Punkobit: Brandon Carlisle

Brandon Carlisle, drummer with Teenage Bottlerocket, has died.

His twin and co-Bottlerocket Ray Carlisle announced on Facebook:

With a heavy heart I regret to inform everyone that my twin brother Brandon Carlisle didn't make it. This is the saddest day of my life. I'm having a difficult time accepting the reality of all of this. We lost Brandon. I don't even know what to write. I feel so sad. I'm going to come up with something better to say when I'm more collected. I will let everyone know when and where the funeral will be. The amount of support Brandon has gotten during the last 72 hours has been crazy! Thank you to everyone for the kind words and prayers for my brother and for my family. So many good vibes were sent our way and it really helped all of us through everything. I can't stop crying.

Brandon had been found in a coma by his roommate on Tuesday; a crowdsourced medical bills page had been established.

Teenage Bottlerocket formed in Laramie, Wyoming in 2001. Ray recalled the band's early days in an interview with Vanyaland earlier this year:

My brother Brandon and I were in a band called Homeless Wonders and we started out sort of sounding like Screeching Weasel, then we got into ska music so we were writing songs that sounded like Less Than Jake and Slapstick and when the band broke up we were doing something in the veil of Fugazi and At The Drive-In. We sort of saw the scene follow that and we got mixed up as far as writing music was concerned because we were mixed up thinking that showing off how good you were at your instrument and using words in your lyrics that people didn’t understand. A lot of things started to be prevalent in the scene and we thought it was OK to that too.

When we started Teenage Bottlerocket, we were just like “Screw that, we’re gonna wear leather jackets, we’re putting our Chuck Taylors back on and we’re writing songs that are meaningful to us and it’s gonna sound like this.” We stuck to a three chord format and since it was a new band at the time we knew we had the opportunity to sound like whatever the hell we wanted to sound like. Especially in Colorado and Wyoming, we came out in a time where people we like “Oh my god, you guys sound like that, what’s this?”. The older people like Chad Price in All and our friends in The Nobodys down in Colorado Springs, they all paid attention right away. They were all like “Holy crap, we really love this new 7″, this new band you have is sensational.” A lot of those older guys encouraged us to keep on going and it meant the world to us that people like Chad Price liked our band. Like you said, I think Teenage Bottlerocket came across at a time where whole Ramones three chord thing was done. That kind of helps inspire the songs as well.

The band has released six albums and toured with NOFX and the Mighty Mighty Bosstones. They were also part of last year's Warped Tour - something that the earlier version of the band might have raised a surprised eyebrow at.

Brandon had another band, That Guy, for whom he sang.

Warped tour "now more like Chuck E Cheese than ever"

Warped Tour's target audience has been getting younger and younger with each passing year; now they're aiming so low that they've introduced a Legoland-style 'free adult ticket with every kid's ticket' deal.

At this rate, we're expecting Peppa Pig to be headlining in 2015.

Warped security

Nasty footage from the Warped tour in Detroit, where one of the security guards is caught on camera punching a girl in the face. The footage was shot by one of Forever The Sickest Kids and starts - apparently - after the worst of the assault; according to the comments on the video the girl involved had been fighting inside the event earlier. None of which really excuses a hefty bloke slapping a woman in the face and then running away to hide inside the secured area.

You can't judge all the rights and wrongs from three minutes of YouTube footage, but having seen some pretty nasty behaviour from security staff down the years, it's nice to know that one of the side benefits of new technology is that it's now much less likely to be a their-word-against-the-fan if they do step over the line.

Auf wiedersehen, Pet

Be Your Own Pet have quit the Warped tour:

We regret to inform our fans that we will not be participating in this year's Warped Tour. We have been going non-stop for the past 6 months and didn't realize how much the intense schedule would take out of us. Something had to give and sadly its this tour.

Much, much too busy, then.

Their non-appearance has nothing, of course, to do with their previous observation about the Warped tour and the fools from whom it will be removing ticket cash:

I just associate it with a certain look and a certain style and the kind of kids at school that I thought were-- this is really bad, I'm sure-- the kind of kids that were dumbasses wearing Rancid t-shirts who thought they knew what punk rock was and threw things at people in the cafeteria.

So it's like, okay, now we're going to be performing for these people. Our label is under the impression that we're going to play one date and then automatically sell 100,000 more records. All those bands have this very specific look and sound and style. It's like the new hair metal or something. There are like 10 different rules about how you write a song and what everything sounds like and looks like.

Apparently, there's an extra rule about not slagging off the dumbasses in their Rancid t-shirts.