"The passenger speaker was blown out and the driver's speaker was also blown out, but still semi-functional," Havok told Radio.com. "My cassette player was broken so we could only listen to the radio and there was a toothpick shoved into the little depressor that would make it stay on FM."

Havok had finally gotten the toothpick to stay in long enough so that it wouldn't switch to talk radio when he landed on San Francisco's modern rock station, Live 105 (a Radio.com station). "We were lucky if we heard some Nine Inch Nails or Smashing Pumpkins or Pulp," Havok said, admitting that back then he very rarely listened to the radio. "Not a lot of great stuff was happening in the mainstream."

But then a familiar song came on. "Like I said, my speakers were blown out and much of what we heard was indistinguishable unless we were familiar with it already," Havok explains. "[The song] came on and we were like, 'What is this? This doesn't sound like it sucks.'"

The singer and his passenger, Lily Chou (who wrote the Berkeley, Calif. zine, My Letter to the World), played around with the toothpick a bit more until the song came through a little clearer. It was AFI's "Don't Make Me Ill," off the band's 1995 debut, Answer That and Stay Fashionable.

It was the first time Havok had heard ever heard one of his song — a punk song no less — on the radio. "You don't hear a lot of oi [a sub genre of punk rock] on modern rock radio in the afternoon," Havok points out.