Whippin Shitties also known as The Shits, are a pop-punk/emo outfit formed in Boise in 2017. Spud had The Shits in our office last month. They’re a fun bunch of dudes with great rapport, who needed little motivation to start telling stories about touring, recording, barfing, and cars. These guys are so gearheaded that even their strange and profane name comes from automobile slang.
Car Guys
Braden: A friend from Minnesota kept saying “Whippin’ shitties” when we were playing Forza. I was like, what is that, nobody says that. Apparently it’s a very Minnesota-specific thing that people say for doing donuts in a car. We played a show in Caldwell with a band from Minneapolis and I asked them if that was a real thing, and they said “yeah, that’s a real thing.” We started calling ourselves Whippin Shitties because we had another band name at the time that need not be brought up, it was awful.
Spud: So you’re car guys?
Braden and Jacob: Oh yeah. Big time. Unfortunately.
What kind of cars?
Braden: Drift cars. Everything, basically. For work, I’m more into supercars and hypercars and stuff like that, but also trucks and everything. I like to just tell people that I’m in marketing, because my actual title sounds like a made-up boomers-get-mad-at-it job: “social media manager.” But I get to make videos of cars and stuff like that.
Are you the guys driving around in circles downtown on Friday nights?
Jacob: Absolutely not.
Braden: Used to be. I mean, we used to go down there to watch people do dumb shit because it’s fun. People get pulled over all the time. But we just go down there and park and chat with people and watch. It’s gotten pretty degenerate down there, to say the least.
Jacob: Yeah, 17 year old kids are a lot dumber now than when I was 17.
Erik: Says the guy who dropped out of school to go on tour with us.
Jacob: But yeah, cars and motorcycles. That’s like my only hobby outside of music, not that I can afford anything else.
Braden: Tomorrow I’m picking up, I think my 49th car.
Jacob: How many do you have now?
Braden: I don’t know, like 7 or 9. I keep them at my parents house, my house, Ross’s house, their all over. I want to start leaving them all over the country, that’s my next goal. When we go on tour we can just pick up a car. Do some Doordash runs to make some cash.
You dropped out of high school to go on tour?
Jacob: Pretty much. It was not a great idea. That was our first tour, our big bonding experience. In that fucking van. I miss it, I miss it so much. It was a dodge caravan that I traded a motorcycle that I paid $200 for. I bought the bike and got it running and I traded it for the van, like a week before we went on tour.
Braden: We put a lot of faith in it right off the bat.
Jacob: and then I drove it for like three years after that. It had mold when I got rid of it, and it didn’t have any seats by then.
Braden: We took to to Vegas and it didn’t have any seats, so somebody had to sit on your bass amp. Then we hit a deer on the way back. I was half-asleep, leaning on the glass, when my head when BOOM! I was like, “Jacob, what the FUCK!” He goes, “We hit a deer,” and I was like, “Alright, this is excusable, I guess.”
One of the tires exploded, so we got all of the gear out to get the spare, the spare was flat. We were about an hour and a half out from Boise. Jacobs dad came out and drove us into Mountain Home, we filled the spare, got food at Jack In The Box, got back on the highway and the SPARE exploded. Jacob’s dad came out again at like 3 a.m, but he had to turn around in Mountain Home because Simco road was closed, and the only turnaround had a State Trooper in it. We left Jacob waiting for a tow truck at 4:30 am, I finally got back at 6 and went to work at Jimmy Johns at 9.
Erik: We drove all the way from Tempe in that thing. We left at like 2 am?
Jacob: It was like midnight. We got Whataburger and were on the road.
Braden: We drove from Tempe to Boise without stopping. It was like 16 hours.
Jacob: It was not worth it. Why did we do that again?
Erik: Because I was a little baby and I wanted a day off before I had to go back to work.
Funyuns, White Claw, and Choice Hotels
What kind of trouble have you guys gotten into on tours?
Dallin: We didn’t get into much trouble, but we definitely stayed at that hotel where we propped a whole bunch of shit against the door because we were scared of some tweakers.
Erik: That was the latest. We played Everett, WA. We were driving back, I don’t know what town it was in. We’re like, alright let’s go get, like, beer. So we go to the gas station, and the door’s fuckin’ locked. There’s a camera up there and they make you fuckin’ say your name, then they let you in. This guy goes “Where are you guys staying, on this side or the other side of the freeway?” “The other side?” He’s like, “Oh that’s good,” and he pulled out this…
Braden: I don’t even know how to describe it. It was like a hatchet handle with just one huge metal spike. He’s like, “I keep this around for protection.”
Erik: So we put the roll-away bed in front of the door so if anything happened, we could at least hear it.
Jacob: There were dogs walking around in the hallway, dude. The people WITH the dogs were scary, but there were just stray chihuahuas walking around everywhere.
Dallin: There were these tweaked out-looking people who apparently lived in the hotel on the same floor as us. They were watching us putting our gear in our cars the next day, like creeping in the lobby.
Braden: You could tell your story about the Funyuns!
Jacob: Oh no.
