Frank Navetta

Frank Navetta and Dave Nolte met as sixth graders at American Martyrs Catholic School in Manhattan Beach, California.[1] "I was friends with him straight away", Nolte later recalled, "We both had interest in music, we both started playing guitar at the same time."[1] They decided to start a band, and Navetta came up with the name Descendents, an intentional misspelling of "descendants".[1] In mid-1977 they befriended Bill Stevenson, who impressed them by overdubbing his own backing vocals onto a demo tape Navetta had recorded.[1] Stevenson joined the band as drummer, and he and Navetta became good friends; as Stevenson later recalled:

We really hit it off and we would go fishing every day. I was in awe of all these great songs he'd written, and he would play them on the acoustic guitar really hard, Johnny Ramone style, all six strings. He had this bitter resentment that drenched every step he took and every word that he spoke. His songs were just filled with that envy of people that are better looking, that are more successful. It was just really inspiring to be around someone that just hated everything that much. It was just great.[2]

While rehearsing in Navetta's brother's garage in Long Beach, California in 1979, the trio heard Tony Lombardo practicing bass guitar nearby and recruited him into the band.[3] Nolte soon bowed out to join his brothers in The Last, and the power trio lineup of Navetta, Lombardo, and Stevenson released the Descendent's debut single, "Ride the Wild" / "It's a Hectic World" (1979).[4] Navetta wrote and sang on the A-side track.[5] Stevenson's classmate Milo Aukerman joined the band in 1980 as lead singer, solidifying the early Descendents lineup.[6] The Fat EP (1981) included two Navetta compositions, "My Dad Sucks" (co-written with Lombardo) and the fishing-themed "Mr. Bass".[5] The Descendents' debut album Milo Goes to College (1982), so named because Aukerman was leaving the band to study biology, included five more of Navetta's songs: "I Wanna Be a Bear" (co-written with Lombardo), "I'm Not a Loser", "Parents", "Statue of Liberty", and "Marriage" (co-written with Stevenson).[5]

With Aukerman away at college, the Descendents added Ray Cooper as both singer and second guitarist.[7] They performed with this lineup, and occasionally as a quintet when Aukerman would make return visits to Los Angeles.[7] Stevenson pushed for the band to tour, which Navetta and Lombardo were against: "Bill kind of sat down with me and Frank and said something to the effect of we were at a point where we needed to grow by going on the road", Lombardo later said. "Frank said no, and I had to say no also, so he said he had to leave the band and we were both kind of bummed out. I don't think Frank even believed him at first. That was a bad scenario."[8] Navetta, Lombardo, and Cooper tried to start a new band, the Ascendants.[8][9][10] "We played one show", said Lombardo. "Frank played in his underwear, and I don't mean boxers. It was all a disaster, it was sad, for me anyway."[8] Navetta ultimately quit the band by setting all of his musical equipment on fire and moving to Oregon, where he became a full-time fisherman.[11][12][13]

Although Navetta had left the Descendents, one song he had written with Lombardo, "Rockstar" (lyrics by Navetta, music by Lombardo), was used for their 1985 album I Don't Want to Grow Up.[14] Lombardo subsequently left the band as well, and the Descendents experienced more lineup changes and released two more albums before Aukerman left the band in 1987. Stevenson changed the band's name to All, and they continued to tour and release albums. When Aukerman reunited with the band as the Descendents for the 1996 album Everything Sucks, Navetta and Lombardo both participated. Navetta wrote and played guitar on the song "Doghouse", and also played on the song "Eunuch Boy".[15]

In 2002 Navetta and Lombardo joined Stevenson for a reunion performance by the Descendents' original power trio lineup at Stevenson's Stockage festival in Fort Collins, Colorado.[16] According to Lombardo, they also recorded some songs for a potential future release: "We recorded some of my songs in 2006 at The Blasting Room. In 2002 we recorded a whole bunch of songs, mostly Frank's songs. He was a great songwriter. He had such a unique EQ out of his amp. When we recorded later in 2008, we did some more of my songs, but Frank wasn't there for that. We tried to recreate that unique Frank sound. I'd like to think of these as songs that if the Descendents had stayed together, this is what we would have sounded like. Those are in Bill's hands. Milo has said from the get-go that he would record it, but he hasn't yet."[17] This project would finally be realized over a decade after Navetta's death in 2021 in the form of the album 9th & Walnut.[18]

Navetta died October 31, 2008, after becoming ill over the course of a few days.[12][13][19] "What I was told by his family", said Stevenson, "was that he died from a diabetic coma and he never came to, he just died in his sleep. But suffice it to say that Frank was in very poor health. Maybe the last ten years of his life, I saw a real decline there [...] Of course, we rekindled our friendship years later in a way that was very ultimate and very real, and it didn't involve the band because he wasn't in the band. He would come out here every year and stay for about a month with me, every year. He did it for years, until he died."[19]