Live music review: Legendary punks ALL played Chicago’s Thalia Hall for a rare treat

Whenever someone goes to see Descendents or ALL, there’s one universal truth: we’re all there, at least in part, to pay homage to Bill Stevenson, a legendary punk rock pioneer. The band played Chicago’s Thalia Hall on Wednesday, August 5.

Stevenson is the engine behind both bands. He also spent time drumming for Black Flag and went on to co-found the Blasting Room, the Colorado studio responsible for recording and producing a ton of essential punk records over the last three decades. Plenty of musicians see him as more than a producer. He’s a mentor, a lifer and, in some cases, the unofficial extra member of the band.

These days, catching ALL is a rare treat. Descendents are the larger draw and the more dependable money-maker, so Stevenson and company only take ALL out for select dates.

When Milo Aukerman stepped away after 1987’s All, Stevenson, guitarist Stephen Egerton and bassist Karl Alvarez kept playing, renamed the band ALL and cycled through vocalists Dave Smalley, Scott Reynolds and Chad Price. When Aukerman returned, that same Stevenson-Egerton-Alvarez lineup became Descendents again, while ALL continued as its own band.

Both share the same fast, melodic and technically sharp punk rock foundation, along with the humor, insecurity and emotional directness that helped define pop-punk before the term became commercial shorthand. The difference is largely at the microphone. Descendents are inseparable from Milo’s nasal, anxious everyman voice, while ALL’s rotating singers pushed the material into different shades of power pop, hardcore and alternative rock.

Basically, Descendents and ALL are siblings sharing three members, one musical philosophy and a complicated family calendar.

After surviving a life-threatening brain tumor, Stevenson receives the kind of affection normally reserved for someone who helped raise you. In a sense, he did.

With Chad Price still handling vocals, ALL arrived at Chicago’s Thalia Hall and moved through songs including “She’s My Ex,” “Mary” and “Million Bucks.” At this stage, nobody needs a veteran band to pretend the newest material is why everyone came. These people have these songs tattooed on their hearts. (For the record, Thalia Hall is one of the best venues in Chicago. Period. Especially for a rock and roll show.)

ALL is stranger, heavier and riskier than Descendents. Descendents lean into enormous hooks and communal singalongs; ALL is gnarlier, more technical and slightly harder to pin down. They’re the deep cut hiding in plain sight.

Underneath the melody, ALL remains a complicated little punk machine. Alvarez makes the bass feel like a lead instrument, while Egerton slips strange turns and almost jazzy flourishes into songs still ripping forward in 4/4 time.

Price remains the right person at the front of it all. His voice carries enough grit to push the heavier material while still finding the hooks buried inside songs. The room was full of punk lifers, but what surprised me was how many kids were there.

At one point, Stevenson spotted a young fan pressed against the rail in an old ALL shirt.

“You weren’t even alive when that album came out!” he shouted, grinning.

The crowd at Thalia Hall wasn’t casual. These were people who knew the different singers, the different eras and the songs that never graduated into broader punk canon.

Punks get older. We become parents, develop bad knees, start checking the parking situation before committing to a show and occasionally choose a spot near the back where nobody is going to kick us in the head. Some of us become aggressively square.

But we still want our children to understand why this music matters to us.

We want them to hear the songs at full volume. We want them to see Bill Stevenson behind the drums. We want them to feel, even briefly, the thing we felt when the music first found us.

That is how punk survives. Not through nostalgia alone, but through the people it raised bringing their own kids back into the room. Old punks don’t die, we just move to the back.

All photos by Robert Dean

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