Recently, the team sat with James Schoessling, the vocalist of Public Display Of Infection, Patrick’s first high school band, in which he drummed. We’ve previously spoken with Joe Edmonds, another prior member of this band, but James had plenty of other details to fill us in on: stolen lawn decorations, high-schoolers at the bar, excessive use of duct tape, and more.
JOEY: We have plenty of questions for you, and considering you’re not the first member of PDI we have interviewed, this one might be a little unique! Other than hearing stories from you, we’re mainly trying to find any other content that Joe didn’t have that we were looking for. I know you mentioned this over the phone– when you guys played at the Afternight, they recorded your set, and Joe doesn’t have that VHS tape, but we were wondering, do you have that?
JAMES: I had it. I actually had a copy of it. People have seen it at my house. In fact, I haven’t spoken to Roger Cuzelis, our guitarist, in a minute. But I did talk to him last night, and we might have information on where that video is.
JOEY: Oh, really?
JAMES: Fingers crossed. There might be somebody who we think that video lies in the hands of right now.
JOEY: Okay, so is that someone who you want us to talk to or– Who do you think has it?
JAMES: I think you already did.
DES: You think Joe has it?
JAMES: No, no, it’s not Joe. I was thinking Beldo. You guys refer to him as Jeffrey Beller. Roger thinks he might have been the last one that video got passed on to the VHS.
JOEY: Okay, interesting.
JAMES: We’re gonna check into that for you.
JOEY: Okay, so with Beldo… We reached out to him on Facebook around the same time we reached out to you. He never replied. But when we talked to Brian Silver– Brian still talks with him. And we talked to Beldo through Brian. We said, “Can you ask Beldo who the ‘Joe’ in the band is?” And that’s how we found Joe’s name. I mean, we might be able to reach out to Brian again and ask him about it. But, yeah, if that’s the last lead of who may have it, we will definitely reach out and ask about that because that’s something that we really want to see. We even reached out to the owner of the Afternight, Dino Manzella, and asked him like, “Hey, do you guys still have the master copies?” And unfortunately, the guy who ran all of the master copies passed away, and no one really knows whatever happened to them.
JAMES: I know Roger said he was gonna reach out, so I think collectively as a team–like [Roger and I] are a team right now too! We’re trying to find it, man. We’re trying. It has to be found. It was beautiful. Absolutely beautiful.
DES: It had been mentioned by the guy that you talked to. I can’t remember his name off the top of my head… That you guys did like an interview portion after that. Is that on that VHS? Is that separate from that?
JAMES: I think it was on there. There was like a sit-down interview. It was very brief. It was after the fact. Like we were just kids in high school. But yeah, it did live. I’m just gonna say that it’s out there somewhere. They did that with every band, though, so we didn’t feel too exceptional. [LAUGHS]
JOEY: Yeah, but that, that would be awesome because we don’t even have pictures of you guys playing. So having video would be awesome. Would Roger want to get in contact with us, too? At all? Because we messaged him a long while back, but he never responded.
JAMES: Yes. He’s going to kill me for saying this. [LAUGHS] You know how we were all straight edge hardcore? Roger now runs breweries. He just opened one in Evanston, Illinois. So he’s a very busy man. But he would love to talk to you guys, and he’s got a lot of information. As I said, I talked to him for the first time in probably 10 years yesterday. He filled me in on a lot of the stuff that I was missing personally. But he would love to chat with you guys.
DES: We’d be enthused, for sure.
JAMES: Roger was like the nucleus [of the band]. I’m just gonna put it like that. That was Roger.
JOEY: Interesting, I definitely want to touch on band dynamics later in this list of questions. But just cause we talked about the tape and the interview: if there’s anything else, like any other photos, video, or any audio of the band that we don’t know about… Is there anything else out there, do you think?
JAMES: Well, the other person you guys need to talk to is Greg Chadwick from Grinding Process. He has those LPs at his parents’ house. After talking to Roger, he confirmed it to me. We never recorded for Brian Silver as PDI. That did not happen. We did not go into his basement. Whoever said Drew Furse was singing on that was incorrect. But there are albums– stuff that Greg has. Grinding Process LPs and the Glenview stuff, it’s there. And Stump, I think, is– Well, he wasn’t on those. But he played for Grinding Process.
DES: The Glenview bands are the thing that I mostly focus on. Getting in contact with anybody from Grinding Process has been difficult. That’s just another thing for me to think about all day.
JAMES: I’ll tell you this. I don’t know if– again, I kind of wanted to talk to you guys a little bit before this interview because I know you guys interviewed Joey, but we actually, at one point in time, we actually did get rid of Joey as a guitarist.
