Reno Divorce's Brent Loveday bets on sobriety to win

"Sunsets and Corvettes" was partly written during the first incarnation of Reno Divorce, in Orlando, Florida, after a teenage Loveday saw Social Distortion for the first time. He says it was on par with someone seeing the Beatles or the Stones, or Elvis in the '50s. Even though he had listened to a cassette tape of the band and had seen the documentary Another State of Mind, which includes early tour footage of Social Distortion and Youth Brigade, he says nothing could have prepared him for seeing the group live and seeing how Mike Ness commanded the room.

"Mike Ness's stage presence back then — you couldn't compare it to anything," Loveday marvels. "He was probably 27 years old at the time, but he just commanded a room full of 600 people. You know, all eyes were on him, and they didn't avert for a second."

Reno Divorce's Brent Loveday (second from left) is on the road to recovery.

Location Info

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Marquis Theater

2009 Larimer St.
Denver, CO 80205

Category: Bars/Clubs

Region: Downtown Denver

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Details

Reno Divorce, CD release, with Drag the River, Boldtype and DJ Kursed, 8 p.m. Monday, December 31, Marquis Theater, 2009 Larimer Street, $10-$12, 303-487-0111.

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More About

• Brent Loveday
• Ruben Patino
• Orlando (Florida)
• Punk Rock
• Arts, Entertainment, and Media

Social D has clearly had a big impact on Loveday, who ranks Prison Bound as one of his top three most influential albums. It gets top honors, he says, because it's essentially a punk band shedding its punk shell and making a country record. "To me," says Loveday, "I really admired the balls that it took them to release that." Second on that list is T.S.O.L.'s Revenge, whose riffs Loveday says he struggles with playing, and right behind that is Dag Nasty's Field Day, another record where the band departed somewhat from its original sound.

"I liked when a punk band, with their unique perspective of the world in songwriting, went and did something that sounded more like popular music, because it just had an edge to it and an approach that was different," he explains.

While Loveday had been dabbling on guitar from the first time he saw Social D, he was fifteen when he had a breakthrough. He was messing around on the guitar one day and stumbled upon a T.S.O.L. riff, and that's when it all clicked. A few years later he formed Reno Divorce with his best friend, Tony Owens, in Orlando, and then Loveday and his wife moved to California to be closer to his son, who was living in Colorado with his mother. But once he got there, he couldn't find people to play with, and he was broke all the time, so he ended up moving to Denver in 2001.

"It was the best thing that ever happened to me," he says of his move to the Mile High City. "I resigned myself. I was depressed about it. Then when I got here, I couldn't believe how backward my thinking was about what this place was about."

Nothing like new beginnings.