This is when we went to Vegas. We got an AirBnB with another band. I got unbelievably stoned, so I was just gonna go to bed. I’m laying in bed, everyone else is downstairs partying or whatever. At one point somebody comes in and starts feeding me Funyuns, thinking that that’s gonna make me feel less blitzed.
Braden: “The Rhythm Section Rescue Team.”
Jacob: I was like, I’m just trying to sleep, man! But they keep feeding me Funyuns and I’m like, I’m thirsty now. So they went back and got me some water, and I drank that, and they kept feeding me Funyuns. I kept telling them to fucking leave me alone, eventually they did. But I had consumed so many Funyuns and so much water in such a short span of time that I end up vomiting all over the floor, next to the bed.
I was freaking out a little bit, I didn’t know what to do. Now Joe was in the room…
Braden: He was, because these were bunk beds in there. So Joe comes downstairs and I was the soberest of everyone, Erik was asleep…
Erik: I didn’t wake up for any of this. Apparently there was yelling and shit…
Braden: Joe comes downstairs just in his boxers, like hugging a pillow. He goes, “Jacob needs help.” I’m like, with what? And he goes “I dunno man there’s a lot of noises up there.” So I go up there and there’s puke all over the floor. I ask, are you good? And he just grins and gives me a thumbs up.
There’s towels and water to clean it up, and Joe is laying in bed with the pillow over his mouth going “Is there chemicals? To clean with?”
Jacob: The next day we had to go to LA, I made Erik drive because I was groggy and pissed off all day. I hate LA now because for that reason. That trip made me hate LA.
Erik: Braden puked when we were driving to Salt Lake to record.
Braden: I just got tired…
Jacob: From all the definitely-not-White-Claw you were drinking.
Braden: South of SLC the road gets real bumpy. We made it to American Fork and the bumpy road and me trying to fall asleep and having a bunch of White Claw in me started to stirring up. I was like, Jacob, you gotta pull over I‘m gonna throw up. We pull into an In-N-Out parking lot. For some reason, I walk all the way through the parking lot, past all the planters and everything, went into the In-N-Out and puked in their bathroom… and just absolutely missed. Fortunately it was clear, you know, wasn’t too insane, but Erik felt bad and bought some French fries.
Erik: I didn’t feel bad, I didn’t realize you puked and missed, I just wanted those fries.
Braden: I apologize, American Fork In-N-Out.
I waited 18 months for my Whippin Shitties record, and all I got was this stupid sticker
You’ve been at it for 5 years, what keeps you going?
Braden: The fact that we hate having money.
Erik: …
Jacob: …
Braden: …
Dallin: It’s easy for us to be a band because we’re friends. I’ve been in bands in the past where you get together to play music first but you’re not really friends with each other. Which makes things weird once rehearsal’s over. You can’t hang out the same way at shows.
Jacob: It’s also really rewarding when that one good thing a year happens to us. Like, this year we got our records, finally.
We put out an EP… well, we recorded it in February 2020, right before the pandemic. We put it out September 2021. When we did that, we ordered 7” vinyl of the EP. Delays and Covid and all that…
Braden: One of the factories that presses records burned down.
Jacob. They finally showed up a month and a half ago.
Braden: The stickers that come with them rip, though. If you preordered it, you get a sticker that says “I waited 18 months for my Whippin Shitties record and all I got was this stupid sticker.”
Fuck the Zuck
Dallin: We had a situation with our social media accounts.
Jacob: I thought we weren’t going to bring that up…
Spud: Let’s bring it up!
Erik: So we starting in 2017, right? So that’s when we started an Instagram account. So we’ve been building follower since then. We had like 600.
Jacob: I got on Instagram one day to post a story. I think I was just gonna post something stupid. It popped up with a little thing before I could do anything, and it said “you have to confirm your age.” So I just hit OK, like yeah, that’s my age. Turns out the birthday that was set to the account was in 2017 when we made it. And it said “Hey, you’re way too young to be using this app.” It locked me out of the account! I didn’t even get a second chance to verify or anything.
Erik: It was so late at night, too! I was asleep and I woke up to fucking chaos.
Jacob: It said you have to use the account verification portal or something, because apparently Instagram doesn’t have customer service or anything.
Braden: I even tried, through my job, because the company I work for spends so much on advertising on Facebook and Instagram they have an actual person we can contact- I even asked that guy. He’s like, we can submit a ticket, but I can’t promise anything.
Erik: We even sent in pictures of our IDs.
Jacob: Basically, 30 days went by and Instagram never said anything to us. I don’t think they looked at any of it.
Erik: So, fuck Mark Zuckerberg.
Jacob: I’m just sad that we lost a lot of pictures and stuff.
Braden: I’m still positive that we can get it back.
Jacob: Alright man, that’s your fight to fight. I’ve given up.
Dallin: You have to fight this fight too, because you did this shit. You’re on the front lines, buddy.
Jacob: Yeah, it’s my fault. I’m not allowed to use Instagram anymore, that’s Erik’s job.
Spud media 