JOEY: Oh, wait, really?
JAMES: And we brought in Greg Chadwick as a guitarist, and some other people filled in here and there. And then Stump went to Grinding Process. It was like we were two bands together, separated by a little bit of time. I know in one of the interviews, Stump said that we were all trying to be Grinding Process– No, we weren’t. We were trying to be us. We were trying to be PDI and better than Grinding Process in every way! [LAUGHS] I sang for Grinding Process at their practices all the time. Loved it. Love those boys.
Joey was a good guy. We loved him. But, there was, you know, something happened that… I think he even stated– he didn’t want us doing covers.
JOEY: Oh, I see. Yeah, he did mention his dislike of covers in our interview.
JAMES: It really kind of fell apart after that because we were in our first year trying to make music. We could only come up with maybe four or five original songs, and then we had to fill it in. So we did covers. And what was big at that time was like Rage Against the Machine, you know, Deftones, so many other bands that had that hip hop mentality. And at one point, in PDI, we had a guy who did turntables for us.
JOEY: Wait, [LAUGHS] really?
JAMES: And he was at the Afternight [show]. Because there was a mashup between us and a band called Diatribe. And we definitely needed turntables for that. Iit was basically what you would expect. It was like Korn and Deftones doing Wicked together back in like, the early 2000s, you know. Off the Predator track from Ice Cube. And Joey hated it! We had fun, guys. PDI had fun.
DES: This is starting to make Rude Awakening make way more sense now. How did everybody listening to this feel?
JAMES: Listening to like, us doing that nu-metal rap rock? That was the thing– Slipknot was just coming in and had a DJ, and we were just like… We’re gonna do that, too. A lot of people were into it at the time.
JOEY: So the guy that was doing the turntables–
JAMES: I want to credit him. Curt Hansen; he was best friends with Nick Anderson, our bassist.
JOEY: Okay, good to know– That’s crazy. That’s so funny that Joe didn’t mention that at all.
JAMES: Well, he was out of the band by that time. He wouldn’t have known it happened.
JOEY: Oh, that makes sense now!. Good information– I guess anything that happened after Joe left would be something we don’t know about.
JAMES: As I said, I didn’t want to put anyone on blast. I love Joey.
DES: You were all teenagers. It’s stupid, teenage… whatever. “You’re out of the band because I don’t want to do this.”
JAMES: Yeah, literally! I remember, like, it was yesterday.
JOEY: That’s hilarious. I’m glad I wasn’t in a band in high school. I would have gotten in some really dumb fights. I also wanted to show you this photo– This is something we found really early on; Beldo, or Jeff, has an old Twitter account. Years ago, he posted this picture of a piece of paper that had writing on it that seemed to be lyrics, tagging Patrick and joking about PDI. Yeah, seemingly, Patrick wrote this.
DES: We kind of assumed that these were the lyrics to his rap part on Rude Awakening before we found the track. I mean, you can’t decipher everything, but I know that’s not what it says. When we talked to him, he said that that’s not what it was. He couldn’t remember what this was.
JAMES: I think I know. Yeah, this kind of goes into what I think was going on with Joey. Joey at live shows always wanted to do a political statement– like a skit. I think at Battle of the Bands, he dressed up as a cop or something. This reminds me of Joey. This could be one of those skits that he wrote out that Stump and Joey did at multiple shows.
DES: I had hypothesized something similar ages ago. I was like, this is probably something that they went up on stage for, like a live show. In that same vein, do you have any show flyers or set lists?
JAMES: Oh, man, we never did set lists. [LAUGHS] Before every single show, we knew our list already. I played a lot of sports, and so did Nick. Before every single show, we would get together, we would huddle up, we would have a pow-wow, and we would hype ourselves for the show. We knew exactly what we were doing. We were so in sync with one another. It was– It was insane. So, no set lists, we just played. We knew what we had to do.
JOEY: I mean, you guys didn’t have many songs, but that’s still really cool. You were all really passionate about music at a young age, especially Patrick.
DES: I want to tack on really quickly about the EP that you recorded at Rosebud with Sean O’Keefe. So that was recorded in 99, correct?
JAMES: Correct, yes.
DES: The taped show at the Afternight– was that before or after you guys recorded the EP?
JAMES: [The EP] was before. I’m pretty sure that was before because… After the recording, we had to get the music out. So we got maybe 50 or 100 cassette tapes, and then that led to the Afternight. And at least that’s where my memory is at with that.
JOEY: All right, so our next question. What was the songwriting dynamic like in the band?
