Shred Til You’re Dead

The space things like Diarrhea Planet live in our memories, and what it means when they come back

The gist of Stephen King’s Pet Semetary is that sometimes dead is better. This is, of course, referring to the main character’s son (and cat) who died and then are brought “back” to “life” with mixed results.

There are things in life you feel connected to, the things that hold a place tethered to a significant part of your life. These are things much less consequential than your child or pet, but they’re things that are important and represent a particular time in your own personal development.

Sometimes these things go away. And maybe they’re meant to. I sort of don’t know whether it’s good for them to come back to you later, given the opportunity, or stay where they are in your memories.

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The first time I heard Diarrhea Planet was in my friend’s car my senior year of college when he showed me I’m Rich Beyond Your Wildest Dreams. The first track, “Lite Dream,” hits you over the head immediately with four guitars that sound like 20, a pummeling mix of heavy power chords and high up noodling. It’s relentless. You’re disoriented by how much is going on. You’re drowning in it, and by the time it finally lets you up for air, you’re getting pulled back out to sea by one of the best pound-for-pound punk songs you can think of.

I thought, “Yeah, this is good. I guess I just don’t understand why people are so crazy about them.”

This same friend invited me to go see them at a now-defunct bar in Philly called Boot and Saddle. It was a tiny little back room venue. You used to be able to get corn dogs there but they stopped that shortly before closing. I’m not sure if that’s why they closed but it probably didn’t help. Now it’s a wine and jazz bar. I doubt they brought the corn dogs back.

Anyway, the fact that they crammed six guys, including that front four of lead guitarists, on that stage was a feat in itself. The fact that they could make it sound that good was another entirely.

I left the show feeling like I was floating.

“Fuck,” I told my friend. “I get it now.”

I was now fully in the church of Diarrhea Planet. I told everyone I could about the band with four lead guitarists and three lead singers, each with cool guitars including one with a sticker that said “Prison” on it and another with a custom Tennessee flag paint job and his frets scalloped out for faster shredding, and how you just need to get past the name because it doesn’t matter. They were so fun. They ripped solos without grimacing or looking like they were passing kidney stones. They were smiling, looking like they were having the time of their life and that this was nothing. They were the actual real-life version of Wyld Stallyns – Bill and Ted’s fictional band upon which future society is based.

They were the best band in the world.

It was a good time to get in on it, because it seemed like they were playing in town just about every month. 

This period of Diarrhea Planet coincided with the transition from undergrad to normal life. It seemed like just about every other weekend my friends and I would be at (increasingly large) venues in Philly to watch them. We’d bounce around the room – it was never actually a mosh pit. Just that: bouncing around. Bopping, you could even say. 

By the end, our voices were hoarse, our knees were sore and we were down a few PBR pounders. And then, with the energy that only comes with being 22 or 23, we’d go to another spot and keep going, rehashing the show and staying awake like you could only do at that point in time.

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Diarrhea Planet’s trajectory was steep. After releasing their first EP on Nashville’s Infinity Cat Recordings in 2009, they followed it up with their first full length in 2011, the speed-run Loose Jewels that delivers hook after hook, shred after shred, with Minor Threat-like clock management.

By the time I’m Rich came out in 2013, they were already getting buzz from the cool sites that were telling you to stop paying attention to the band name and just go see them live. They were making all of the festival rounds by this point and touring relentlessly. You really had no excuse not to try them out.

It really seemed like they were poised to be that long-heralded “savior of rock” or next great band after years in the EDM desert. If anyone could save guitar music, it was probably the band with four lead guitarists with a fucked up name, right?

In 2016, though, Diarrhea Planet did what a lot of artists who appeal to youthful sensibilities do. They set out to make a more “mature” album. Turn to Gold wasn’t a bad album by any stretch, and a band is perfectly within their rights to try different things. To be trapped making art that doesn’t feel fulfilling for all of eternity is a special kind of hell, and success brings change.

