my opinion, all of their best stuff was the WAY early stuff, I especially love all the stuff they released as Sweet Children.

 

4. Stabbing Westward – Stabbing Westward Tour, bought a patch for my backpack – Darkest Days got me though a lot of my own darkest days. I totally connected with the concept of the album – the four stages of breaking up: sabotaging the relationship; lust, hope, and longing; hitting rock bottom after it’s over; recovery and self-respect, especially since both of the girls I dated in high school were way into them.

• I suppose if I’m going strictly by number of times I’ve seen them live, I should include either Flogging Molly, They Might Be Giants, or Real Big Fish (all x4), but those aren’t bands I would listen to on a regular basis like all the others, so instead I’m going with

5. The Verve Pipe – Villains Tour – “The Freshmen” is my absolute favorite song ever. It was the song of my Summer of ‘97. It always takes me back to my time spent at summer camp for SIG, and all the craziness that entailed.

 
As to what I generally listen to now, it’s mostly the last.fm station for Damone, Meg and Dia (Dia Frampton of last season’s The Voice), and Hey Monday, which tends to give me a bunch of pop punk I love by the likes of Automatic Loveletter (a.k.a. Juliet Simms of this season’s The Voice), Skye Sweetnam, Kenotia, Aloha from Hell, Boys Like Girls, the Summer Set, Every Avenue, Lillix, Flyleaf, All Time Low, Tegan and Sara, New Years Day and various others.

I also had long periods of time where I would only listen to one band repeatedly for like 4 months at a time, and that list included Yellowcard, Story of the Year, Hawthorne Heights, Hoobastank, Evanescence, The Starting Line, The Ataris, Cute is What We Aim For, Jimmy Eat World, Avril Lavigne, Jack’s Mannequin, Red Jumpsuit Apparatus, Monty Are I, Amber Pacific among the above and others.

JohnScott is the proud owner of a life size replica Captain Kirk Chair. He is a hoarder of Comic Books, Transformers, and Star Trek action figures. He attended Space Camp as an adult. He has taken vacations to the closing of the Star Trek Experience and the final night Shuttle launch. He has been known to yell at his television when the kids can't put together the damn statue in the Shrine of the Silver Monkey. When not writing for InsufficientScotty, he is a Software Engineer for a major healthcare communications company. You can Email or follow on Twitter @NotEnoughScotty or Facebook