THE BLACK PACIFIC
Sideonedummy and Complete Control’s Joe Sib talks with frontman Jim Lindberg
I’m with longtime friend Jim Lindberg. I think we are going on fifteen years now? I met Jim, lead singer of PENNYWISE, when I was out on the road with OFFSPRING and PENNYWISE and we were in the opening band, WAX. I remember everyone would come to see the other bands and no one would come to see us. But Jim, every single night, would offer us the hotel room because we didn’t have anywhere to sleep.
Yes, I did offer you my hotel room.
Every time man.
I’m a very generous person.
There was this special time, special place that was happening in music and looking back on it now, I don’t think any of us really realized that. Epitaph hadn’t exploded yet, OFFSPRING was a middle band, which is something funny to imagine… them being direct support instead of being the band that plays at these huge places that we see now. Being a guy on the inside with Epitaph Records, PENNYWISE, OFFSPRING, RANCID, can you talk about that time in music and what it was like?
Yeah, I mean the great thing about then was that it was totally a family. You had all these new bands who didn’t really know each other and I remember going into Epitaph Records for the first time and Bryan from The OFFSPRING was sitting at a desk helping mail stuff out. You had one guy in the warehouse putting all the shipments of records together, you had Mike from NOFX telling us we had sold 1,200 records and saying, “that’s really good dude, that’s huge” and then came these guys from RANCID that basically you just heard their album Let’s Go and you loved it, and it was all happening at the same time. So all these bands were experiencing the same thing, and we were like, “wow we are getting a bit more popular than we thought” and then more and more people started to come to the shows. It all happened really fast.
When PENNYWISE originally got together, let’s talk a little bit about that, because when you say a little more popular then you thought was the idea behind getting the band together “Hey we want to be this massive force?” Or was it like “hey these are the guys I surf with, we want to get a few beers, we want to have a show, we want to hang out?” What was the point? What was the goal?
Well, you have to remember at this time when we first started back in ’89 punk rock couldn’t have been more out of fashion. It was very much GUNS AND ROSES and MOTLEY CRUE. A few of the guys in my hometown had long hair and were riding Harleys all of a sudden. The GUNS AND ROSES look was very cool and metal and POISON and all these bands were big. I think it was when the DANZIG record came out and then (BAD RELIGION) Suffer came out that a lot of us were saying, “Man, this sounds insane, this sounds good! I want to do this type of band again.” I got together with Fletcher and Jason and Byron and we started playing and basically the goal was to play a back yard party and to play as many of the songs as you could before the police came. So we would just jam out ’cause they could be there at any second because it was illegal down in South Bay to play live in any backyard. So we would just go and play and go absolutely nuts, and then we would just bail ’cause they would come in and arrest everyone. That was success for us, just getting through a show. Then someone said, “let’s do a 7 inch,” so we went down to Radio Tokyo in Venice and I remember the guy saying as soon as we finished, “you guys can never come back here, that was the worst thing I have ever seen.” We were just drunk, stoked to be recording, but didn’t know how to record a record and they were like, “just get out of here.” A guy at KXLU really liked it a lot, he was a DJ there, and he said that Brett Gurewitz from BAD RELIGION was doing a label and he gave it to them. It was really that fast; he asked for some practice tapes and then the next thing you know we were on Epitaph. It was just super, super fast and everyone started realizing that this music was cool again around here and people stopped listening to GUNS AND ROSES and they started getting back into the punk scene, especially with the skate scene. The first Plan 9 video, and different surf and skate videos made it huge.
When you talk about these parties, I’m thinking of you, Byron, Fletcher and Jason, everyone playing these shows. Were Fletcher and you guys as crazy then or more? I mean, what is Fletcher like at a back yard party?
