Interviews

Pennywise

Interview with Fletcher Dragge on Nov 19, 2005 by Archive Bot

Seventeen years of making music. How many bands, how many artists can make it for nearly two decades and still be excited about what they do? Pennywise is one of them. They’re veterans, but they still rock harder than half the punk rock bands out there.  Guitarist Fletcher Dragge sat down with me backstage at The Trocadero in Philly, poured me a cup of coffee and dove into history, hardship, evolution and myspace.
 
 
Katie: Having been around for almost 20 years, it’s fair to say you’ve seen a lot of changes in music.  What was it then as opposed to what it is now?
 
Fletcher:  Music in general back in 1980 was all about hair bands and then there was punk rock which was kind of the rebellious, anti-establishment attack on everything that was normal in society.  I chose the punk rock route. It seems like nothing has really changed. When metal was underground and new wave was popular, the major labels found a way to market the metal and make money off of it. When punk rock was underground, they found a way to make that popular. The machine just finds whatever is cool and they expose it and milk it dry and then they turn their backs on it. Emo, Screamo, and the whole British Invasion garage thing is all getting blown out of proportion but in two years that will be over and there will be something else. Maybe punk rock will get popular in ten years but right now it’s all about Emo and Screamo and the Interpols and Hot Hot Heats of the world.
 
Katie: My music history professor this morning said that punk is something that is dying right now, but that it would be interesting to find out what it was really all about. To you, what was it really all about?
 
Fletcher: In my opinion, it’s a way of life and an attitude. It started off as people being sick of hippies and the new wave and that whole element and being sick of the government and wanting to say fuck you to everybody. It was about being an individual and doing what you want to do. Now, punk rock is dead. It was shocking back then to walk down the street with a black flag shirt on, you were standing out and being different but now you can go into a Hot Topic and buy a Dead Kennedy’s shirt and dye your hair and be a punk rocker in ten minutes and that’s okay. Kids are sleeved up with tattoos and that’s normal. So is there any such thing as punk rock? Not really. Everything’s been done and commercialized and ruined. You’re always going to have bands out there doing what they feel is from their hearts but as far as the scene, it’s totally dead.  Society has been maxed out in a way; punk rock is nothing crazy; it just is what it is.
 
Katie: So then what keeps you going?
 
Fletcher: What keeps us going is being able to make a statement. Our music is pretty political and life affirming. We just started this out to have fun and play the music we loved even though it wasn’t popular. People were calling us the re-birth of punk rock because it kind of died off in about 1985 and when we came around it was really about doing it yourself.  It’s what we love, what we feel passionate about and people come to the shows and have a good time and they still come up to us after the show and go “man, that was a good show, I really love you guys,” and that’s enough reason to keep it going.
 
Katie: Over the past almost two decades you’ve grown and changed as people. The messages in your music must have changed as well.
 
Fletcher: I think in the beginning, our message was more about being able to conquer the world. We were letting people know that we’re a bunch of guys that have day jobs but we’re in a punk band and we’re chasing our dream.  At the same time, we had songs about friends on drugs and people killing themselves. It started to morph into more political stuff the more we got to travel the world and see how fucked up American government and American people are. We feel so strongly about our country, we love it and we want it to be better and the American people have just become so complacent and they just seem to pull the wool over their eyes and believe anything they see on Fox TV but there’s so much going on behind our backs. We’re not a democracy.  There’s so much stuff going on to get inspired from that it just keeps us going.
 
Katie: Back in 1994, why did you say no to the major labels and if they came around again, would you say the same thing?
 
Fletcher: We’ve really learned a lot by watching our friends’ bands go to major labels and get screwed over. Back in the day, major labels weren’t there for punk rock in the so why are they there now? Do they care about the scene? No. Do they care about the bands? No. They want to make money and when they’re not making money the bands’ projects are shelved or dropped. We’re on a label that put us out because they loved punk rock and they loved what we’re doing. Of course bands were tempted by the money so they ran to a major label and then they find out all their money’s gone and they’re in debt.  We might have been able to sell five million records on a major label but chances are we would have sold no records. It’s about having some integrity and following the path that’s really the right one. If a major label approached us now, it would be an even more emphatic no.
 
