Nobody Does It Better: Me First and the Gimme Gimmes, Cover Bands, and Connection by emily costa

In 2003, sweat-soaked and dazed in the late July heat, the four of us queued up to meet The Used. Or, more specifically, to meet Bert McCracken, their longhaired, grimy lead singer and unlikely heartthrob. The line was packed so tight that if we jumped, I thought we’d stay caught in the air, suspended, mashed together by bodies on either side. I’m not sure who was the bigger fan—me, Nikki, or Ash—so I’m not sure which of us decided that we needed to meet Bert, that, yes, if he could fall in love with Kelly Osbourne, surely he could fall in love with one of us. I don’t think Lauren even liked the band, or really cared about being at Warped Tour at all. She’d simply devised a plan to meet up with a boy she liked in Massachusetts, somehow convincing her dad to pack us into his Suburban (which promptly lost its air-conditioning) and drive from Connecticut to wait in the massive car line snaking all the way back up the exit. It was something I couldn’t imagine my own dad doing. I couldn’t even really imagine speaking to him at that point.
Our music preferences were all over the place: I think Nikki skewed darker, and all three of them were soaking up every violent, maybe-misogynistic lyric by feuding Brand New and Taking Back Sunday. I was clinically depressed and getting way into Bright Eyes, Conor Oberst’s words like the little aches I felt in my bones daily, the ones keeping me from going to school. Other than that sad-sack shit and my years-long Weezer obsession, I was into pop-punk, listening to my copy of Dude Ranch until it was so scratched I had to buy a new one. But it didn’t matter which alt offshoot each of us favored; we were fifteen-year-old girls alone at a huge music festival, two rudimentary, borrowed Nokias among us, and we were ready to see it all.
One of the others had to pee, so I was line-holder. They’d take one phone, and if anything happened, I’d be contacted. But since so many kids were waiting, we were sure I would only move a few feet during their absence. The thing is, at fifteen, there’s a part of your brain that seems slow to develop, the part that follows directions, the part that’s totally cool with waiting, the listening and respecting others part. So I abandoned the line to wander the festival. But I had an ulterior motive: Me First and the Gimme Gimmes were just heading to the Teal Stage, and I could maybe catch some of their set while being “lost.”
They were the only band there I really needed, like desperately needed, to see, only I didn’t think I could get everyone else on board. Lauren, probably—we’d always listened to songs from the past, were hooked on oldies radio, had been trading our Pure Funk and Pure Disco CDs back and forth for years. But not the other two, not when there was Yellowcard or The Starting Line to contend with. How could I convince everyone to go see a silly pop-punk supergroup in matching Hawaiian shirts cover 1970s songs? If the girls said yes, I’d spend the whole time looking over my shoulder, trying to interpret their faces. Do you like this? Is it okay? Are you having a good time?
The phone buzzed in my back pocket as I walked the dusty fairgrounds leafing through the program guide, trying to find my way to the right stage. I wasn’t watching where I was going and then bam—I was hit, some bulky Hurley-clad kid gesturing too widely, his fist rocketing into my jaw. I lost my balance and could hear him apologizing frantically as my brain sloshed around in my skull. I rubbed my face and went on.
I remember walking by one stage and seeing Rancid, the audience full of mohawked kids in ripped t-shirts and bondage pants. Wow, I thought. Real punks. I had never seen any in person before, and although I felt a leaping in my chest, this desire to join whatever slam-dance thing they were doing, I was on a mission. The buzzing in my pocket continued. My face throbbed. When I heard the opening to “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard” cut through the din of the crowd, I knew where I belonged. I pushed through the sweaty bodies, sang along, and thought of my dad.

