All is the fourth album by the American punk rock band the Descendents, released in 1987 through SST Records. It was the band's first album with bassist Karl Alvarez and guitarist Stephen Egerton, who brought new songwriting ideas to the group. The album is titled after the concept of "All" invented by drummer Bill Stevenson and friend Pat McCuistion in 1980. Based on the goals of achieving "the total extent" and "to not settle for some, to always go for All", the philosophy was the subject of the one-second title track, the two-second "No, All!", and "All-O-Gistics".
All marked the end of the Descendents' original run. Following two tours of the United States to promote the album, singer Milo Aukerman left the group to pursue a career in biochemistry. The band was relaunched under the new name All, and released eight albums with other singers between 1988 and 1995, before reuniting with Aukerman under the Descendents name.
Background
Following the Descendents' summer 1986 tour in support of their third album, Enjoy!, guitarist Ray Cooper and bassist Doug Carrion left the band. Seeking a new bassist, drummer Bill Stevenson contacted a musician he knew in Boise, Idaho. The musician declined but suggested Salt Lake City native Karl Alvarez, whose band the Bad Yodelers was staying with him at the time while on tour. According to singer Milo Aukerman, Alvarez and Stevenson "just locked in completely." "Those first tours were very grueling in the way that it is when you're not used to it", recalled Alvarez.
Writing
As with previous Descendents albums, all four band members contributed to the songwriting of the new record. With their shared history and eclectic musical tastes, Alvarez and Egerton brought new ideas to the band. "We already had a kind of highly evolved vocabulary of licks and riffs", recalled Alvarez. "That's proven to be one of our identifying songs", said Stevenson 26 years later, "Here he is, new to the band, he walks in and writes one of the songs that would define us." Aukerman's lyrics for "Iceman" were loosely based on the 1946 play The Iceman Cometh by Eugene O'Neill.|align=right |bgcolor=#c6dbf7 |salign=right |width=33%
The album was titled after the concept of "All", which Stevenson and his friend Pat McCuistion had invented during a fishing trip on Stevenson's boat Orca in 1980. According to Aukerman, "While drinking all this coffee in the midst of catching mackerel they came up with the concept of All — doing the utmost, achieving the utmost. The more they got into it the more it turned into their own religion; it's partly humor, but it's also an outlook on how to conduct your life: to not settle for some, to always go for All." Stevenson served as record producer, and later said that of the Descendents' first five studio albums he felt only Milo Goes to College (1982) came closer than All to authentically capturing the band's sound. SST released All and also re-released all of the Descendents' previous albums.
Supporting tours and Aukerman's departure
thumb|Since 1987 it has been common for Aukerman to hold up a sign displaying the "All-O-Gistics" when performing the song, as seen here in 2014.
The band supported the album with a 60-day spring 1987 tour from mid-February to mid-April that took them through the Southwestern and Southern United States, up the East Coast, into Canada to Montreal and Hamilton, then snaking westward through the Northern and Central United States before making their way northwest to Calgary and Vancouver, and finally down the West Coast of the United States back to Los Angeles; covering 29 states and 4 Canadian provinces with a total of 44 shows in 41 cities.
The "FinALL" tour was so-called due to Aukerman's decision to leave the band to pursue postgraduate education in microbiology. "The band was fun, but I hadn't achieved All, basically, in music or in science, and I had the opportunity to go try to achieve All more in science, and I decided to take that opportunity", he later reflected, adding that he had always considered music a hobby and science as his career, and "the more the music started to seem like a career, the less I seemed to like it. In '87 I left the band and we did the final tour. There wasn't one of these things like 'Well, I'm gonna do this for a while and come back to the band.' It was more like 'I'm embarking on my life's career to do this. "I've been wanting to change the name of the band to ALL for eight years", he said during the FinALL tour, adding that it would not feel right to continue as the Descendents without Aukerman and that he wished to shelve the name in case he and Aukerman should wish to use it again at some point. He remarked that the relationship-themed songs "prove that the most creative music comes out of personal tragedy" and called it a felony that "Pep Talk" was not included on the band's 1991 "best of" compilation Somery. Jenny Eliscu of Rolling Stone praised several of the album's songs as being among the Descendents' best work: "All is often underrated because of the strange pseudo-arty instrumental tracks on its second half; nonetheless, the album features three of the band's best songs, 'Cameage', 'Coolidge', and 'Clean Sheets'. The subjects are perennial, but [the band's] sophistication as lyricist[s] has grown. 'Coolidge' is about accepting one's uncoolness, and 'Clean Sheets' talks of being forced to sleep on the floor after a lover's infidelity sullies the sheets." For the Descendents tribute album Homage: Lots of Bands Doing Descendents' Songs (1995), Garden Variety covered "Clean Sheets", Parasites covered "Pep Talk", Peepshow covered "Coolidge", the Teen Idols covered "Cameage", and Meatjack covered "Iceman". For Milo Turns 50: Songs of the Descendents (2013), The Henry Clay People covered "Clean Sheets", Yacht covered "All" and Beatsteaks covered "Clean Sheets".