Okay, story time.  In case you don't know, I was in a punk band for the better part of a decade called Twice Defeated.  We were no one to anyone but us.  But we had a great time, all the time.  We never recorded anything, except some live incidents.  We played very few shows.  I think the average was 1 every other year.  But we did practice every week.  We were very professional at every gig we played.  We had a cool website no one looked at and some nice merch no one bought.  Sounds rough but honestly, being in a band with my 2 best friends was glorious.  What wasn't glorious was our first show.

Here I am, about to start a new company.  And my hope is that it becomes successful, brandwise and financially.  So, I believe it's important to reach back into the past and revisit the utter failure my first company was and still remains to be.  When I started Up to Zero Records, I had no idea what I was doing.  I just wanted to be involved in the underground music scene.  Armed with a list of suggestions from Mike Park of Asian Man Records, I felt my way along to failure and financial ruin.  It's been six years since I spent any money on the label but I still have a mountain of debt to call my own.  The music industry is fickle, so there are a million reasons for a record label to fail.  But I could have set myself up for success and probably not have incurred so much debt.  So, let's look at how to not run a record label, or any business for that matter.

When I first heard that Matt Skiba was going to replace Tom DeLonge in blink-182, I had several reactions.  First, what about Alkaline Trio?  I love that band.  Second, okay, whatever.  blink hasn't been all that exciting these last few years.  I didn't even buy their last album and the whole drama scenario that Tom brought to the band sort of ruined what had been one of the biggest bands to influence me as a musician.  I used to love blink but they really had become a let down in every facet of a band worth following.  Lastly, what the Hell is this going to sound like?  How is the King of morbid Chicago pop punk going to sound in the band that brought the light hearted, fun pop punk of Southern California?  The scenes and styles couldn't be much more different.  This made no sense to me.

Until I thought about it.

Bizarro was a villain from the DC Comics universe.  He was basically Superman with an evil twist.  He came from Bizarro world.  This whole Bizarro version of Superman was later expanded into pop culture by the T.V. show, "Seinfeld".  Jerry Seinfeld is a big Superman fan, so it's no wonder this became a running joke on the show, as characters would run into the Bizarro versions of each other throughout the seasons.  The idea was picked up by "How I Met Your Mother", as the characters would run into the 'doppelganger' versions of themeselves.  Bizarro branding even appeared in an episode of "South Park", with the little Bizarro versions of the Colorado kids appearing identical, but with goatees.

It was from this perspective that I decided to start comparing the two bands.  And what I found is that Alkaline Trio is indeed the Bizarro blink-182.