The Story of 'Teenage Dirtbag' by Wheatus

[Music] i was just lying down on the floor like but her name is just right there and stop i was just like really you're going to do this and then go and show people their debut album for the longest time i didn't know the backstory of teenage dirtbag or what inspired brendan to write it i had always had the question what is a teenage dirtbag there's no teenage dirtbag without just murder in the summer of 1984. i do remember people then all of a sudden we're focused on the lyrics and some people are like i can't play a song that says that they were asking me to rewrite my own personal history of life where it came from trying to dismantle who i am it kind of felt like the song was in mortal danger at that point it's not as important to win the battle as it is to win the war call it a one hit wonder or like a missed opportunity or whatever the hell you want to call it some people just wanted to hear tina's dirtbag and we were like sure let's do it [Music] i am brendan b brown i'm the singer songwriter and guitar player for the band wedis [Music] and i wrote teenage dirtbag [Music] i had always had the question what is a teenage dirtbag and i had always given the sort of cheeky answer like it's somebody who does their own thing marches to their beat of their own drum you know blah blah blah that's not a lie but tracing the steps back it was kind of like i kept bumping into this thing the summer of 1984 in long island it's not happy stuff i grew up in northport long island the town at the time was a sort of like a lobster town on decline sort of cloistered but also dangerous just kind of learned that you had to watch out for the older kids i was in more fist fights by the time i was nine than i could even count it was that kind of a town [Music] in the summer of 1984 i was just starting to find my musical identity and same summer a 17 year old kid named ricky caso who had lived on my block lured his friend gary into the woods and he stabbed him to death in the name of satan northport long island a quiet community rocked by reports a teenager was dragged through these woods toward a late night ritual of death the subject is satanism castle was into satanism and rock music associated with devil worship he got arrested wearing an ac dc shirt and that was my favorite band at the time i was had a tape case full of ac dc here's the rolling stone article about the murder the first time i ever saw the term dirt bag used in its like sort of period correct vernacular is in the rolling stone article ricky was a dirtbag he would have been called the dirtbag before the murder that was like what people who listen to ac dc and iron maiden and all that stuff that's what they were it shook the foundation of the whole entire town and what it meant to be a dirtbag or a metalhead suddenly parents and teachers and cops priests everybody wanted to know what was in your tape case i loved heavy music and heavy music was supposed to have caused this murder as a result i wasn't even allowed to go to northport high school because like my mother was like no i don't know what's going on in this town but you're not going there so i got on the long island railroad every day and commuted an hour and a half to mineola to go to high school i really don't remember the last time i was here long time ago the real time spent for me in high school was commuting back and forth to this place i really did wish that i had a normal experience i wish for it every day this is definitely not the school where teenage dirtbag takes place the teenage airbag would be impossible here first of all it's not co-ed this is an old boys school there was no noel here when you were on school grounds you're supposed to have blazer on dress socks and dress slacks and a button-down shirt and a tie that led to a period of time where there was like zero social life the only thing i did spend my time on productively was guitar i just played guitar and played guitar and played guitar i think for me on that train kind of looking out the window the idea of what i was missing became this like mythology it's like mourning the high school experience i just couldn't have had writing teenage dirtbag was like a long process because i was also writing my identity as a songwriter what i was willing to talk about what kind of a story i could tell and still be authentic i had a title that i was like conceptually writing a song called dirtbag or teenage dirtbag and it's going to be about like ricky caso and that stuff i had the guitar riff for teenage dirtbag going all the way back to partially in high school i had that sort of formation right that e chord that's the e chord from tom sawyer [Music] you know and it's the first chord from back in black in that spot i felt like i had to come up with a voice because every other rock band had a big song in e i wanted to figure out how to make my own version of that and over time you know came up with this [Music] but it also can at a moment's notice can turn into when the first verse came when i was i was lying on my bed thinking about cindy lauper i was just lying down on a futon on the floor like [Music] but her name is noel just right there and stopped and i was like this is so weird you sound like a girl and it's just like this weird story that you're trying to tell i was really doubtful about the whole thing and then from there to a sort of lonely triumph moment the kind of moment of just like i'm such a waste of life but you know i can still rock like by myself in the living room look you know no don't look you can't see me fine cause i'm just a teenage dirtbag baby yeah i'm just a worthless of a person you know like that kind of what do you care listen to iron maiden baby or don't go yourself you know like it's just kind of like let's it's a wild abandon of not giving a that third act was just one of these like are you sure you're not sure about this you know i've got two tickets to iron maiden baby come with me friday don't say maybe i'm just a teenager baby like [Music] you know i was just like really and then i also wanted a second chorus that wanted it to soar in this soaring failure oh yeah and you're supposed to sing it louder no she doesn't know what she's missing when i get to the chorus of teenage dirtbag i'm screaming at a priest or i'm screaming at a teacher who hated my guts or i'm screaming at my parents to try and let me go to the regular public high school you can imprison me in this boys school and you can make me do all these things that you think are good for me is never going to change who i am i'm a dirtbag teenage star pack was a solo endeavor at first before i was willing to share it with anybody it was the same solitary endeavor that it had been when i was playing my way to hell when i was 10 years old but then one day i ran into my old friend phil jimenez when brendan and i first met i think it was like we were both so psyched to meet an equally weird music obsessed person so one day i run into brennan at guitar center i hadn't played the song for anybody publicly at all yet saw you and was like oh man this is phil it's phil oh my god