Siren was part of a scene in Santa Rosa that provided a lot of inspiration to me when I was first being introduced to the punk community. Along with a few other bands and zines, they provided a glimpse of what -- at least from afar -- seemed to be a circle of friends striving to build something together. No doubt the reality was more complicated, but it was nonetheless heartwarming to see. Brian Zero, their singer, was also someone I found pretty inspiring when I was younger, and whose perspective resonated strongly with my own hopes for what kind of community punk rock could provide. He wrote an article for the 'Major Labels' issue of MRR, the first issue I ever read, and later wrote a regular column for a few years. This interview was conducted just after Siren had finished playing at Icky's Teahouse in Eugene, in the summer of 1997. Originally it had been intended for a print zine, but like so many other plans, that never came to fruition. Years after the fact, some of this is a little embarassing to look at, but I still value it as a document of a certain time and place. When looking over it, please keep in mind that Brian had a lot to say, and that no attempt has been made to edit it for either content or readability. I'll try to post the second, slightly shorter half of this conversation within the next week or so.
The first thing I wanted to ask you about was just some basic background things, like how and when you first became involved in the punk community.
Oh, okay… way back in 1984. I became involved in the punk rock community about the same time I became involved in political awareness, actually. To tell you the truth, it’s an interesting question, because for me life certainly led up in that direction anyway, so I can almost say I was always a person who cared about things, even when I was seven years old. It just kind of was a natural progression. It was in 1984, though, that I first started going to shows, and also that I first started becoming active in terms of doing political stuff, whatever you want to call it, trying to make a better world.
So what attracted you to the punk community?
Uh… probably not so much an attraction to the punk community as a feeling of alienation from the non-community that was being presented by standard society. No sense of belonging except for belief in things that were obviously nonsensical. Punk rock was a place that I sought not so much for the music, but that I sought for people that felt really disenfranchised with the status quo. And apart from all the problems that the scene had, and it sure had a lot of them back then – god, it’s got tons now – this was scene that I could find people that I really related to, people who just felt totally outside of everything.
You mentioned political activism. What did you mean by that?
Political activism means, for example, feeling a concern… I think political activism actually stems from becoming aware more and more [of] what’s going on in the world. Around the 1984 time period I started finding out more about what was happening, in terms of things like the way animals are treated, in terms of the nuclear arms race… it just sort of escalates to a point where you feel the responsibility to try to do something, otherwise you will be carrying around a lot of guilt for doing nothing. At an early age, I saw that was the choice that I had, because once you open up that door to knowledge, you can’t close it. Unless you’re just going to destroy yourself with something, unless you just say, ‘okay, I can’t deal with this, I have to get rid of my pain by being a junkie of some kind or another.’ Which means you can be a junkie to everything from drugs to television to Nintendo.
Do you see a connection between the two – punk and activism?
I see a connection in that some of the people… see, unfortunately, I can also say that there are a lot of people who get involved in punk and political activism that are doing for the reason that it gives them something to believe in, and not because they’ve searched themselves. I would say that there’s a connection between feeling alienated in this world, and then trying to seek out why you feel that way, and then trying to do something about it. You know, when you find out that it’s not necessarily you, that it’s actually a society. It’s not just your problem, it’s the whole shebang. In that way, I would say yeah, there’s a connection between punk rock and activism. On a superficial level, obviously there’s something there, because the scene has a long history of bands and whatnot that were doing things on a political level. You know, the anarchy signs on clothing evolved into actual anarchism. What was first a shock value thing had actually turned into a political threat and a political message. Whether everybody who was involved on the political end believed in it or not is another thing entirely. Especially in the 1980s, politics were a very strong part of the punk scene. Maybe now it’s diminished. It’s huge now, the scene… but ninety-five percent of it is, you know, you wonder where it’s coming from. Maybe five percent is kind of on the sense of community, and out of that, maybe there’s a core out there that’s really got an idea of it being a real community type of thing.
