Main Street Saints’ lone full-length album gets wax treatment for 25th anniversary

Photo Courtesy of Main Street Saints

In the ‘90s, few genres of music were as omnipresent in Kansas City as punk rock. Thanks to places like Fred P. Ott’s, The Pub (now The Brick), and Davey’s Uptown, along with all-ages venues like The FuseBox, The Daily Grind, El Torreon, and Gee Coffee, you could step out to hear loud, fast, aggressive tunes on nearly any given night.

Whether it was the nasty rock ‘n’ roll of Cretin 66, the Nuclear Family’s pop-punk, or the nasty pogo of The Sex Offenders, there was something for every fan of the genre. One particular subgenre which had a brief but shining moment in the sun was Oi! Also known as street punk, this working-class take on punk rock leaned heavily into the latter part of that descriptor, with lyrics emphasizing the day-to-day toil of the blue-collar worker, along with a healthy dose of letting loose with a few beers after getting off shift.

In Kansas City, no one did street punk finer than Main Street Saints. The four-piece formed in 1994 as bassist Tim Nord joined with guitarist Edu Cerro and vocalist Jason Pollard’s prior band, The Outsiders.

“I met Ed and Jason in Fayetteville, Arkansas, at an [anti-racist action] gathering back in the late ‘80s, early ‘90s, somewhere in there,” Tim Nord says. “They ended up moving here somehow, and then we just became buddies.”

As Nord remembers, first, he tried out to be The Outsiders’ drummer and was “asked not to drum,” but when the band got rid of their bass player, Nord then took on that role.

“The band just dissipated and then reformed,” Nord continues, with the initial Saints lineup being Cerro on guitar, Nord on bass, Pollard on vocals, and another former member of The Outsiders, Matt Cathlina on drums. There would be a steady rotation of drummers until the band finally ended up with Brianne Grimmer on the skins until the band ended in 2000.

During that short but vibrant heyday, Main Street Saints would play shows with a veritable who’s-who of punk rock: British legends The Business, Dropkick Murphys, and Agnostic Front, to name a few.

That wasn’t originally the plan, though, says Nord.

“When we originally started, we didn’t want to play shows,” he says. “We wanted to be like The Wretched Ones and just put out records and then get invited to festivals and stuff, but not actually tour as a band. We just wanted to make our music.”

Nord explained that a lot of Main Street Saints’ success had to do with the era in which they operate. “It was just the time. A lot of great bands were coming out, and we jumped on tours with them.”

Their newly prolific show schedule was bolstered by a rich series of releases. From 1997 to 1999, Main Street Saints would release three 7-inch vinyl EPs of their own, a split 7-inch with Atlanta’s Terminus City, and appear on a Flat Records’ tribute to AC/DC before finally dropping their only full-length, Everybody Wants To Go To Heaven … But Nobody Wants To Die, via GMM Records. There’d also be a posthumous release of the band’s final seven songs via a split with The Antagonizers on Street Anthem Records, but it and the full-length were fairly well cursed, says Nord.

“Originally, when GMM put us out, we had a two-record deal, but then the record label folded, and Ed was getting ready to move away,” the bassist says. “So, we frantically recorded all the music we had left. It’s a good record, except we were cursed with record releases, and they screwed all the song names up, and the artwork on the original CD for Everybody Wants To Go To Heaven got messed up. It was just a tragedy.”

To that end, things are being rectified, at least in the case of the full-length. A brand new label—Street Rats Records, out of Versailles, Kentucky—has, as its inaugural release, the first-ever vinyl pressing of Main Street Saints’ Everybody Wants To Go To Heaven in time for the album’s 25th anniversary.

The label’s Dan Moody never actually saw the band when they were a going concern, and came to the band in a way that is likely to be familiar to many folks who were around in that era.

“I was listening to a lot of bands at that time, and Main Street Saints were one of the best to me,” Moody says. “I had their singles and stuff before the CD actually came out. The “Johnny Bomb” single is on Haunted Town. There was a Bruisers single on Haunted Town. I was aware of that label and just kind of kept my eyes out for other releases. Like, ‘What else are they doing?’”

Photos Courtesy of Main Street Saints

From there, Moody went backward and picked up the material Saints had self-released on their own 13 Luck Records, and it just went from there. As he writes in the liner notes for the vinyl release, “Music matters to people. To me, that’s what this release is about. I got into Oi! sometime in the mid to late ’90s. Main Street Saints were one of the first U.S. bands that clicked for me once I bought in on the genre and subculture.”

As Moody puts it, it’s always bothered him a bit that Main Street Saints aren’t mentioned more often, but, more importantly, it’s bothered him that their full-length never saw proper release on vinyl. He reached out to Nord via Instagram and began the three-year process of making this reissue come to life.

“About three years ago, one of my buddies was like, ‘Yeah, you should do that,’” Moody says. “I reached out to Tim, and then we went back and forth, and I’ve got a six and a four-year-old. I’m an army recruiter. Adult stuff kept coming and kept me distracted from it.”

However, sometime in April of this year, Moody decided it was time to make this happen.

As the liners note: “That’s all just to say that this happened because the band was cool with it, I wanted to make it happen, and (at the time) I had a low balance on my Discover card.”

While it’s been a long time coming, the record is now mastered for vinyl by Well Made Music’s Dave Polster and pressed at Gotta Groove in Cleveland on your choice of black or limited-edition transparent blue with black-swirl vinyl. Main Street Saints’ full discography is also streaming via Bandcamp, and Everybody Wants To Go To Heaven has finally made its way to Spotify as well. It’s a bit of a vindication that maybe these cult favorites might finally get a wider appreciation.

Pollard and Nord, along with Moody and countless other fans, can now rest easy that Main Street Saints’ sole full-length will find a home on their shelves alongside their Cock Sparrer and Sham 69 LPs and will be able to drop that needle and feel the way the band members themselves do.

“We have the lacquer that we listened to the other day, full volume, like a couple of kids sitting on the couch drinking tea,” Nord says. “I got a little choked up. I had some quiet moments, and then I listened to it one more time with my kid. Me and my son sat and listened to it, and I was like, ‘This is your dad!’”