look look look watch this you know people who had heard teenage dirtbag were myself my mom and my sister i think so i was like the first real person and i did it in a public place which was weird i was blown away man like you played the entire song i played the whole you did the we're both crouched down like this i'm playing a steel drum right yeah you did play along and i was like her name is noel i have a dream i'm like okay she rings my bell you like i like it [Music] it was so stupid but it was it was obviously an important song like i was like i want to make that record i was like you know i would really like to work with you on this and i had no idea what that meant just that i wanted somebody else who i saw eye to eye with brendan and i hit it off right away we related in that we both went to catholic school he suffered through catholic school and i got out and i think it was a real painful experience for him in the parking lot at guitar center we decided we're going to get our studios together and he brought all his gear to my house my goal was to make a production that stood out as much as the song stood out so this is the original akai mpc2000 and this is the actual unit we used to do the teenage dirtbag record we built all the drum sounds on this on the original recording of it you could go and buy these very expensive cds and you would essentially be buying the license to use their samples you just listen to every single hit yeah and then another one yeah and then another one and then you'd be like oh that one this thing was made though for hip hop and dance music right what we were trying to do that was different was make it sound like a real drug really as bad as we could it wasn't a good idea it was so terrible it was such a dumb idea it was all had to be edited on this tiny screen and took hours and hours with this like jog wheel with that we mapped out these really complicated songs they don't make them like this no do you want to hear the mix that we did in 99 oh god i'm scared we made our own drum samples in my mind we were borrowing from run dmc and aerosmith [Music] the way that the base moved needed to be all the motown and hip-hop school then the guitars are where the upper body starts yeah all right let me play them for you and then it came in like a hard rock song from above [Music] we spent about a year working together at my house he would sleep in my closet like i didn't have an extra room and he'd sit in there and he'd be up late writing lyrics that period late 97 was where as a four piece we started playing we started off very small we're playing the downtown manhattan scene within a year we're getting bigger audiences and playing bigger venues having family and friends to having lines around the block of people we didn't know that's when label interest started [Music] kevin patrick was a guy who approached us from columbia records who wanted to sign the band i feel like kevin himself was a bit of an outcast and a bit of an underdog and i think he found some kind of kinship with brendan and that song my assistant actually knew about the band i guess he would have played me teenage strip bag i mean i just thought it's perfect you know if you can't feel a song like dirtbag you're just a freaking idiot you shouldn't even be in the room kevin patrick was the only reason that we signed with a major label with our demo teenage dirtbag didn't even have real drums on it we needed to spruce it up a little bit columbia records was like we want it like it is we want the demo it's finished oh that's great well we want to re-record it it didn't need a lot of work it didn't need to be rethought it didn't need to be redone we begged kevin to give us an advance so that we could re-record the record and he said yes but but he had this condition he's like it has to be done in three weeks and if it's not done in three weeks and it's not better than the demos we're putting the demos out and i was like okay all right call my mother hey we're on our way out to you right now okay okay cool hi mom how you doing hello mother it's good to see you so boom crash bang we went flying into like my mom's house with all this gear and we took over the basement and the dining room and the bathroom and built a makeshift studio over there this is the dining room with the wallpaper that got ruined with the tapes the blue painter tape you know what's funny i'm not in a lot of these because i was actually working yes we set it all up in here do you have the soundboard on top of this yes yeah it went all across this whole bay window and then everything else was occupied with something here's the board tape that she's referring to which was what we used to mark the channels on the console it was pandemonium for the most part okay let's let's try and hit it again but it was wonderful and all i would do is keep making chicken cutlets and feeding them feed the beast when we made the record that was when we really took over the house a little wiggly there at the end we broke it down and started over from scratch we replaced one instrument at a time we were working on day jobs at the same time so we were in and out of my mom's house in the dead of night i was like immensely nervous that we were gonna blow this opportunity we were three weeks away from making it not a demo project on an mpc2000 i knew they were going to put out those demos if we didn't do a better job it was really like a threat because i felt like the demos were inferior we finished the album in the three weeks that he gave us we pulled it off i was exhausted we were like zombies [Music] [Music] we had delivered the record on the one-year anniversary exactly of the columbine massacre it started with gunshots in the schoolyard just before lunchtime and then the carnage moved inside two students murdered 13 people and wounded another 33 with gunfire and pipe bombs they hated jocks loved the internet they were known as the trench coat mafia everybody at columbia records said something about the gun a lyrics to school there's a line in this song that says he brings a gun to school my role was to get airplay for our artists on top 40 radio i do remember people then all of a sudden were focused on the lyrics and some people were like i can't play a song that says that walmart wouldn't carry the record meanwhile down the aisle they're selling guns and they still sell guns but they wouldn't carry an album that had that lyric on it at the time it was suddenly like something was really wrong they said that they wanted me to sing some alternate lyric they wanted me to write another verse or some some other thing they couldn't have possibly known what they're asking me to do they were asking me to rewrite my own personal history of life where it came from and the threat of violence that i felt was the only honest way to say the feelings that i had as a kid that made the song actually exist they wanted to remove that made me regress and be defiant again the way that i was antagonistic towards adults when i was a kid in the summer of 1984 there was a panic ricky being arrested with an ac dc t-shirt on and parents blaming the music