Punk Rock Dad

by Jim Lindberg

  The issue becomes how do punk rockers get older and keep their edge and youthful idealism but still hold on to their dignity. To me it’s starting to feel strange to be my age with three kids and a mortgage and life insurance and singing songs about not wanting to grow up and be responsible. It’s a little late for that. It seems I have more hairs coming out of my ears and on my back than I do on my head nowadays, and what I do have up on top is rapidly becoming flecked with gray. The crow’s feet around my eyes and wrinkles on my forehead are inspiring long, somber gazes into the mirror and more reflections on my mortality than I’d like to admit.

  I don’t want to be one of these guys in their sixties still wearing their leather jacket with NECROS spray-painted on the back and dying their gray hair orange in a vain attempt to convince themselves they still got it, that they’re still cool. Some punkers have this romantic notion that you need to wear the uniform forever to prove that you are punk for life and you’re never giving up. I’m punk for life because I love the music and the message and because I grew up surrounded by the culture of punk kids listening to beautiful nihilism in our headphones. The songs and imagery are the touchstones of my youth, riding through the alleys of the South Bay on my skateboard in my jeans and flannel shirt, listening to Wasted Youth and not caring what the world thought of me. This is who I am. I don’t need to prove my stripes to anyone. Still, holding on to it so dearly can get kind of pathetic, like seeing a guy in his forties wearing his little high school football uniform, crying into his beer on his front lawn, pining for lost glory.

  The last time we played the Warped Tour for its ten-year anniversary, although our fans were still as supportive and rowdy as ever, you could sense a shift, that a certain portion of the crowd was waiting to see the next hot young band playing after us and was just sitting through our show watching the veteran punk band so they could get a close spot for the next younger act. That sucks. I remember every other year the bands being scared to death to play anywhere around us, when the king of hip-hop, Mr. Number One on the top of the charts, cut his show early because our fans were chanting “PENNYWISE!” so loud you couldn’t hear him. Yeah, those were the days. I already can envision myself, old and fat, drinking a scotch and water by the pool in Palm Springs retelling that one to my golf buddies day after day.

  But recognizing that you’re not as young as you used to be doesn’t mean you need to stop loving the music and believing in its ideals. Punk to me stood for independence and nonconformity, and was a constant source of strength for those of us who felt ostracized for whatever reason. It embraced and championed individualism, while also trying to inspire a populist idea of unity and brotherhood among like-minded misfits pushed out to society’s fringe. Coming out of the 1960s, punk was also about standing up to religious and political tyranny, demanding civil liberties, and exposing the fakes and phonies of the establishment for the greedy money grabbers they were. Punk rock encompassed so many of the concepts deeply embedded in my value system that I could never grow out of it. The music and spirit of bands like the Clash and Ramones flow through my veins and define who I am, no matter how old I get or what clothes I have on my back. It’s not a fashion or an age but a way of looking at the world and finding your place in it, and like country, rock ’n’ roll, blues, and hip-hop, it’s going to be around a long time, as long as someone isn’t willing to settle for the status quo and has an amplifier and guitar to tell the world about it.

  BACKYARD CAMPOUT

  After witnessing the tragic events of recent years, like many people I’ve felt a vague dissatisfaction with the sorry state of the world always looming around in the background of my everyday life. Maybe it was more like the last several decades. I’m not sure what the problem was; some people might say I was borderline depressed, which seemed stupid since I have so much to be happy about and thankful for. I’m a lucky guy in many respects; I have a great wife and three wonderful kids, and a career that brought a modest amount of notoriety and admiration, but I’m also one of these pathetic bleeding-heart liberals who wishes the world could be like the perfect utopia of a John Lennon song. I’d read the newspaper every day and see stories about babies getting killed in drive-by shootings and innocent children caught up in any one of the armed conflicts around the world and before I’d finished my morning coffee I’d already be shaking my fist at God for creating a world like this.

  My career was another thing that gave me a lot of stress and dejection. Like many people, I’m not easily satisfied, and no matter how much praise or rewards we received, I heard the voices of the critics the loudest, and was always envying those who had more success than we did. I’ve read all the Buddhist books and tried to digest the idea that life is like a climb up a mountain, and that most people spend their whole lives hurrying through it, in an all-consuming effort to reach the top, eyes focused on the prize, when in reality we should go slow and enjoy the scenery, and be happy with what we have, the whole stop-and-smell-the-roses idea. But as much as you want to live that way, it’s difficult to stay appreciative of everything you have in life when you’re caught up in the daily grind, and you’re always looking over the fence at your neighbor’s grass to see what kind of turf builder he’s using that keeps it so much greener than yours. Shallow, ungrateful, and pitiful, I know, but lie and tell me you don’t feel this way sometimes as well; it’s only human.

