STOP FUCKING WITH PEOPLE
A Talk with Jay Bentley
September 12, 1998
by Dusan Rebolj
The interview that Jay Bentley graciously granted me on September 12th 1998 was a peculiar animal. I truly prepared myself. I was about to conduct an interview with someone from my favorite band ever. It had all been arranged through Bad Religion's then-manager Michele Ceazan, but when Jay and I ran into each-other at the Warped Tour field-headquarters, he was so disarmingly nice that I knew all that red-tape hassle had been completely unnecessary. I could have just as easily walked in right off the street and struck up a conversation. So we stepped outside, had a Gatorade (how punk, I hear you say) and did a 45-minute Q & A where all of my pre-prepared questions were adequately answered, but then I discovered the bitch of my cheapshit tape-recorder for some reason hadn't recorded a single word. I felt the cold tingling of despair coming over me, but Jay unphasedly encouraged me to do it all over again. Just as I was succeeding at getting the worthless piece of equipment to work properly, Brian Baker walked by and Jay exchanged a few brief words with him about the contents of the buffet, in the process calling him something like 'turdfish', but don't quote me on that. All intention of repeating the already discussed topics evaporated. Our interview sort of evolved by itself after Jay remarked:
That's Brian, the guitar god. Look at him. Look at him walking there. From here you would just think »what a doof«.
A punk rocker, basically.
How does that happen? How does a punkrocky guy become such a good guitar player, what's up with that? It' s like, stop it, we're supposed to suck. The rule of punk rock is, »You suck.« I don't know, I don't get it. He doesn't suck and that's the fundamental problem with Brian. We're gonna have to throw him out of the band.
Yeah, 'cause he doesn't suck. It's an interesting aspect of punk rock. People tend to expect the least. It's like, the sound is terrible, the band sucks, nobody can play their instrument, vocals sound like a cat being dragged by its testicles over a tarmac road, but that's cool.
I don't know if that's cool or not. I think that people have to remember the greatest aspect of punk rock is that anybody can do it. That's why I'm here. I had a guitar when I was six years old. I learned how to play really badly. I couldn't do shit (immitates weird, finger-picking noises), nothing, just horrible. And because I was so bad I got an electric guitar. Alright, that made me even badder, now I was louder! (laughs) And then went from that to playing bass in Bad Religion. You get a little better at what you do but this guy is so much better. It's just, it's simple to do and you don't have to be very talented to be in punk rock. That's what we learned in 1979. You know, if you wanna go on stage and just beat on a fucking typewriter with a sledge-hammer, I'm into that, that's a great band. You know, they don't even play any music, they're just beating on things.
I know a guy who has his own project where he turns on the vacuum-cleaner and screams at it. That's his whole project.
Fine. And that's kind of what this all started from. And so, because of that image from the eighties, punk rock is always thought of as just screaming, angry, pointless bullshit. Just violent, you know. But obviously it has come leaps and bounds.
A lot of the bands that are popular now, like NOFX is a great band, I really like Down By Law, the younger bands on Fat Wreck Chords like Good Riddance, Lagwagon, stuff like that, they're really good bands and they can play their ass off, they can play their instruments.
Well, we've come into a new era of this type of music, where if you actually get up there and are bad, people don't like you. So maybe there's a shift in perception and that's because, I think, a lot of people in America that have 'discovered' punk rock were the same people who have 'discovered' AC/DC or Led Zeppelin and maybe they're a little more demanding. They're not so concerned about, you know, what's the issue here, what is punk rock really all about. Because the music of punk rock was, you know, from the Sex Pistols it was just fashion and saying 'fuck' a lot. It really just shocked a lot of people into saying, »OK, the rock 'n' roll as we know it is dead,« and that was fine. Then you had bands like Black Flag coming out of Los Angeles that actually had a little bit of a message. They were saying, »Hey, fuck this,« you know, »Fuck this whole system, this is bad.« And for me, I wasn't even in a band, I just thought that the American dream of going to college, getting a degree, getting a job, getting married, having kids, living in the suburbs and just working until I die didn't appeal to me. I really wanted to just say »Hey, fuck this,« but not the way the hippies did it, which was »Let's fuck this and get stoned and lay in the mountains.« It's like, no, I want to be proactive, I want to get involved and change things in my world. I'm smart enough to know that you can't change the world, but you can change your world. My little fifty feet. I've got fifty feet of world. I can change my world and say, »That's how I want it to be,« and it's so against what's 'normal' that you ... Punk is your outlet, it's your outlet of saying, »Hey, I don't need this shit, I don't need what everybody thinks I need.«
I don't really listen to a lot of old punk rock. I'm not going to stand here and pretend that I can tap into what was going on and made that happen. I mean, I was born in '75, but I talk to people and it's like, »Yeah, punk rock, Sex Pistols.« Bad Religion? »Yeah, the first two or three records, but then they sold out.« It's bullshit. I think that a lot of old punk rock, in my eyes, because I can't really know what it was all about, is pretty inferior to what is going on now. And I think that it's especially because of the aspect that people can play instruments and the lyrics are better. The whole thing is just much more positive.