that they listened to the columbine massacre was you know a little over a decade after ricky caso in my childhood and i feel like the response didn't change at all why are we even talking about what somebody listened to they wanted me to sing something else and to that i said go yourself never mind we don't need a record deal if you don't want to put this out the way that it is then don't but that kind of surprised everybody they were like well we have to do a clean version for pop radio anyway so let's just see what that's like we'll put something over it so they replaced it with the record scratch [Music] when we released teenage dirtbag as a single the reaction was mixed those lyrics were an uphill battle wasn't just guns it was the other lines i don't know about iron maiden what do they have to do with us we don't play iron man like you're oh my god what do you think a kid back then listen to i think that's why we came up a bit short in the first couple months dirtbag got to number seven on the alt music charts and that sounded awesome to me and i remember that was hugely disappointing to like the record label we didn't really know what it meant to have a flop at a major label were they going to keep us were they going to let us go we wound up touring through thanksgiving and we were all exhausted we were just burned it's fine we've got a show in lawrence kansas tonight in front of two people they don't know who we are but they showed up because they thought smash mouth was playing so you eventually come to the conclusion that you didn't write a good enough song and you just don't aren't a good singer no one wants to hear that it was a weird time of like existential questioning coming to terms with that it was done that it lasted three months and it was done then all of a sudden there was a big buzz two or three months later is when it came out internationally kevin called and he said you're going to be number one on the pop charts in australia you got to go to australia now your records coming into the chart at number two or number one of course you want to be there so we went to australia by the time we got there teenage surprise was quadruple platinum and was like the christmas hit of the year none of us saw it coming i didn't understand what that meant to take us out are the boys from wedis uh this is their debut album wetus by the time that we landed in australia it was like a different world something picked up really fast we played a sold out tour and it was crazy kevin called me again and he said now you have to go to england you're gonna have a hit in the united kingdom it's already testing well you're gonna do this in three weeks we were in the united kingdom playing tower records in piccadilly i was in england that first week i went into towers and they would have like this long row of the top 30 songs and their column was just completely annihilated that you couldn't even buy it i walked in and i was like wow this is definitely happening [Applause] that was really different that was suddenly there was like gold records being shipped to my mother's house and like thing we weren't ready for at all we toured england pretty much non-stop in 2000. over there they were like conquering heroes it was insane [Applause] [Music] we lined up for festivals played a show with james brown we were on stage in reading festival and bee festival top of the pops played in front of 250 000 people at the princess trust party in the park [Music] it was impossible to convey how it was doing overseas friends and family just didn't get it and there's also that like kind of joke like i'm big in europe you know my cousin bought me a shirt for christmas and said i'm taking europe you know it's like it was like a joke when there was all that excitement and momentum and success in the other countries then to come back to your own country and feel like you never even got off the ground and you're starting from the beginning all of that becomes a poison that it's really hard to shake sometimes i think there was a lot of bitterness that the band had towards a us company because there was this glaring question of like how did you screw this up it's not like i think it should be a hit it's a hit everywhere except here in my home in my backyard and i think brendan was very unhappy he had good reason to be disappointed and bitter after about a year and a half he had had enough i think we had burnt too many bridges with the label and the label was sick of us and we were sick of the label it was pretty bad i'd never learned how to play the game and i wasn't interested in it and what i had learned how to do was pretty toxic like you know go back to the street in northport and fight and taunt and you know antagonize we got swept up by the tornado and it dropped us off right where we had started only there was millions of people who knew our song some people just wanted to hear a teenage dirtbag you know and we were like sure let's do it it's always been the kind of thing that like every couple months we hear that it's gotten big again or it's going to be used in something so the record found a new life by artists like one direction who sang it every night and it was a highlight of that tour it makes me feel good about the future that that's how it can weave in and out of people's existence without me without my intention you know without the dark story and all that stuff you know i think a big part of our success was the connection with the fans especially for brendan if you like that song that means you understand this character he really hunkered down on the musicality of what he really always had and he started to enjoy the music side more than the shiny label radio success side i mean they're still around today doing it when a lot of acts that had a lot of money put behind them and got played on the radio and they just kind of went away it's not as important to win the battle as it is to win the war and he kind of did that everyone has a story about a song that one got away or that timing was bad on that one or the artist didn't do this teenage dirtbag was one of those records he never felt any kind of triumph off of it because it didn't work out that way it was slow and bumpy and it was overseas you never really felt it so we just found other things to focus on and just carried on as the people that we were before the record came out her name is noel and i have a dream about her the events of teenage dirtbag never happened to me so it's a hundred percent fantasy it's 100 daydream the song has a happy ending because it's not something that i experienced myself there's no teenage dirtbag without this murder in the summer of 1984. however the song doesn't need the murder to survive as a piece of whatever people will see in it themselves [Music] it's your song singing it in your bathroom mirror you know whoever you are belongs to you and your history and your place in time is more important in the reflection of the song and the way that you see yourself in it than than my thing which is weird [Music] look cool [Music] you sound good awesome he really does his voice is amazing right [Music] you

