Chicago Beatdown: Talking with Screeching Weasel co-founder Ben Weasel (part one)

If you’re a Chicagoan, punk rock scenester, John Jughead, a local promoter, an avid supporter of local talent under all circumstances, a member of a Chicago punk band, Fall Out Boy, the Dropkick Murphys, or you hate profuse swearing, chances are you may be offended by our interview with Ben Weasel.

But there’s no denying that as lead singer and co-founder of iconic, Chicago-reared pop-punk outfit Screeching Weasel, the 41-year-old punk pioneer has established a lasting legacy in that corner of the music world, making an impression on Green Day and others … although as Weasel (real last name, Foster) says about legacy, “Fuck that. Who cares?” He’ll happily admit that as a person he has few supporters, particularly in the Chicago music scene, but Weasel the musician is still very much in demand.

Screeching Weasel formed this year for the fifth time, taking the top slot on the impressive bill for local punk music showcase Riot Fest, kicking off tonight and now in its 5th year. (Weasel, along with locally grown punk powerhouses Alkaline Trio and Pegboy, headlines performs at the Congress Theater Sunday. Update: Screeching Weasel’s listed as going last at Riot Fest, but Weasel requested to play second to last. Alkaline Trio is closing the night). But for the first time since the band’s formation in 1986, co-founder John “Jughead” Pierson, whom Weasel’s known since he was 12, isn’t a part of the band.

Weasel recently called Chicago Beat from his Madison home for an 80-minute conversation. Part one of our interview, appearing below, features Weasel’s thoughts on the Chicago scene past and present, punk’s place in the world today and more. Part two, posted tomorrow, explores why Screeching Weasel has returned once again, the chance there’ll be new Screeching Weasel music, and that rough, very public split with Jughead. And next Monday, look for our review of the band’s first Chicago show since 2004.

Chicago Beat: I read that you were expecting twins.

Ben Weasel: Yeah, they’re almost 7 weeks old.

CB: Wow, congratulations. That’s fantastic. Boys or girls?

BW: Girls.

CB: What names do they have?

BW: Lydia and Collette.

CB: So are you going to be raising them punk at all?

BW: Well, no, I hope not, no.

CB: Why is that?

BW: Well I don’t know what that means. I’m sure they’ll hear a lot of music in the house growing up for sure.

CB: Do you think they’ll be like you or do you even want them to be like you? I’ve read that you were a bit of a tough kid growing up.

BW: Nah. I wasn’t tough. I was a softy. I hope what every parent hopes, to give them a good life and teach them good values and give them self-confidence and all those kinds of things. I think that certainly, you know, encouraging kids in creative pursuits is important, so that’s something we plan on doing. But as far as punk rock goes, I imagine they’ll grow up with the same view of it as me, being in the same house as me. And I imagine as they get older they’ll go to shows with me and stuff and that I play and see it for what it is, and come to the understanding really quick that the idea that it’s sort of a rebellious, against the mainstream alternative or something is just laughable. It’s very provincial, it’s very insular, its very reactionary in terms of not wanting to depart from any of the conventions of the sort of lifestyle or whatever. So I think that certainly it’s a hard way to live, to sort of never go and try and fit in to any kind of group or anything, but I think you end up being happier in the long run if you end up being an individual and be happy with who you are. So I think that’s a long-winded way of saying punk rock is totally phony and a big lie, and my kids will see that whether I teach that to them explicitly or not, I think by virtue of being around it that becomes pretty evident to anybody with eyes and a brain that it’s a lot of bullshit.

CB: So ‘it’s a lot of bullshit,’ yet there are punk fans that see you as such a punk pioneer. What was it that you fell in love with that wasn’t the ‘bullshit punk’ as you’ve defined?

BW: It’s just fucking total lack of pretension. I felt very isolated as a teenager and very alienated, which is a really common thing. I think for most people who feel that way they’re searching for a group to be a part of, and I came to the conclusion very early on that there wasn’t really much substantially different between a group of punk rockers sitting around, drinking and acting like idiots, and a group of frat boys sitting around, drinking and acting like idiots. It was just a matter of haircuts and clothes and music. Once you got past the superficial thing of the same clique, the stuff that I was into when I got into it, The Ramones and Black Flag and things like that, to me that spoke to this feeling of being a perpetual outsider. It reinforced the idea with me that you can’t find truth in things like that, it’s just really just another lie like anything else. So to me to the extent that there is a punk rock spirit, to me it’s inherently, violently opposed to any sort of social cliques or groups or anything like that. And I think that’s always been a huge part of punk as long as I’ve been involved in it, and I think that’s true now more than ever.