*

Like everyone else, I recently watched Get Back, the new Peter Jackson Beatles documentary. It’s a fascinating study in the creative process. There’s one clip that was all over the Internet, and which I still can’t stop thinking about, where Paul is hyper-focused, almost hypnotized, as he plays a riff over and over, tweaking it until it magically coagulates into “Get Back.” Although trolls and spoilsports were quick to point out, duh, how do people think songs get written, it goes deeper than that. Here is that process captured gorgeously on camera, the enchanting, mystical quality wholly preserved. So there’s that moment, and then there’s the guys just fucking around for hours, playing songs they grew up with, songs they love. It’s those moments where they seem closest to each other. Joyful. Those are my favorite parts.
That’s sort of how I’m picturing a cover band’s rehearsal—messing around with your friends, playing your favorite songs. There’s creativity involved, sure; you’re breathing new life into something everyone already knows. But that familiarity must take some pressure off. When I think of Me First and the Gimme Gimmes forming in 1995, this bunch of new-school punk vets bonding over “a mutual love of '60s and '70s music,” that’s sort of what I’m envisioning. To be clear, I’m not comparing these two bands in any other way, just positing that if you don’t have the stress of coming up with original material, perhaps rehearsal feels more like those pure-joy jam sessions. Because a Me First show kinda feels like that anyway.
The band’s main lineup is packed with members of seminal pop-punk bands, mostly Fat Wreck Chords alums: Spike Slawson of Swingin’ Udders, Fat Mike from NOFX, Lagwagon’s Joey Cape and Dave Raun, and, sometimes, Chris Shifflet from No Use for a Name and the Foo Fighters. Their first release is a 7” featuring two John Denver songs. To date, they have nine albums, all covers. Clearly there’s some staying power, something beyond a bunch of guys just fucking around. Slawson says it’s more than just something “frivolous, like a side project,” and that “it kind of took on a life of its own.” He does assert, however, that pure enjoyment is the bottom line: “…we’d like to keep it just something that’s fun. I know that some of the elements that make other bands serious are happening with this band. So it’s important that we keep it funny and have a good time doing it.”

*

My interest in cover songs probably started in an unlikely place, its roots in nü-metal of all things. When Limp Bizkit’s “Faith” hit the TRL countdown in mid-November of 1998, I was awestruck and confused and so very, very into it. The chugging guitar in the second verse is probably what fostered a lifelong love affair with the sped-up, harder-edged cover song.
In early 1999, Fred Durst talks to Billboard about his version: “I love George Michael and decided to cover ‘Faith’ for fun. We like to do really aggressive versions of cheesy pop hits.” Despite declaring it cheesy, Durst has respect for the song. He says, “I hope kids remember to go back and investigate the original as well as our take on it.” I bought their first two albums, as well as a red Yankees hat, but the magic of “Faith,” for me, was absent in something like “Nookie.” So what was I looking for?
Around this time, my dad brought home our first CD burner. As MTV played faithfully in the background, I took to the Internet, finding chat rooms, blog posts, curated internet radio station playlists. Anywhere I could learn more about music, something deeper and beyond what I was already being fed by the television. And then I’d hit up whatever P2P was working that day—Kazaa, Limewire, Audiogalaxy, whatever. I’d bounce back and forth, starting seemingly unending downloads.
But the burner was a piece of shit. It took hours and worked maybe one time, so before buying a replacement, my dad devised a new method of getting songs onto discs. We would use his much nicer work computer; my sisters and I would make lists of what songs we wanted, then he’d download them and burn us copies. It’s only now I see all of this big-picture stuff, the kindness with which my dad took on this arduous task, the care he’d take to type up track listings, to clip-art the covers. Back then, I rejected the corny “Emily’s Mix” WordArt title he put on the CD jacket. I was an ungrateful preteen, but now my dad’s dead and I look at the past with a tender nostalgia that’s almost unbearable at times. Even the bad stuff is rose-tinted.
I still did my own P2P searches, even if I could only listen to the mp3s on our clunky desktop. With “Faith” in mind, I started looking for covers of ’80s songs to see if maybe that would satiate me. I found that typing “punk cover” would get me closest to what I’d been looking for—songs that didn’t deny the pop hooks of the originals, just went…harder. Faster. There was a very particular sound I craved, and I knew it when I heard it. My song-hunts worked; I amassed a sizable playlist, which included two favorites: Goldfinger’s “99 Red Balloons,” and Gameface’s “Time After Time.” But one name kept popping up in my search results. When I discovered that wow, there’s a band only doing exactly what I like, mp3s wouldn’t cut it—I’d have to buy an actual album.

