Pennywise Interviewed

photo credit: Dan Monick

Pennywise
Fuck Authority All Over Again
By Matt Bettinelli-Olpin
Among the myriad of adjectives used to describe Fletcher Dragge, there’s one you can be sure you’ll never come across: boring.

Boring people don’t appear on nationally syndicated radio talk shows threatening to have a grenade (either do “sane” people, but that’s another story all together).

Boring people don’t habitually vomit on their friends and acquaintances (you can see this for yourself on the DVD that accompanies the latest Pennywise album, From the Ashes, on Epitaph).
But, but definition, boring people aren’t very interesting, either. And Dragge is anything but boring. Moreover, as the 6’5” guitarist and founding member of Pennywise, he is precisely one-quarter of one of the most enduring punk bands ever.

Known for their energetic shows and inspiring lyrics, Pennywise has been bringing their fierce brand of Southern California punk rock to the rest of the world for over fifteen fruitful years. After the release of “Fuck Authority,” from 2001’s Land of the Free? (Epitaph), the band that had never followed a trend was suddenly setting their own. No less ferocious than their 1992 breakthrough, Unknown Road (Epitaph), From the Ashes is their most ferocious album yet.

Matt Bettinelli-Olpin: What’s the band’s relationship with the fans?
Fletcher Dragge: They’re part of the band. We want them to feel like they’re part of the experience, rather than, ‘Hey we’re in the band, we’re cool, we’re up here on the stage and you’re down there.’ We feed off them. Without them, you’re nothing. You’re sitting in the garage playing. But when you’re sitting in front of a thousand kids that are singing your lyrics, that says it all. For us, it’s hugely important to make them feel like they’re part of something, rather than they’re just buying a record or just going to a show and we’re above them, because we’re not. We’re just four normal guys that like to play punk rock and we want them to feel like they’re a part of it.
Matt: Everyone piling on stage…
Fletcher: Yeah, and it’s getting harder and harder to have that kind of stuff happen. In the old days, when there were no barricades and no security guards, it would get really crazy. It would almost be scary at some points. But with everyone suing everyone these days, it’s a lot harder to get the real close intimate feel like the old days.
Matt: How have you guys changed since then?
Fletcher: I don’t think we’ve changed a lot. We’ve always been of the mindset of ‘this is what we do.’ And this is what we started out doing and we’re not going to change it up. We’ve had plenty of opportunities to go down different roads and follow different trends and play different styles of music, but we tried to keep it Pennywise because that’s what we’re good at and that’s what our fans like. Who knows--if we went down the pop-punk road, we might have sold another million records but that’s not what we’re about. We try to keep it the same musically. And personality-wise, you get to the point where you’re like ‘fuck this guy, fuck that guy,’ you go through that whole stage where you get fed up and sick of everybody…for us, that wasn’t a huge problem, but we definitely have our battles. Then you get to the point where you know everybody’s personality and you deal with it and make compromises because everybody’s different. In this band, and I don’t know if it’s fortunate or unfortunate, but it’s kind of run like a democracy and everybody throws their two cents in and we vote on stuff. It’s really cool that everyone voices their opinions. It creates a lot of dissention--one guy’s screaming, ‘fuck that, there’s no fucking way I’m going to do that’ and the other three guys say, ‘well we really want to do it’ and it creates some tension, but I think that’s part of our formula, having tension and everyone having a voice and having an opinion. It’s good and bad. It’s harder because you don’t have one person calling the shots, but it’s also more fulfilling.

L-R: Jim Lindberg (vocals)
Randy Bradbury (bass)
Byron McMackin (drums)
Fletcher Dragge (guitar)
photo credit: Dan Monick

