T-Shirt Tuesday # 8 – BYO (Better Youth Organization)

For over 2 decades I have been moving band t-shirts from apartment to apartment, and now to the basement of my house. I’ve said for years that I want to make a punk rock quilt out of them. What’s more punk than a quilt? I don’t know how to quilt, so until I learn I will be posting pix of these vintage gems and remembering when. I will call this series T-Shirt Tuesday.

BYO is a record label out of LA. They started releasing records in the early 80’s and I became interested in BYO in the late 80’s because they put out many of the early 7-Seconds records. I must have sent away for a BYO catalog to see what other bands were on the label and that must have led me to sending a well concealed 10 dollar bill to California in hopes it would come back to RI in the form of a T-shirt.

Two funny stories about this shirt -

I was playing a show at a space called Under the Hut. Under the Hut was “under” an indoor skate park called Skate Hut in the Olneyville section of Providence. Under the Hut seemed like it was open for less than a week before it closed down, but there were a few great shows in its brief existence.

I was playing in Common Ground and we played with Go! and Bad Trip from NYC. At that show the coolest of cool punk rockers and singer for The Wurst, Rob Phelps, told me my BYO shirt was cool. The punkest of the punkers gave me a compliment on my T-shirt. I was floored. You have to understand, getting a compliment from Rob was like getting blood from a rock, nice words did not come easy. His forte was ripping hardcore bands to shreds in his article in the nicepaper. He once wrote that our band "looked retarded" for covering an LL Cool J song, now that I write that, we probably did.

Story #2, I was on Thayer street, walking by In Your Ear, when a dude offered my $20 for the shirt. I thought that was interesting because I bought it for 10 and he could have done the same thing. Plus, what if I went for that deal? Would he have given me his shirt? Would I have had to return home shirtless. I didn’t sell it to him. I thought the guy that made me the offer was the guitar player for Puzzlehead, but looking at the photo on their 7-inch, none of them look familiar except for a very young Ted Leo. These t-shirt Tuesday’s teach me so many interesting things.

Until the next shirt, take a listen to this Bad Trip song

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