by Jim Lindberg
7
F@#K AUTHORITY?
“My daughter is at a school in a conservative area and she doesn’t dress punk rock ‘per se’ but her attitude is all about doing her own thing and creating her own style. Some of the teachers and kids think it’s kinda weird and she’s gotten some flak from a teacher’s aide in third grade who said what she was wearing wasn’t appropriate for her age. It could be something as mellow as a Queen shirt with arm warmers. First of all, they are just a teacher’s roadie, not a morality or fashion because sometimes when people are being creative and different and not conforming, it’s not a bad thing, some people just don’t understand. She took it personally like the teacher didn’t like her but I told her the teacher didn’t understand her and to just keep doing what she’s doing.”
—Greg Hetson, Bad Religion & Circle Jerks
When my daughter’s teacher asked me on parents’ night about my song on the radio, I was kind of embarrassed. What was a forty-year-old father of three doing singing a song about giving the finger to authority? Wasn’t it being hypocritical to expect my kids to respect authority when I’ve been yelling at everyone not to?
As kids and teenagers we naturally wanted to rebel against our parents. Imagine if from the time you woke up in the morning to the time you went to bed, there were two giants hovering over you, saying, “Don’t do that!” “Watch out!” “Don’t touch that!” “Be quiet!” “Wear a jacket, or you’ll catch a cold!” “Be careful, it’s hot!” “Stop it!” “Time for bed!” Eventually you’d either (A) hate them with every fiber of your being or (B) want to do everything they’re telling you not to do just to spite them, or more likely, both. After getting bossed around their whole lives, sometimes kids rebel just because they’re tired of being told what to do all day.
Young chimpanzees and gorillas make faces and show their asses to their elders, but only when their backs are turned; they then revert to a submissive posture when the mature monkeys turn back around, kind of like when you used to sit in the backseat of the station wagon and make pig faces behind your dad’s head. Rebellion is fun! We all like giving authority figures a piece of our minds when we think we can get away with it, whether it’s flipping off the meter maid, sneaking past security to get into a show, or writing a punk song about sticking it to the man. Thumbing our noses at people in authority and derailing their power trips are how we take back some of the control for ourselves. Kids come with this impulse preinstalled, so it’s up to us to know how to handle it.
In truth there are any number of reasons young people become rebellious, some just are total spazzes and can’t help themselves, others just have a knack for wanting to be a pain in the ass. For my friends and me, when we were young we thought the rejection of all authority was what punk rock was all about. We spent all our time trying to prove society wasn’t the boss of us. If the fashion of the day was preppy and conservative, we’d have green hair and torn clothes. If polite society decided what great art was, our music would be loud, fast, and obnoxious, and the imagery surrounding it deliberately decadent and offensive. It gave us independence from the other clones at school and a sense of self-worth, however damaged and depraved. Like the generations just before us that used rock music to distinguish themselves from their parents’ taste and sensibility, we were staking out our own psychic territory where we made the rules, and decided for ourselves what was cool and what wasn’t. What became known as punk rock and alternative culture arose out of the fallout of our generation’s rebellious adolescent years.
As we got older we thought we could hold on to this youthful, idealistic state of mind, singing “I’m gonna stay young until I die!” at the 7 Seconds show and resisting the pressure to grow up and take on responsibility and wallowing in a state of perpetual adolescence. We thought that if we ever became parents ourselves, we’d be the coolest parents ever, letting our kids do everything our parents wouldn’t let us do, like stay out all night and drink beer and smoke cigarettes and eat candy every day for breakfast. So what happens when we do become parents ourselves and the shoe is on the proverbial other foot, and we have little rebellious hellions of our own to bring up? Do we teach our kids to rebel against authority like we did so we’re not hypocrites? Do we show them how to reject society’s laws, live a life of anarchy, flip off cops, and join the Peace Corps?
