Rux

Jonghee dropped by the practice room.
We talked about We Are the Punx and everything, and then he asked if I could step in for a while — Sanghyeon, Rux’s drummer, couldn’t keep playing with the band due to some personal circumstances.
Hm, honestly I thought, oh, this could be fun, so after a few rehearsals to roughly get in sync we started playing shows. Rux had a completely different vibe from Half Brothers.
Half Brothers was pop-punk, something like the Toy Dolls, while Rux was street punk through and through. Even the atmosphere of the shows was different, and so was where the songs put their weight.
Back then Juhyun (of Galaxy Express) was still on bass, and Gunwoo (now the YouTuber Minimal Yumok) was on guitar. We shot the “Hanmaeum” music video together, played the Korea-Japan Oi Festival, and put in a lot of work playing club shows.
We also got a few chances to play rock festivals, and I got to go up there. Not quite ten thousand people, maybe five thousand? — the crowd surging together like one single organism. And the drums, even though they’re at the very back, are also up on the highest riser, so I get this view from up there that honestly only I get to see: the band and the crowd fusing into one, this real marbling of interaction unfolding in front of me. Anyway, that show on Pentaport’s sub-stage was — how do I put it — a genuinely special experience for me, the kind where I thought, is this the feeling I’ve been raising all this hell trying to get to, all this time?
We also went to Let’s Rock Festival — Jonghee and the organizers went back and forth arguing over our set time before we even got on stage. We’d decided to open with “Ruckus Army,” with a drum intro, and Jonghee asked if I could just keep repeating the same pattern until he gave me the cue. Sure, okay, I said, and started —
Duh-guh-dung tak-tak, duh-guh-dung tak-tak, duh-guh-dung tak-tak, duh-guh-dung tak-tak……. I kept playing that for over a minute, and this guy wasn’t giving any cue, he was just staring out at the crowd. I must have played it for at least two minutes.
Why, was it because the stage was so big? Playing the same pattern over and over, I started losing track of which bar I was even on, whether I’d counted to three or to five, my legs started giving out, and right as I was thinking, god damn it, would you just start already, the cue finally came.
Three, four, in my head, juwang~~ duh-guh-dung tak-tak, juwang~~ duh-guh-dung tak-tak, and then the guitar and bass came in and the whole place went off. It was still daytime so the crowd hadn’t fully filled in yet, but I could already feel that surging energy from down below rolling right back up to me.
We were about to launch into the second song, “Our Life, Our Stage,” when Jonghee announced into the mic, “Alright, last song.” Huh? All the other members were like, huh? Everyone just stared at Jonghee, like what are you talking about — turned out the organizers had only given us 15 minutes total, setup included. No matter how unknown an indie band we were, that was pushing it. Jonghee, pissed off about it, went, fuck it then, I’ll make it even shorter — and we played just two songs and walked off.
Playing EBS Space Gonggam turned into another special experience. Even now, if you dig up the old footage, you can see just how tense and clueless I looked.
But once my wedding came around, I had no choice but to leave Rux too.