Good Riddance

Russ: My name is Russ. I sing, Luke plays guitar, Chuck plays bass and Sean plays drums. The band’s been around ten years but Shawn’s pretty new, Chuck’s been in the band for about two years and Luke’s been in the band since about 1990. We weren’t a really serious band until about five years ago.

SLUG: One of the things I noticed when I got the CD was how hot, political and forceful the lyrics are. I knew it was on Far, therefore I had some idea of what to expect from it, but I have to admit it was more pop than I imagined. I was expecting more Discharge, or that strain of music… so, why does it work in Good Riddance’s case? 

Russ: Well, I think that that CD is a really good first album, but you can really see a lot of our melodic influences on it. I think that when you do your first album, you can really see a lot of your melodic influences on it. I think that when you do your first album, especially when you’ve been around for a long time like us, your first album tends to be the “best of” all the songs that have been floating around for years and years. Whereas our new album coming out has the songs written in a space in time with a solid lineup. My main influence and why I ever wanted to start a band was Bad Religion with their social-political lyrics mixed with the melodic style; so I think it all stems from that. We’re just a Bad Religion rip off band!

SLUG: I’m a college-educated person and I consider myself to be intelligent, but most of the time I need to pull out a dictionary to understand just what he’s saying in most Bad Religion songs.

Russ: Me too… 

SLUG: Do you think that pushes people away, or brings people in? 

Russ: I don’t necessarily believe either. I don’t think it attracts too many people, but I think that people will buy the CD because they like the music, then they might want to understand the lyrics. I like it because it kind of forces you to enrich your vocabulary. Well, it did for me, anyway. With hardcore it’s so hard because everything’s been said about a million times. If you actually have something worthwhile to say it isn’t just a cliche. So my biggest challenge in writing lyrics is to try to put forth a vital message that’s worthwhile in a way that people will want to listen to it instead of the same old thing.

SLUG: Give me three songs that you are most proud of writing.

Russ: On the first CD there’s a song “Decoy,” – “Mother Superior,” and “Flies First Class,” too. Yeah, that’s a good list. There’s a lot more on the new record. I’d say I’m maturing as a songwriter by just doing it more and more. I wrote a lot of the music and lyrics on the new album, whereas on the last album, I wrote maybe 60 or 70% of the music.

SLUG: I think in the first album you could definitely see the musical influences, but the ideas that were put forth were from the same roots, but had much more to do with our generation of punk rock than Bad Religion. So what can we expect from the new release? 

Russ: Well, half of it is really hardcore, and half of it is complete emo-cheese.

SLUG: Hitting all spectrums? 

Russ: Yeah… We wrote some harder songs that we’ve always wanted to play. There are some faster, 30-second-long screamers, then there’s a super heavy slow, just a really gloomy sounding one, and there’s some faster melodic stuff, kinda like the first CD… Maybe because I’m almost 28, and so is Chuck, the other guys are younger – 25 and 22. 

SLUG: Well, what about that? What about growing older in hardcore? Does it affect how you’re writing or how you’re seeing the community? 

Russ: Someone once said that if you’re over 25 and you’re still into punk, then you’re a lifer. I’m starting to think that’s true. It’s a bit weird to go to shows and see our audience being much younger than I am. I started to wonder where the people who were going to shows when I was that age were. Where’s everyone else? What am I doing? I guess I just have a blind idealism for what I’m doing. I think if punk didn’t stir me like it does, I’d probably get out of it. But I just never stopped to question it; it’s all I do. 

SLUG: When you were young, what was it about punk that moved you? 

Russ: That it was honest and passionate, it was raw and captured a… I don’t want to say angst, but that’s probably the best word, I suppose. Basically, I grew up in the 80s when Reagan was President and I’d go to bed each night not knowing if I was going to wake up, thinking that there was going to be a nuclear war every night. 

SLUG: Yeah, I think about that element a lot. We don’t live under that kind of fear anymore. It was a type of pressure cooker lifestyle, and I think it influenced us because it was all desperate. 

Russ: I look back on the time when I was 18 and I did a lot of crazy things. Punk was much more nihilistic back then with all this unfocused anger and frustration. I think as punk has progressed, it has gotten more direct. Kids come up to us and say “What’s with all these songs about the eighties and the Reagan-Bush years? What was the deal? And I just think, ‘You’ll never know!’ I’m sure that it’s scarred me a lot more than I think, but it creeps through into my song writing.

SLUG: What other sort of influences did you have that have stuck to you from that period? 

Russ: Just bands where the lyrics gave you chills and made you want to smash something. And I also saw the movie DOA which documented the Sex Pistols tour and that was the first time I really saw a live punk band. And the Sex Pistols had this energy about them; they hated each other which made for a great live show. 

SLUG: Is that something Good Riddance is going for? 

Russ: No, well, actually, it’s funny because when we first started this band we only did Sex Pistols covers because it was the only thing I liked. But that was a long time ago. 

SLUG: What an evolution. What took you so long to record the record? 

