Old school punk-rock band Total Chaos will be performing tomorrow night at The Waiting Room on O’Neal Lane with the doors opening at 7 p.m.
The band has gone through a plethora of musicians through their career, and has recorded six full-length albums while becoming a major force in underground punk scenes around the world.
Total Chaos have toured throughout Europe and Japan and just finished touring the United States with British punk legends The Exploited.
Their brand of music is much heavier than today’s “poppy” punk bands, according to Andrew Ferguson, a psychology sophomore.
“The first time I heard Total Chaos was on Epitaph’s compilation ‘Punk-O-Rama Volume One,’ and it was balls to the wall punk,” he said.
Ferguson had forgotten about the band until the mention of the upcoming show by a friend.
“When I first heard about the show, I had completely forgotten about them,” he said. “But then I went home and found some old stuff of theirs and got mad at myself for not listening to them anymore. That s**t rocked.”
Total Chaos have been around for over 10 years and helped Epitaph Records owner Brett Gurewitz make his label a punk household name, according to their Web site.
The band was around in the early years of Epitaph, before the label signed more notable mainstream punk bands such as Rancid, NOFX, Bad Religion, and Pennywise.
Amanda Maher, a marketing senior, agrees that Epitaph is the daddy of all punk rock record companies.
“Epitaph is the only label that I would buy a record from just because it’s put out by Epitaph Records,” she said.
The band sold over 200,000 albums for the independent label before they left in 1998 for Cleopatra Records where they released two albums and then signed to Reject Records in 2001.
Currently, the group is signed to the independent SOS Records based out of Houston, Texas.
David Everhart, 26, of the newly formed Jac Off Productions got Total Chaos to play at The Waiting Room.
He said that this is their first effort for the company and wants this show to kick his company off with a bang.
“With this show, maybe people will look at Baton Rouge as a place that has a music scene and then maybe there will be more really cool shows,” he said.
Ferguson agreed that a band of this caliber will really boost the scene.
“It’s cool that they’re coming to Baton Rouge because it seems like in the past six months or so, there haven’t been as many good shows to go to,” he said. “But now we have Total Chaos coming — who knows, maybe we’ll start getting some badass shows like this more often.”
Everhart met the band at The Exploited/Total Chaos show at the State Palace Theatre in New Orleans last November.
They exchanged information and Total Chaos recently contacted him to fill in a show that they had scheduled in Florida, but was cancelled.
“A lot of bands play in Texas and Florida and end up driving right through Louisiana,” Everhart said.
The show will be all ages, with the doors opening at 7 p.m. and the show starting around 8 p.m., he said.