They even referenced it on “Lite Dream”

It used to feel so good

Just to be misunderstood

But now where’ getting paid

And it’s just not the same

It’s fantastic, and it’s terrifying

You just keep climbing

Up and up the mountain of power

Til you reach the top

But Turn to Gold didn’t reach the highs of Loose Jewels or I’m Rich. The critical consensus was lukewarm. They were no longer a “band to watch.” They were now a band we’ve been watching with great expectations.

Turn to Gold had some genuine sparks, though. “Life Pass” is a highlight for me, with its big Van Halen gang vocal chorus. It also starts with an all-hands-on-deck guitar overture, but unlike “Lite Dream,” or Loose Jewels’ “Intro,” “Hard Style” had a lamenting funeral procession quality about it, like the band knew what was next.

In 2018, the year I turned 26 and lost my parents’ health insurance, just another quantifiable metric of reaching l“real adulthood,” Diarrhea Planet announced they were calling it quits with three farewell shows in Nashville. It was released on video called “Shred Thee Well.”

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The point of this article is not just to talk about Diarrhea Planet and how much I miss them. Diarrhea Planet is just, for me, that thing that was always in the background of this transitional period of my life.

Others have them with movies or athletes or bands with trendier names.

“Star Wars”

Tom Brady

LCD Soundsystem

We all have these things we attach to. And sometimes they leave us forever. And sometimes they just say they’re going away but then they come back.

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So, when Diarrhea Planet went away, it seemed like a forced rite of passage, not unlike having to sign up through my job’s health care portal, or a pandemic hitting when I was about to turn 28, introducing me to the idea of staying at home on weekends more.

I had moved on. In the words of the one guy in “Forgetting Sarah Marshall,” it was like “The Sopranos.”

It was over. Find a new show.

It was over. Until it wasn’t. Last fall, the band first announced what seemed like a one-off concert at Nashville’s Exit/In at the end of the year. Then they ended up on the Bonnaroo 2023 poster. Another one-off show just for Tennessee, or a soft open for a reunion?

Honestly, I don’t know what a Diarrhea Planet reunion means for me or the people who are excited to see them. The world they left is different than the one they’re coming back to. 

In some good ways: their style of arena-ready, shred-heavy, borderline-gauche punk is a little more palatable with bands like White Reaper and The Dirty Nil now more prominent. Also, Turnstile just became the biggest rock band in the world by embracing extremely accessible capital-R rock and partnering with cool skate brands (plus making excellent records). And, despite the fact that nobody I’ve ever met listens to them, despite critical eviscerations, that band Måneskin is somehow celebrated for being a caricature of what a bad movie’s idea of a rock band is enough to get Grammy nominations (not that that’s a reliable indicator of quality in 2023).

Seriously, it feels like they jumped off the page of a hacky screenplay about a rock band. I just watched the episode of that Rian Johnson Natasha Lyonne show where Chloe Sevigny and John Darnielle are in a shitty band that supposedly had a big hit once. They play that big hit a few times and it straight-up sucks. The songs by No Vacancy in “School of Rock” were better.

“I’m hungry, A minor G ohhh”

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If Diarrhea Planet mounts a real comeback, I’m very curious to see where it lands with the TikTok generation. I’m positive guys my age would go back to the shows (myself included), but what would the feeling be like? Would the vibes be, as the kids say, off?

It would be naive to think we just pick up right where we were in 2018. The world has still been spinning since Diarrhea Planet left. Boy has it ever been. And, to use a cliché and a pun: Not everything that turns to gold can stay gold.

Now they have to start from scratch explaining the name, who they are, what they do, to an entirely different audience who maybe weren’t even in high school by the time I’m Rich came out.

They might look at it like a kid looks at a dusty old video game console their dad is super jazzed about.

Would they “mature” their sound like they hinted at before going away? What does a fully “mature” Diarrhea Planet even sound like at this point? Because, let’s remember, the guys in the band weren’t frozen in time, either. And if they try to recreate the past, you venture dangerously into “Back to the Shack” territory.

