CDs Revisited: Rancid - '...And Out Come the Wolves'

via Amazon

When I was 14, I so desperately wanted to be a punk rocker. I'm no psychiatrist (despite my grandfather's attempts at trying to talk me into it), but I sometimes wonder if the concept of rebellion called to me after spending my formative years practicing karate- I had a rigid training schedule and around the time I quit was about a year after I got really into the whole "punk rock" thing. Or maybe I just really liked the music- I don't know. I was 14 and impressionable, and something about punk rock spoke out to me. So of course Rancid was the ideal band for me at the time.

By the end of my freshman year of high school, I had already gone through my major Green Day phase (as I've said before: I spent the summer of 2002 listening to literally nothing but Green Day's discography), and I had started listening to the Ramones, but I wanted more. With no punk role models in my life, I turned to the internet and naturally I discovered Rancid. Pretty much every Amazon and Interpunk review I read pointed toward ...And Out Come the Wolves as their best album so, being the impressionable youth that I was, in the spring of 2003 I started with this one. Semi-interestingly enough, the day that I got this album was the same day that I got The Essential Clash.

If anyone else I went to school with also listened to Rancid, I sure didn't know them. (That's only partially true- I would hang out with people who were aware of them, but I didn't know anyone who would have considered them to be a favorite band.) I quickly became enamored with them and, because I didn't know many other punk kids at school (to clarify: I knew plenty of alternative kids, but many of them were self-professed metalheads or were really into grunge), the songs of alienation clicked with me. Adding to the "me against the world / loner" mentality was the time I got cornered by my own kind- at least I assume they were punks because one of them was wearing a Misfits shirt- and was called names (of the insults used, the only one I feel comfortable repeating is "poser" but I can assure you that most of them were much meaner) and physically threatened (though, and this is just my dumb male ego fantasizing, I was still physically fit from the years of karate and I like to think that's the reason nothing ever actually came from those threats). Like almost all of my favorite records, from ones I've been listening to since before I was punk to ones that I discovered two months ago, ...And Out Come the Wolves made me feel not so alone, and like I could direct my rage somewhere.

It still holds up to today, too. I can't say I've cared much of what they've done since in the last 14 years (whether as Rancid or any of their various side projects), but, and I think this holds true for a lot of people who discovered Rancid early on, ...And Out Come the Wolves really holds up to this day. The stubborn part of me wants to insist that Life Won't Wait is their best album, but at the very least, ...And Out Come the Wolves is their most accessible. The flow is consistent and it showcases a lot of the band's strengths. It's not exactly as ground-breaking, or even as diverse, as London Calling, but I completely get why it has been hailed as the 90's London Calling. Listening to it now, it still doesn't even feel like there are 19 songs here.

Anyway, whether Rancid is "punk rock" or not is a moot point to me. I do sometimes think that the ultra punk rock posturing is excessive and, well, mostly just posturing, and I know that I've definitely mocked Rancid in the more recent years. But the fact remains that getting ...And Out Come the Wolves marked a crucial point in my life: this was a period when I could have easily been sucked into the hype surrounding 50 Cent or Jet, but instead I found solace in a punk rock album from 1995. It also continued to set me on the path of punk rock and discovering lots of great music and meeting some great people through it.

Of course, I also think that Indestructible is a pretty good album, so what do I know?