Channel: VICE

Views: 1,566,239

Keywords: documentary, documentaries, docs, interview, culture, lifestyle, world, exclusive, independent, underground, videos, journalism, vice guide, vice.com, vice, vice magazine, vice mag, vice videos, film, short films, movies, wheatus teenage dirtbag, wheatus teenage dirtbag lyrics, teenage dirtbag, teenage dirtbag one direction, the story of, music video, loser movie soundtrack list, loser movie teenage dirtbag, brendan b brown, teenage dirtbag live, wheatus a little respect, wheatus live

Id: 2mTq7BSLe74

Length: 24min 10sec (1450 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 19 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/ButWhatAboutisms]

Went in thinking "how could i possibly care about this?" to not being able to peel away and do productive things.

[u/grimache83]

His mom at the end was just adorable!

[u/obsessivesnuggler]

This song randomly popped into my mind today, and surprise surprise...

[u/ScrumpleRipskin]

BTW, the whole album is really good if you like this "one hit wonder" of the track list. It's one of those CDs that I bought and listened to multiple times.

[u/somethingstoadd]

I still hear the song sometimes on the radio at night if I might be driving somewhere.

Interesting story that accompanied the song!

[u/anonimityrules]

Such a great song and even better now with more context. I’ve railways really resonated with it and the sound is just perfectly nostalgic, big, and angsty that brings me right back to being a “teenage dirtbag” myself. Thanks for posting OP.

[u/asu2021]

Wow. I just realized I was in high school with the lead singer! (A grade behind)

[u/raff97]

Video never answered this, did the song ever gain popularity in the States?