It's taken a step forward, I think, in that it's an evolution like anything else. Early punk rock was like cavemen pounding on things with rocks, going »gong-gong-gong-bleah!«, that was it. And you evolve into becoming more musical, the lyrics become more meaningful. A lot of the English bands, if you take the U.K. Subs or Sham 69, even though at fifteen, living in Los Angeles, I'm listening to these bands and I'm loving this, but I don't have any idea what they're talking about because all those issues are English. I don't know anything about being on the dole, I don't know anything about getting your 0 level, I don't know what this fucking means to me but I'm ensconced in this.
I don't even know where New Belsen is.
I don't know where any of this shit is, right? But there's not that much to choose from at the time. And I think right now you've probably got ten thousand punk rock bands that sound an awful lot like Green Day, Pennywise, us, you know, NOFX, and there's so many bands to choose from that people can go, »I like them but they suck,« or »I like them and they're good,« or »I don't like what that guy says.« Your choices are unlimited right now in terms of this style of music.
A lot of punk rock is just saying, »I don't like this, fuck this, fuck the bomb, fuck the government, fuck this guy and fuck that,« but Bad Religion seems to have a different approach. Greg's words to some extent are a lot like addressing a college auditorium. He explains himself in a very coherent way. It's very rational.
The idea is to share information, not ideas. Ideas mean, »Here's an idea and I'm gonna try to sway you to think like me.« Here's some information and maybe in your head you come up with, »Fuck the cops, fuck the government, fuck the system.« That's what you get out of it. Maybe you get out of it, »Yeah, I felt like that too.« A song like Automatic Man. It's just based on doing something and not even thinking about it, you do it all the time. A lot of our lyric content is just based on getting information out so that you come up with your own conclusion, not sitting there and saying, »This is the solution, this is the answer.« I don't know what the answer is, I don't have any idea.
In your interviews, the band has said that your audience never seems to change, not in terms of the same people listening to you, but the age of the audience. Constantly there are kids, eighteen, nineteen years old.
Yeah, I think that's about where it stays.
Do you think you're being understood to a satisfactory level? Do you think they get what you're saying?
(pause) No.
No?
No, but if they do, that's ... I'll give you an example. When we sit down and write a song and the lyrical content is such that Greg and I have a discussion about it and he tells me exactly what he was thinking when he wrote it, so I know exactly what the song means, and someone will come up to me and say, »I was listening to this song, it means ...« and they'll tell me something absolutely different than what Greg said, but they say it in the way that that's what it says in their head, then I'll go, »Yup, that's what it means, that's exactly right.« Unless it's so far off the base that it's like, »Does this mean kill a bunch of people?« No! No, we need to change this, your perspective here's a little askew, but ... You know, it's like if you go to a museum and see a painting. You and I can be looking at the same painting and get two totally different ideas from the same piece of work. Same with music. And especially with us, because the way that we write things is multidimensional. It can be taken literally, it can be taken subliminally, it can be taken metaphorically. There are so many different ways to look at things in terms of what we're presenting information-wise, that you can come up with just about anything.
When I first started listening to Bad Religion, the first album I bought from you guys was Against the Grain when it came out, and at the time the songs that appealed to me the most were the more visceral ones. You know, like Anesthesia or Generator later on. Songs that don't necessarily bear a lot of rational meaning, but operate with certain metaphors that strike you as very vivid. They really bring some things home to you on a very emotional level.
Right.
It's only been lately, now that I've grown up a little and learned some things, that I can basically relate to Greg's stuff more. I was really a Brett fan.