It was total mayhem because our scene was so crazy, you have these guys who were surfers or skaters or just street hoodlums. A lot came from broken homes and there were huge fights. You had SUICIDAL TENDENCIES down in Venice and you had these different punk gangs that were around back then and there was a lot of brawling. There were a lot of cute rad chicks, but they would also break bottles over other chicks’ heads. It was just total mayhem. I remember a couple parties where we were playing and you were just looking around all the time to see what was going to pop off right around you and so that is why it was all about playing as fast as you can, because you knew something crazy was going to happen.
Either the police are showing or the audience is going to start fighting with each other…
Or they are going to attack us; anything could happen. A lot of credit goes to Jason. He wrote such cool, quick 7 SECONDS- influenced punk rock songs. All of a sudden people wanted to listen rather than just drink, and they’d say, “Hey, play that one song again.”
Talk a little bit about Jason. Everyone of course knows “Bro Hymn.” When you go to a show of course everyone sings the chorus at a PENNYWISE show. I had a chance to meet Jason on the OFFSPRING tour and he was such a gentle soul. I felt like he was always the guy dealing with the craziness of your band, but also the same guy who would be at the merch booth setting up the shirts helping me count it and I’m some kid in a band and I have never even been on tour. He was like, “Hey check it out, when you count in you give one number to the promoter which is way more then you actually counted in so when you sell more you actually make a little bit of money off of it.” So what was Jason like?
I’ve always said Jason never had a bad word to say anyone. He was just one of those really great guys. When you talk about positive mental attitude, well that was what his first band was called, PMA. I think he really liked MINOR THREAT and the whole idea of after the nihilistic 80’s, everything was just so anti-everything. MINOR THREAT came about and was kind of a positive influence. Even some of their giving shit songs actually had a positive edge to them; he also liked bands like DAG NASTY. That was just an extension of his personality it wasn’t an act. Jason was the type of guy that when people fought or talked bad about each other he would always have something good to say, “He’s a cool guy” or “Don’t talk trash about that guy” and all the chicks loved him. He was a real ladies man, had a lot of girlfriends. He was really my emotional center in the band, in the sense that I totally agreed with that philosophy. I had been reading a lot of Emerson and Thoreau and I felt that the punk scene was so important to my life that I wanted to make music that was positive and life affirming and telling people to live every day like it was your last, and to put this message in the music. When I heard him writing music I was like “Yes, this is it” and I knew Fletcher is this big crazy guy and I like Fletcher and he is a wild man and a big part of the band, but I was really attracted to Jason’s style of writing music and lyrics. I’ve said recently that, that was something that was really tough for me to recover from, when he passed away, of losing my partnership with him in the band. It’s something I never really recovered from and it’s taken me the last ten years to really realize that and accept that. The hard part for me has been having to sing “Bro Hymn” every night, which is a song he originally wrote for some other friends of ours that I went to school with. Carlos Canton sat in a chair next to me in math class, Tim Colvin gave me my first mixtape, Tom Nichols was a mainstay at the beach scene where I grew up. So these guys were a big part of mine and Jason’s lives, and so the song was originally written for them and our whole scene of friends and appreciating their lives. To be singing that song for Jason then, night after night, even though it was inspiring for so many people, for me it was just a reminder of everything we had lost, and it just got to a point where I started going “I’m not sure I can continue to do this.” It seems lame to some people because they get such inspiration from that song, but for me you have to imagine going and singing it every night for your friend that passed away, you get to a point where you have to let it go.
[pro-player width='600' height='400' type='video']http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCgQA6BosbY[/pro-player]
Also you’re reliving it every time you do it. Every band has that relationship. You go to the RAMONES you got Johnny Ramone and Joey Ramone, there was this tug of war and you had Dee Dee in the middle. With PENNYWISE it was a known thing that when you were on stage you definitely had Fletcher and you had Jimmy and later on Randy comes in there and you have Byron in there. That made up the band; every band has that chemistry. For you, with PENNYWISE to finally decide to walk away from everything- this history, starting this band with your friends when you were in your teens, going to Epitaph Records, all the road trips, all the adventures you’ve been on with these guys- what finally got you to make the decision to step down and walk away from PENNYWISE?
