Wig Out With Shawn

I picked up a couple of the Dag Nasty remasters from Dischord recently.

Before there was the Can I Say LP...before there was Swiz...Shawn Brown handled the vocal duties for Dag Nasty. There have been some unofficial releases floating around for years, but it's nice to see Dischord finally recognize those first recordings with a proper release.

The back of the album cover documents the brief history of the Shawn-era Dag. There is no mention of why Shawn left the band, but hey, it gave us Swiz, so I'm not complaining.

Until now, I have never bothered to really listen to anything past Can I Say that did not have Dave Smalley as the singer. Can I Say is perfection, and around 1990 I followed it up by buying the All Ages Show 7 inch. As a young kid whose world was starting to be taken over by Hardcore, the All Ages Show record was complete shit. I dropped the needle on the vinyl and immediately hated it. I couldn't believe how bad it was, and vowed to never bother with anything post-Can I Say.

Here we are 30 years later, and I get an introduction to the Dag Nasty song Safe from H2O's recent covers album. Of course I'd never heard this song before, so it was new to me. I did some research and found that it was from Dag's Wig Out At Denkos LP. I was diggin' H2O's cover, so I figured that I'd track down the original. Surprisingly, Wig Out isn't nearly as terrible as I expected...sure When I Move is painful to get through, and but overall, this is a solid album.

Since I liked Wig Out At Denkos a lot more than I expected, I decided to pull out the copy of All Ages Show that I bought so long ago. Upon first listen, I can certainly see what turned off the 20 year old version of me. Really, these songs are pretty far removed from Can I Say. After a couple of spins though, I'm not hating it, and I can see it fitting in with the whole Revolution Summer thing that DC had going on at the time. Yeah, I'll keep it. Who knows, maybe if I get daring enough, I may get around to checking out the Field Day LP.