Katie: I want to talk about The Fuse a little bit.  In the first song on the record, the chorus reads, “Knocked down stumble and you fall/Sit down find some use for it all.” In what ways has Pennywise been knocked down and in what ways have you found some use for it all?
 
Fletcher: I’d say one of the main ways we got knocked down was when we lost our original bass player, Jason. That was one of the times when drugs and alcoholism really came to a head and losing him was a huge blow to the band. We thought we weren’t going to continue, but we’re about continuing. In his honor and spirit we decided to keep this band going. But having one of your best friends dying…you can’t get much worse than that. What he taught us was to never give up.  That was one of Jason’s mottos.  We used what he had written in songs and used that to move forward and conquered it. We’re never going to be over it, but we used it to our advantage to keep playing music and the crowd is still singing his lyrics. It’s not easy, but there have been a hundred things that have happened to this band but we’re still here.
 
Katie: Being your latest release, what are most proud of with this album?
 
Fletcher: We love all our records we make. There may be some we love more than others but I think the main thing is that we approached this one from an old school perspective of just going into the studio and recording this album without all the bells and whistles. Science and recording technology have turned it all into such a meticulous process. Half these bands on the radio can’t even play their instruments or sing. We never needed that shit before and we don’t need it now so we just went in their and had fun and went for it.  We just wanted to do it and not sit there for months re-doing guitar solos.  We went back to the roots of recording and didn’t care. I think that’s when you get the best recordings, when you don’t care.  When you have a big budget and analyze things to death you lose the feeling.   
 
Katie: This afternoon I was telling a friend about this show and how I was going to do an interview with Pennywise. He goes “Wow, those guys are legendary!” Do you agree with that? How does a band become a legend and what does it mean?
 
Fletcher: Being a legend. Wow. A legend to me is someone that has made a mark on society or on the world and built something that was so great that people will talk about it for years to come. For me bands like Minor Threat or Black Flag…those are legends. For us to be called legends we must be getting really old. It might be a little far fetched but I think sometimes we forget that we’ve been around for so long and we kind of helped start the re-birth of this movement. The scene was so small back then and all these kids were coming to the shows and there were no bands but now there are punk bands everywhere! Everyone I know is in a band now and it’s weird, I think we forget how long we’ve been around and the influence we may have had on people.  I know we’re infamous, that’s for sure. We picked a path and we’ve stuck to it the whole way so we’ll see how that legend status holds up in about twenty years.
 
Katie: How long will this band going to keep going for and when would be the right time to say goodbye?
 
Fletcher: That’s a really hard question because I personally didn’t think I’d even live to be twenty one, let alone be in this band for seventeen years.  I think as long as we’re having fun doing it- we don’t need to be getting bigger and bigger, we’re not expecting anything like that.  There have been tons of times we thought this thing was over. Being out on the road it’s like being married to three ugly guys and you’re going to get in fights and disagreements. There will be a point when we just know; when no one really cares anymore and we’re just up there hanging on for no reason. We’ll know when it’s time to quit and right now it still feels pretty good being up there so we’ve got a ways to go I guess.
 
Katie: What’s the most important thing everyone should understand about Pennywise?
 
Fletcher: That Pennywise was always from the heart. It was never about money, it was never about fame. So many bands these days sell a couple records and they start acting like stars. With so many evolutions and things like myspace, kids think they’re rock stars over night; they’re playing gigs twenty minutes after picking up an instrument and they’ve got fans and every body wants to be on a major label. It’s so contrived how people behave towards music when to me; it’s always been about art and expression. I hope people remember us as a band that stuck to our guns and had some integrity and made our own path and never tried to be anything else.  We had plenty of opportunities to be on major labels and be in car commercials and be on huge tours and we’ve said fuck no because that’s not who we are. Just realize that if you’re going to play music and be in a band than it should come from your heart. If you can do that, you’ll feel better about yourself when you go to bed at night.