I’ll tell you, and a perfect example is the RAMONES and you know the RAMONES story better than anyone. These two guys had friction for whatever reason, they butted heads a lot.
Did that friction help though? You know like “Man this guy is driving me crazy, but he still has my back.”
Absolutely, and that is how it was for the last twenty years, where as much as me and Fletcher would butt heads, it was because we both cared so much about how the band was presented and you almost have to have that. If you have one guy calling all the shots then you don’t have a foil to bounce ideas off of. I would be the one saying, “We can do thing but it might make us look bad to our fans,” and Fletcher would say, “No I think we have to do this,” and so we argued for a reason. It wasn’t like we argued for no reason at all.
Was there a final straw though? A final night? Do you remember the moment in your mind when you knew, and anyone who has walked away from a relationship before, girlfriend, marriage knows this moment? You’re with them still but you go, “Wow they don’t know that I’ve already written this off, I’m out of here.” Do you remember that moment?
Yeah, I think it had been coming for a while, just because I knew a big part of it for me is about recording the music. I’m so much about the music. I’ve been playing music since I was twelve years old on the guitar writing songs and I really loved doing that. Our last time in the studio just wasn’t fun anymore for me and I’ve always said I want to keep doing this as long as it’s fun.
Is it ever fun in the studio?
It is for me. I can remember certain nights in the studio where it was like ‘this is why I do this.’ To take a song that is kind of crappy when you are first working on it and then in the studio it just comes alive and you nail it. For me that wasn’t happening anymore, and it just got to a point where, for example with a band like THE RAMONES, you don’t want to see those guys up there fighting and see they don’t totally want to be there. It just got to a point where I had so much respect for our band and for our fans, it was more like saying, “If we’re going to have so much conflict all the time, I have to walk away.” And the conflict had a lot to do with touring and recording as well and almost everything we did together. It just got to a point where we butted heads so much and we had a lot of really negative emails going back and forth and things like that, where someone says something that crosses the line and you finally go, “Ok I can’t accept that, and can’t accept you talking to me like that. I’m the singer of this band and you can’t say that type of shit to me.” That is basically what happened, if there had to be a final straw or whatever. The band was supposed to be about friendship, and brotherhood and unity and support and that wasn’t happening for whatever reason. It happens to tons of bands. Why did the BEATLES break up? If the world’s biggest can break up, it’s silly to think that a band with as strong of personalities as we had couldn’t.
Here is another important thing; I think it’s interesting to see how guys have left bands. I think the worst thing you can do is just jump out of a van in the middle of Europe, or in the middle of a show and just leave everyone hanging. I worked my ass off to write songs and release our last record, we did a shit load of touring, we toured more than almost ever before, we did festivals, and we went to all the different places we always go. Then we did a tour that I really wasn’t that excited about because I didn’t think it sent the right message for our band, but the other guys voted me out saying they really wanted to do it and I said, “Ok then, let’s go.” We did the tour- a very grueling, long, chaotic tour. After that I basically went to them and said, “all right let’s have a meeting face to face, let’s talk about these issues. Here is how it is, I would love to keep doing this, but if it’s going to make you guys so upset for the situations where I have a family or let’s say my voice can’t handle being in a different airport in South America for two weeks straight, I can’t do this type of stuff anymore and just keep getting voted out. I’m not twenty years old anymore, but I can do it if we just adjust a little.” Then I said, “If this doesn’t work for you guys I will help you find someone else, but I don’t want to have it where it is always three on one.” So I basically tried to be as cool about it as I could. I understand there are probably hurt feelings from some people, but at the same time I can hold my head up about the way I left the band. For me it had to happen for my own health and the health of my family. I think it will be better for everyone in the long run.