  Then the other day I woke up and my daughter said to me, “Daddy, I want you to play with me today. You never play with me anymore.” It hurt hearing her say it, but it was true. I’d been so wrapped up in my career and my pseudointellectual development that I’d become just a participant in her upbringing, breaking up fights with her sisters and refereeing at the dinner table, trying to get them to stay seated and eat their peas. I wasn’t a terrible parent, but I wasn’t a great one, either. So I told her we would set up the tent in the backyard and camp out. We went and got some firewood, my daughters brought their sleeping bags and dolls into the tent, and we played shadow finger games, told ghost stories, and roasted hot dogs and marshmallows all night. After they couldn’t keep their eyes open any longer and finally nodded off, I sat there and watched them sleep and thought to myself, This is what it’s all about. This is how I can truly be happy. I can’t change the fact that men continue to resort to war to resolve their conflicts, or that people choose to kill each other over some strange idea of a benevolent God choosing sides in all this carnage. You can’t always change the world. But I can make sure to play with my kids every day, and try to make them laugh and smile. It’s easy to do. My daughters will remember the time I set the tent up in the backyard and we camped out together as long as they live. It was a day that we had a great time playing together and being carefree. It’s our duty as parents to increase the number and frequency of these moments and memories. It doesn’t matter how much money we have or what the critics say or what others think of me. What matters is if I had a great time with my kids. There are no rules on how to do it right, just real life. Everything else is out of my control.

  THE SLOW, CONSTANT DRAINING

  I can understand now how some parents get so competitive, or overprotective that they begin to hover over their kids constantly, hoping to shield them from every kind of harm that might come their way. If there’s one thing parents do well, it’s worry. We know how cold and heartless the world can be, and how tragedy can strike at any time unannounced. There will be late-night car rides from parties to worry about, bad grades and missed goals, dateless prom nights and career setbacks, not to mention the heartless teasing and name-calling that cuts deeper than if it was you yourself being wounded by it. Then one morning, you wake up and you’re middle-aged, and it seems the whole world has passed you by. In our kids we see our lost youth, and that naïve sense of hope and innocent wonder at the world, where even when it felt like the weight of it all could crush you, at least you knew you were alive, and ascending.

  So now when he gets a free moment the Punk Ro
ck Dad goes into the garage and plays his guitar. He plays in the morning, and late at night, and at strange times in between. He plays a ’78 black Les Paul Standard through a Marshall JCM 800, because only a poser would play through anything else, and there is absolutely no need whatsoever to play through anything other than a JCM 800 if you are holding onto a black Les Paul Standard. He plays extremely loud to the point of perturbing the neighbors and making backyard dogs howl, and there is feedback, and distortion and velocity that echoes throughout the house and shakes the rafters on the low E notes. The dog covers its ears, the cat hides, and the children turn up the television to try and drown out the sound that won’t be drowned out, and the wife, in vain, pretends not to hear it, but Punk Rock Dad strums away for hours on end, writing songs no one may hear but himself, odes to his frustration with the way the world is, but also to the nihilistic spark of life that boils inside him, that at certain times makes him want to get in his car and drive extremely and dangerously fast, to go outside and knock the hat off the first person who looks at him in a way he doesn’t like, to the Gods and fables that have foisted this world upon him. He plays until his fingers bleed and shoulders ache, songs about love, hope, fear, joy, redemption, heartache, and death, and the songs never end, but begin to blend into each other, until they are one long connected symphony of pain and release, a tribute to being alive and dead at the same time, an opera of blood, sweat, and tears, of nothingness and everything, and the song is still going, still being played at criminal volume, in garages, and small towns. It has become the music of the spheres reverberating between the planets and echoing across the universe. For him, it becomes the song of life and the slow, constant draining of it, one that before had seemed pointless and currupt, but is now filled with purpose.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I would like to thank Matthew Benjamin at Collins for his immeasurable patience, hard work and help in putting this book together and for taking a chance on the lead singer of a punk band who thinks he can write. To Caroline Greeven and Marc Gerald from the Agency Group for coming up with the idea for the book and believing that I could pull it off against all evidence to the contrary. To Andy Somers, our long-suffering booking agent, for suggesting me as an author. To the supportive team at Collins: Joe Tessitore, Mary Ellen O’Neill, Jean Marie Kelly, Ginger Winters, George Bick, Teresa Brady, Felicia Sullivan, and Marina Padakis. To the other punk rock dads, Joey Cape, Tony Adolescent, Noodles, Fat Mike, and Greg Hetson for their quotes, and to Crystal Lafata for helping me track them down and force them to do it. To Kat Monk for taking the cover photo. To Steve Carranza for the insane drawings of the Anarchy Bottle and Mommy’s Little Monster. To myself for doing all the other images and to Sunil Manchikanti for assembling them all. To Amy from KROQ for being cool. To Brett, Gina, Andy, Dave, Jeff, and everyone at Epitaph for putting up with us for nearly two decades. To Fletcher, Byron, Randy, and the worldwide PW crew for letting me have the back lounge on the tour bus in Europe to work on the book, and for being the best band and crew in the world. To my mom and dad for not grounding me half as much as they could have, and for just being two great people anyone would be proud to call parents. To my sister and all the Johnsens for being awesome and to our entire extended family. To all the punk bands who got me through my adolescence. To my friends who tried to understand why I stayed home to work on the book when the waves were good. And most of all, to my wife, Jennifer, and to Brighton, Emma, and Kate, for giving me something to believe in.

  About the Author

  Over the last 15 years, JIM LINDBERG's punk band Pennywise has sold three million albums and headlined America's longest running music festival, the Vans Warped Tour. He lives in southern California with his wife and daughters.

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  Credits

  Jacket design by Clinton Van Gemert for Mucca Design

  Jacket photograph by Kat Monk Photography

  Copyright

  PUNK ROCK DAD. Copyright © 2007 by Jim Lindberg. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  ePub edition May 2007 ISBN 9780061750595

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