Alphabetical Order: Grade - 'Under the Radar'
A high school favorite that taught me that reunion shows will keep you trapped in the past.
Welcome to ZERO CRED, the only music newsletter ever to exist. Alphabetical Order is a project where I go through my record collection and try to make sense of my life, from A to Z.
There are some looks people have given me that have stuck with me for my entire life. These looks were memorable because they were a reflection of myself. Something I said or did was so peculiar or off-putting that it caused a person’s facial muscles to contort in such a unique way that never fully left me.
I will forever remember the look on my sixth grade teacher’s face when I told her the subject I chose for my class presentation was Beavis and Butt-head. The look the mall Santa Claus gave me when I farted on his lap is another one that has stayed with me for decades. And I will never forget the confused look on the bouncer’s face at the Toronto Opera House in the summer of 2006 when he looked at my New York driver’s license as I stood at the door to enter Grade’s reunion show. “You drove all the way here for this?” he asked.
The look the bouncer gave me was one of shock and pity and skepticism. His face said that he was sad for me and also confused. I could tell he was doing a mental calculation. Not about my age—I was 23 and old enough to enter—but about how many miles that trip must have been for me and my two friends behind me.
“How long did it take you to get here?” he asked.
“Nine hours,” I said with a pride that melted into shame by the time the short sentence was over.
He showed my license to another bouncer and murmured something and they both laughed. Then he handed it back to me and let the three of us through.
I learned a lot from that look the bouncer gave me. The look told me that even in their hometown, Grade was never a terribly popular band. It was downright incomprehensible to this guy that anyone would travel from outside the city, let alone the country, to see them reunite.
None of my friends knew that when we discovered their album Under the Radar in high school. I cannot stress enough how much more difficult it was to gauge a band’s reach and popularity before streaming numbers and follower counts. All we knew was that every few months, Grade would tour through the tri-state area, headline medium-sized clubs, and we would scream along to their lyrics with a roomful of people. That, to us, was popular.
Under the Radar became one of the albums that bonded my friends together in high school, which makes sense because the album articulates thoughts a teenager might be grappling with. It’s an album about life’s transitional moments—relationships ending and new beginnings that haven’t fully taken shape yet. Hitting the road with your best friends and making someone a mixtape. The rest of the songs are about, as singer Kyle Bishop liked to tell the crowd, eating pussy.
Grade’s shows became rituals for me and my pals. We’d catch them whenever they hit CBGB in New York or Club Krome in New Jersey. Every show was catharsis. We’d spend an hour finger-pointing and screaming every word at the top of our lungs. Afterwards we’d end up at a diner, recapping our play-by-play of the night.
But as we were graduating, Grade was calling it quits, ending their operation sometime around 2002. So, when word hit the message boards four years after their breakup that Grade was getting the band back together for one last show in Toronto, my friends and I knew we had to make a road trip.
Four years is nothing to me now. I am currently wearing a shirt that is more than four years old which I still refer to as my “new shirt.” But at 23, four years is a lifetime. By that point, I was two years out of college, working as an underpaid office assistant, and feeling like my life was over. As a music fan, I felt ancient. Aged out. The high school kids who screamed along to bands now, they were the people the scene belonged to. I was just an observer.
I remember looking at myself in the mirror that summer and having a Richie Tenenbaum moment where I spontaneously buzzed all my hair off. My thinking was: Well I’m old so it’ll probably fall out soon anyway. Might as well beat it to the punch. The chance to see Grade again felt like a way to return to the youth that I had taken for granted.
When my friends met back up in our hometown to begin our Canadian roadtrip, it felt like catching up with old war buddies from past lives. Like we barely recognized each other’s worn and tired faces after four long years of the weight of the real world crushing our spirits. Again, four years is nothing to me now, and I regularly go long stretches without seeing some of my closest friends and we’re fine with that. But at the time, it felt like an eternity had passed.
The three of us endured a long drive up the East Coast, a needlessly difficult border patrol line, and several Canadian parking tickets, but it was all worth it when the lights went out at the Opera House and Kyle Bishop took the stage. He wore blue jeans and a tight white t-shirt. He had a razor-sharp jawline outlined by thick sideburns and his light brown hair was combed up high in a greaser’s pompadour. Punk rock’s Johnny Bravo. The lights came on and he charged the crowd, screaming.
The band played almost every song from Under the Radar that night and my friends and I shouted along to every word, trying to recapture the freedom of adolescence. By the last song, most of the audience was on stage, trying to tackle Bishop for the microphone. Trying to shout out their own feelings of lost youth. As the final note rang out, Bishop raised his arms triumphantly, shirtless and sweaty. “Thank you very much for sharing this night with us. We appreciate it,” he told us as we cheered. “We were Grade.”