So on the Warped Tour, “did you hear, Jimmy left PENNYWISE” was the topic for the day I had written you off like “Oh great, I got his book on being a dad” and I knew you were making a documentary about punk rock dads and I went, “Makes sense, he works with Havoc TV, he’s going to come over to my side (the business side).” At a certain point you put the mic down and you say, “How can I stay in this game?” A year goes by; you and I are talking here and there. You kept it totally on the DL; I think there was a mention of “Yeah, I’m putting something together. It’ll be cool.” Fast forward to now; it hasn’t even been a year, and someone gives me this record from THE BLACK PACIFIC. I put it on the seat of my car, and I’m driving around and I just assumed it’s going to be acoustic guitar, put the flip flops on, maybe the hat off, no sunglasses, maybe like Jimmy Buffet style music, I mean I don’t know.
I’m not sure if I should be insulted or if I should just laugh at that.
A lot of our friends, a lot of our peers, are going acoustic. You’ve got Joey from LAGWAGON and Chuck Ragan (HOT WATER MUSIC), both have the acoustic guitar stuff now, which I love, but all of a sudden I have your record. I take it. I put it in the CD player… the first track comes on “The System.” I remember I was like, “Holy Shit!” and then it goes into the second track and then the third track and I said, “I have to call Jimmy right now.” How did you do this? You play guitar on it, you sing, these are all your jams, these are all your lyrics. Were these songs you were writing on the road while you were with PENNYWISE? Are these supposed to be PENNYWISE songs? Because I don’t know how someone pulls together a band and ten killer songs and has the record done in less than a year.
Well I’ll tell you, and those ideas did go through my head. I know a lot of guys like Tim Barry and various people who have done really great things acoustically and I plan to do that, but I figured wouldn’t it be silly for me at my age to do some acoustic stuff now and then ten years from now decide I’m going to do a hardcore record. I feel that I have this fire in me now still, and I’ve been writing this kind of music my entire life, so why stop now? I wanted to prove was I was capable of, and experiment a little within the form.
So literally the same week I made the decision to leave my PW, I called my friend Alan Vega, who I’d met on the Warped Tour. He was the drummer for GOOD GUYS IN BLACK and I said “Let’s get together and jam” and literally that Wednesday we were in the studio and since then it’s been about not looking back. I had been playing guitar since I was twelve years old; this is the type of music I helped create. We were one of the many bands from the Southern California skate punk scene; we helped define the sound, so it’s not like I’m going to go and start playing Johnny Cash and starting singing in a different register or something crazy like that. When I pick up a guitar and I start playing and I turn on the distortion this is what comes out of me, these types of songs where the lyrics have a certain message, the music has a certain velocity. My vocal range is very narrow, so this is how I sing and this is how I play. Some people when they hear THE BLACK PACIFIC will say, “Oh yeah, sounds just like PENNYWISE.” Yeah of course it does cause this is who I am. I was a big part of creating that sound. I can’t change who I am.
The thing I think will surprise most people, in my opinion, is that at times it’s harder than PENNYWISE. It has a heavier and harder sound. Sometimes it’s more laid back than PENNYWISE was, too. But it does keep in the root of the South Bay sound without going back to and counting on it. It definitely sounds like something fresh and new. How did that all come about in the time period you had, ’cause you know, we are talking about less than a year here.
I’m a very disciplined songwriter; I started to realize that this is what I do. My life for the last fifteen, twenty years has been about waking up, having the coffee, reading all the shit in the newspaper and then going into the garage, putting on the guitar and writing songs. I just realized this is what I wanted to do.
Wait for the last fifteen, twenty years. Wake up…
…Coffee, newspaper, guitar.
Wow, that is not happening at the Sib household.
It’s who I am, can’t change it.
I’m going to come over in the morning and jam with you, I really am.
The kids hate it; they are literally going “please stop playing.” I mean it is really loud, they have nowhere to go and I am just blaring in there.
Were you nervous at all while you were writing it? Were you thinking ‘can I do this? Can I write another “Alien,” or “Bro Hymn?”’