The live show is really where they thrive, so if they came back they could just be a touring band. But that’s also what seemed to kill them. The reliability of Diarrhea Planet coming through every few months meant a huge toll on the six guys in the band. And, while the world they return to might be more friendly for the music they make, it’s certainly not an easier life from a business standpoint.

There is no shortage of stories about the grueling and financially unforgiving nature of touring right now. It’s almost impossible for artists without major label backing to turn a profit. Hell, even some of the biggest names in music are forgoing touring because it’s just not profitable due to the enormous costs associated with it in 2023.

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Sometimes, dead is better. Sometimes you shred until you’re dead and that’s it. You’ve shredded. You’re dead. And I can’t decide whether I want to bury Diarrhea Planet at the cursed burial ground or let it rest with my memories intact.

There are plenty of successful reunion stories. The Jawbreaker reunion seems fine overall. And it’s important to note that at least on the surface, Diarrhea Planet left without any public baggage. No members were called out for shitty, predatory or harmful behavior, so they don’t have to perform any acts of penance or sneak back into the public eye. It just seemed like they were exhausted. I feel like if any band could do it well, it’s them. I really do.

But, there are countless “Star Wars” fans who wished they never made that Pet Semetary deal and ended up with Jar-Jar Binks. Patriots fans were forced to watch the man who carried their franchise to never-before-seen heights get eaten alive by opposing defensive lines in Tampa and become the most divorced man whose ever lived. And someone spent their savings in 2011 to see LCD Soundsystem’s “last show” at Madison Square Garden, and now that memory’s value in indie fed and sentimental worth-it-ness has plummeted.

I can also confidently say there are plenty of fans of bands like Weezer who wish for nothing more than to await a reunion from the band that called it quits after the Green Album. Fans who would kill to live in a world where when they hear the phrase “I Can’t Stop Partying” have no idea what you’re talking about, because that song doesn’t exist what are you even talking about?

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It’s not about capturing lightning in a bottle. There’s always lightning. I was just holding the right sized bottle in the right place at that time when it hit. More accurately, it’s damn near impossible to capture lightning in a bottle twice. That’s the real issue. And to chase it means getting electrocuted or, at the very minimum, drenched from a storm while you try to recreate that feeling you once had.

All of this is not to say that if or when Diarrhea Planet truly comes back I won’t buy the tickets immediately. I will. But, if I’m being honest, I don’t know how I’ll feel when I leave. I could leave feeling like a guy who grew up with the original “Star Wars” movies felt when he left the theater after seeing Episode I.

And that’s more on me than them.

Because for every one of those sad adults, there was a kid who left the theater after seeing Episode I with no attachment to the originals who thought podracing fucking ruled and that Jar-Jar Binks was hilarious, and he couldn’t wait to talk like him in school the next day.

I’m going to stop before I keep comparing a genuinely great band to Jar-Jar Binks, and hope that the point I’m trying to make resonates.

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I have a shirt I got at a Diarrhea Planet show in probably 2015 that I can’t bring myself to get rid of, despite having gone through multiple T-shirt purges. On the front pocket it has a little scythe and says “Shred til’ yer dead,” with the grim reaper on the back standing over the band’s name in giant lettering.

I don’t see too many Diarrhea Planet shirts out in the wild. I used to. Maybe their owners decided to go through with getting rid of them. Whenever I do, though, I think about the fun we definitely had together in the same room. Because if you’re wearing a Diarrhea Planet shirt, it means you saw them live. Because to love them was to see them.

So when I see those shirts in the wild, if I ever do again, I’ll look at them like we once belonged to the same club. Maybe we even collided and spilled beer on each other, laughing the whole time. Maybe we’ll do it again. Or maybe we’ll drink slightly more expensive beers – or even a nice Liquid Death – in the back of the room and keep our knees intact for the evening.

Or maybe we’ll never get the chance again, and those shirts will serve as funny reminders of a very specific time in our lives. And we’ll have to explain to people what the hell “Diarrhea Planet” was, and how it soundtracked some of the most fun we’ve had.

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Today’s Snakes and Sparklers musical guest is Flycatcher.

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