JAMES: I do want to mention… A lot of hardcore bands– I don’t care if you’re Earth Crisis, Harvest, Vision of Disorder, there is going to be a real hard fouling with the lyrics. We decided [lyrics] as a team. I said, “Guys, I’m not putting anything into our lyrics that you guys don’t want to have.” We were sitting down– we have the music, but you guys are going to help me write the lyrics because I want each and every one of you guys to have a voice on this. So we sat down, and we wrote the lyrics. There are actual lyrics. You may not be able to hear them as clear as crystal, but that was the sound back then. That was the straight edge hardcore sound, like it was really hard to decipher lyrics. My lyrics were no different. Very difficult to decipher. But I promise you, it. It wasn’t just like, “rah, rah, rah.” There were actual lyrics. It meant a lot to us at the time.
JOEY: Okay, got it. I see. So you all wrote them together, like collectively?
JAMES: Yes.
JOEY: And regarding Patrick’s rap on Rude Awakening, Joe recalled Patrick writing that part on his own and then bringing it to the band. We asked Patrick about it, and Patrick was like, “I don’t know if I did it that way.” He couldn’t really remember how that ended up happening. What’s your recollection of that?
JAMES: I saw the interview you guys did with Stump. He sat down with me and [wrote] it. We did it together. But honestly, he did the work. All I had to do was just be like, ” Cool, done deal.”
DES: You had veto power.
JAMES: There wasn’t anything I was gonna really veto from Stump ever. [LAUGHS]
JOEY: So I think we may have talked about it in the interview with Joe, but back in the day, when MP3.com was a thing, Patrick made an MP3.com page for the band. That’s like how we found out about the details of the Afternight tape. Was there ever a proper, separate website for the band?
JAMES: No. In fact, after everything was said and done, I remember going to college, and one of my friends came up to me. He remembered PDI, and he was just like, “Dude, did you go to that website? Did you see your band is like number one right now on streaming?” I had no idea what he was talking about. Like, no clue. But apparently, PDI had some weight [on MP3.com]. I would say a year after we were done, it was still being listened to over the Internet.
I never went [on the page]. I never saw it. But I had people come up to me and be like, “Your music is still going on, and you guys are battling it out with other bands.” And I’m like, “We don’t play anymore. What’s going on?”
JOEY: That does seem right because the MP3.com–when it went defunct in 2003, someone basically took a capture of all of the pages so that you can see what they were like in December of 2003, and it lists the number of plays from that date. Patrick’s band, which he joined after his time in PDI and Grinding Process, Patterson, had low plays in comparison to what PDI is listed as having at that point. I remember looking at that and being shocked because I think more local Glenview kids knew about Patterson than they did about PDI. But at that point, around 2003, PDI had more plays.
JAMES: That’s so funny that you guys found that. I love that. That’s a great stat.
DES: So in 1998, both Joe and Patrick told us that you guys played a Halloween show. We found out about this from a post on Roger’s Facebook page. Brian Silver had commented, and a couple of other people that I can’t remember, who are kind of notable, commented about this show and said it was very legendary. We’ve got the recallings of the stories from the other two, but I kind of want to hear your recollection of this Halloween show.
JAMES: You got it. Almost everything you heard is true. But here’s the thing. I don’t think it was a nativity scene. It was in October, way too early for a nativity scene to be put out. So I do believe– and I did talk to Roger about this yesterday –there were some decorations stolen. Lawn decorations. And, depicted with maybe some not-so-moral coding… Yeah, no, we definitely defaced them. It was bad. I didn’t do it. Stump didn’t do it. But it was done, and it was there. It was our first show.
DES: Wait, really? Your first show?
JAMES: The Halloween show was our first show. It was at Lucas Sikorski’s house, I think. From The Imposters.
JOEY: No way! We actually talked with Lucas a year or so ago. Did you guys play with any other bands in that show?
JAMES: Grinding Process couldn’t make it. They were all in college. But there were some bands, I think Rudnick’s band was there.
JOEY: Oh, really?
JAMES: I think they might have been the headliner. But I know that we were just getting started.
JOEY: So Dave Rudnick… I mean, he was in Kungfu Rick. Is that what you’re referring to?
JAMES: Yes! Kungfu Rick. They were still in the area and still playing shows… Glenview hardcore was crazy, man. It was awesome because all these kids from older bands would eventually show up somewhere or another down the line in a garage in other bands.
DES: On that note, what was that Battle of the Bands show like? We know that you guys won with two-thirds of the votes, which is pretty impressive. What’s your recollection of that?
