Remember when punk bands were punk bands? When it was just a couple of musicians getting together for the love of music, playing live and having fun? Outpatient X remembers.
“We never want to stop having fun because that’s what it’s really all about,” says guitarist and co-vocalist, Shane Bauleke. “Having fun and meeting new people.”
The three piece skate punk act ferociously dropped into the local scene last year and hasn’t stopped grinding. Back in May they released their debut record, Deceptive Optimism and have played a plethora of shows from benefits to bar gigs and venues. Now, they are gearing up to play with fellow local acts, F.U.X., Schlep and San Francisco’s Blunt Force Karma this Saturday, October 5th, at the Blue Lagoon.
“Personally, at the end of the day I just want to play shows,” agrees vocalist and bassist, Isaiah “Zay” Folks. “It’s addicting.”
Harkening back to the most punk rock of origins, Outpatient X formed through a “musicians wanted” ad online. Bauleke and his brother Kai–aka the “Vanilla Gorilla” and Outpatient X’s drummer– were looking for a third person to jam with and had put out the wanted post on Bandmix.com.
“It was a really nasty winter,” Folks– who works as a crewmember of a whale watching tour boat–remembers.
“We couldn’t work and couldn’t surf because the ocean was too rough. I couldn’t go [rock] climbing because everything was wet and I couldn’t go snowboarding because I couldn’t afford the gas since I wasn’t working. I just sat around in my room, playing guitar and watching YouTube videos of NoFX and thought ‘I want to be in a band.’ So I looked up band websites and immediately found Bandmix.com.”
The rest–as they say–is history.
The three began jamming and quickly realized something magically was forming.
“A lot of our songs are very real,” Bauleke says. “They’re authentic because they’re all real-life experiences about heavy shit that we–and people–have to deal with and go through.”
And that’s where the Deceptive Optimism name comes from. On the surface, Outpatient X’s songs explode with upbeat, fast, punk rock energy drawing from groups like Green Day, Bad Religion, Social Distortion and –of course–NoFX.
However, sit and simmer with the lyrics and it’s quickly apparent their music isn’t simply three chord hero worship. Instead, Outpatient X has no problem laying out the horrors of life like drug addiction, catastrophic environmental collapse and the struggle of living with severe mental illness.
“I have bipolar disorder but I spent 17 years in denial,” Folks says. “That’s 17 years of not even admitting to myself that I have this thing. And now–finally–I’ve come to the point where I’m ready to talk about it.”
It’s the subject of two of the band’s tracks off the EP, “Genetic Lottery” and “Scription.” While the former explores Folks thinking about bipolarism, what it means to have been born with the disorder (to have won the genetic lottery),and a generation of self-medicating people living with trauma and mental illness. However, the latter dives into the consequences of having a mental illness. For Folks it meant breakdowns, police and brief stints of institutionalism without his medication.
The EP’s grittiest track is also the one it chooses to end on. In “Gen” Folks sings about a friend of the same name who died of a heroin overdose due to her own mental struggles. In the most harrowing part of the song, he screams “Fuck! Oh Fuck! She’s Not Breathing!” followed by gut-wrenching, repeated cries of “Wake Up!”
Whether it’s on the recording or performed live, the emotional realness commands attention and takes the listener from enjoying a punk song and traps them in the nightmarish moment of seeing a loved one die before their eyes.
“Heroin sucks,” he says pointblank. “We did the vocals in one take because we wanted to capture the emotions. I can still hear [Bauleke’s] dad in the control room say ‘Holy shit’ when we did it, which made me collapse crying.”
It was Shane and Kai’s father, Matthew Bauleke, that got the brothers into music in the first place. Along with being a Santa Cruz punk band, Outpatient X has deeper ties to the scene’s history through Matthew who was in the late 1990’s local punk act, The Undecided. Deceptive Optimism was also recorded by Bart Thurber who’s worked with a plethora of celebrated Santa Cruz punks like Fury 66 and Riff Raff along with more infamous bands in the larger punk scene such as the U.K. Subs and Cocksparrer.
“I’ve worked with him before and he’s great,” Bauleke says. “The dude is a legend.”
While still celebrating the release of Deceptive Optimism, the Outpatient X trio is looking ahead with a full-length sometime in 2025. But for now, they are honing in on playing more shows with the possibility of planning a tour in the not-too-distant future. No matter what they do, the guys promise not to lose sight of their focus.
“It’s all fun,” Folks says. “It’s fun to play shows. It’s fun to post fliers. It’s fun to meet new people and network. With a band it’s a communal high.”
If you go: Saturday, Oct. 5th, 2024. 8pm, The Blue Lagoon, 923 Pacific Ave., Santa Cruz. $10. 423-7117.
