Ryan Hoffman on True Till Death

Curtis with Chain Of Strength at the Safari Club, DC, Summer 1989, Photo: Chris Yormick

Ronny Little sang for Rain On The Parade and also did a few zines (most notoriously, Fuck You) as well as the Bare Bones blog a few years back. Around 1997 he also did a quarter sized zine called Penalty Box that had some cool little pieces in it. One such piece was a little blurb he ran that came straight from Ryan Hoffman in February of 1997. I always thought this was cool, and Ronny was cool with us running it here. True Till Death indeed. -Gordo DCXX

True Till Death was one of the last things we put together for the first 7". Frosty came up with this riff, and it was really basic. The whole thing with Chain Of Strength wasn't to be this intricate hardcore band. It was just to play simple progressions that enable you to kind of go off and play with power and emotion. That was the whole idea behind Chain Of Strength.

I wrote most of the lyrics. I started the song, and Curt pretty much helped me finish it up. Basically, the whole thing was taken from an interview with Al from SSD. He was just talking how...'cause I was going through the same thing (Ed. Note: This isn't a typo, I think Al was talking about being in a band Ryan could relate as he was going through the same thing with Justice League). I was in a band. He was in a band. I happened to go back to my roots, where he was talking about going back to his roots, but his roots were different than mine. He's a little bit older than me, and basically his roots were Van Halen, and he talked about how he was so into Van Halen, and that he bought a whole row of front row tickets to go see a Van Halen concert, and just basically how SSD was just a progression into hard rock. He just wanted to reach thousands of people and all of these things, and it just totally turned me off.


Alex with Chain in DC, Photo courtesy of: Kevin Young

I was the complete opposite. I was touring with 7Seconds and Justice League, and things of that sort, and I wanted to go back to playing way small shows and actually saying something that people are actually going to listen to. More people are going to hear you at a small show than at a big concert, you know what I mean?

So basically, I just wrote about that interview. A lot of it was taken from the interview, and the second verse was more or less an, "okay, we're going to pick up where you guys left off" sort of thing. You guys helped form this whole straight edge movement...this whole hardcore movement, and we're going to pick up where you left off and run with it.


Alex, Ryan and Curtis with Chain Of Strength in NY, 1988