Jay Bentley - Bad Religion (17/02/2013)
Having formed in 1979, and just released their sixteenth studio album, True North, we chat with Jay Bentley of the iconic Bad Religion.
It’s 2013, for a band that started over 30 years ago did you expect to still be living in a world, singing about the same world issues?
No not really, I think that when we were 15, we could only really sing about the things that we were living in, we were living with our parents and what we knew was from television, there was no internet back then. We are still singing about those people who are left behind by society, I think that’s changed a little. We sing about social issues now based on travelling the world and seeing everything, so I don’t think we would have ever seen ourselves being able to talk something, like a song ‘Dharma and The Bomb’ being able to talk about terrorists and bombs or India, Pakistan, nuclear proliferation, I never thought that was coming.
So do you find with the more success, the more travel, the more inhumane issues you’re exposed to?
I think in America there’s the general consensus that punk rock goes very well when republicans are in office and we were very quick to point out that we didn’t really care who was in office because the things that we talk about aren’t particularly politically motivated and it wasn’t really about a left verses right issue, people who always pin this ‘left’ thing on us, but we’re like “no we’re just humanists and we don’t want to care about sides”, it’s like you said when you wake up and read the news of how incredibly in humane human beings can be, that’s enough to drive you to write the songs.
How do you deal with living in America, a country with still so many in-just social issues?
I think it’s really hard to express. I have ideas but they’re based on the fact that I’ve been fortunate enough to travel outside of America and I lived in Canada for a number of years, so I’ve seen how other systems work, but for the majority of Americans they’ve never been anywhere but here and so it’s very easy for them to be told that everyone outside of America are bad countries and they do everything wrong and the people are poor and they believe that, because they’ve never been there to see anything different and it’s that age old thought that the way to get people out of their oppression is education.
Right now in America they’ve just decided now facts are subjective, like your facts are different to my facts and that’s now the new unbelievable ideology that some brilliant, smart person has come up with to basically keep people in line.
At least you’re not short for inspiration?
(Laughing) never! Sadly but for our benefit there’s plenty of things to write about. It gives me a reason to wake up in the morning.
It does lead to the bands long jeopardy, not only the mass of inspiration but the community in which the band exists, you’ve gone from being a teenage punk band to being one of the most influential punk bands across the world, where do you see yourselves within the scene?
I don’t know.
My friends are still playing, whether it’s NOFX, Social Distortion, Pennywise, Alkaline Trio, Against Me! Or Hot Water Music, I think that we all think as though we are carrying on and playing.
I think that if there were ever a time that I sat down and thought “wow, we’re really important” someone would need to come along and kick me in the ass, there’s no time for thinking that.
The new album ‘True North’, like all Bad Religion records, is instantly recognizable. Do you find an importance at keeping that similar sound within the band?
I don’t think that we put a huge emphasis on trying to make a sound, I think it’s just a byproduct of the way that we were formed as a band.
We put out a record in 1984 called ‘Into The Unknown’ which was completely different and it was a commercial failure and everyone went “wow, I guess you can’t just do whatever you want” which was a learning lesson, but with that being said, if someone were to come along to our rehearsal studio and say “here’s a David Bowie song, you guys should learn it and do a cover song” after about twenty minutes we would have just beaten it down into the ground and it would sound like a Bad Religion song, they’d be like “owe, that’s just what you guys do” and we’re like “yeah, sorry!”.
Does the band enjoying setting those challenges to work on another person’s song?
Yeah! We don’t do a lot of cover songs, we don’t put them out on records, we were asked to do a Ramones cover song a while back and we did that, that was kind of sensible, it was too far from our ball park but when we did the Bob Dylan song, then we kind of thought ‘How do we do this? We don’t want to sound like Bob Dylan’, so we just played it the way we know how to play it, play it fast. We didn’t know what else to do. We had two choices, we could hand Graffin a guitar a say “hey, you do it” or do what we did.