*

The origin of the type of cover Me First and the Gimme Gimmes have perfected can be traced back to the late 1970s, because to try to tease out the history of the punk or punk-like (in attitude, maybe? Will that let me get away with my own nü-metal introduction?) cover of a pop song, we’d have to go back to the progenitors of punk music itself. Of course, it gets sort of slippery to define what is or isn’t punk, and I don’t want to do that here (please don’t make me do that here), but perhaps it helps to define what types of songs seem to fall into the cover category I’m talking about. What I’m referring to are punk musicians taking pop songs from about ten to twenty years earlier, songs these artists grew up hearing, songs that were in most cases bubbly and clean, and roughing them up a bit, saturating them with an urgency and edge.
The Ramones covered a lot of songs like this, notably “Do You Wanna Dance?” and “California Sun,” and other staples include “Great Big Kiss” by Johnny Thunders, The Damned’s “Help!” and even The Clash’s “I Fought the Law.” This tradition really seemed to ramp up in the mid-1990s to early 2000s, coinciding with the California punk (pop-punk) revival, with artists again looking back to songs from a decade or more earlier and revamping them with a punk sound. Pennywise, The Vandals, Mr. T Experience, MxPx, The Goops, The Muffs, and Social Distortion all have great covers, and then there are ska offshoots like Save Ferris doing “Come on Eileen” and Reel Big Fish taking on “Take On Me.” The list is a long one. There are also comps full of this stuff, like Before You Were Punk (1 & 2) from Vagrant Records, and the Punk Goes… series from Fearless Records. The latter series has nineteen albums. And, as time goes on, genre lines get fuzzier and fuzzier.
Me First and the Gimme Gimmes are still putting out albums as well, and they fit nicely into this history; the members’ original bands have themselves released really solid songs, like Lagwagon’s “Bring on the Dancing Horses,” and No Use for a Name’s “Turning Japanese.” If you listen to enough of these covers, though, you start to see how formulaic they are—something pointed out in a piece from Slug Mag on Me First and the Gimme Gimmes in 2004:

Some champion the band’s ability to seize mainstream culture, fill it full of power-chords and turn it into something with which punks can identify; comedic cultural piracy for the ‘who cares’ generation. Others, however, view it as testament to how easy it is to boil down the NOFX/Lagwagon formula that’s served as the blueprint for countless acts over the years, apply no imagination whatsoever, and cash in on a large, ready-made audience. Both assessments are probably pretty accurate.

But…is there anything wrong with sticking to a formula, as long as it yields the same positive result? The thing these covers have in common is how fun they are. Perhaps there’s nothing deeper or of more artistic merit than that. Which is okay. In Me First’s case, their shtick is at the forefront, and perhaps their self-awareness has given them their longevity, allowing them to put their spin on other eras and genres. But to be clear, there is definite skill at work here, something needed by any good cover band. Slawson describes the proficiency necessary to create these renditions, citing Fat Mike’s talent during this process: “He has a good ear for pop hooks and melodies. As for selecting songs, even if he is not an active touring member, that part is crucial for me. Hearing the song, envisioning how it’s going to sound in our particular idiom is an art. It’s crucial,” he says. In a 2020 interview with Brooklyn Vegan, Fat Mike says this about the art of the cover: “Anyone can do a song exactly how it was written, but making it different without ruining the song is an art…I guess the real trick is finding songs that are really good, but could still be better. Perfect songs are bad songs to cover cuz no matter what you do, they won’t be as good.”

