Throwback Thursday: Remembering Bloomington’s Indie Punk Rock Band, The Nicotones, 10 Years Later

Image Credits: Ebay

For this week’s Throwback Thursday post I wanted to do something special. While this is a pop culture blog and most of what I post will be about mainstream celebrities, indie and local music acts will always hold a special place in my heart. I always support these smaller acts and share in some of their hopes and dreams of seeing them to go on and become larger mainstream acts. I cannot begin to explain the excitement I feel when I see a local/indie band with their album on sale at a place like Hot Topic or better yet, when I actually hear their song on the radio. It’s a feeling that you’ve favorite band that was once known by no one is finally making it, and maybe you as a fan played a small part in that. It’s such a cool feeling.

Image Credits: Facebook

I first started listening to local, indie, and unheard of bands when I was about 12 or 13. The first indie band that I remember having a strong impact on me was an indie punk rock band from Bloomington, Indiana called The Nicotones.

Image Credits: Myspace

The Nicotones was made up of four guys — Dave Adicted on vocals and guitar, Tre Deuce on backup vocals and lead guitar, Sir Bri on drums, and Action Jaxon on back up vocals and bass. With names like that and judging by the band’s looks in this photograph Sir Bri sent me 10 years ago, one other very famous band comes to mind: Green Day.

Some of the Nicotones’s songs were reminiscent of early Green Day, but most of it was more like an old-fashioned kind of punk rock that is not widely heard today. It’s not the pop-punk or alternative stuff making airwaves and pages of Alternative Press, that’s for sure. But The Nicotones didn’t really want any of that anyway.

Image Credits: Myspace 

When I first discovered The Nicotones I quickly befriended the drummer, Sir Bri. While I never met him in person due to the band being based in Indiana and me being from South Jersey, Sir Bri and I would talk on AIM (this was 2003…) all the time. He actually grew up in New Jersey and his parents still lived there so we had that in common. He was a really nice guy, pretty laid back. He was living the nonchalant rock star kind of life. His priorities in life were pretty much playing drums, getting drunk, and getting laid (13 year old me didn’t get the later part of that. The current 23 year old me finally came along to that conclusion though).

Sir Bri along with the other Nicotones played music because they loved to, not because they wanted to become famous (although I believed them to be talented enough to end up that way one day. I wanted them to be famous far more than they did). They didn’t care about making a good impression. They didn’t care what people thought about them. I think that just made them all the more attractive to me.

I emailed the band and asked them for an autograph in 2003. I think they were all very surprised by that (I did that a lot to little bands I liked back then and the response was almost always the same). But they gave me a nice little picture from someone’s basement, signed, and Sir Bri wrote me a personal letter to go along with it. Even after all of these years I’ve still managed to keep it.

I haven’t talked to Sir Bri in several years. I assume the band has disbanded since their official website is now defunct and there’s hardly anything available on the internet about them. Back in their prime, my favorite song of their’s was “Shady Katie”. It was one of the older songs (The band was formed in 1998. I think this song was from around 2000) from an album I believe was called Bubblegum Army or something along those lines. Sadly, I cannot find the song online anywhere anymore or anything about the album (if you can find either of those things for me I’ll probably marry you…).

If you’re willing to go to Myspace (yes, I said Myspace…it was new when the band was around 10 years ago…) you can hear some of the band’s music. These are all songs I was not familiar with, but they are still pretty awesome and worth taking a listen to.

If you do go to the band’s Myspace page and check them out leave a comment and let me know what you think!

Posted by kimerskine in Indie bands, music, nostalgia, Throwback Thursday Tags: action jaxon, bass, bloomington, bubble gum army, dave adicted, drums, guitar, in, indiana, kimberly erskine, nicotones, punk, sir bri, the nicotones, tre deuce, vocals