J-Card Press is following recent books on Brainiac and De La Soul with one on AFI by Andi Coulter, who previously authored the 33⅓ on Suicide’s self-titled album. The description reads, “J-Card books are not listicles or clickbait blog entries. They’re also not academic think pieces or a purely critical take on just a band’s recorded output. AFI covers the entire arc of the group’s career: how they formed, why they’re important, and how they fit into both their regional scene and a larger historical context.” The book comes out on December 12, and ahead of its release, we’re debuting an excerpt about AFI’s signing to their first major label, DreamWorks, from Chapter 6: ‘The Despair Factor.’
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AFI knew that signing to a major would come with growing pains. Long before Warped Tour’s feeding frenzy in 2001, there had been rumblings in the scene about their Nitro defection. Major labels had mounted a furious search for another West Coast pop-punk-friendly band, a Green Day or blink-182. AFI was not that band. They were not interested in the snarling riffs of adolescence. Their DIY Gilman crowd continued to ask, “Why did a band like AFI need or want a major?” Certainly, Fugazi would’ve passed. Steve Albini always gave punk bands the same advice: “Call your lawyer and get off a major label. Quickly.” But AFI was past their DIY get-in-the-van days. They knew—and Dexter Holland agreed—that Nitro was too small to handle the band’s international distribution needs.
When AFI signed to DreamWorks in 2002, they had two main concerns: First, maintain creative control of their music and image. Second, create something special for their longtime fans. The first was easier than anticipated, as DreamWorks was fully on board with their ideas. The second was more difficult. They wanted to make sure that just because they had signed on to the musical equivalent of a Marvel movie, they weren’t going to forgo their A24 roots. Many nineties bands had been labeled “sellouts” once they signed to a major; heck, AFI were called sellouts just for signing to Nitro Records. From the band’s perspective, it was often worth weathering the accusation to get their art out to a larger audience. For the Gilman bands, the sting of selling out was not just that a local group like Green Day became huge. In fact, there’s a large contingent of early Green Day fans who felt pride at the success of one of their own, even if Maximum Rocknroll denounced them. However, the Bay Area sellout narrative that concerned AFI the most was Jawbreaker’s.
In 1994, Jawbreaker and Green Day were Gilman seniors to AFI’s freshmen. While Green Day’s Dookie was soaring up the charts, Jawbreaker was entertaining a move to a major. Like AFI, Jawbreaker had self-produced their early material and signed to local San Francisco label Tupelo/Communion. After releasing two seminal albums on the indie, major labels started taking note of the band, especially their sizable following. Jawbreaker inked their deal for a reported million dollars only to watch the move stoke the ire of Gilman regulars. But it was the resulting 1995 release of their overly polished Dear You that truly alienated their longtime fans. Somehow, the similarly produced Sing the Sorrow did not suffer the same fate.
For starters, the AFI album came out in 2003, not 1995. While the “sellout” calls kept coming from inside the house, they were not nearly as loud. The biggest difference in the narrative between AFI and Jawbreaker was their anticipation of fan reaction. AFI had always been accessible to their fans. After a decade spent hanging out after shows, crashing on couches, and signing every autograph into the wee hours of the night, they had a reputation for being regular guys. Yet this alone was not enough to ensure they could maintain a good relationship with longtime fans. What set AFI apart in 2002 was their marketing tactics and willingness to lean into the internet.
DIY is more than just getting in a van. It is more than just booking your own shows or putting out your own music. Beyond the ethos of DIY, what has changed between the days of Minor Threat and Sonic Youth is the marketing. When AFI started, there was Gilman Street, a community pit stop to see bands and meet friends. There was also The List, an independently distributed paper on all the underground shows that week. This alternative network for music included radio stations, record stores, skate parks, and even malls. Much of the fieldwork included “press the flesh” marketing or handing out flyers announcing your upcoming shows. This worked well if you were playing locally, but if you were from the East Bay and you were playing in DC, you had to hope that sending flyers and posters to like-minded kids—or venues—would net turnout.
Having a decade’s worth of business under their belt made a difference when they signed to DreamWorks. But it was AFI’s marketing savvy that changed the trajectory of their career once on a major. The most notable change was that in 2002, a band could have immediate access to their audience online. As early as 1996, AFI had a GeoCities site and later an official site hosted on punkmusic.com before finally setting up afireinside.net. In 1999, AFI set up its own website, actively posting or responding to fans. It is hard to understand today, but online presence was not a given with bands, and certainly not with labels. When Luke Wood actively encouraged their online ideas, this was a forward-thinking move. To put this into perspective, when I worked at Live Nation in 2007, I tried to get online advertising for our upcoming Nine Inch Nails show, a band that was basically birthed on the internet. I was laughed out of the marketing meeting.
AFI were early online adopters and were hands-on as much online as they had been on tour. AFI’s understanding that most of their fans were online was crucial to their success. In order to give a nod to their longtime fans, AFI decided to create a space just for them: an online VIP section roped off from the rest of the internet. In the spring of 2001, AFI announced they were revamping their website and creating a “fan only” section. As they stated on their own website in 2002, “The purpose of the Despair Faction is to give back . . . this is for the fan-letter fans, the gift-package fans, the first-in-line fans, the front-of-the-stage fans, the eight-hour-drive fans, the cross-country-flight fans, the fan-since-I-was-a-kid fans.” AFI also created a “Name the Fan Club” contest for the newly developed site because who better to name them than the fans?
