It’s the week before the Ink & Dagger shows in Philly, but Don Devore, founding member and guitarist, is in Los Angeles. When we hop on the phone, Devore’s getting samples ready. Their late frontman Sean McCabe’s voice loops in the background for just a minute. “I’m preloading Sean disses to the crowd,” Devore explains simply. “Sean disses?” “Yeah.”
In the four weeks following the coming-out party for the Philadelphia Society of Future Vampires, speculation ran amok, and the billboard didn’t even mention Ink & Dagger by name. Devore has been feverishly busy, something that’s characteristic. I first met Devore in the wake of the 2010 Ink & Dagger shows, and we formed a band ourselves. I recruited my friend Alan Yuch, from the Mongoloids, and I remember the look we gave each other when Devore walked into the first practice, rubbing his face, saying, “So our deal is we’re going to be perfect.” While we fell short, this is always the mission. It has always been the mission. It results in practices that span entire nights. It necessitates plotting and conspiracy. It requires purpose. Devore mentions that Dave Wagenschutz, their original drummer, has lost 13 pounds training and practicing for the shows.
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Devore played guitar in Frail, and McCabe fronted Crud is a Cult and Mandela Strikeforce. They met, sized each other up, and became best friends. Ink & Dagger did not emerge out of the darkness they would eventually walk into. From 1995 until 1999, a portal in Philadelphia was opened, and out of it came the Society of Future Vampires. Ink & Dagger were an ambush. The music lends itself to self-aggrandizing sentences like, “It is at once chaos and peace,” but the truth is their sound bridged the gap between punk and hardcore during a fractured time in a fractured city, and these records have long since gone out of print, reaching an almost mythic status in the age of availability.
Chris P
McCabe died in a motel in Indiana in 2000. Since his passing, the band have reunited to play only a couple of times — once, in 2010, when the guitarist of Crud is a Cult had mounting medical bills surrounding the care of their child. The Vampires provided where the world at large failed. Their return this October is a bit different — it bookends years of work, alongside Trust Records, pulling together everything necessary for a proper Ink & Dagger rerelease. There has also been a change in Devore’s relationship to the source material: “My relationship with the music, up until a few years ago, was very communal, as it just felt as much mine as it was like everybody else’s, and I kept that distance for a long time.” To revisit the music with the right energy and intent, it was important that it be an exercise in reanimating something, rather than a look back in time. “It’s not nostalgia, you know?” he says. “It’s just living right now, and it’s got to be the sickest shit we can possibly do. That just comes from putting the work in and making sure everything is produced properly.”
It wasn’t until Frail reunited for a string of shows across the country at the start of this year that things began to come together. The experience was warm, and most importantly, not stale. Devore reflects on revisiting his earliest songwriting, building on that for the Frail reunions, and how it led him back to Dagger’s music. “I can just look back, and I see all the similarities in the writing, being that I wrote all these songs and was developing as a guitar player,” he says. “It’s really interesting ‘cause starting with Ink & Dagger [material], I really see the thread that goes through to now [with my playing] and where I was developing before that.
“I knew there needed to be a [Dagger] discography, but everything was such a mess,” Devore continues, looking back on the state of things before the project began in earnest. But as time wore on, the pieces for a reissue began to fall into place. To untangle such a vast web of work and lore, Devore needed friends in his corner, like Evan Weiss, solo artist and Sparks/Orville Peck touring guitarist. “Evan Weiss, my partner in this whole endeavor, a couple of years ago, was like, ‘Let me help you. Let’s get this shit insanely organized. Let’s figure out a home for [the discography].’ Because he always knew I wanted to do a box set, with a book.” They searched for an ally who could be counted on, careful and understanding of the band’s legacy, and found that in Trust Records. “We talked to a bunch of people, and the prospect of Trust kept coming up.” Known for handling the discographies of ’80s hardcore luminaries like SSD, Youth Brigade, and 7 Seconds, the label was interested in taking on a project from the 1990s when they were linked with Devore. “[Trust] has that sort of anthropological approach of making sure shit is looked after in the punk world,” he describes.