Another thing I wanted to ask you about was… you have a relatively high profile in the community – you write a column for MRR, you sing for Siren. I want to know if you think that places an unfair emphasis on your views, as opposed to say [Siren guitarist] Adam’s, or anyone else’s.
Very intelligent question. I can tell you right now that the answer is yes, it does, and I don’t think that anybody who is a columnist for Maximumrocknroll, or anything with a high profile in that community, could intelligently say no. You can’t say no to a question like that unless you’re A)lying or B)[unintelligible] …power pyramid. And whether people in the scene want to admit it or not, there’s definitely that power pyramid there. People have been bred to see a stage, and to see a person on the stage as being somehow wonderfully more powerful than they are. Jello Biafra’s a perfect example. We are a scene full of icons. Even if they’re preaching anarchism or preaching progressiveness, there’s definitely a division there between people. Now the question arises, though, as to what you can do with that. Some people will say ‘Why not just completely destroy the stage entirely? Why not just rip the stage down?’ It’s a wonderful, good idea, but holistically, looking at the society, the stage also encompasses money. It also encompasses private property. It encompasses the cars that we drive. And after a certain point, you have to logically say to yourself, ‘What can I do that’s going to be progressive and not going to drive myself mad?’ So for me, I recognize that there is a division there, there definitely is, and what I can try to do to make that better is to use the tool for a better purpose. That’s what I see when I look at other bands, and I look at what people are doing, I ask myself ‘What are they using this tool for? What are they trying to do with it?’ Sadly, it looks like most of the time, nothing is really being done that anything constructive at all. And I know that I don’t always do it myself, I’m sure that I’m guilty of that, but I would like to think that at the very least I’m trying to balance it out. It’s like being a teacher. Perfect example: I also work in a classroom. And this is the way I look at the punk scene, too – it’s like life is a learning experience, teachers, students, whatever, we all are that. We’re both the teacher and the student. Unfortunately, in this system, when you go into a public school classroom, the way it’s set up is… no matter what anybody wants to say, I mean, I know there are examples of things that are alternative schools and whatnot, but for the most part, in the public school system, like, a high school for example is run like a fascist state. It’s very much power pyramid-oriented, you have all these irrational control devices like pep rallies, like school colors, the principal is a manifest of power, and teachers have more power than the students do. Me as a teacher, I certainly do. My profile is exceedingly high where I work. I’m the ‘cool guy’ sub, you know? I’m the substitute teacher that is just like… it’s like a positive thing. And I guess that’s what I’m trying to strive for, is rather than a negative, maybe in that system I can try to be a positive. It would be nice if I could totally say ‘fuck the system’ and run away, but every time I’ve seen people try to do that, it just never works. The system is all-encompassing. We’ve got to come up with a way of working… of changing things, trying to do things without driving ourselves wacko. Even collectives, even communes, I think a lot of these things are doomed to failure because of the fact that the system will not let it get away. It will never let you get away. It won’t let you go do your commune thing. The system has bred itself into people. The only thing that you can do is to try to be both a teacher and a student. Again, though, in the classroom you have more power than the students do, and you have to try to do something that’s effective in that scenario. For example, if you’re a resistance fighter and the Nazis have power, what you have to do is you have to be logical. If the Nazis are at power in Nazi Germany, the best thing is not to go out with a sign that says ‘Fuck Nazis,’ because somebody will scoop you up off the street and get rid of you. The best thing to do is actually to try to find... if you’re going to sacrifice yourself, then do it in the way that’s going to make the most impact, that’s going to make the most effect. And that’s not to diminish activism. I’m trying to say that you have to be intelligent with it. You have be constructive, and creative, and think strategically. Otherwise, you’re just going to end up wasted. That’s what happens to people. The resistance fighters in France were not out there on the streets yelling anti-Nazi things, they were in secret places, hiding people and never showing themselves. They were a secret organization. That doesn’t necessarily mean you have to be deceptive to be progressive, it just means that you have to be aware of what’s going on, and aware of the fact that if you’re not careful with what you do, then you’re going to end up messed up.