I was more nervous that I would have too many songs, and wouldn’t be able to choose which ones to go with. I was basically paring down a lot of stuff and I knew that if for once I could be totally in charge- if I could decide what the artwork is going to look like, and what each lyric is going to say, you know when the breakdown comes it’s going to do this and during the chorus there will be two guitars, and the vocals are going to drop out- I knew that if I was given the total freedom to do that, that I could produce something good. Something that my friends would like a lot and by extension the people in Australia and wherever we go and that people who liked my last band would like it. So I just got to work, and I don’t say work in the sense of grinding out a job. I just do what I’ve always loved to do. I feel like this record is a transition from where I was to where I want to go, and I really wanted to show people what I can do on guitar. I know it will be impossible to repeat everything we accomplished in PENNYWISE, but I still want to keep playing and writing recording and doing all the stuff I love.
One of the stand out tracks on the record is obviously the opening track “The System.” It kicks off into this riff that wasn’t what I was expecting. Very heavy, punk rock, then a breakdown, but then obviously it goes off into the next place- even the screaming on the song. That was one of the funny things, I was on Warped Tour this year, and I run into Brett Gurewitz and the first thing he says to me is, “Wow congratulations on THE BLACK PACIFIC, is that Jimmy screaming?” But on this record there are elements of that change in the guitar playing as well. With the guitar riffs what are you influences? Obviously your influences as a singer, you have BLACK FLAG, CIRCLE JERKS. I have read all the interviews, I’ve heard you say it a million times, but what are your influences on the guitar?
I think for this one I really had a conscious idea of what I wanted to do and I wanted to push it a little more on the guitar and with my voice, even though I’m pretty limited on what I can do on both. But now I feel like now I can expand a little on what I do. Also as far as influences, there’s elements of bands I like and if I had to narrow it down I would have to say take PENNYWISE and add some REFUSED and NIRVANA and PEGBOY and JAWBREAKER, maybe a little CLASH. These are some of my favorite bands. I knew I just wanted certain energy with each song; it didn’t have to be all hardcore. You don’t have to play a million miles an hour to play powerful music, you know? I think that is something that has been signified the whole Warped tour/skate punk scene. Us and NOFX, we played faster than anyone. We played a million miles an hour and it was rad for a while, but I knew I just wanted to go to a slightly different place that wasn’t possible before. One big problem with my last band, instead of being able to expand our sound more, it seemed to get narrower and narrower… what was expected of us. I’m not saying that as a burn on anyone, I’m just saying we were protecting our fan base so much and not wanting to change to turn people off, it was difficult not to repeat ourselves. Similar to the RAMONES, you just wanted to hear the next great RAMONES record. You didn’t want the RAMONES to go, “Hey this is our really great salsa record” or “We’re going to try and be like RADIOHEAD now and be all experimental. We very much felt like, “let’s do our best to stay fresh, but still give our fans what they want”. So this record is really an opportunity for me to add the elements in that I didn’t have the freedom to before because I didn’t want to mess with what people expected of us.
You’ve mentioned in the time that we have talked here the word freedom quite a lot. Even in THE BLACK PACIFIC there are hints about being free, whether that is musically, lyrically or just Jim Lindberg being free. At this point, right now in time, do you feel free? Yes, there is a difficult part about being in a band for twenty years and that is the fact of four guys compromising, it’s like four guys trying to paint a picture…
“Maybe we should put some red here.”
“Oh Red sucks! You’re an idiot for liking red there.”
But everyone has a valid opinion, it just gets harder and harder to communicate and to always have to be, “Man, I really wanted the red there and I didn’t get the red” and then that guy is bummed out. So it’s not a burn on any of the guys; it just gets harder for four guys to compromise all the time. So yeah, it is freeing to be able to go out now and say, “I want to tour, but I have family stuff in October, so let’s start the tour in November,” or I want to tour with this band, not that one, and when I record I want this guitar sound.” It was definitely very freeing in that sense, but the main thing is I don’t want to slag on what happened with PENNYWISE. Why would I do that? We were a great band together and I am extremely proud of what we did together. I’m proud of what we accomplished and I think we inspired people with out music and that’s why I cared so much about it.
Are there plans to tour? Are there plans to continue to make records?