We’re still like kids, we just want to turn our guitar amps up, like “dude, check out how loud this is”.
Recording wise I read the bands intentions on ‘True North’ was keeping the sound stripped back, which is a signature sound for the punk genre, why did you feel the importance in making that point?
First and foremost, I think that stripped down can mean a lot of things to a lot of people and one of the first and biggest things we had to strip away was time.
We found ourselves getting caught up in these 3 minute, 40 second songs, intro, verse, chorus, verse, bridge, solo, chorus, verse, chorus, outro. Why the hell are we writing these songs? They’re too long, they’re ok but let’s just do this, verse, chorus, verse, out (laughing). It doesn’t take away from the background vocals or the guitar parts that we put in, those are the things we’ve been putting in since ‘Suffer’, so I think when we talked about stripping it back, it was just really about the excess things that we were doing and doing it in 2 minutes instead of 4.
I remember Brett said something, back when we were doing ‘No Control’ and ‘Against the Grain’, around that time and he said ‘there’s something amazingly cathartic but very difficult about putting a lifetimes worth of emotion in a 2 minute song” and I remember him saying that, saying that in a nutshell what we do. Just take everything you ever thought and felt about a particular instance and sticking it in a 2 minute song.
The album has been stated as the bands most emotional yet, what created this theme within the album?
I’ve haven’t heard that it was our emotional album.
Some things that I can think of right off the bat, one, our singer, who wrote maybe 60% of the songs on this record is dealing with watching his son, at 21 years old, go through that life struggle that we all go through at 20-21 and I think for him, watching it through the fathers eyes brought back a lot of memories for him about the concept of finding your own way if you just keep going.
Another part of it was, Brett, when ‘The Dissent of Man’ came out, which was the record before he said: “I wrote all my songs on an acoustic guitar in front of my, then one year old daughter, I’m not going to do that this time”.
I think those two things combine to make the record more personal because it was more thought out, instead of just like “well, here’s topic a”, these are really personal moments and I think that does make sense as to why it’s our most emotional record.
The debut single from the album is bluntly titled ‘FUCK YOU’. It surprises me this name hasn’t been used by the band for a song title previously, after 34 years as a band why was now the right time for such a powerful song title?
Well, when we were 15 and sitting in (Greg) Graffin’s garage, we had a discussion about what kind of a band we wanted to be and one of the choices was a band that just sang ‘fuck you’ into a microphone and we said “we don’t want to be that band” (laughing) so 30-odd years later, we write a song called ‘Fuck You’ but in typical Bad Religion form, the song isn’t saying fuck you, the song is about saying fuck you and why you would do such a thing.
That’s typical of us, let’s analyse why we say fuck you.
And how do you feel when you stand on stage screaming those words after the teenage Bad Religion thought that wasn’t a sensible thing to do, yet adult Bad Religion love the idea.
There’s an interview that I did, back around 1988 (pausing to remember) and I said “I can’t imagine myself being 30 years old and screaming ‘Fuck Armageddon’ into a microphone” (laughing). Well I’m way past 30 and I’m still screaming ‘Fuck Armageddon’ into a microphone so I may as well sing ‘Fuck You’ into a microphone too!
Saying that am I right in saying you didn’t for see long jeopardy for the band?
I guess, you know I think that Greg (Graffin) and I, when we’re on the road we kind of say “look, we don’t really have a real future” because we never really thought about it ever, we just kind of plan tours and it’s always like “maybe this is it, or maybe not, but if it is, whatever that’s cool”, so I think we’re not taking it seriously, but we know it’s inevitable we will just stop, we just don’t know when.
Or was it that when you were teenagers you said you didn’t expected to be screaming “Fuck Armageddon” as a 30 year old, did you expect to grow out of the punk?
No, I think I was around 9 years old, that was around 1973 (chuckling) and I did something super shady and my dad said “you fucking punk” and I went “what? What does that even mean?”.
