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Nate “Igor” Smith 🎩
@drivenbyboredom
When I was a freshman in high school I started "the punk rock club" at school. We didn't have anything to do, so the school told us we had to join other clubs if we didn't find something to do. I wasn't joining the chess club or whatever so I came up with the idea of starting a punk zine. A year later we started a punk record label and had some surprising success locally for such young dumb kids. One of the bands on that label was called The Infertil and I was photographing a show for their album art. Some guy in the front row was talking shit and trying to disrupt things and spit on one of the band members. The drummer Will jumped over his drum set and attacked the guy. The rest of the band jumped him and started fighting with his friends. I was standing there with a camera and I didn't want to miss the action, but I wasn't about to let my friend's fight alone. So as I'm taking this photo, I'm also kicking the dude who wound up at my feet.👇
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Nate “Igor” Smith 🎩
@drivenbyboredom
The photo ended up as the back cover of their CD, but shortly after the record label disbanded when my business partner used all our funds to fix his broken down car. He had been my best friend since I was 11 and we didn't talk for years over it. But I kept booking shows and photographing bands and managing bands and writing record reviews and doing pretty much everything you could do in the music industry other than be in a band. I couldn't play any instruments and I couldn't sing. I'd stick to being behind the scenes.
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Nate “Igor” Smith 🎩
@drivenbyboredom
Years pass and I am 30 years old and I am having a bit of a quarter life crisis. I happen to be at SXSW photographing an event for some client and one of the headlining bands is punk cover band fronted by Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth and featuring J Mascis of Dinosaur Jr. I was pretty excited and their setlist was full of all my favorite bands as a kid. I would have been pumped about it, except they were terrible. Moore didn't memorize any of the lyrics and they all just stood there. I would have been pissed if I wasn't so inspired.
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Nate “Igor” Smith 🎩
@drivenbyboredom
When I got back to NYC I posted on Twitter: I want to start a "shitty punk band". Anyone want to join me? My friend Brian was a long time musician playing guitar a ton of bands. He was in, but he wanted to play bass. His friend Smo wasn't much of a guitarist, but figured he was down to play some sloppy punk. We just needed a drummer. I posted about the band again, this time on Facebook, and the old Infertil front man responded. "What is this? 1995?" and suddenly I had an idea. Will, the drummer that started that fight, lived in Brooklyn. We hadn't talked in years but we were friends on Facebook. I tagged him in the post. He was a guitarist these days, still playing in bands and running music distribution company. He hadn't drummed in a decade but he still had his old kit. He was in. All of a sudden I was the lead singer of a punk band called Fucking Bullshit.
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Nate “Igor” Smith 🎩
@drivenbyboredom
We called ourselves Fucking Bullshit because if we were good that was a hard name, and if we sucked then you just paid to see a band called Fucking Bullshit, what did you expect? But despite having a band made up of three guitarists fronted by guy who had never been in a band before we were surprisingly good. More shocking still, I was great at it. I might not have been able to sing, but I could put on a fucking show and since we were doing covers anyway, our shows were so much fun. I was friends with the original bassist to Johnny Rotten's band Public Image Limited and he came to show. He told me I had wasted my life because this is what I was meant to do. I fucking loved it.
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