For three straight days last week, the symptoms of serious gastrointestinal upset arrived in a flash epidemic to the Midtown area of Nashville, infecting hundreds of people. To the untrained eye, it looked like a mysterious flu had sent 20-something punk kids into delirium: heavy sweating, aching bodies, sore throats, the occasional runny nose. But to the trained eye belonging to any doctor of shred, the sickness was as obvious as the antidote.

The city of Nashville had a serious case of diarrhea.

Playing sold-out shows on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday at the Exit/In, beloved local guitar heroes Diarrhea Planet had been the ones responsible for putting both natives and out-of-towners into this sudden feverish state. With their style of raucous performance—where the band crowd-surfed as much as the crowd, where pitch-perfect AC/DC covers were as much a guarantee as their own songs, and where even the most arms-crossed-and-clearly-over-it ticket holders became beaming kids again—no one left feeling the same as they had upon arriving. Diarrhea Planet shows induce an uninhibited madness, a madness for which the only remedy is more Diarrhea Planet.

Unfortunately, the antidote will soon be hard to come by. Though the band announced one final “victory lap” opening for Jason Isbell in October, the headlining shows on September 6th, 7th, and 8th served as Diarrhea Planet’s proper long goodbye. After thousands of gigs over the course of nearly a decade, the scatalogical punk six-piece announced in July that they’d be calling it quits.

It was the end of the planet as we know it, and no one felt fine.

The crowd at Diarrhea Planet’s last show. Photo by Wrenne Evans. The crowd at Diarrhea Planet’s last show. Photo by Wrenne Evans.

Bob Orrall suggested that this article be titled, “With the Demise of Diarrhea Planet, Is This Truly the End of Rock and Roll?” It was the Friday of the second-to-last show and we were in his office in the Wedgewood-Houston neighborhood of Nashville. Orrall runs Infinity Cat Recordings, which has put out every single Diarrhea Planet release, starting with 2009’s Aloha EP; from there, the band made two more EPs and three full-length records, the most recent of which, Turn to Gold, came out in 2016. He is both the spiritual and literal dad of the underground rock scene in Nashville—spiritual because of the bands signed to the label (DP, Daddy Issues, Music Band, White Reaper) and literal because his sons are Jake and Jamin Orrall, the two founding members of JEFF the Brotherhood. Technically the label is Jake and Jamin’s, but since the duo’s ascent early this decade, day-to-day responsibilities have fallen on dad.