So I just figured, this is how I’ll live my life. I’m never growing out of it, it’s the best thing ever.
A true punk from 9 years old! Longest existing punk dare I say?
I might not have thought that I’d be standing on a stage doing this, but I never thought I wouldn’t be this person who just didn’t fall in line and do what was expected of me, because I’ve just never been that person.
Can you remember what it was you did at the age of 9 that made your Dad so mad?
No, I probably broke something and blamed my sister. You know something stupid. I do remember this, when I was young, I was just this super liar kid. I just lied about everything, I couldn’t stop lying. So no matter what it was, even if it was a dumb thing, I’d just start lying about it. Why? I don’t know, I just can’t tell the truth.
Lying just sounded so much better.
Obviously you had a great imagination and a great way with words, even back then.
Yeah… my Dad didn’t think so.
There is a social change that I’ve noticed, punk logos have become symbols in popular culture, available in every day fashion stores with t-shirt blasting the Bad Religion, Misfits and Ramones logos and symbols, how do you as an original punk dude, obviously from the age of 9, react to this change?
I think I’ve already had my ‘Hot Topic’ moment where I just kind of said “wow, they’re selling our life” and then it was over and then I didn’t care anymore. Now I’m like “who cares?”, it really isn’t about that, it was never about logos or clothes, it was really just about music to be honest. For me and others that I know, it was just asking questions, going against the grain and just being true to yourself.
People always say “Can music change the world?” and I say: “Well if the biggest selling record is 15 million units and there’s 700 billion people on the planet, the answer’s no”, so I would assumed that when people ask “what does punk rock do?” I don’t say it changed fashioned or it let people with short hair wear a t-shirt with a cross on it.
As long as you’re thinking for yourself, I don’t care what you do.
Bad Religion have been so kind to Australia with recent tours, will we be hearing ‘True North’ in concert anytime soon?
We’re working that as we speak and I’m hoping that some people who’d like to see us down there can expect us in January or February next year, that would be nice!
Cassie Walker
It’s 2013, for a band that started over 30 years ago did you expect to still be living in a world, singing about the same world issues?
No not really, I think that when we were 15, we could only really sing about the things that we were living in, we were living with our parents and what we knew was from television, there was no internet back then. We are still singing about those people who are left behind by society, I think that’s changed a little. We sing about social issues now based on travelling the world and seeing everything, so I don’t think we would have ever seen ourselves being able to talk something, like a song ‘Dharma and The Bomb’ being able to talk about terrorists and bombs or India, Pakistan, nuclear proliferation, I never thought that was coming.
So do you find with the more success, the more travel, the more inhumane issues you’re exposed to?
I think in America there’s the general consensus that punk rock goes very well when republicans are in office and we were very quick to point out that we didn’t really care who was in office because the things that we talk about aren’t particularly politically motivated and it wasn’t really about a left verses right issue, people who always pin this ‘left’ thing on us, but we’re like “no we’re just humanists and we don’t want to care about sides”, it’s like you said when you wake up and read the news of how incredibly in humane human beings can be, that’s enough to drive you to write the songs.
How do you deal with living in America, a country with still so many in-just social issues?
I think it’s really hard to express. I have ideas but they’re based on the fact that I’ve been fortunate enough to travel outside of America and I lived in Canada for a number of years, so I’ve seen how other systems work, but for the majority of Americans they’ve never been anywhere but here and so it’s very easy for them to be told that everyone outside of America are bad countries and they do everything wrong and the people are poor and they believe that, because they’ve never been there to see anything different and it’s that age old thought that the way to get people out of their oppression is education.
Right now in America they’ve just decided now facts are subjective, like your facts are different to my facts and that’s now the new unbelievable ideology that some brilliant, smart person has come up with to basically keep people in line.
At least you’re not short for inspiration?