I watched a TV show recently about a family where the parents let their children do whatever they wanted. The kids didn’t listen to anyone, they acted and dressed in whatever way they saw fit, and came and went as they pleased. I’ve never seen three more disrespectful, obnoxious, maladjusted little brats in my entire life. They screamed at their mom when she would ask them to do the smallest thing. They hit, spit, kicked, and beat on each other, and generally ran around the house screaming like little pint-sized Napoleonic tyrants. Their mom and dad just shrugged and were okay with it because they wanted to be “cool” parents, and let them do whatever they wanted so they could “express” themselves. One of these so-called “cool” parents gave me my first bong hit when I was thirteen years old. She and her whole family smoked out together. After a few years of hanging out at their house every day after school, her kids and I all looked like miniature Keith Richards, stoned out of our minds. Sometimes trying to be the cool parent can do more harm than good.
The goal for us punk rock dads, then, becomes to somehow find a balance that will encourage our kids to question authority, but still respect us as their parents, even as unlikely as that sounds. I want to try to teach my kids to develop a healthy bit of skepticism so they’re not easily gullible, because I think they need to be warned that some nefarious figures of authority aren’t worthy of respect. Kids need to know that there are all kinds of different cults, religions, and dogmas out there trying to coerce them into accepting their sometimes highly fallible ways of seeing the world as fact, and that they should be wary of anyone trying to tell them exactly what to think and what to believe. They should also be encouraged not to always go with the in-crowd and cave in to peer pressure and not be afraid to express themselves creatively. The slogans of punk rock individualism and nonconformity are valuable guidelines when it comes to approaching the world philosophically, but we soon find out that when we have to face the harsh realities of the practical world, you need fewer slogans and philosophies and more common sense. So do we as punk rock parents teach our kids the bumper sticker mentality of “reject all authority” in every instance, even our own?
At a certain age we begin to realize that, like it or not, there are some rules that will keep you out of jail and out of trouble, and others that will keep you alive. We find out that our happiness—or at least staying out of really shitty situations—is eventually what becomes most important in life, and it’s hard to be happy when you’re in jail, on skid row, or dead. We all have tragic stories of friends and family members who without any discipline or respect for some of life’s more appropriate rules ended up in extremely not fun places. So when your kid is playing in the front yard and bolts out into the street, you have the responsibility to show them that’s a good way to become a human hood ornament. When they want to build a skate ramp to try and jump from your roof to their neighbor’s, you can warn them that next time they’ll probably be trying it in a wheelchair. You tell them that as much as you, too, would like to storm the Rampart Division, Congress, and the White House, and grab people by the lapels and take them to task for using the American Dream like toilet paper, the Constitution has included ways of doing this that won’t get you brought up on federal charges. Even though you might have done it yourself, you also need to teach them that smoking dope and stealing cars for a living are great ways to make sure you become someone’s bitch in prison. This is your duty and responsibility to your kids, no matter how cool and punk rock you think you are.
The balance between being the cool parent and the figure of fair and just authority is the balance beam all parents have to learn to negotiate; lean too far one
way and you’re the overbearing asshole always yelling at their kids until they can’t have any fun, and lean too far the other way trying to be their best friend and your kid grows up with no discipline until life teaches it to them the hard way. This latter travail is even tougher for a parent from the Gen X punk scene. We feel so close to our own psycho adolescence, where we wanted to do anything to piss off our parents, and remembering what maniacal taskmasters our parents were and how we hated them for it, that now we overcompensate by trying to be the supercool parent.
Respect for authority needs to be earned. My kids will hopefully respect our authority as long as we set a good example and treat them like human beings instead of little cretins to be molded into whatever image we think they should be shaped into. They’re still going to test the boundaries daily, it’s in their genes. A parent becomes cool by considering their kids’ point of view and by remembering back to when we were little punks and how shitty it felt when no one gave a crap about our opinions. When you have to lay down the law, you do it by setting boundaries beforehand, explaining the reasons why things are the way they are, and then doling out consistent humane discipline so they can learn a lesson they won’t have to repeat a hundred times. If I can somehow manage this, maybe then they won’t one day write a song about what a terrible dad I was.