Well, Greg's presentation is very scientific. He's a scientist, that's reality. He's a scientific person who spends his spare time reading scientific books. I'll sit down and read a Philip K. Dick book ...
Like 'Valis'?
Oh yeah, and I like 'Do ... 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?' (note: this book was made into a little movie known as Blade Runner)
And 'The Man in the High Castle'. That for me is entertainment. For Greg, entertainment is reading a Darwin book (laughs) and arguing the theories with us on the bus. Like, »This is crazy!« Well, you gotta go with what you've got. But with Brett it was a very ... Obviously, Brett and I were both high school dropouts, so our education level stopped at about 10th grade. And we voraciously ate up books and art and literature in terms of saying that the way to present something is maybe more in prose, maybe more in poetry. Maybe more in saying that, you know, the ship is sinking, in such a way that you're no longer the pessimist, now you're simply the optimist saying, »The ship is sinking, let's get going.« Not running around and screaming »Fire!« in a crowded movie theater.
Right. Brett will say something like 'like a twitch before dying, like a pornographic sea' and you get an image of a pornographic sea, an uncontrollable mass of naked bodies fucking each other. And it's motion, it's generator, god, whatever.
Yeah, what is the generator. Exactly.
Whereas Greg will say something like 'despite that he saw blatant similarity, he struggled to find a distinctive moiety'. With Brett, you'll go WOW, but with Greg you'll go, »What exactly is he saying? I'm going to listen to that again.«
To me that was always the key to what we did, because the idea was to ... The game we play is called 'Stump the Band', that's the game that we play amongst ourselves. Write a song, stump the band, get them to figure out what the hell's going on. Anything, maybe not even a song, just a cataclysmic idea that you have that will get people to thinking for two or three days. And you come out and go, »It's the sun, isn't it?« No. Fuck, I didn't get it, right? You just lose. So the idea and the concept of Bad Religion writing material simply for themselves is true. We write material for ourselves to allow us to think more, to give us things to talk about.
So would it be safe to say that the way Bad Religion works is take a chaotic situation and turn it into something meaningful, maybe give some meaning to whatever comes your way?
Well, if you can get there. In a lot of ways, a lot of what Brett wrote about was based on his lack of faith in anything and his inability to find faith, which was something that he really wanted. Faith in anything, just to have some kind of comfort. And in that sense, you're putting ideas out there and maybe you get it back, more like a mirror. You throw this out there and maybe somebody will come up with something and get it back to you. You can't expect that we're going to put out an album and it's going to make the world happy, change everybody's opinions of life and everybody will now live this peaceful coexistence. It's not gonna happen. But it would be a lot more interesting if more people would just simply say, »This is my life and what they do is irrelevant to me.« Less pointing fingers at other things. It's the duality of saying, »Do what you want but don't do it around me.« You're free to live your life and do exactly what you want to do. But not here. Go over there and do it. 'Cause I'm doing what I want here, this is my little space.
Fifty feet.
Right. (laughs) This is my fifty feet, you go have your fifty feet over there. Whatever you want to do, I don't care. I'm not going to get upset if you build a big temple to some god that I don't know, understand, like, whatever, I'm not gonna come over there and hit you because my god is bigger than yours, I'm past that. Maybe we can all get to that point of saying that as long as what I want doesn't involve physically or mentally abusing others, what's the problem?
When you're on stage and you play a song, does it ever have any therapeutic value? However fucked up a situation might get, do you feel better because of your music? Does it help or heal you?
Yeah, it helps me. It's a physical release, just playing, 'cause it's loud and it's fast and it's jumping around. That's great. Mentally it helps me because I get to rationalize all my fears. And I get to sing songs that ... for me they're old enough where I'm coming to conclusions about these things and that helps me. Part of what we've done in our history is present questions without answers. No answers to these questions, we don't know them. It's like, »Here's a question, I don't know, what the hell, whatever ...« So it's been a challenge for me to, like, »OK, why am I like that, why do I think this way, why do I feel this way? Is this human nature? Yeah.« So you just pound it into my head enough playing and yeah, I start to feel a lot better. Like I'm not alone here, I'm not crazy in being crazy. I'm not this fucking freak that wants things so different than what other people want. I think the only difference between me and other people is just the way I want to go about getting there. It doesn't involve anarchy, which seems to be something that people like to have a dream about and you say, »That's not what anybody wants.«
Well, it seems that for a lot of punk rock people ...
