I love early punk, and by “early” I mean, like, prehistoric.

I don’t mean to brag or anything, but I was into The Velociraptors way before they sold out. I remember buying their demo about 75 million years ago. We were nearing the end of the Cretaceous Period, and everyone had gotten pretty tired of the over-produced orchestral pop music of the earlier part of that age. We were looking for something a bit more raw, a bit more vicious.

The first time I saw them, they were playing in this smokey basement dive bar. It only took them twelve minutes to play through their entire fifteen song set list. All twenty of us there were blown away. We kept cheering for an encore, but the band never came back out. We found out later it was for two reasons: 1) the lead singer got into this huge brawl with a protoceratops back stage, and 2) they didn’t have any more songs.

I remember thinking, “This is going to change music forever” when I first heard their Swift Seizure LP. All that energy and anger, what 18-to-22-year-old dromaeosaurid theropod dinosaur couldn’t relate to that. It’s just too bad they never understood their own potential. Don’t get me wrong, their albums after Swift Seizure weren’t all bad. It’s just that the music got lighter, more airy.

It wasn’t long before they broke-up and reformed with a synth player and a different drummer as The Early Birds. Soon enough you couldn’t turn on the TV without hearing one of their songs in the background of some tire commercial or something. Pathetic.

Wear this shirt: if you support anarchy in the (region of Pangaea that broke off to form) the UK!

Don’t wear this shirt: if it clashes with the pants you usually wear.

This shirt tells the world: “I’m DIY, a Dinosaur In Youth.”

We call this color: White Riot

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