Absolutely, like I said, I love playing music. I love getting my message out there. It’s very important to me. I feel that I was helped by so many bands growing up and inspired by them that I want to continue to do that. I really feel that this is the beginning of something that will have a long history and I’m really looking forward to expanding on it. Like I said, this first album is transitional. I see the next record as being a little more melodic and experimental when it comes to guitar stuff, but I want to keep it pure So Cal melodic hard rock still as well. I really like what bands like the THE METHADONES are doing and DILLINGER FOUR and bands like that. They’re doing this really straightforward, cool, melodic punk rock and that is what I want to get back to. It doesn’t have to be that each record has to be full of crazy pit songs and have the F word in it every five seconds so people will respond, even though I was as big a part of creating that as anyone.
I couldn’t find the F word on this.
There might be a few in there, but I think it’s important that I’ve tried not to lose my edge politically as well. A song like “The System” is very timely in the sense that so many people these days are really starting to feel completely helpless to this huge bureaucracy of our economic system. You feel powerless to get out from under it, but that’s what the song is suggesting we try to do. I think people are really starting to feel like they are trapped in a system and that it really doesn’t matter if they go to college or work hard, that the system is just going to gobble them up. How do I find an identity? How do I evolve as a person when I am under this huge monolithic financial system controlling my healthcare and my property and all my rights? I feel this song will resonate with people because it is basically trying to say that you have to find your own way to break free and not let it define you somehow. Easier said than done.
Going back to that PMA again.
Yeah, exactly.
There is another track on there called “Kill Your Idols.” That is a song that is a whole different energy and a different tempo for you.
That is one of the few songs that I’ve had for almost eight or nine years.
Just carrying it around with you?
Exactly, in my big box of cassette tapes- that’s how old it is. But yeah, that song is very much about getting to a point when you feel like you are hitting so many road blocks in life and when is it going to be that time when you are going to get our from under all the things that are holding you down and when are you going to stop fooling yourself into thinking that you are going to get this golden ticket and everything is going to be fine. It’s not like that; you have to make it happen for yourself. There is another song on the album called “Put Down your Weapons.” It’s about the verbal weapons that we use in communication. So many times you can see people lashing out at you and all you can think is “Man that was a really lame thing to say, I wonder why he or she said that to me?” It’s like are they are lashing out because their egos are hurt or they are lashing out because of fear of rejection. Whether it is with family or friends or people you work with “Put down Your Weapons” is saying let’s just talk like human beings instead of always going to war with each others’ egos. More and more on shows like TMZ or FOX News everyone is just digging at each other relentlessly. That is the first thing on any comment page- who is going to get the best burn, the best insult? Who is going to say the worst thing about each other? We have almost totally lost our ability for intelligent discourse to solve any of the real problems out there. Perfect example, I hate to keep bagging on FOX News, but it’s, in my opinion, by being so divisive in our culture they are the ones now being unpatriotic. To be patriotic would be to bring this country together, but by us being separated into either being totally right wing or totally left wing, to me it’s totally unpatriotic. You have to try and find the method of discourse that’s going to help move us all forward, instead of further away from each other, and the same goes for personal relationships. In that sense I’m carrying on what I was trying to do in PENNYWISE. Play hard music, approach different topics, and try and walk that line of taking on certain subjects without preaching, but it’s difficult. I always wanted to write lyrics that make you think a bit rather than… “Let’s party down in Cabo.” There are plenty of bands that do that way better than I can. So this is what I do and I think people who enjoyed my last band will like this one too.
Well Jim I appreciate you taking the time. BLACK PACIFIC in stores everywhere Sept 14th. You have ten tracks on there; you’re going to be hitting the road. You’re going to Europe and you’ll be coming back and hitting the states in 2011 as well. I appreciate you taking the time to talk. THE BLACK PACIFIC, look for it. Jimmy, hat on, shades. Are we keeping the hat and shades?
The hat, shades, of course. Finger pointing, everything.
Popularity: 1%
