Vegas Archive: Civic Minded Five – Discography

Jul 19, 2016 Posted by Alan Madrigal In Vegas Archive Tagged Civic Minded Five Comments 0

Click here to download the Civic Minded Five Discography

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Welcome to Vegas Archive, a feature where we re-release music from local bands that are gone, but certainly not forgotten.

Today we’re bringing you the complete discography of punk band Civic Minded Five, who were active from 1996 to 2003, and have played sporadic shows since then. For more information about the band and these songs, read the interview with the band members below.

Civic Minded Five merch is available via Recess Records.

The outcomes you’re presented with upon starting a punk band are very few and not all that appealing. For the ones who won’t become The Ramones (95% of them) the alternatives whittle down to either silently withering away into obscurity, or burning down in a parade of drunken mishaps, bad choices, and more than a few regrettable moments. It was the latter that initially sparked my interest into this immersive world. While I never had anything against bands like Pennywise and Social Distortion, their audience consisted of, at least in my neck of the woods, beefed-up jocks who didn’t care too much for a Bay Area kid who, ‘till this day, couldn’t throw a ball to save his life.

As my distaste grew for any band whose members looked like they’d recently done a push-up, Recess Records had already gained my trust releasing albums from bands that sparked my interest. One day, during my usual perusing through record stores instead of being in class, I came across a record titled E=CM5 by a band called Civic Minded Five. It had a seal of approval by Recess Records, and it was all I needed for me to buy the record. Well, I actually stole it and I haven’t been able to come to terms with that fact until now, but nonetheless it was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.

The Civic Minded Five were a force to be reckoned with on the days where their collective pre-show rituals didn’t take the wheel. Rituals which at that time involved getting plastered before every show. It was a symbiotic relationship that actually took them places. Many bands have dabbled in similar game plans, but more often than not, things go off the rails pretty quickly. Yet, the CM5 did it majestically, gaining the necessary experience from the days before the band’s inception, where drinking all day as friends was just part of their existence, that’s where songs started to brew.

“There was a placed called A-Able Mini Storage where there was probably, at any time, at least three bands [practicing]…we hung out there probably five times a week,” stated CM5 guitarist/vocalist Jason Wilda. Although, actual proper practice seldom got done, somehow they still managed to concoct some worthwhile songs.

“It was more of getting fucked up and jamming and then a song came out, it was more of a hanging out,” added bassist Shane Bement.

That “work ethic” seemed to manage just fine with the Civic Minded Five’s three core members, Jason Wilda (guitar/vocals), Michael ‘Lazer’ Lavin (guitar), and Shane Bement (bass/vocals), with a seemingly revolving open-door policy on drums, up for grabs to any person committed to the challenge, which five drummers later, Clay Heximer strapped up for, and the band’s longest running (and final) personnel solidified.

“As a fan of the band before I was in the band, it wasn’t about musicianship. This isn’t a Rush band. I always do the comparison with Rush and The Ramones. Rush is fine, technically awesome, I don’t want to listen to them. Ramones are fucking horrible players but I want to listen to them all day long. This is way more of a Ramones band where you didn’t have to be good at what you were doing, you’re just fucking doing it. When you’re watching it you saw how fucking good it was,” said Heximer, who at this point switched from the last sips of a bottle of rye he had started the interview with, to taking swigs straight from a bottle of Jim Beam.

“There was never a show where someone didn’t end up bloody. Before I knew these guys I was like ‘I’m kind of afraid of them, they’re fucking nuts,’ then like a month later they were my roommates,” concluded Heximer. The CM5 excelled in brash, noisy, snotty, and intensely catchy punk rock. Through it all, the songs were impossible not to get stuck in one’s head, and they quickly stuck out.

“The weirdest [part] was we were west side kids in Vegas and Clay and all the people that we liked were all east side kids, so we were totally out of fucking place. All the kids from the west side were all like that new school punk….but we just weren’t from that clique. So we liked all the kids from Boba Fett Youth, Catapult, Leap Frog, and The Heroines and all that stuff. We started hanging out at Benway Bop a lot and [with] Ronn Benway and Boyde [Wenger] from Boba Fett Youth, we kind of followed them and [we were] learning shit from them,” says Wilda.