MUSIC HISTORY 101
“You gotta play punk rock for your toddler. My daughter is two and she loves the stuff, but it really depends on who it is. She hates the first Suicidal Tendencies record, but she loves the new Sum 41. She hates David Bowie, but she loves Filthy Thieving Bastards. She hates None More Black, but thankfully she loves NOFX (well, not our new record so much, but she sure likes War on Errorism, though). You gotta play the punk for your kids early so they can have something to rebel against when they’re older. As long as she doesn’t start to like hip-hop, I’ll be happy.”
—Fat Mike, NOFX
When the second wave of punk music was going strong in the mid to late 90s, it was also the beginning of the boy band and pop music starlet era in which Britney Spears and *NSYNC ruled the modern radio charts and MTV. I considered it my duty as a punk rocker to ridicule their music as mindless drivel at every show we played, using our song “Perfect People” to launch into a tirade against lip-synching, sugar-coated, bubble-gum synth-pop performed by freshly scrubbed, impossibly attractive celebutantes that I saw as ruining American music. Now that I have kids who listen to this type of music all the time, I have to admit I’ve softened my opinion somewhat. Pop music exists solely to entertain people. It’s escapist and catchy and all the neighborhood kids love to sing and dance along to it and read Tiger Beat magazine and put posters of pop stars up on their walls. Who am I to deny them this pleasure or say that it’s wrong? It’s almost a rite of passage. At first, I thought I should preach to them about how this type of music was consumerist, plastic, formulaic pabulum, but why ruin their good time and make them listen to the angry, aggressive message music I’ve listened to all these years? Maybe they’ll have a better attitude toward the world than I did from listening to too many Sham 69 records.
That being said, once they reach a certain age, I do feel it’s my duty to give them a week-by-week musical education so they’re exposed to all different kinds of music. I’ll start with some classical music—your Beethoven, Bach and Brahms, basically anything that starts with a “B” and has violins, just to give them some culture and lay the groundwork—but then it will be straight to the blues. I’ll play them some Robert Johnson, Leadbelly, Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, Bessie Smith, and B. B. King while they’re playing with their dolls, and I’ll explain that the blues was about feeling low and sad, and that sometimes, playing songs about feeling low and sad somehow makes you feel better. The next week we’ll listen to some jazz music with Coltrane, Miles Davis, Chet Baker, Charlie Parker, and Thelonious Monk, and we’ll wear French berets and dark sunglasses while discussing Sartre and existentialism. Then I’ll play them some country with Hank Williams, Woody Guthrie, Gene Autry, and Bob Wills. I’ll tell them this was music played by simple, hard-working American country folk and that it was really good before it was co-opted by urban cowboys in two-thousand-dollar snakeskin cowboy boots and women’s jeans singing about achy breaky hearts and not messing with Texas.
The next week will be devoted entirely to rock ’n’ roll. I’ll tell them that although many people consider Elvis Presley to be the King of Rock ’n’ Roll that there was also Chuck Berry, Bill Haley, Buddy Holly, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Gene Vincent, and many others who should be included along with him as the forefathers of modern rock music. I’ll tell them that the kids of the 1950s immediately loved rock ’n’ roll, but their parents hated it, saying it was the “devil’s music.” I’ll try to convince them that no matter what type of music they get into as teenagers, I won’t tell them it’s the devil’s music, as much as I secretly suspect that it could be. Later on I’ll admit that Elvis truly was the King and we’ll rent Jailhouse Rock and Viva Las Vegas, and eat fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches and when it’s all over I’ll send them to bed and shoot out the television.