With your teaching position… I was wondering how you try to incorporate your ideals into that.
Well, the best thing I can say, and this might sound trite, is I try to make the students… the best thing that I can do, because I’m just a substitute teacher, is to put myself as a piece of an idea of community. That I’m somebody that can be talked to. I mean, I can’t always do that for everyone. But I’ve had chances where, or times where students have come up to me, and they’ve confided in me, and talked to me. And that’s understandable, because, let’s face it, the idea of family and community has been utterly obliterated. We’ve got computers, we’ve got televisions, we’ve got cars. We don’t have any sense of ‘who is this person who lives next door to me?’ I don’t know this person at all, and I’m going to be afraid of them. And you see sometimes in the classroom, with these students, these kids, they’re longing for a sense of something. Even sometimes, just by being there for people, you can make a difference. I have to be honest – in the classroom, a lot, I have to play cop. There’s a reason for that. You have to play cop because if I were not a disciplinarian to a certain extent, those people who were bred into a system of control would simply step over you. I’ve worked with emotionally disturbed kids, and it’s so fucked up, it’s so screwed up, but they don’t look positively upon feminine roles. They don’t look positively upon people who can hold them and cry with them. A lot of the time, they look at these male, macho figures as being, you know, father coming down to the dinner table to set order straight. With that kind of psychology set, especially in a class where you have thirty students… I’m moving from emotionally disturbed to students again, and I’m not saying all students are emotionally disturbed in any way, shape, or form, but that kind of idea is really prevalent anyway in the system at large. When you have thirty students in a classroom that have some semblance of that -- a lot of them do – you have to be kind of careful. I would not have lasted a week within the school system if I were not a little bit willing to compromise on the issue of control. I would have had students walking out of classes, standing outside of classrooms smoking cigarettes. And this is a typical, middle-class high school, you know, a high school in a middle-class area. The students would have done this, they would have done things like that, and the administration would have seen it, and they would’ve said, ‘get this wacko out of here.’ Gone. Hasta la vista. And that would’ve been the end of that one. So that’s why you have to be very careful with those things. And sometimes you get a chance to talk with them, you know… like, after school, especially, when I’m out of the school grounds, and I see a student walking around, and they talk to me about my beliefs: totally different thing. I can sit down and say, ‘well, you know, I don’t feel this way. I don’t really care for all of the computers that you guys have in your schools. I don’t really dig on that.’ But also, in my position, I’m able to talk to so many students with different backgrounds. I’m able to talk to students who are sixteen-, fifteen-years old, who’ve come from extremely right-wing backgrounds, who are slightly short of joining up with the Klan. Perhaps, just by being there for them, when they understand some point in my opinions, it’ll have a positive influence on them. I mean, for a job in this society, I certainly can’t complain. I’d rather be doing this than be a manager at K-Mart. Certainly.
I’m going to change the subject. I’m not sure if you want to get into this, but I heard that there was some sort of dispute between Siren and Lookout Records.
Okay, I can talk about that. We were basically… I don’t know if it’s really much of a dispute. They offered us a chance to do a full-length record about two years ago, and we did not want that. We did not want any material of ours to go through Caroline. Especially given that I’d written an article for Maximum about Caroline being a subsidiary of EMI. It’s important to stress EMI, because a lot of people who work with Caroline will say, ‘it’s owned by Virgin,’ but Virgin is owned by EMI, so Carline is owned by EMI. We did not feel that, given the fact that I wrote this article, or even given the fact that it’s with EMI, and EMI used to make components for cruise missiles… we did not feel comfortable with our material going through an EMI distributor, because it’s contradictory to what we’re about, it’s contradictory to the fact that we should be an independent scene and not affiliated with some behemoth of a huge corporation. No matter how nice the people at Caroline are – whatever, I don’t care about that. They might be the most wonderful people in the world. Anyway… we were offered the chance to do something with Lookout, we said ‘no Caroline,’ they said, ‘no deal.’ That’s the end of statement. It’s unfortunate that that’s the case, especially considering that other, shadier labels I feel have made that exception for bands. And if them, why not another?
