With Noah Baumbach‘s "While We’re Young" rolling into cinemas today, telling the story of a middle-aged couple trying to reclaim their youth, there is probably no better moment for this news to drop. Star Ben Stiller had a punk band in the 1980s, they recorded an album, and over 30 years later, it’s getting an official release. You can’t make this stuff up.
Pitchfork has the news the today and it goes something like this: indie label Captured Tracks stumbled across Roadkill by Capital Punishment — recorded on the cheap, and given an initial run of a couple hundred copies — contacted Stiller to ask if they could re-release it, and the rest is history. While most people would be mortified to see their high school band’s recordings put back out into the wild, it’s kinda great Stiller is eager to roll with it, and he seems pretty amazed anyone cares. "What happened was some outsider music label, which I didn’t know those existed, but people who are just into weird music; I guess it’s been found and they asked us if they could re-release it," he recently told Howard Stern.
Joined by Peter Swann (now a Supreme Court Justice for Arizona), Peter Zusi (now a professor of Slavic Studies), and Kriss Roebling, the band was influenced by Cabaret Voltaire, Throbbing Gristle, Chrome, and, according to Stiller, David Bowie, in particular Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps).
See how close these kids with the track "Confusion" below, followed by Stiller talking about the band with Stern (it starts around the 26-minute mark). No word yet on an exact release date for Roadkill, but fingers crossed for a reunion tour.
