Anti-Flag. Staples of a generation.
It doesn’t seem like that long ago that I lost my punk rock virginity during rides to high school listening to classic records like Anti-Flag’s Die for the Government. Add to that that frontman Justin Sane currently looks half his age, and it’s hard to imagine that Anti-Flag has been rocking sounds of peace and justice going on over 20 years. To mark this longevity milestone, Anti-Flag recently released a retrospective album, A Document of Dissent: 1993 – 2013 (Fat Wreck Chords) that comprises 26 tracks culled from the band’s nine full-length albums. I recently chatted with Justin to get the skinny on the band’s juicy history, including that time Fat Mike didn’t think Anti-Flag wasn’t good enough for Fat…
Corey Jones: Your Wikipedia says you formed the band in 1988 with Pat. I didn’t think it went back that far. Do I need to correct the Wiki folks or what?
Justin Sane: Yeah, you do. We played a show while we were in high school in 1988 as a band called Anti-Flag and that was the first incarnation of the band, so to speak. We didn’t have another incarnation of Anti-Flag until 1993, so the Wiki is wrong. Really though, there is very little similarity between that band and that performance and what Anti-Flag later became.
The liner notes to A Document of Dissent suggest that in those early days there was a lot of collaboration between you and Pat in writing songs. Is that still the case?
Pat’s a person who is still really important for concepts to songs. There are a lot of days where Pat just comes to the studio and is like “You know, I was thinking about this thing and we should write a song about it.” Otherwise, I think it’s transitioned into a place where #2 and I will come in individually with song ideas and the band will flesh them out. There is a lot of collaboration. That’s why with our liner notes we always say [all songs] “written by Anti-Flag.”
When I was looking at the notes for the song “A New Kind of Army”, Chris #2 said “I just remember Fat Mike not thinking we were good enough for Fat Wreck. Ask us in person for the candid version of the story.” So, what’s the real story here?
Well, I mean he pretty much summed it up. We were talking to Mike at the time and he wanted to put out Anti-Flag. He basically approached me in a phone conversation and said he had this new subsidiary label to Fat called Honest Don’s and wanted to put us out on Honest Don’s. The more we came to understand what Honest Don’s was, the more we decided that Honest Don’s didn’t make any sense for Anti-Flag. It was a lot of power pop bands and we didn’t feel we had anything in common with them. So I went to Mike and I said “Yeah man, we’d love to work with you but not on Honest Don’s. Fat makes sense to us. You’ve got the Swinger Utters, you’ve got Good Riddance…” There were bands on Fat that we could relate to. And he was basically like, “Well, your record isn’t good enough to be on Fat…” Neither of us would budge.
Interestingly enough, the [record we ultimately released on another label] sold 100,000 copies faster than any Anti-Flag record. Later, Mike was like, “I should have put that record out.” But in his defense, I understand where he was coming from. At that point in Fat Wreck Chords history, the bands on Fat had really slick production. They were mostly different kinds of bands than Anti-Flag and as a band we were still really evolving and finding our sound. It was interesting for me to go back and listen to this 20-year retrospective. My voice was totally different. I couldn’t sing, you know? I totally couldn’t sing.
When you started this band, did you have the intention of making the bass such a driving force in the sound, or have you just been fortunate enough to work with some really good bass players in Andy and #2?
I think that Andy was just so good. He was the best bass player in town, you know? I have to give him credit that he really helped form the sound of the band in that way. He was just doing what he did. I think he was listening to a lot of Rancid. He had a pretty eclectic taste in music. He was listening to Primus and things like that and he had the ability to play bass as well as he wanted. He really helped establish our sound with the bass being at the core of it, so when he left [the bass] had been a big part of the band and we decided we wanted to maintain that. It’s interesting because on the A New Kind of Army record Chris Head and I actually played a lot of the bass and wrote a lot of the bass lines. I continued to write bass lines for Anti-Flag for many years, well into to our last record or two, though at this point I don’t even think about it – #2 just does his thing. On For Blood and Empire I wrote a lot of those bass lines – like the bass line for “The Press Corpse”, I wrote that bass line. But what is amazing is that #2 can actually play it (laughs). It’s like giving someone the hardest Tetris puzzle ever and they can do it. That’s the great thing. It’s like “I’m going to write this impossible bass line and not only is #2 going to play it very, very excellently, but he’s going to do it while he’s jumping around and running around on stage.”
Chris Head is the obvious quiet one in the group. Is that just what we see as fans, or is he really that quiet?