JAMES: I do remember having to bring the lyrics in… There was an admin member who was kind of in charge of that event. Stump knew him pretty well. And so I sent my lyrics in, and they approved it. Then we played our set. We had a following, as you said. About 10 seconds into us playing, the PA cut out. I turned around, and I looked at [the admin member], and I looked at these two other students, and they’re standing by the PA, and they’re just like, “I didn’t do it.” I was told that it was an order from somebody else. The school pulled the plug on us because they didn’t know what I was saying, which is actually really funny. But the cool part was– I looked back at those guys like, “Are you going to plug my mic back in? No?” So I turned to the crowd and sang. All of our friends sang in unison with me, so I didn’t need a PA that night. That was the coolest show.
DES: So your friends and fans all knew the lyrics by that point. Had you guys been playing a decent amount of shows between that Halloween show and this Battle of the Bands show?
JAMES: We didn’t play a ton of shows like [the Battle of the Bands show]. We played probably once every week, every two weeks. There were a couple of gigs where we went into the city on a school night. We’re all in high school. Stump is 14 years old and the drummer of our band. And we’re playing in a bar in Chicago with a 14-year-old drummer. No one said anything to us. [LAUGHS]
DES: With the track record, I’ve heard about Chicago in the 90s with the music scene, I’m not shocked.
JAMES: One was [called] the Crazy Horse or something. And here’s the other thing. Patrick’s sister– she came to see our show in Chicago one of those nights. And again, here’s Stump drinking a Diet Coke at a bar at like 10:30 at night on a school night. And we’re chatting it up with his sister. She said my singing was shit, but I totally agree with her. [LAUGHS]
JOEY: Oh man, that’s brutal!
JAMES: I don’t know if you guys realized… Stump, we hazed the hell out of him, and he was such a good spirit. We put duct tape over his mouth at a show. Meaning like, “Dude, you’re, you’re the freshman of this band. Like, you are not allowed to talk. You are not allowed to speak your mind whatsoever unless it is in our band setting! So you go out on stage, Patrick, and you’re wearing duct tape over your mouth!” [LAUGHS] He did it, and he loved every second of it.
DES: I was actually re-watching our interview this morning, and he mentioned he was like, “I was just so Gee Whiz!”
JAMES: Very, ‘Thank you for letting me be a part of this band.’ He was a really good sport.
JOEY: That’s awesome.
DES: I think he mentioned that he remembers playing about 15 to 20 shows. You said that you guys didn’t play a lot, but do you recall how many you did play roughly?
JAMES: We played a couple of Battle of the Bands. I think we won two Battle of the Bands. Including Glenbrook South. There was another one, and it was– I think it was in Winnetka or Wilmette, and it was a bunch of other bands. We won that by popular vote. But out of all the shows we played, it wasn’t a lot like you said. I would say probably about 15 to 20 shows throughout our span.
DES: Someone, somewhere, told us that you guys played at the Fireside Bowl. Joe did not remember this. We didn’t ask Patrick. Do you remember if this happened?
JAMES: We all loved the Fireside. Fireside was where we wanted to play. We never got that gig. Grinding Process did, I believe.
DES: I don’t recall where we heard that, but speaking of Grinding Process… On their website– which you would have graduated by this point –in March of 2000, a news update was posted that said, “PDI is back, go listen to their music,” and it linked to the MP3 page. Patrick was running the website at this point. When we talked to Joe, he said that there were no reunion talks. But according to you…
JAMES: Joe was out of the band. Here’s what that was. Nick and I had come home from college for spring break, and we wanted to get together with PDI. I think Greg Chadwick joined us in Stump’s basement. It was me, Nick, Roger, Stump, and all of our friends who were always there whenever we played. We did one playthrough of all our songs. And we’re like, “This is cool. Like, guys, we should do this band again.” I felt bad because I was in school, and Nick was in school. It felt right, and we talked about it, but then it just never came through.
JOEY: That’s a shame, but good to have clarification on that, though. So you mentioned Greg. An interesting thing is that on the MP3.com page for the band, the group members listed are “Nick, James, Roger, Stump, and Dekker.” A guy named Dekker… is that Greg?
JAMES: No idea who that is.
JOEY: Okay, That’s still a mystery then. I mean, this page was written by Patrick.
JAMES: And if Patrick doesn’t remember, there’s no way I’m remembering. No clue who Dekker was.
JOEY: Because it now makes sense that Joe wasn’t listed because he would have been out of the band by that point. Maybe Dekker was a nickname for Greg. That’s the only thing I could think of.
JAMES: No, because he never went into the studio with us. Yeah, that wouldn’t be the case.