Then we’ll come to the precursors in the 1960s who, each in their own way, whether by their music, stage presence, lyrics, or attitude, contributed to what would later be known as punk rock. We’ll play the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Who, the Doors, the Seeds, the Velvet Underground, and the MC5. I’ll explain to them while they’re seated in beanbags around me and wearing tie-dyed shirts and moccasins that while this period undoubtedly produced some of the most awe-inspiring, jaw-dropping pure rock moments of all time, it also ushered in the era of free love and uninhibited experimentation with drugs. This will be a perfect segue into a long, complicated, uncomfortable discussion about the dangers of both that will include graphic slideshows and embarrassing first-person narratives that will hopefully entice them to want to join a convent. I know some of my punk rock counterparts plan to let their kids learn by their mistakes, but I don’t have the time, money, or mental fortitude to do this. I’m thinking coercion by intimidation and fear will be easier on all of us.
Then it will finally be time for early punk rock with the New York Dolls, the Dictators, Patti Smith, Television, the Ramones, and Blondie. I’ll buy them their first CBGB shirt, but never, under any circumstances, will I let them wash it. This is one genre of music that won’t take any explaining. I’ll just put on Road to Ruin, turn it up as loud as the speakers will go, and let them go at it. Punk rock is spontaneous combustion. When I was about fourteen, I put the Ramones on the stereo for some of my friends who hadn’t heard of them yet, and the room instantly broke out into a spontaneous slam pit before anyone knew what that was or had ever seen one. Kids love to roughhouse. Punk rock just gave it a soundtrack.
Next I’ll play them some British punk with the Sex Pistols, the Clash, Generation X, the Damned, and the Buzzcocks. I’ll teach them how to flip people off the British way by using a backwards peace sign, but then ground them if I catch any of them doing it. Then, it will finally be time for my personal favorite, California punk, with the Germs, Black Flag, the Circle Jerks, the Descendents, the Adolescents, TSOL, 7 Seconds, Social Distortion, the Dead Kennedys, and Bad Religion. I’ll show them how to stage dive and what to do if you fall down in the middle of a circle pit. I’ll tell them that this was music created by bored suburban kids just like them, and that if they ever feel frustrated and confused, that they can always start a band and write songs about it and that sometimes this can be better than thousands of dollars’ worth of time spent on a therapist’s couch.
After that, I’ll fill it all in with some East Coast punk like Bad Brains, Agnostic Front, Minor Threat, and the Misfits, and then post punk, skate punk, hip-hop, and everything else—Sonic Youth, the Pixies, Nirvana, the Smiths, Hüsker Dü, Eric B. & Rakim, Grandmaster Flash, the Replacements, Green Day, the Offspring, NOFX, Rancid, Refused, etc.—basically everything left over in my album co
llection that isn’t punk or simply there by reason of lame ironic comedy. I feel that it’s my responsibility as someone whose life was completely altered, colored, shaped, and categorized by whatever music I was listening to at the time, to give my kids a little background on why music is so important to me, and how it almost comes to define who we are. Once I’ve done this, it’s up to them what they want to listen to. If they hear “Hold My Life” by the Replacements or “Clocked In” by Black Flag and still want to listen to the Britneys and Justins, I might be a little disappointed but, at the same time, I’m their parent, what do I know?
EVERYTHING TURNS GRAY
Though wise men at their end know dark is right
Because their words had forked no lighting they
Do not go gentle into that good night
—Dylan Thomas
The other day I was talking to the owner of our record label and complaining that the guys in the band are giving me a hard time about not touring as much now that I have a family. I can’t go out on tour for weeks on end like I did when I was twenty-one and had no responsibilities. He understood but said the other guys who don’t have kids probably still want to go out on tour and live it up and that all of the bands from our era were facing the exact same problem. The guys with families are starting to settle down, but the others are still clinging to the hope that they can make the ride last a little longer. He said, “This is the graying of punk rock. It’s never happened before.”
Punk rock as a musical form is entering its middle ages. Jazz and blues are old and gray and staring mutely at a TV in a nursing home. Rock ’n’ roll is a senior citizen eating at Sizzler and shouldn’t be behind the wheel of an automobile. Hip-hop is approaching thirty, rolling in the dough but starting to look for tax shelters, and emo and screamo are young teenagers driving by us with their ass hanging out the window. A lot of us graying punk rockers are sitting around looking at each other, saying, “What happened?”