After months of voting, fans selected Kyle Fielding’s “The Despair Faction” as the new name, a play on the band’s song “The Despair Factor.” On April 3, 2002, despairfaction officially launched. Akin to music fan clubs of the past, AFI’s black splash page with purple DF logo explained that you could become a “lifetime member” for the low price of $29.99. Membership included a branded AFI box that would arrive at your door, complete with a T-shirt, sticker, patch, armband, and the all-important numbered membership card. The items in the box were to be exclusive to members and not sold at shows or online. The band’s marketing plan was impressive, stating that the members-only package would change annually, with designs from varying local artists showcasing the group’s desire to remain connected to the indie scene. Once the Despair Faction website was operational, it didn’t take long to become a daily destination for most fans. It is hard to fathom now, but kids wouldn’t have had access to smartphones in the early days of the internet. In fact, some may not even have had reliable internet, opting to go to the local library after school to get online. For most, it meant using a desktop computer to chat with others, as no one had social profiles and message boards served almost like a global Gilman Street.
Part of AFI’s continued success has been their desire to be hands-on in all aspects of their business. Going back to Stormy’s advice to learn by doing, AFI had been learning the ropes through DIY methods for over a decade. Their understanding of marketing can also be traced back to before the web. Many of AFI’s early recordings were in limited editions, and when they signed to Nitro, the label also agreed to make specialty vinyl for their albums. The exclusivity they created around the Despair Faction was just an extension of this idea. DF was for the diehards.
While band fan clubs date back to the Beatles, online fan bases in the early aughts were still in their infancy. Napster had shown that there was a tidal wave of kids willing to get their music online; what was less known was the confessional aspect of the internet. Since the late nineties, message boards and LiveJournal blogs have been a destination for disaffected kids to express their feelings. Unlike live hardcore shows where you could physically excise your demons, early online communities allowed for a more sensitive approach to emotional purging. Additionally, while AFI’s initial audience was male, it grew into a sizable female fan base. And like the rabid female fans of Jawbreaker front man Blake Schwarzenbach’s soul-bearing lyrics, Davey’s emotionally opaque words spoke to many young fans.
The Despair Faction attracted longtime fans as well as awkward kids with reliable dial-up connections. By August 2002, the DF fan club had swollen to twenty thousand members worldwide, with the message board being the most popular area of the site. Sections of the board included “Tours,” “Ask the Band,” and even a love-life question section with Fritch, the DF administrator. In these early online days, the band members were extremely involved in their own online community. In 2002, AFI started dropping hints about their upcoming album on the Despair Faction website. The band asked any fans who were interested, and in the Los Angeles area, if they wanted to be part of a video. Chris Evans, who was seventeen then, sent in his application. Now in his forties, Chris told me about his experience. “They called, and I didn’t have a cell phone at the time. They called my folks’ house, telling them I’d been picked to be in the video.” In November 2002, about thirty AFI fans were chosen to be in a secret video, only told that they should show up in a white button-down shirt and slacks. Chris recalls the fans were in a scene in a mobile classroom, and after they were done, they got to hang out with the band. “We got a chance to hang out with the band and take photographs,” he said. “That’s so typical of them just to hang out and not put on airs about it.”
In the documentary Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey, Rob Zombie discusses metal music’s rabid base. “Metal fans love it forever. No one says, ‘Yeah, I was into Slayer that one summer.’ I’ve never met that guy. I’ve only met the guy that’s got ‘Slayer’ carved across his chest.” In many ways, that type of bloodletting is similar from AFI fans. When people in the music industry speak about the band, the most common response is about the group’s extreme fan devotion (second only to, “The guys in the band are really nice”). Initially, the community aspect and place to talk about your favorite band drew their fans. However, what transformed DF members from diehards into fans with Slayer-like devotion came from the band’s creating a mystery out of their own mythology.
By the time they signed to DreamWorks, AFI felt they had learned lessons from their punk peers. Luke Wood had the foresight to give them money to keep doing what they were doing, just at a larger level. Labels don’t just underwrite every band. Most labels actually have terrible batting averages, signing a huge roster only to support about 1 percent of those artists. Because labels are essentially a failure model, most albums will not recoup their spending. The ones labels choose to get fully behind have to be their strongest prospects. In 2003, of the entire DreamWorks roster, only two acts went Gold: the Isley Brothers and Nelly Furtado, both established acts (with the latter’s sales disappointing that year). Only two acts reached Platinum status: the All-American Rejects and AFI, with Sing the Sorrow charting at no. 5 on Billboard, second only to the Isley Brothers’ top spot that year. AFI was also the only untested band of the four multi-sellers, with the other three riding on the strength of previous records.
This period was also a time of chaos for DreamWorks, which makes AFI’s success even more surprising. The label was in the process of being subsumed into the Interscope Geffen A&M label under Universal, making the question of why the label chose AFI to get behind even more fascinating. Sure, there were a lot of pop-punk bands on the charts. But AFI wasn’t blink-182. And they weren’t as clean-cut or catchy as the All-American Rejects.
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Pre-order ‘AFI’ from J-Card Press.