Russ: I think it’s because the town we live in is a small town, it’s a beach town and everybody there is really laid back. I was friends with this band and they asked me if I wanted to sing and I said, “I’ll sing, but you have to play Sex Pistol’s songs.” They started playing it and they liked it…

SLUG: So you converted them all! 

Russ: I started noticing that I really liked it, but at the same time I started listening to some punk that was really politically motivating me to see it as a medium of communication, and a viable tool to express myself. So I got more and more into it and wanted to do it and the people I was with wanted to play birthday parties, hang out, not practice a lot, not tour. So it basically meant finding the right people. We’d get someone to play with us awhile until either they’d quit, or we’d kick them out. Chuck, our bass player, is from Los Angeles and his girlfriend went to college in Santa Cruz and so that’s how we found him. Our drummer found out our old drummer quit (he’s from Santa Barbara), and he pretty much stalked us all year saying, “I’ll try out, I’ll try out.” And since everyone who plays drums in Santa Cruz has already played in my band, we had to get someone from Santa Barbara. I always had a feeling that someday it would all just work out, as long as I just kept trying. 

SLUG: What are your plans for the future? 

Russ: I just feel as though it’s almost my job to keep good punk music available to younger kids because it was offered to me when I was a kid. I know how awful it all was until I got into punk. I hated everyone; I was angry and I didn’t know why. It was the first thing I really experienced that I cared about. And I want to make sure that experience is available for younger people. It’s more or less up to the bands around today to keep it real and not let it turn into some big corporate thing. 

SLUG: But don’t you think that the kids have to come with the kind of angst and the kind of thinking that we did when we first came to shows?

Russ: But think about how much different the world is right now. If you were growing up in suburban America right now, you’ll always have the angst because of it being that time of your life, but they don’t have the Cold War and for me, and maybe for you too, that was just…well, there’s just nothing like that now. And you won’t get beat up at school for wearing a Bad Religion t-shirt anymore. Now all the guys who were beating you up are wearing the Bad Religion shirts! You used to have to go against the grain to be a punk, go to really weird record shops to find the music you liked, do a lot of mail-order stuff, and go to all these out-of-the-way, shitty shows. 

SLUG: But don’t you think that’s what has kept us in it for so long? The fact that it was this gem, you know? It was hard to find, hard to get a hold of…but once you did, it was so worth it. 

Russ: Yeah, an analogy I use is that maybe there’s a restaurant that you know of that’s really, really good, but a lot of people don’t know about it. It’s a hole in the wall, an out-of-the-way place. You love it because it’s great and no one really goes there. Then all of a sudden people start finding out about it, and it starts to expand. It sucks, but at the same time I know that it’s not just my own thing, and I can’t just hoard it. It’s just going to go through its growing phase. I think that a lot of the people who are into it now just because of MTV will be out of it in about two years once MTV stops playing it. And I don’t pretend to know how to pick them out – who is real and who isn’t…I just try to let them take what they want from it. 

SLUG: Someone just walked in with a Germs T-shirt on. There was a time when this would happen and you knew you had something profoundly in common with this person. I wonder what will bring that link back. 

Russ: I think the history of MTV and Rolling Stone and any media that has to do with music, they pick something up and claim they discovered it, they try to tell you about it, they make up the history of it and try to exploit it and steal anything that was ever good from it! Punk is something that I don’t think will ever die out. There were too many people doing it before that it’s going to keep going! 

SLUG: You said something interesting about the history. Maybe it’s better if we don’t try to make up a history and assign time frames in some kind of chronological order. Maybe we’re forcing it into something that defeats it. 

Russ: Yeah, but I think people who really care about punk don’t get caught up in that. I can remember reading an issue of Spin and they had a thing about the punk timetable, about four years ago: punk began, and then punk died in ‘81. This is the same magazine that, two years later, were claiming it to be the “Year Punk Broke.” So if you’ve been around the scene for a long time, you just have to laugh at that. Rolling Stone, Spin and all those – They have no clue, they never have. In a year or so they’ll stop covering it when it stops working for them and it’ll go back underground. Maybe we’ll sell less records, maybe there will be less kids at our shows, but maybe that’s better – I’d rather have it that way. 

SLUG: What do you do with your time when you’re not on tour? 

Russ: Well, we had to quit our jobs. I didn’t want to quit – I worked at an espresso bar and I liked it but I was gone so much they just couldn’t keep me. So when we’re home we just write music, surf, skateboard and play ice hockey in San Jose. (I chase around this girl I want to marry but who doesn’t want to get married yet..) 

SLUG: So what do you want to tell the Japanese readers? Will you play Japan soon?

Russ: Yeah, we’re trying to go there this winter. We want it really bad, we just got messed up last time. So hopefully the people of Japan will see us soon. 

SLUG: Any info as to when the record will be coming out? 

Russ: June 18th in the States, I don’t know when in Japan. 18 songs with two covers of the Kinks’ “Come Dancing” and “Government Issue”…So everyone should buy it, and if you don’t like it, it makes a good coaster! 

SLUG: Last words?

Russ: Go vegan!

Read more interviews from the archives:
Stuck Mojo
9 Spine Stickleback

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