Grade started out as an emotional hardcore band in the mid-90s. Their early sound was a prevalent one in the VFW hall circuit at the time. Soft and twinkly buildups that abruptly crashed into heavier chaos, punctuated by screams that struggled to be heard over the noise. Bishop had ratty brown dreadlocks and delivered his lyrics with sincerity and earnestness. But when the band released their third album, Under the Radar, in 1999, he chopped off the dreads, developed a more confident stage swagger, and a new era of Grade officially began.
The album did an interesting thing in that it took the grimey hardcore style of their early work and slapped juuuuust enough melodic sheen on it to make them more commercially palatable. This mixture of catchy melodies and controlled aggression would become a commonplace approach in the following years with bands like Thursday and The Used. But before Y2K, it was a fairly novel concept.
Under the Radar had two other things working in its favor:
The backing of Victory Records. Say what you will about the controversial label, but it was extremely successful in getting heavy music into chain stores and mainstream spaces. The label backed their bands with heavy marketing pushes and it was not uncommon to find their promo posters hanging in record stores.
“A Year in the Past, Forever in the Future.” This was the album’s “single” which largely stripped away the screaming in favor of a catchy hook. The band even recorded a more radio-friendly version that buffed out any remaining traces of latent anger. The result was something more in line with the sound of The Get Up Kids than The Swarm. It also had an incredibly catchy chorus whose lyrics were broad and vague enough to be applicable to any situation: “This is a time in my life, where everything is falling apart, but at the same time it’s all coming together.” The song became the band’s singalong crowdpleaser and its video got a few plays on MTV2.
With these two assets at its side, Under the Radar was the closest thing to a breakout album Grade would ever see. Which isn’t saying much, because the band didn’t do much breaking out, especially not when compared to their commercially lucrative label successors like Taking Back Sunday and Hawthorne Heights. Any forward momentum was crushed two years later thanks to internal struggles. “There’s a lot of self-sabotage that happened within this band,” Bishop once said. “Instead of making the follow-up to Under The Radar a pop gem like everyone wanted from us, we made a metal record that sounded like shit.”
(The shitty sounding metal record in question is 2001’s Headfirst Straight to Hell, an album which, dogshit recording and murder fantasies aside, I actually think was a cool left turn for the band, even if it did effectively mark the beginning of the end for them.)
The more time that goes by, the less I hear Grade spoken about as an influential band. Under the Radar has not been deemed An Important Album by the tastemakers and historians. Maybe the band’s reunion was a few years too early to cash in on the nostalgia boom. Maybe their sound helped shape a future generation of bands who didn’t pay them enough credit. Maybe their image wasn’t right or they didn’t have a cool enough logo. Maybe this or maybe that. Look, I don’t know why these things do or don’t happen or why certain albums are canonized but others aren’t. All I know is that every once in a while I pull Under the Radar off the shelf and remember what it meant to me and my friends and how much connection it brought us at a formative period in our lives.
Grade’s Toronto show was the first time I can remember attending something that was billed as a band’s reunion. Nowadays, they’re extremely commonplace. There is an entire music festival industry based around touting bills full of reunited bands. At this point, it’s probably easier to name the bands that haven’t been seduced out of retirement. I’ve seen a few bands that were ahead of their time take their long overdue victory lap decades later, and those performances have felt special. I’ve also seen some bands return to celebrate a point in time that was better left buried by history.
Grade reunited again in 2014, just a few blocks from where I was living in Brooklyn, saving me the humiliation of another foreign ID check at the door. But by then my old high school buddies had moved too far away to make the trip so I went without them. Standing in a crowd of strangers, finger-pointing and screaming along to my favorite songs from high school, sobered me up pretty quickly. It felt like the lights had suddenly come on and I saw myself stuck in a nostalgia loop, reliving the same experience to diminishing returns. Time moves on and it’s foolish to believe that any band or album or show can do anything to stop that.
I’ve largely avoided reunion shows since then. I don’t need to reenact my teenage years for the rest of my life. I am thankful for the memories but am also content to leave them behind. The more time you spend trying to reclaim the good old days, the more that’s going out the door. 2006 was just a year in the past, but I’d rather spend forever in the future.
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God this record hit so hard, I’m glad it holds up. Headfirst Straight to Hell has some riffs but holy shit the cover art is transcendently bad in a way so specifically 2001 I’ll never hate it completely
Another band for me to check out. Great article as always!