Face To Face

The First Seven Years (VHS) (1999)

coldjuly

The title of this video is pretty much self explanatory, Its a retrospective look back at the first seven years of Face to Face. From their incarnation in 1990 up to the release of the live record in 1997.

The band started out as Zero Tolerance, and after they found out they were other bands called Zero Tolerance, the Name Face to Face was just kinda blurted out one day,and it stuck.

The first to speak on the video is Trever, who tells how he and Matt got together and began playing shows at their high school in the late 80's. It then goes to an old performance of the song "dont turn away". which appeared on a now out of print 7".

The band then signed with dr. strange records…and recorded their first full length titled "dont turn away" But the record had been recorded for about 6 months, and not been released….at the time they then caught a deal with fat wreck chords, who then was also a new label..so the band decided to leave dr. strange, and go to this new more promising label.

It then goes on to show their first european tour with lagwagon, and eventually their departure from fat wreck. The band had heard lagwagon….and their two guitar players and liked their sound…so they decided to recruit another guitarist….(insert chad yaro). and began recording their next album for victory records. The result was big choice, and the band toured extensively afterwards with the likes of the bosstones, NoFX and others. Big choice went on to be quite successful and catapulted the band to be one of the top punk bands of the time…and of all time.

This video has some awesome live performances…with footage of the jon stewart show, the first warped tour which you gotta check out the song bikage, where milo of the descendents sings vocals. And lots of other footage…including the riotus footage of punkfest…where everything seemed to go wrong.

After big choice…the original bassist matt…was suddenly out of the band. So then, (insert Scott Shifflet) as their new permanent bass player. The band had written an albums worth of new songs and wanted to try the songs out in a small club/small audience environment. It was dubbed the econo-live tour….the tour was pretty much unpublisized just getting their audience from word of mouth. The next record…the S/T album on A&M records in 1996. Which is probably my favorite F2F album. After the record was released, they then hit the Warped tour (again), and also toured japan…among the states and canada. With the ill fated Sno-Core tour…but still The band continued to get more and more recognition, and a worldwide fan base.

The video then goes into descriptions of each album telling the high and low points…the good and bad songs on each one. And the description of the live record.

It comes to and end with the videos for the live version of "im trying" and also, "Disconnected", "debt", and "I wont lie down". All in all a pretty entertaining hour or so of one of the best bands in punk today. If your a F2F fan you should probably see this. Great video, on how this band got to the status there at today.