(Laughing) never! Sadly but for our benefit there’s plenty of things to write about. It gives me a reason to wake up in the morning.
It does lead to the bands long jeopardy, not only the mass of inspiration but the community in which the band exists, you’ve gone from being a teenage punk band to being one of the most influential punk bands across the world, where do you see yourselves within the scene?
I don’t know.
My friends are still playing, whether it’s NOFX, Social Distortion, Pennywise, Alkaline Trio, Against Me! Or Hot Water Music, I think that we all think as though we are carrying on and playing.
I think that if there were ever a time that I sat down and thought “wow, we’re really important” someone would need to come along and kick me in the ass, there’s no time for thinking that.
The new album ‘True North’, like all Bad Religion records, is instantly recognizable. Do you find an importance at keeping that similar sound within the band?
I don’t think that we put a huge emphasis on trying to make a sound, I think it’s just a byproduct of the way that we were formed as a band.
We put out a record in 1984 called ‘Into The Unknown’ which was completely different and it was a commercial failure and everyone went “wow, I guess you can’t just do whatever you want” which was a learning lesson, but with that being said, if someone were to come along to our rehearsal studio and say “here’s a David Bowie song, you guys should learn it and do a cover song” after about twenty minutes we would have just beaten it down into the ground and it would sound like a Bad Religion song, they’d be like “owe, that’s just what you guys do” and we’re like “yeah, sorry!”.
Does the band enjoying setting those challenges to work on another person’s song?
Yeah! We don’t do a lot of cover songs, we don’t put them out on records, we were asked to do a Ramones cover song a while back and we did that, that was kind of sensible, it was too far from our ball park but when we did the Bob Dylan song, then we kind of thought ‘How do we do this? We don’t want to sound like Bob Dylan’, so we just played it the way we know how to play it, play it fast. We didn’t know what else to do. We had two choices, we could hand Graffin a guitar a say “hey, you do it” or do what we did.
We’re still like kids, we just want to turn our guitar amps up, like “dude, check out how loud this is”.
Recording wise I read the bands intentions on ‘True North’ was keeping the sound stripped back, which is a signature sound for the punk genre, why did you feel the importance in making that point?
First and foremost, I think that stripped down can mean a lot of things to a lot of people and one of the first and biggest things we had to strip away was time.
We found ourselves getting caught up in these 3 minute, 40 second songs, intro, verse, chorus, verse, bridge, solo, chorus, verse, chorus, outro. Why the hell are we writing these songs? They’re too long, they’re ok but let’s just do this, verse, chorus, verse, out (laughing). It doesn’t take away from the background vocals or the guitar parts that we put in, those are the things we’ve been putting in since ‘Suffer’, so I think when we talked about stripping it back, it was just really about the excess things that we were doing and doing it in 2 minutes instead of 4.
I remember Brett said something, back when we were doing ‘No Control’ and ‘Against the Grain’, around that time and he said ‘there’s something amazingly cathartic but very difficult about putting a lifetimes worth of emotion in a 2 minute song” and I remember him saying that, saying that in a nutshell what we do. Just take everything you ever thought and felt about a particular instance and sticking it in a 2 minute song.
The album has been stated as the bands most emotional yet, what created this theme within the album?
I’ve haven’t heard that it was our emotional album.
Some things that I can think of right off the bat, one, our singer, who wrote maybe 60% of the songs on this record is dealing with watching his son, at 21 years old, go through that life struggle that we all go through at 20-21 and I think for him, watching it through the fathers eyes brought back a lot of memories for him about the concept of finding your own way if you just keep going.
Another part of it was, Brett, when ‘The Dissent of Man’ came out, which was the record before he said: “I wrote all my songs on an acoustic guitar in front of my, then one year old daughter, I’m not going to do that this time”.
I think those two things combine to make the record more personal because it was more thought out, instead of just like “well, here’s topic a”, these are really personal moments and I think that does make sense as to why it’s our most emotional record.