Punk has its own fucking Woodstock in Gainesville every year. These fests are just left and right, and they become these things, and Riot Fest is actually the only one I can think of off the top of my head that isn’t like this, that’s actually about fans going to see bands. But the other ones, those people would show up regardless of what bands are playing because it’s a social event, which I find totally appalling and just really fucking boring. So you know, I take a sort of perverse pride of never playing that game and never fitting in like that, but also I’ve never wanted to. So that’s not something that ever really appealed to me.

CB: So what did appeal to you in those early years when Screeching Weasel was first coming together, when you were recording your first stuff, and being a part, whether you liked it or not, of something. Take me back to that scene.

BW: As I said before, the primary thing that appealed to me was this idea that I’m not able to fit into these groups, so I’m going to celebrate that and be a thumb in the eye of all the people who want me to. So I took great delight from very early on at thumbing my nose at the punk establishment, even in the days when I was a teenager and my early 20s, when I was really provincial and had a lot of silly ideas about the way things ought to be and so forth. At the same time, I really couldn’t help but alienate people and it’s not anything I regret. (Laughs). I think there have always been a lot of people, especially in the Chicago punk rock scene, that don’t like me, and I wear that as a badge of honor.  And it’s not just Chicago, it would be anywhere else. I don’t want to be part of their fucking group, and I find it hilarious that the people in the ’80s who so desperately wanted to succeed, who would have done anything, would have sold anybody out, to be able to earn a living from playing music, I find it hilarious that we’re the ones who ended up making a living and we never even gave a fuck. We never even tried. So there’s a certain sort of poetic justice in there somewhere.

CB: Give a sense then of why you would be hated in the local scene.

BW: You’d have to ask these fucking clowns. I didn’t play their fucking reindeer games, who knows? There’s more rules than a 19th century society party at these things, so who knows? I had one of these douchebags come to a show I was promoting and he launched into some tirade about how I should have gotten his permission before I put on the show in his neighborhood. (Laughs). It was like a gang or something. I like laughed in his face, I thought he was joking, but he was totally fucking serious. He was like, ‘This is my neighborhood.’ And this was a guy who was a total douchebag who is a totally prominent figure in Chicago punk rock to this day, to the extent that that’s possible; I mean he’s a medium-sized fish in a very small mud puddle. But the Chicago scene was always just rife with fucking clowns like that. (Laughs). I don’t know how you cannot end up being disliked by people like that unless you’re really good at biting the insides of your cheeks and not laughing your ass off at them.

I think that there have always been people who didn’t like my political views. There have always been people who didn’t like that I was candid about taking my business seriously and about making money. People who were upset that I didn’t sing the same tune and say, ‘Oh, I’m just doing it for fun,’ and all that kind of bullshit. Nobody does it just for fun. If you did it just for fun, you’d never leave your bedroom. The second you go out and do it for a crowd you’re doing it for other reasons, and for most people, the reason is attention. It’s not money, it’s not fame for most people. It’s fame in the sense that they want attention and adulation, they want all eyes to be on them, and certainly when I started out it was no different for me. But I think that I reached the point where earning a living became more important because I grew out of that need of having all eyes on me when I walked into a room or whatever. 

But to get back to what you were talking about earlier, I realize that you wanted to talk about the Chicago scene, and I don’t want to give the impression that there weren’t interesting things happening and good bands because there were. And one of my favorite bands in the ‘80s were the Bhopal Stiffs; I’d love seeing them play and playing shows with them, and Larry [Damore], one of the two singers for that band, ended up being the singer for Pegboy. But they were a really great band; they were the most underrated band from that time I think. And of course in those days everybody went to see Naked Raygun. They would regularly sell out the Metro and then later the Riviera, and those shows were always really fun too. So there were some good things, but there was I think a real difference between the Chicago scene and the Bay Area scene that we were familiar with and even the New York scene in that there was never a club that was the center of it. There was never even really a group at the center of it; there were all these different cliques, and while I’m sure it happened in those other scenes, the amount of jealousy, backbiting, gossip has always been through the fucking roof in Chicago. It’s been really, really, really out of control. It’s really, really, really always been bad to my knowledge, and from what I’ve seen it’s still that way.

