DIE YOUNG played their farewell show on October 10, 2009 at Walter’s on Washington, Houston TX with 7 GENERATIONS, FOLSOM, MAMMOTH GRINDER, DEAD CITY, THE GOLDEN AGE, THE SEPARATION and LEGION. The band has just released an amazing multi-cam video documenting that show, as well as lengthy memoir wrapping up the 7-year period of their restlessness (the band punched and kicked its way into existence on a cold winter of 2002). Read the official word from Daniel below and be sure to head over here and here to check out our informative interviews with this respected artist.
Photo: DIE YOUNG live in Santiago, Chile at Manifest HC Fest, 2009.
Set List:
The Tortured Role [0:00]
Anthem of the Prodigal Son [2:07]
Making a Killing [4:36]
The Story of Our Lives [6:18]
Fuck the Imperialists [8:15]
The Trail of Tears [10:54]
To Forget Civilization [14:12]
Graven Images [15:32]
Believe in Nothing [17:16]
Begging for Blindness [20:09]
The Renaissance [21:54]
Carried by Visions [23:52]
The Message [28:01]7 years ago today we broke the band up. Whoops. But if you don’t mind, we’d like to share the surviving footage left of that great “last show” neatly compiled onto one video, and reminisce for a bit.
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2002-2009. The years of restlessness.
It’s fun to look back on those times now, because during those times, in the midst of everything, they often weren’t fun at all. We were literally out of our minds more often than not. We gave our all to Die Young in those days, and it required a sense of sacrifice and insanity to keep going with it on many occasions. Being broke and constantly on the move took its toll on our minds in countless ways. Personal relationships took a backseat to the band, as did family, as did any thought of the future. All we knew was that we had to get in the van and go until it no longer felt right, so that is exactly what we did. We lived and breathed the band in a physical and spiritual sense back then. It was our means to escape work and what we perceived as normal, mediocre modes of living. In casting off those chains of work and school, we traveled all over the world playing the songs in this video and gained priceless life experiences.
I was 19 when I started writing the misanthropic and sacrilegious words to our demo. It was liberating for me to have the reins of the band, to be the spokesperson, as I had only played guitar in previous bands. I was only 19, sure, but I had an arrogant and naive sense of knowing everything back then. Sometimes I think back and laugh (or cringe) at the offensive things I would say on stage in those days. I just wanted to spit venom at the world, regardless of better sense. In that manner, I can look back at 2002-2009 in Die Young as a special time where we–not just I–were guided by passion over practicality. All of us who participated in the band for those years were drawn to it by a nihilistic sense of passion, creativity, hostility, and desire to do anything other than what we were expected to do by society. Though we all find ourselves older now, more practical and conformed to some degree by the dominant culture, I think what we collectively set out to do in Die Young at that time was still a beautiful thing.
The traveling we did allowed me to expand my own horizons, intellectually and spiritually. In the beginning I was mainly concerned about my own liberation from the repression of our mainstream culture, but through years of sitting in the van, planes, and trains all over the world, and from also connecting with countless other people in different regions I learned to compare and contrast the circumstances of our lives, cultures, and histories. In doing so the scope of my concern expanded exponentially. I owe a lot of what I know and who I have become to Die Young. The band allowed me a great education. All that idle time spent traveling allowed me the means to learn about history, philosophy, and other important issues, no matter how grim much of it may be.
I am eternally thankful that enough people supported Die Young back then that we were able to quit working for several years and pursue what burned brightest in our hearts, and I am also proud to say we seized the opportunity with full force.
2002-2009 will forever be one of the important chapters in all our lives, not just mine. Those were the days when caution was thrown completely and recklessly to the wind, and I think for any of us to live in the same manner now would entail a path towards total hopelessness, poverty, suicide, prison, or all of the above. Setting out against the world like we did is generally a young man’s game. There is only a relative brief span in a young man’s life where he may feel compelled to live as we lived, because it is the kind of living that cannot sustain itself for a lifetime, let alone ten years. The Die Young that reunited in 2013 to make the Chosen Path record, and to then go on to make the new No Illusions record, is a more mature, wiser beast than the untamed animal that was laid to rest on October 10, 2009.
This will forever be a special night to me, as we had friends and fans join us at our homebase, Walter’s, for an emotional farewell. They came from every corner of North America, Canada and Mexico included, and we only hope some of you aren’t bitter with us for later reuniting, as we know attending the show in this video likely cost you a small fortune. We truly had no idea we’d ever be back together in some form making new records. At the time, in this video, we knew we had to lay the band to rest, for our own good.
We hired a University of Houston student film crew to capture this footage, as well as 7 Generations’ set (which we never received). The quality on this upload is degraded, because truthfully…one of my dogs ate the original DVD copy of this show, and so much of the set is actually lost to history, as this is actually only half of the set. We played an unthinkable 29 songs that night. A European label was set to put out a DVD of the whole thing in 2015, but it seems that copy has been lost in the mail. Despite our best efforts to give you this whole show in full, in higher definition, this is simply all we have to share.
This show was truly the end of an era for Die Young, as many of the songs we played on this night were the last time any of them were played, and it’s likely some of them will never make it back into the set. We have moved on in our new incarnation, hellbent on forging a new future, not reliving the past in our old catalog.
Nevertheless, I hope you enjoy this footage for what it is: a final snapshot of young men who were out of their goddamn minds for seven years.
Thank you for everything.
Forever Learning, Forever Growing,
Daniel