*

 My dad was burning me those CDs full of punk covers, but soon after our relationship got complicated and started breaking down due to my own mental illness, a few traumatic events, and a divorce that should’ve happened ten years prior. So my family was fracturing, and I was wading into my depression and self-harm, and shit was decidedly not good. But there was this moment, which occured despite our broken relationship, where I slipped back into our previous closeness, into the thing I’m most missing now that I’m grown and he’s gone: I was fifteen and listening to the first Me First album Have a Ball for the millionth time. Maybe it was during this particular listen of “Seasons In the Sun,” or maybe “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard” or “One Tin Soldier.” I knew them, knew these songs so well, had known them since childhood, but I’d never heard them without my dad singing loudly over them, blasting them from his Chevy Beretta tape deck. I didn’t like them then, but I liked them now, these versions filtered through the punk music I was used to. I sat, let them stream through my Discman, and the urge crystalized: I had to tell him. I don’t remember how I broached it, how I gained the courage to do it—we were barely speaking then. But I did, and he was hooked instantly. I told him about how I’d seen them twice, what they wore. He asked to borrow my CDs to burn, and he started blasting those from his car.
In the late 1970s, right when punk was breaking, my dad was playing in his high school band. He knew saxophone, guitar, keyboard, could handle the accordion. Inevitably, he formed a band with some friends. I had forgotten this part of his history, had forgotten the musical side of him. When I started this essay the fact rushed back newly, a flash, but then that next feeling seeped in, that sour one, the one where I reach for the phone and realize, oh. There’s no one to call to ask.
But the thought lingered so I did some digging anyway. I found the band’s sax player, Carl Rosa, on Facebook. He’s still playing, and he’s glad to talk to me, even thanks me at the end of our conversation for bringing all this stuff up. I try to explain what I’m writing about but it doesn’t come out right, and as I talk, I realize this whole thing is just another expression of grief, another attempt to articulate a connection I’m always grasping at, something that will echo the relationship’s best attributes back at me, prove there was something good among the rubble. Carl tells me they were called Spare Change at first, but eventually settled on The Committee. They were a wedding band, or, rather, a party band. A cover band. They played weddings and wedding trade shows, holiday parties, corporate functions. Sometimes they rented a hall and put on their own parties, getting them catered and selling tickets. I can’t help but think of the Me First album recorded live at a bar mitzvah.
He says that they never made it to the club circuit, which I took to mean they never became a band playing new material, but he clarifies: “Being a club band for us meant that we would have to learn covers, Top 40, and dance songs for four complete sets. If you played the club circuit, you had a chance to play regularly throughout the year. [But] the money was with weddings.” So they stuck with that sort of thing, tightening their repertoire, adding in a Beatles and Beach Boys set—Carl liked to play “Birthday” and “Fun, Fun, Fun,” two songs where they’d get to practice harmonies. He also liked anything with a sax solo. He says, “The only time we played an original was one of your dad's songs, ‘Slightly Bossa.’ [It] was a perfect number for the dinner set.” Although I don’t think I’ve ever heard it, I can imagine it—this was the sort of thing he’d played on his keyboard during my childhood. Carl says other than that, they’d rearrange some standards: “For a Christmas Party, we once transformed Deck the Halls to a rock version…We transformed a couple of 60's classics into jazz riffs for our dinner set. Or, rearranged some progressive rock numbers to use for our ‘taking a break’ songs.”
I ask Carl how they picked which songs to play. “The main thing,” Carl says. “Is could you dance to it? Was it danceable?”  He ended his email like this: “It was fun. We loved it. And we loved the music. I miss those days.”
Talking to Carl got me thinking about money and art, about being a working, paid musician (or artist, or writer, etc. etc.), about what success looks like. What’s the end goal? And then: what makes something art?
What’s the point of any of it?
Yeah, I’m not going to come up with an answer here. Perhaps I’m just spiraling and getting away from what I intended to explore. Or maybe not; it seems like Me First and the Gimme Gimmes formed with the same kind of goal my dad and his friends had—play and have fun. Make money by giving people something you knew they already liked. A guaranteed party. Everyone knows all the words. Maybe cover bands exist for one reason: to create a good time.
But Me First and the Gimme Gimmes form something more meaningful for me, by bridging gaps in time, connecting me to someone I didn’t feel connected to at all. Maybe this essay is even, in some way, my shitty attempt at a cover version of my own life, the original too slow, too complicated. I can do it over, create meaning. Speed it up. Highlight what was working in the original.
Or maybe I’m overthinking. Maybe it is all about fucking around and having fun.

Emily Costa’s work can be found in X-R-A-Y, Hobart, Barrelhouse, Atticus Review, and elsewhere. Her book, Until It Feels Right, a collection of diary entries about OCD treatment, will be released this summer. You can follow her on Twitter @emilylauracosta.