CB: Is that one of the reasons you left for Madison?

BW: No, I had nothing to do with the music scene for so many years when I was living down there anyway. No, I just wanted to be away from the city. I wanted to live a slower-paced life, my wife and I wanted to get out of there, we wanted to buy a house, we could never afford a house down there. No, we wanted to raise a family, and this is a nicer place to do it. Schools are better, less pollution, less traffic. It’s just a much nicer place to live frankly, although one thing that appealed to me about this area up here is for all intensive purposes there is no punk rock scene. The music scene is much smaller, but I mean punk rock is just all if non-existent up here, which I find really appealing.

CB: And why do you find that appealing?

BW: Because I don’t have bands up here asking me to go to their shows. (Laughs). It’s always uncomfortable. I have no interest, so do I make up an excuse? No, actually I really wanted to go last Sunday to see The Weakerthans. I almost never go to shows; I don’t really like live music. But I like that band and I haven’t seen John Samson, the songwriter and singer in that band since the ‘90s, so I wanted to meet up with him. But it was the day my daughters were being baptized, and we had to get up really early that day and we had 40 people over here all afternoon. So come 9 o’clock or whenever they were playing, I was fucking wiped, and I had to watch the kids while my wife took a nap and shit. So you know it backfires once in a while, but for the most part I don’t care.

Getting back to what we were talking about before, why do so many people get angry with me, that’s a big thing. I think people think, and for some reason I’ve never seen this apply to so many other people in the Chicago scene like the guys in Naked Raygun or the Effigies, but for some reason people get really upset that I don’t go to shows. This is evidence of all sorts of terrible things said about me, that I don’t go to punk shows and ‘support bands.’ The idea of supporting bands is so sad and empty and shameful really. (Laughs). To support bands, really? If I like a band, I’ll buy their record. I’m not going to support them because they’re a local band. That’s horrible; you encourage terrible music by doing that shit. ‘Well you should support your local scene.’ Why? Why should you do that? You should support good bands period, regardless of where they’re from, and you should not support lousy bands. And I hate to break it to you, but most of the fucking bands out there suck, and that goes double for the punk rock bands, and that goes triple for the punk rock bands in Chicago. I wasn’t inclined to go out and sit through what amounted to a bunch of fucking noise to me 99 times out of 100. And this was evidence of every negative thing under the sun about me and my character and blah blah blah. It’s a funny thing. If you go out there and say, ‘I think your band sucks,’ the guys in the band that you say that about, nine times out of 10, their response will be like every fucking reason you can think of why you’re saying that, except that you actually mean that. (Laughs). You know what I mean? The thought that they might actually suck never crosses their mind.

And again, I think there’s a difference between my band and a lot of other bands because when we were coming up, we never thought we were really good. (Laughs). We were kind of surprised when people wanted to see us because, gee, we can’t really play our instruments. And when I was starting out, I was aware that I didn’t really know how to write a song. I sort of got it, but I did have a nagging awareness that I hadn’t quite figured it out. And conversely, it seemed like everyone else was walking around, maybe it was false bravado, but they were walking around convinced that they were fucking geniuses, and they sucked, they weren’t any good. And again the problem with Chicago, and it’s again true of so many of the punk rock scenes, but Chicago I think of as being a really provincial, very uptight, unhappy place filled with very small people. When you see, it’s a funny thing, if something happens in the world, and somebody from Chicago is involved, the local newscast will zero in on that. They’ll just hone in on that and hype that angle, and that never happens in real cities like New York. Chicago is just a big, fucking, insecure small town. Really, when you’ve been out and traveled around the country a lot and you come back to Chicago, there are positive things about it, but it’s really a very small place and it’s really [filled with] kind of very uptight people who can’t laugh at themselves and take themselves very seriously and are very easily offended by anything they perceive to be a slight against them or their character. So I think that always extended to the punk rock scene. When I think of Chicago punk rock bands, I think of a whole lot of people who took themselves very, very fucking seriously and didn’t have anything resembling a sense of humor about themselves.

