After playing a number of shows together in the past couple of years, the original True Sounds of Liberty came roaring back with a vengeance in 2001 with the release of their ripping new album Disappear. Featuring original members Jack Grisham, Ron Emory, and Mike Roche, the band is only missing Todd Barnes, who tragically died in a car wreck in 1999. There is an enormous amount of history behind TSOL, much of it chaotic. The original band released a six song EP in 1980 that introduced Ron Emory’s sizzling guitar to the punk world, and followed it up with a brilliant turn to the diverse and dramatic punk of Dance With Me, leaving some orthodox hardcore fans confused.

“When we grew up, punk rock to us was a real wide spectrum of stuff,” said singer Jack Grisham when I interviewed him at a show in Boynton Beach, Florida. “It was a free kind of trip – punk rock was Black Flag and punk rock was three kids banging on pots and pans screaming ‘fuck’ at their mother. Punk rock was the Go-Go’s, and punk rock was the Bad Brains. It was such a big mix of stuff, and it was all just classified as punk rock. So when we started playing, that’s what we did. It was like, hey, we can make a song like this and this is still punk. We can make a fast song and this is still punk. So that was our sound; that was what we did. It was punk to experiment.”

After adding keyboards on Beneath the Shadows, they really perplexed fans by going out on the kind of limb that the Damned did in their post-1979 work. Still, they drew even bigger crowds with their great songwriting and Jack’s charisma, and were playing big shows like the S.I.R. Studio riot in 1983, when Jack famously got the 2000 person crowd to sit down to prove that it was the cops who were rioting. Unfortunately Ron and Mike decided they couldn’t deal with Jack anymore, and got a new singer, launching the sad era of the “other TSOL”. There is a simmering bitterness just below Jack’s gregarious surface that explodes at the mention of the other band.

“Even now, it’s a fucking nightmare,” says Jack (it doesn’t help that the other singer married Jack’s sister). “It’s real hard, I have a real hard time dealing with that every now and then. Hearing people yelling out shit, it’s like I’m paying for someone else’s mistake. Every night. It gets old.”

Jack isn’t quite satisfied with Disappear. Some of the straight-up punk songs likeable by any modern punk fan don’t meet his high standards. I’m 70 percent happy, maybe 60 percent happy. I keep thinking about the next one now, and I know the mistakes we made – or at least, I made. That's a part of making a record after 17 years. I’m stoked. It’s like coming out of a coma. A lot of TSOL is drama, that early stuff has drama, that show tune thing, and there’s a lot of that which I didn’t get so into this because I’d been away from it for so many years. If we do make another record, it’s gonna be better. The kinda cool thing about this record is because of all that metal damage the other band did – anything we make is gonna be alright. I’ve got so many ideas in my head for the next record. It’s all flooding back to me. All the time on stage is making me remember what we stood for, what it was all like.”

Playing to an entire different generation was also eye-opening. “A lot of the principles, a lot of the stuff we believed in, it’s not there anymore. There’s backstages now, there’s security, there’s bodyguards. It’s just rock. I was at a show the other night, and a friend of mine was working the door, and some kids come up and he says “go around, fuckin’ go around” like he’s some kind of security at a show. I looked at him and said “man, you’re someone’s ass we used to kick”. We give out our home numbers to kids, we invite them to our house, we take them on tour with us, we invite kids we don't even know to shows. We do the same thing we did before. Huge guest list, no backstage, our beer is your beer. We’re a little anachronism.”