Matt: How did you get a song called “Fuck Authority” to be a big single? Has radio changed the band?
Fletcher: We never figured we’d have a song like that on the radio. The record company was going with what they thought would be the safest bet, because you only get one shot at radio. But KROQ was really supportive of “Fuck Authority.” We like to think that we’re not a radio band, that we’re not a commercial band--that’s just extra stuff that came with us doing our thing. But it’s a strange thing hearing yourself on the radio. It broadens the horizons. It’s not like we sold a million records. But because we kept our integrity and wrote songs that we liked that got on the radio, then we’re totally cool with that. It’s been a pretty good experience. It hasn’t hurt that band, and we want as many people as possible to hear our music. It’s a good vehicle for that.
Matt: Speaking of radio, what do you think of the current state of pop music?
Fletcher: I’ve never been a fan of pop music. New Kids on the Block, they were really popular for a while, then when they became unpopular, it was cool to bag on them: ‘Look at these clowns.’ And when metal was popular, but now it’s, ‘Look at these clowns.’ In five years, we’ll be looking back at some of the bands that are popular now and we’ll be calling them clowns. The pop music stuff is really phony. Half the people aren’t writing their own songs--they’re just a pretty face that knows how to dance. I’m not really down with that. There are exceptions to the rule, where people are just really, really good at what they do, but for the most part, I think the whole image of pop and the way it’s presented and all the money and all the beauty and all that shit, it’s just really phony to me. I’m not backing it. At all.
Matt: What would you want someone to take away from your new album?
Fletcher: We’ve become a more political band over the past few years, because as you grow older, you become more upset by government policy. You become more affected by what the government does to you and how it effects your daily life. At the same time, we still talk about random things, whether it’s drug addictions or this or that or the other. You get a broad spectrum from us, and we’re definitely really upset about the occurrence on 9/11, and we’re trying to bring light to that whole subject. There’s a reason why this happened and it’s because of our government. It’s not because of us, individuals out there in the street, it’s because of things that we’re doing overseas, in the Middle East, and how we’re treating people over there. We feel very strongly that our government is out of line on a lot of stuff. We get to travel the world and meet a lot of different people and see things from a different angle, so over the years we’ve found out a lot more about what our government does and how we behave than the average American would know. So we try to write songs about it and try to open people’s eyes and hope that the future gets better by people educating themselves with what’s going on. No innocent people deserved to die because a madman is pissed off about American foreign policy, but until we start correcting the stuff that’s going on and until the citizens get on top of what our government is doing overseas, there’s going to be more innocent people dying because we don’t have a clue to what they’re doing. No one told us they were going to use Osama Bin Laden to fight the Russians, and arm him and train his people to fight. We put Saddam Hussein in power and taught him how to make chemical weapons. No one pictured those people were going to turn around and come after us, but it happened, so I think we need to stay more informed. This album is kind of educational, it’s self-motivating, and then you’ve got a couple of other random things, and I think it’s a little more heartfelt than previous albums.

photo credit: Dan Monick

Matt: What role does the punk rock community as far as offering an alternative voice to Big Media?
Fletcher: I think it’s getting really clouded by people calling themselves punk rock.
Matt: How would you define “punk rock?”
Fletcher: Being on a major label is really hard for me to accept for a punk rock band, because punk rock was about doing things yourself when no on else would believe in you and the music was shitty and no one could play their instruments, when it was just a bunch of noise and a bunch of freaks. And that’s how it was born, by people doing things themselves. But now you have bands that are on major labels that are owned by whatever parent company and it’s all about the bottom dollar. If you’re not making the money, they’re not going to keep you around. So it’s really not about creating a scene, it’s about creating a money making machine. You have all this hard work that’s been done by independent labels like Epitaph and Fat Wreck Chords and Dischord and Cruz and all these great labels that have done really cool shit, and now all of a sudden it’s like, ‘Oh, this stuff is popular, these bands are selling records, let’s go out and grab ‘em up.’ And the bands are running to these labels like, ‘Hey, give us the big money, give us the big advance, make us rich and famous.’ I just don’t understand that because punk rock shouldn’t be about being famous or being rich, it should be about how you feel. But when you get to that position, they start telling you what you can and can’t sing about. How many bands have we heard that had their songs taken off records? Or ‘Go re-record this, rewrite the lyrics.’ It goes on and on. We all need to make a living, but I think when you start making decisions based on making money…

I mean, fuck, I was reading a teen magazine the other day and there were finger puppets in it for Good Charlotte. I’ve met the guys and they’re super-cool, but how do you get to the point? Maybe they didn’t know it was going to happen, but when you get to that point, you’re kind of crossing the line. The problem with bands claiming punk rock roots and doing these kinds of things, it kind of taints the whole message of punk rock and makes it a thoughtless publicity thing. If that’s what they want to do and they feel comfortable with doing it, that’s great. But the punk rock title should maybe start switching over to ‘alternative’ or something else. Punk bands are the ones out there in the ditches that are writing songs that people aren’t going to necessarily like or relate to, that are out there working and talking about important issues and doing things on their own…on independent labels, for themselves, by themselves, with people who believe in the scene…

To me, the whole punk rock scene is kind of in shambles right now, and including us. I mean, how punk rock can we be? We’re on the radio, we’re more of a mainstream act than underground act at this point. The only thing we can do is try keep our wits about us and try to do things that are beneficial for our fans, beneficial for our label, and so we can go to sleep at night and do things that we think are sell-out maneuvers and not taking money for things that you think are lame. That’s really all you can do, but I think the media has turned it into a punk rock circus and taken the heart away from it. No, not the media, the bands…the bands give the media the fuel to turn it into a circus.
Matt: What’s the best part of being in the band?
Fletcher: Being up there, playing a live show, and having kids sing your lyrics and take something away from your music. When you have a kid come up to you and say, ‘your music changed my life, your music’s that important to me,’ that’s extremely powerful stuff. Just having one person come up to you and say that to you would be really cool, but we’ve had thousands and thousands of kids tell us that we’ve really been influential in making them better people.