CB: You have this view of the scene and local bands and promoters, but what about punk rock fans in Chicago?

BW: I never really saw a difference between that and anywhere else in the country. There’s always a percentage of punk rock fans who are really, you know, kind of have that provincial, parochial, rule-oriented, ‘you should or you shouldn’t and here’s proper behavior in punk rock and here’s what’s not;’ there’s always that element in any punk rock crowd. But I think by and large it’s the same. There are certain characteristics in a Chicago crowd that are more prevalent. If you go to San Francisco or D.C., those are crowds where people just stand there and stare at you; even if they love you and think you’re great, they won’t move. You go to some of these cities on the East Coast, like New York and Boston, if they like you they’ll go fucking crazy and kill each other. And I think Chicago is kind of more in the middle of that. There were both of those elements in Chicago, but I always felt that the crowds were pretty reasonable in Chicago actually.

CB: And what’s your view of Chicago now versus then in terms of the scene or in terms of the fans, from those early days when you thought your band wasn’t very good to now when you’re back again and headlining Riot Fest?

BW: I’m not immersed in it the way I was many years ago. These people who I guess are well-meaning, but for reasons that they are never really able to articulate, believe really strongly in ‘supporting local bands’ and having a ‘sense of community,’ what is ultimately just fucking hippie dippy, fucking meaningless platitudes and fucking slogans and bullshit that doesn’t really mean anything except, ‘I’m a fucking failure, and I need to fucking stamp DIY on what I do so that I can say I’m a failure by choice, instead of by virtue of people not giving a fuck about my band.’ So if you take away those people though, I think that what’s happened in the Internet age is that the relevance and importance of a particular local scene is just gone pretty much. You can be a band from fucking Utica, New York or Tempe, Arizona, and you can be a fucking smash success. You don’t need to be from a big city anymore. So it doesn’t matter.

I don’t think that local scenes matter anywhere near to what they used to. For instance, if you look at punk rock, when we were coming up in the punk rock scene, real clubs just didn’t book punk. The Metro did, but then the Metro stopped booking it, and even though the Metro did, you had to make a certain amount of money to do that. And there was for better or worse, and I’ll freely admit it was mostly for worse, there was a crowd for bands that the Metro wouldn’t book, and there were a lot of them. So you had to come up with these alternative ways of securing a space to put on a show and promote a show, because you didn’t have the money to take out ads in the weekly papers and things like that. So things like going and getting a bucket and some flour and some water to make some paste, and put up some fliers at Belmont and Clark and other spots around town, it was important. It was how you promoted your shows. And working out deals with people at some of these venues, or doing shows in creative spaces like warehouses, it was done out of necessity, not for aesthetic reasons. Nowadays when you see people doing that it’s because they have a strong nostalgia for a time that they weren’t a part of, and to them it’s really romantic. But there’s actually nothing at all cool about putting on a show in a squatted warehouse. It sucks. It was done because there was no choice. And the point I am getting at is nowadays there’s no need to do that. Punk bands are totally acceptable to rock clubs now, and they will happily book them. The only bands that really, really need that are the bands that are so unbelievably band and have so little appeal to anybody that no club is going to book them because they’re not going to bring in a crowd and they’re not going to make any money. If you went back to the ’80s and Toxic Reasons is on tour, they couldn’t get a show for the most part in a real club, and if that were now, yeah, they’d get a show really easily because they could draw a crowd and make somebody real money.

And I think also back then part of the problem was there was a lot more violence. Chicago had a really, really, really bad skinhead problem in the ‘80s, and some of these shows got just absurdly violent, so you could sort of understand why some of these clubs wouldn’t want to do that. When we started booking shows out in the suburbs in the late ‘80s, I was promoting shows for a year out in Palatine and then the first show we did out in Elmhurst, we never had those problems, and those people would not come to our shows. They had no interest in it because coming out to the suburbs was totally lame. It was an aesthetic thing for them. The people from the suburbs were supposed to come to the city, not vice versa. So we had really, really great shows with almost no violence. I know for me doing shows for almost a year, I could count the number of fistfights that broke out on one hand. We almost never had trouble.