Devore began to locate all the ephemera that would go into the book, which is authored by longtime friend and author Erik Bader. However, to give McCabe’s voice space, the book will not contain any quotes. Once the call went out, the pieces began pouring in from all corners. “We had people scanning stuff in all kinds of various cities because the collections were so big,” Devore says. “It’s cool when you see the live photos and show flyers, but it’s mostly other stuff… diary stuff, notes to each other, lawsuits. It’s really funny when you would have your itinerary and it’d be a show three weeks in the future, but you still have a paragraph of directions for it because there were no phones or GPS, and there’d be all kinds of private little notes in that. All of our merch. People that would write in self-realized applications for the Society of Future Vampires [to our] PO box.”
The magic that surrounds Ink & Dagger carried a different weight before the enormity of the internet. The band were quick to see the role the internet would play, releasing a song called “Vampire Fast Code Ver. 1.5” on their stunning 1998 release The Fine Art of Original Sin. The song’s lyrics detail the dystopia they see in the new world, and it’s almost more poignant now: “Your thoughts compiled/Your memory on file/This transfer in denial/You call this survival?/Break the system!” Lies and the distortion of the truth aren’t so much the tools of the trickster in 2025, but cudgels of the state. Today, it’s important to Devore and his cohort that the truth and earnestness of Ink & Dagger shine through, far beyond some good stories — some of which are true. A major barrier was the disarray the masters and art were in. The things necessary to pull together to make the project worthwhile. Devore doesn’t complain, but he doesn’t try to hide anything. “I’m tired,” he reveals. “It’s been a full-time job, especially the last six months. At least it’s definitely going according to plan. At least my plan.”
That plan is just now coming to fruition, with all pieces locking into place since everything went —somewhat — public at the start of October. This four-week spring after a six-month slog is nothing considering what it took to get to the place where it could all come together at all. “It’s been so unorganized. Everything has just been floating around. There’s been no central organization for a lot of material, and it was practically on purpose. Wes [Eisold from American Nightmare] would hit me up and be like, ‘Yeah, I’m gonna steal your shirt design for this thing.’ I’d be like, ‘Cool.’ But then there’d be 10 other people that didn’t feel the need to ask, and that was cool. That was fine. It’s probably the Grateful Dead of hardcore or something. But it’s been a joy to get it organized properly, to tell the story properly, and present these shows properly.”
Chris P
As I write this, the first of four thoroughly sold-out Ink & Dagger shows is underway at First Unitarian Church in Philadelphia. Thursday’s Geoff Rickly, the channeling voice on the microphone when Ink & Dagger play, is idling in the green room, which is gigantic. The green room is the actual main room of the church. His gentle and good-natured approach is generous for a frontman with his capabilities. He manages to front the band without taking away from McCabe’s memory or trying to compete with his spirit that lingers over their posthumous sets. The next morning, he writes on his Instagram stories, “It’s not my mic, it’s Sean’s mic, it’s your mic, so get the fuck up.”
The shows were planned for months, on the books for close to a year, each featuring important Philly blood, past and present, with direct support from Paint it Black, Deadguy, Soul Glo, and Honey. Each night, a frontman from Philadelphia, such as Michael Berdan of Uniform and Pierce Jordan of Soul Glo, will handle vocal duties for “Philapsychosis.”
For all the shortcomings of personal photography at concerts, the Instagram videos that creep across social media over the weekend do what justice can be done to the gigs, when seen through a tiny screen. Devore is not an effusive man, but he is earnest and exceedingly grateful looking back. “[The whole experience] has been unbelievably rewarding, because I was able to turn this corner and start feeling more celebratory about it and more in tune with the Philadelphia Society of Future Vampires, a vibe which has never left. You just gotta remind yourself sometimes. It’s just like a version of PMA.”
Over the weekend, a mural went up in Philadelphia, on Boston Street, between 10th and 11th, courtesy of Mural Arts Philadelphia: A portrait of Sean McCabe, by Philly stalwart Steve Powers, aka ESPO. The shows have passed, but the music plays on, and Sean McCabe is forever.