It's a symbol and, you know, it doesn't mean anything.
The Circle A.
That's good, but all I can say is that anarchy means certain death. Period.
Yeah, if you take anarchy and you define it as a state of mind or a state of affairs where there is no organized pressure on people to be productive, they're not gonna be. But I think many people confuse anarchy with chaos ...
Chaos theory is a much better way of thinking that ... Look, everything is out of control, which is really what we've got. Everything is out of control and it might seem like we're ordered mass but we're not. We're just simply ...
Mass.
Mass. We've got nothing on the ants, the ants just kick the shit out of us. If you wanna see organized mass, watch an anthill for five hours. You'll see things that you couldn't imagine happening. We couldn't do that if we fucking tried. It just doesn't happen.
Do you write your setlists based on the feeling for the day or ...
Sometimes. Setlists are more based on ... (long pause) »What do we wanna play? How do we feel?« I don't wanna do the same thing every night. I wanna do something new. And there are songs that I wanna play, there are some songs I don't wanna play that I play. Because maybe you're in a mode where you're saying, »No, I want this to be like a one-two-punch night,« and other nights you just wanna go out there and play Struck a Nerve a hundred times. Just, »This is all we're gonna play tonight, fuck it. 'Cause that's just how we feel.«
But how much of it is, »This is it, let's give the kids what they want.«?
Well, if we go out there with a setlist and somebody's in the front row screaming for Along the Way, I'll just turn to Bob and go like that (gestures) and he'll start the kick-drum and it's not even on the list. It's like, »Let's play it, whatever,« it doesn't matter. We have a hundred and sixty-something songs, sixty-four or sixty five. So it's impossible to make a list that will make everyone happy. People come up and go, »Oh, you didn't play In the Night.« Sorry. »You didn't play Eat Your Dog.« Sorry. It's hard to make everybody happy with that, so it's kind of back to, like, »Well, we'll make the band happy.«
Are there any special songs that people wanna hear wherever you go?
No.
There's not one song that people will get really enthusiastic about every time you play it?
Maybe Digital Boy. I don't know why. It's a weird song that people seem to like. I like it, I just thought it was a really ... when we did it, it was a very weird song. You can tell by, you know, »Here's this song, we burried it on the album, it's like track thirteen.« What a weirdo song, but people seem to like it. I don't mind playing it, 'cause I think it's just ... It's coming on, the millenium, and that's pretty much what we are now. Here's a song that was written in 1991 and it could have been on No Substance, 'cause the theme of No Substance is, »Here we are and what have we got?« We've got nothing, we've got the internet. Whew! We're digitalized. Wow!
So, it's been, what, four years since the departure of Brett. Are you in the process of letting go a lot of his songs from your repertoire?
No. You can't take that many songs and just say, »They no longer exist.« Songs for the band, they're like children. Each one is unique in itself and has specific meanings to each member of the band. I don't care whether Bret wrote something, Hetson wrote something, I wrote something, they all have meaning. It would be irresponsible to just say, »OK, now that Brett's not in the band, we're not playing any more of those songs.« That would be stupid. I wouldn't like that.
Even though the split was reported to have been somewhat rocky?
Yeah. Still, to this day I don't understand it. I can only assume so many things and I know that guessing at things, as to why things are the way they are or were the way they were, is not something that I would do. 'Cause that's being egocentric and thinking that I know everything, 'cause I don't. I don't know anything. I don't know why ... I don't know why. (long, awkward pause, me not knowing what to say next, after which Jay lets out a big gut-laugh) It's hard, you know? You'd think that after a certain amount of time you could say, »Oh, this is what happened,« but I can't. He and I were arguing when he quit. What we were arguing about was so mundane and stupid, that it was, you know, we'd had arguments that surpassed that tenfold. About real, meaningful issues. And you know, nobody quit, nobody ever did that, so obviously there was something going on for him that he wanted something else. I don't know what he wanted, though. I don't know what the issue was.
I think that just about covers it, unless there's something else that you'd like to say to whoever will read this or listen to this.
Stop fucking with people.
That's a good one.
Why bother. Stop fucking with people.
Well, I guess that's that.
Easy.