The debut single from the album is bluntly titled ‘FUCK YOU’. It surprises me this name hasn’t been used by the band for a song title previously, after 34 years as a band why was now the right time for such a powerful song title?
Well, when we were 15 and sitting in (Greg) Graffin’s garage, we had a discussion about what kind of a band we wanted to be and one of the choices was a band that just sang ‘fuck you’ into a microphone and we said “we don’t want to be that band” (laughing) so 30-odd years later, we write a song called ‘Fuck You’ but in typical Bad Religion form, the song isn’t saying fuck you, the song is about saying fuck you and why you would do such a thing.
That’s typical of us, let’s analyse why we say fuck you.
And how do you feel when you stand on stage screaming those words after the teenage Bad Religion thought that wasn’t a sensible thing to do, yet adult Bad Religion love the idea.
There’s an interview that I did, back around 1988 (pausing to remember) and I said “I can’t imagine myself being 30 years old and screaming ‘Fuck Armageddon’ into a microphone” (laughing). Well I’m way past 30 and I’m still screaming ‘Fuck Armageddon’ into a microphone so I may as well sing ‘Fuck You’ into a microphone too!
Saying that am I right in saying you didn’t for see long jeopardy for the band?
I guess, you know I think that Greg (Graffin) and I, when we’re on the road we kind of say “look, we don’t really have a real future” because we never really thought about it ever, we just kind of plan tours and it’s always like “maybe this is it, or maybe not, but if it is, whatever that’s cool”, so I think we’re not taking it seriously, but we know it’s inevitable we will just stop, we just don’t know when.
Or was it that when you were teenagers you said you didn’t expected to be screaming “Fuck Armageddon” as a 30 year old, did you expect to grow out of the punk?
No, I think I was around 9 years old, that was around 1973 (chuckling) and I did something super shady and my dad said “you fucking punk” and I went “what? What does that even mean?”.
So I just figured, this is how I’ll live my life. I’m never growing out of it, it’s the best thing ever.
A true punk from 9 years old! Longest existing punk dare I say?
I might not have thought that I’d be standing on a stage doing this, but I never thought I wouldn’t be this person who just didn’t fall in line and do what was expected of me, because I’ve just never been that person.
Can you remember what it was you did at the age of 9 that made your Dad so mad?
No, I probably broke something and blamed my sister. You know something stupid. I do remember this, when I was young, I was just this super liar kid. I just lied about everything, I couldn’t stop lying. So no matter what it was, even if it was a dumb thing, I’d just start lying about it. Why? I don’t know, I just can’t tell the truth.
Lying just sounded so much better.
Obviously you had a great imagination and a great way with words, even back then.
Yeah… my Dad didn’t think so.
There is a social change that I’ve noticed, punk logos have become symbols in popular culture, available in every day fashion stores with t-shirt blasting the Bad Religion, Misfits and Ramones logos and symbols, how do you as an original punk dude, obviously from the age of 9, react to this change?
I think I’ve already had my ‘Hot Topic’ moment where I just kind of said “wow, they’re selling our life” and then it was over and then I didn’t care anymore. Now I’m like “who cares?”, it really isn’t about that, it was never about logos or clothes, it was really just about music to be honest. For me and others that I know, it was just asking questions, going against the grain and just being true to yourself.
People always say “Can music change the world?” and I say: “Well if the biggest selling record is 15 million units and there’s 700 billion people on the planet, the answer’s no”, so I would assumed that when people ask “what does punk rock do?” I don’t say it changed fashioned or it let people with short hair wear a t-shirt with a cross on it.
As long as you’re thinking for yourself, I don’t care what you do.
Bad Religion have been so kind to Australia with recent tours, will we be hearing ‘True North’ in concert anytime soon?
We’re working that as we speak and I’m hoping that some people who’d like to see us down there can expect us in January or February next year, that would be nice!
Cassie Walker