JOEY: I guess that’ll just always be a mystery then. Unless Roger knows.
JAMES: I’ll check with Roger.
JOEY: Maybe Nick knows, too. Or what about Mike Day, who was in Grinding Process for a little bit?
JAMES: He really wasn’t a Grinding Process member like Patrick said. He was a super fan.
DES: Well, I know that Mike Day took pictures for them, at least at some point.
JAMES: Yeah, he was great at that. He was really good at taking pictures of live shows. I can try to get your guys in contact. I could reach out to Mike and probably get a hold of him.
JOEY: We’d love to see [those photos]. On the Grinding Process website, it lists photos he took from when Patrick was in the band, but unfortunately, the photos are so old that they weren’t saved. So we know that there were photos there, but we can’t see them.
JAMES: So, there really was a Grinding Process webpage?
JOEY: Yes, there was. You can view an archive of it. I can even send a link over.
JAMES: Greg and I have been trying forever to figure out where that music went. There was one music video that they actually shot for Glenbrook South.
DES: Really?
JAMES: It should be in the archives of Glenbrook South’s student records for TV broadcasting. I would search there because they should not have gotten rid of that. But that would have been Grinding Process’s “video breakthrough” that they had on cable TV.
DES: Do you know what year that would have been, roughly?
JAMES: 98’. I’ll be honest. That Grinding Process album was phenomenal. Like, that really kicked all our butts into gear into moving forward after they were kind of done. But then they resurged again with Stump.
DES: Are you referring to the demo? Because the only music that we’ve been able to find is the split EP that they did with The Imposters, so there’s that one. Because I know Patrick told us that Screams of Justice was his kind of inspiration for Rude Awakening.
JAMES: It was that one. Drew Furse did a bang-up job on that one. [LAUGHS]
DES: Yeah, but like that’s like the only music that’s– And then I think one song that was on the Glenview Hardcore 1998 vinyl. Which, by the way, I ordered, and it’s going to be here in like an hour. So I’m excited.
JAMES: Oh my gosh. No way! That reminds me… Can I tell you something funny about Rude Awakening? It’s the ska song, right? Like that was the internal name for that song. Stump loves ska. We despised it like when we were playing shows. We were in a lot of shows with ska members, and that was not our style of music. It was for Patrick, not us. We did that song as a complete knock against the ska community. And even if you listen to the guitars, the guitars are off tune on purpose.
DES: That’s what [Patrick] had mentioned. Roger wrote this ska riff as a diss track to ska. I’ve been trying to decipher the lyrics for all of the songs and it’s just very difficult– I mean, the fact that it’s on a cassette that’s been sitting wherever for so long, and then we got it digitized, so it had already probably degraded, and then– no offense, but I don’t think it was probably the greatest sounding when it first came out. [LAUGHS]
JAMES: Oh, God, no. My lyrics are horrible. Like, I’m such a critic of myself, and the lyrics aren’t turned up. You can barely hear it– Yeah, it just sounded like garbage. But I love it. It’s good garbage that I love.
DES: I listen to it unironically all the time, and everybody at the archive makes fun of me for it. But it’s arguably become my favorite band.
JAMES: That’s so awesome, Des. I love that there is still a PDI fan today in 2026.
DES: Oh, I’ll be one till I die. You guys got me.
JOEY: We make fun out of love, trust me. I think that’s the end of our list of questions, but are there any other stories or funny things that you wanted to talk about?
JAMES: There are some cool things I told you, obviously; the duct tape over Patrick’s mouth. That was just us ribbing him, and he totally took it like a champ. This was also around the time that MTV’s Jackass was very popular. I remember us putting Stump in [shopping] carts in Kenosha at the Cracker Barrel by Gurney Mills and slamming him into snow– like, huge snow mounds. We did some really bad things to Patrick, and oh God, one of my favorites! My friend Carl Burke and I– Carl Burke introduced me to Stump, by the way. We were very close. They were both drummers. We would go to, like, Northbrook Court or Golf Mill just to hang out at the mall. That’s what kids did in the late 90s. And, when Santa Claus– [LAUGHS] When Santa Claus came to town. What did we do? We told Stump, “You’re sitting on Santa’s lap, dude. You have no say– You’re gonna go up, and you’re gonna sit on Santa’s lap. You’re gonna tell him what you want for Christmas.” He did it. He hated it, but he did it. We fooled the hell out of him.
DES: Dude, you can’t make me feel bad for Patrick Stump. This is just sad. [LAUGHS]
JAMES: You should have seen the picture. I wish I still had it. He really sat on Santa’s lap!