CB: What’s your take on the scene overall now that you’re getting back into it with Screeching Weasel?

BW: It fucking sucks. The music is God-awful. It’s all this fucking dog-barking cadence chord core. Everybody’s got to yell at the fucking top of their lungs and do the gravelly voice thing. It’s embarrassing. There were bands like that in the ‘80s that were just copying whatever was popular at the moment, and in the ‘90s [too]. Nobody fucking remembers their names now, nobody gives a shit about them now, and nobody’s going to give a shit in 10 years about these bands. They’re the fucking flavor of the moment. It’s great they can go down to Gainesville and fucking get record deals and things like that, but nobody’s going to fucking care about it because they can’t write fucking tunes and because they’re totally inauthentic.

The trademark of these bands, and you’ve got to blame Dillinger Four for it, and it’s nothing against Dillinger Four, but they started that whole thing of, ‘Let’s come up with these lengthy, irreverent song titles that have nothing to do with the lyrics in the song.’ Like fucking, I don’t know, ‘My country invaded Iraq and all I got was this lousy T-shirt,’ like that would be a song title for these idiot bands. Or fucking, I don’t know, [Fall Out Boy’s] ‘(Coffee’s For Closers)’ and [Mason’s] ‘Tricks Are For Kids.’ You can think this stupid, retarded shit up, just off the top of your fucking head because it’s fucking brainless, and it’s supposed to make you sound all fucking irreverent and give a shit. But the fact of the matter is all you have to do is study these bands for two and a half seconds to realize this is so fucking contrived, that they just pour over this shit, that they put so much fucking thought into their little costumes, and it’s all of course designed to appear completely off the cuff. And like I said, the thing that kind of gets my goat about it the most is this form of reverence. From my perspective, it’s so fucking transparent, and people just eat it up. Fucking people were eating up bullshit in the ‘80s. People always eat up fucking bullshit.

And one of the things that I’m proud about my band is for better or worse we were always authentic, and we never went out and did that shit, and that’s what the fans liked about us. They identified with the lyrics and shit the same way I identified with bands like The Ramones. There’s something there that you can tell these guys are for real; they’re not phony motherfuckers. So you know, I really think that’s what’s at the heart of me not getting along with people. When a bunch of people have basically made an unspoken agreement not to pull each other’s covers on being totally full of fucking shit, they don’t like it when somebody comes around and says, ‘Yeah, I’m in a band too, and you guys are full of fucking shit.’ (Laughs). They don’t like it. It pisses them off. Well, fuck ‘em. It’s like Joe King goes out for The Queers and he talks about these guys in the Dropkick Murphys and shit and it’s just this fake working class bullshit. I mean a lot of people buy it, and that’s good for them, but it’s as phony as fucking hell. It doesn’t have anything to do with reality or working class. You guys are fucking musicians? What the hell is working class about that? So you’d think they’d come home from touring and go lay brick or something the way they fucking act. And that’s really what all these fucking people are about.

I don’t know. I think right now punk rock is as fucking dumb as it’s ever been. The music is fucking almost universally, embarrassingly bad. As always seems to happen, the stuff I occasionally find interesting fucking nobody gives a shit about it. And then when I do find stuff that I like that maybe is popular then I’m fucking raked over the coals because that stuff isn’t punk enough, whether it’s The Weakerthans or U2 or whoever I fucking want to listen to. Apparently I’m supposed to fucking submit my fucking iTunes playlist to a punk rock fucking council of elders for approval or some fucking thing. It’s just silly, it’s fucking retarded, it’s unbelievably childish. And I’m embarrassed for these people who are my age going, ‘Yeah, I’m putting on punk rock shows DIY.’ Part of me wants to say, ‘Oh well, good for them,’ but the truth of the matter is I’m totally fucking embarrassed for them. Grow up, get a fucking real job and like go have a family or something. Fucking grow up, you retard.

Part two of our interview with Ben Weasel, where he talks about the band legacy’s, the reason Screeching Weasel is back, and the split with co-founder John Jughead, will be posted tomorrow (Oct. 8).