Taking what they were learning from important people in the scene at the time into their own band, the Civic Minded Five released a cassette split with Cobra vs. Mongoose in the summer of ‘98, which was recorded by a friend in the same storage unit where the band began, followed by the band’s first full-length, Trackin’ the Bacon Train in the winter of ‘00. With more dangerously chaotic shows throughout town, the guys would soon get a taste of the road, where their wild antics would intensify and become the stuff of legend all while their chops as musicians would grow, along with their fan base.

“We put out Trackin’ the Bacon Train like right before we went on tour with Clay’s band, The Heroines, for our first tour. Our first show we played out of town we drove all the way up to fucking Montana from Vegas in one shot,” says Jason. “We had our minds blown. By the first tour we were all hooked. I mean, I had my 21st birthday covered in beer throwing up with the flu outside of Wenatchee, Washington, loving every fucking minute of it…everybody’s rocking and having a good time. I don’t speak for everybody, but I was hooked. I wanted to be anywhere but at my job in my hometown. We always did better playing out of town. We played to nobody here and then the place would be packed in Tucson,” said Lavin, “we learned very young, if you hook up a touring band they’re going to reciprocate when you go to their town. We always tried to help people out, book shows, give them a place to crash, we all still have friends to this day all over the country,” he added.

It was that camaraderie, along with some extensive touring, which really made a difference as their name got out, partly due to the crazy stories attached to their name. Lucking out on sharing the stage with some impressive bands, and simply just partying with others who rolled through town (like Dillinger Four for example) would have meant big things for most bands, but the CM5 were never about that, “As far as thinking we were going to…I mean, I guess I always kind of thought we were going to play, but I never went like ‘okay guys, we go to fucking sober up,’” mentioned Wilda. “I think we did a whole tour with Toys That Kill and we weren’t good one night,” added Clay.

“I think a lot of people who I would consider respectable musicians tolerated that from us because once we were done playing we were generally fun to hang out with,” says Lavin.

The band were added to the Recess Records roster, which at the time included the likes of acts such as The Dwarves and Pinhead Gunpowder, and released E=CM5 in January of 2002, the same record I would end up stealing from a San Francisco record store years after the members disbanded. I knew nothing about the band’s history or well circulated stories. I just heard an aggressive band with a pop punk sensibility and a knack for some damn catchy hooks. Think Zeke with less testosterone but double the rage. It only adds to the beauty that was the Civic Minded Five, that you could do something for the sake of doing it. To the people in it for the wrong reasons, stories of bands like the Civic Minded Five seem like cautionary tales of things not to do, but those people end up making shitty music and normally don’t tend to last long. These were four guys doing punk rock at its most pure form. It may have been messy, erratic, and at times uncomfortable, but it’s as genuine as you can get in punk rock.

“Paddy (Costello of Dillinger Four) used to say he worked at a record store and he would play our record to get people to leave,” Lavin laughingly says.

“The one thing that hit me the closest was probably the third or fourth tour, we were coming back west and we played in New Mexico in Albuquerque and dudes from Scared of Chaka came to see us play, and that to me was fucking amazing,” says Wilda, whom immediately afterwards was reminded by Shane that Scared of Chaka also came to see them play in San Francisco, furthering his awement.

Nowadays, much of the band have dramatically toned down the partying, as they’ve found success in their own endeavors, and they’re all still involved in music. They’re getting back together for the first time in 14 years to play a show with Toys That Kill at the Dive Bar on Tuesday, July 19, and while the days of getting hammered every day might have passed, as Clay puts it, “nothing is different from then to now, we have a fucking show in a week that we haven’t played for 14 years or something like that. We haven’t played together since 2002 and we’ve had one band practice, so nothing’s changed.”

-Alan Madrigal