Rich Kids on LSD
Rock 'n' Roll Nightmare

In the summer of 1991, my only concerns as a 14-year-old were: bursting my eardrums with my walkman (primarily Nirvana, Descendents, and Misfits), where to go and how much to skate, and fiddling with my thing in the evening on the secondary channels.

One day, my lifelong friend, and he still is, Simone, calls me.

I think: he’ll want to go skate or mess around, but instead, he announces, all excited, that he bought this amazing tape from Contempo (anyone from Florence will know what that store was like back then) and that I absolutely had to record it.

Back then, we recorded tons of tapes, mainly punk hardcore stuff that we often heard in various skateboard videos. Sometimes, good old Simone would pass me genuine gems, and other times absolute crap, and vice versa, of course.

I got quite a few insults when I recorded Dynasty by Kiss for him, passing it off as a great album. Anyway, I swing by his house a few days later and he shows me this tape: horrible cover, 5 guys in front of a pool with a fake border with crappy drawings, meh, I look at the record label “Alchemy Records”, re-meh, but there are skateboards on display, hmm, Simone sees my skeptical face and says, “oh listen to it 4,5 times because it’s unique but you’ll see, you’ll like it, it’s a bomb.” Okay, but in the meantime, let’s go bother the people at the bank on Viale Morgagni with our skates.

In the following days, I put it on, what crap I think, or what is this stuff? Everyone’s going their own way here!! I take the tape out and return to more known and safe shores, those above.

In the following weeks, after lambasting Simone, given his insistence, “listen to it, listen to it,” I decide to listen to it several times.

And this record starts to take shape, it begins to make sense, I fall hopelessly in love with this record.

Simone was right, it needs to be listened to!! After almost 30 years of listening, I still cling to the notion that everyone in that record is doing their own thing, drummer Bomer can’t keep a defined time for more than 10 seconds in a row, the bassist the same (in fact the bass parts were recorded by the drummer), the singer Jason screams like a madman, breaks, restarts, quick solos at random, hints of rap crossover, metal riffs, killer choruses, howling cowboys, a beautiful organized chaos.

Unstable, absurd in some ways, and not particularly lucky since 3 members are now six feet under for quite a few years, including Bomer and Jason, but authors of this gem underrated in the 80s.

They would release two more good albums with Epitaph Records, but they would never be at this level again, and good old Fat Mike from NOFX would declare a few years later:

“We all wanted to be RKL, we all wanted to sound like RKL at that time,” and he was right.

Scab on my brain!