So… one of you runs Mustardfield, right?
No, that was Kevin, and Kevin is no longer with us.
Then I was wondering how the record came to come out on Day After.
Well, that’s a story in and of itself. We, the guitarist and myself, went to… we had a very, very hard year. The Lookout deal, all that stuff was kind of the culmination of things that were really quite messed up for us. Then something happened with our old drummer, and … he had a problem with drugs. He was doing drugs on the side, and I was living with him at the time, and everything in his life fell apart. He quit the band, and I think the guitarist and myself were really going through a lot. We scraped some money together, and got cheap airfare to Europe, and took off. While we were over there, we ended up hooking up with this guy in the Czech Republic, and he’s a cool human being. We respected his ideals, we respected him, and thought, shit, he loved the tape, and we just went with that. It’s crazy, because at the time we had no band. We just had to come back and get things rolling again.
I did want to know… you seem a little cynical about the punk community lately…
I am a bit.
Is there anything that you’ve been finding really inspiring?
Um… in the punk community or outside of that community?
Anywhere.
Give me a chance to think about that for a second here. That’s a hard one, because I am a little bit cynical on the subject, because it’s hard sometimes to find the positive… you might want to stop it for a second while I think on this one. [tape stops] Actually, the positives for me are spin-offs of the negatives. It’s kind of like the whole dialectic thing, because I was really disenfranchised, especially in the punk scene, with seeing all this superficial interest in the music alone from major labels and from… whatever. For a very long time, I was like, ‘this is such crap,’ I was pissed off at it, and… but after a while, you start realizing that, to a certain degree, it can be a positive thing. Because let’s face it: the first punk-ish thing that I went to was a Billy Idol concert, and I went to that concert, and I said to myself, ‘it’s got to be more than this shit.’ You know that for every NOFX show with fifteen thousand kids at it, with merchandise being priced out of the reaches of the poor or whatever, there’s got to be a couple people in that audience who’ve never been even touched by punk rock, who are going to see that and say, ‘well, the music sounded rebellious, but it’s not really. But there’s got to be more to it than this.’ And perhaps those people will find something. That seems like that’s the case, because it seems like a people move from one thing to the next. We’re kind of getting a… I hate to use the term, but I guess it’s… we’re getting a trickle-down, to a certain degree, of people. They go to those shows, and then they come to find something better. And there seems to be more of them. It’s also… it seems to me that there’s a lot of people out there in circles that are outside punk rock, too, that are really hungry for a community, and I’ve seen this from a lot of different tangents. A lot of the kids in the schools, I mean, that’s something to find positive. I think it’d be wonderful to see more people who are progressive being in the classrooms, because they can make a lot of impact there. Because there are kids, like, fucking out there, who are just, like… I don’t know what it is, but up until the point when people are like… there’s a certain age or something when people just get so cynical, and they just burn out, but a lot of the kids in the school system are just… they’re ready. They’re like, ‘Where do we go? Where are we going to go?’ And maybe the fact that that question is even being asked by people is a positive thing. Because back in the Eighties, when I was in high school, everybody was… god, they had an agenda. It’s certainly wasn’t one that I liked. But it seems like now that agenda has crumbled for a lot of people. It’s like this technology is advancing so quickly, and all these things are happening, and people have no control over it, so that you even get people from the right-wing perspective who have been bred with these beliefs in this, whatever, apple pie thing. They’re lost, too. They’re like, ‘where do we go?’ Maybe that question, in and of itself, will lead to something. That’s a very positive thing. That’s the best thing I can think of, that people are asking that. Because once people start asking anything, man, they only can find knowledge And once that knowledge is found, then, at the very least, we can all share the responsibility of making this a better world. Otherwise, it’s only up to a few of us, and I’ll tell you, that weight’s too much to carry.
