Lost But Not Forgotten: WAX

Three letters that =a big "?" When you look back to the summer of 1994, the Phillies were locked out, Randall was considering a return and in between episodes of Sandblast and shots from the MTV beach house you saw buzzclip of this guy running around on fire. It was an unforgettable sight produced by Spike Jones, whose video originality has never aired since. Quickly after the single showing of “Who is Next”, several Nike commercials late rand a tour with the BossTones came the abrupt ending of one of the most original west coast punk bands of the 90s...WAX!

A couple of weeks ago I was able to talk with Joe Sib, Philadelphia native and the singer of the late Wax. What has he been up to since the beak up..”well I originally started Usa Side One Dummy Recordings because of Wax. We needed a label.” Since the break up of Wax Joe has been hard at work with his label and his latest project 22 Jacks, who he sings for. Why in the hell did Wax break up? They were at their peak. They had videos and commercials. Was it all the popularity? “Getting popular didn’t help up break up. The band had been around for a while and the road took its toll on the band. Certain people’s personalitites were conflicting. When you’re young, you think your band will never break up, but sooner or later things grow apart. You gotta realize you’re underneath hard living conditions. So when you’re on tour peoples personalities are magnified and you grow apart if you can’t tolerate it.” “Did you ever go down the shore for a week with a couple friends and when you came back, find yourself saying damn he/she is really annoying...it’s like that.”

The frist time I heard wax was at the Trocadero, when they opened for Face to Face and The BossTones. After the show I picked up their album “13 Unlucky Numbers”. The funny thing is that today, three years later, I still find myself desperately craving the audio pleasure of that album on a weekly basis. Joe had no hard feelings and was very lighthearted about the other members of Wax moving on and taking on new careers. “The day the band ended was the day Jerry Garcia died. The joke was that we were laughing all day that he died and then we broke up later that evening. So no only was the band dead but I was stuck in San Francisco with a million people crying over Jerry Garcia.”