No, he really is that quiet. Chris has a lot of artistic ability and he’s just a really nice guy. We had so much conflict with Andy that we knew that the next member we brought in would be someone with whom conflict wouldn’t be there. That ended up being Chris Head. Chris is a funny guy in that he doesn’t say a lot throughout the day – he’s really quiet and really introspective. But when Chris talks, he’s always the guy that says the funniest thing in the course of the day. He’s very shy in a lot of ways, but he’s such an interesting person and when you get him in an environment where he’s comfortable and start talking to him… some days, I’ll be sitting there talking to Chris, and I’ll think to myself what a great guy he is.
Let’s talk about your record The Bright Lights of America. When that came out, it didn’t get a lot of love.
Yeah, I would totally agree with that. Our first major label record was For Blood and Empire. We kind of felt like “Okay, we put out a major label record and we dealt with that backlash. Now we’re going to try something different musically.” We were excited to try something out of the box. Luckily we hooked up with this producer, Tony Visconti, who was incredibly talented and gave us the ability to do that. The idea for The Bright Lights of America had been percolating around our band for a good five or six years. Then we went on tour with Arcade Fire and it was like “Wow, we want to do something like THAT! We want to do the punk rock version of THAT!” (laughs). Ultimately that was where a lot of the production value and the ideas came from for The Bright Lights of America. I think our audience just didn’t get it. It was so out of the box. It was something people didn’t expect from us and they couldn’t wrap their heads around it. A lot of people were like “They just did it because they’re on a major label and they’re trying to sell out!” but we had already made that record and had already been on a major label for several years – that had absolutely nothing to do with it. It didn’t connect at all, but I’m still really proud of the record. I think it was a big accomplishment for us. We worked really hard on it. Over the years it’s been interesting. That period was also a perfect storm of other things. Not only was it a musical experiment for us, there was also so much turmoil in the personal lives of the band that our focus on being this laser, pin-pointed political band that people had come to expect of Anti-Flag got pushed a bit. It was a perfect storm of confusion for our audience.
Do you care to shed light on some of the personal conflicts you just mentioned?
In general, I mean, our bass player’s sister had been murdered and he was struggling with that. Myself and our drummer were going through really difficult relationship issues at the time. It was just things that happen to people in life. They’re the kind of things you can’t avoid if you live long enough. In a way, for me it was political to actually sing about those things. Our relationships are formed by the constraints of our society and to think that your love life or your personal relationships aren’t political is to miss the greater point of what’s going on in life. In that respect, I felt like we were trying to make that statement within the record, but again, it was something that was lost on our audience.
So this next question is a strange one. I saw Bad Religion in New York in 2004 and Greg made some reference mid-set along the lines that he was sure some government guy was on their backs all tour. It was right before the song “You.” Have you ever had a moment like that given the political nature of your band?
I don’t know…I don’t know if I’m that paranoid (laughs). It’s funny in that I’m paranoid enough to believe that everything Edward Snowden says I had an inkling of 15 years ago. But the idea that there is someone following us around that we’re that important is something I’m suspect of. I will say, though, that the G20 was hosted in Pittsburgh a number of years back and we have a studio in an industrial office in Pittsburgh and the week leading up to the G20 there was a black SUV that would park outside of our gate and anytime any of us approached it, it hurriedly sped away (laughs). I don’t know if the FBI or somebody decided that they needed to keep tabs on us and make sure that we weren’t going to be up to something that was subversive in a way they weren’t going to be cool with. So I guess we have had experiences like that, and that would be one of them.
That’s really funny.
Yeah, it’s totally weird man. I have no doubt that it was an intelligence service. It was like straight out of The Borne Identity (laughs). Anytime we got near it, it left. It was really weird.
I’ll be honest, man – you haven’t aged in 20 years. That’s a pretty big feat for a guy that tours for a living. What’s your secret?
Unicorn blood. It keeps me young, man. It’s the reason Lord Voldemort was into unicorn blood. He doesn’t lie (laughs). It is funny though, people tell me that a lot. If you really look back at old pictures of me, I’ve aged. I’m sorry to say, hate to say it. I have. But I really do believe it’s just a mind frame. I still love going to shows, I love hanging out, I love making music. The things that normal adults do still seem really strange to me. Like getting married and having kids. I think I’m in that perpetual youthful state of mind. My friends are getting married and things like that and I’m like “Oh yeah…that’s what grown ups do.” I don’t know if it’s a mental thing or this lifestyle of being on the road that we’ve lived for the past 20 years, but I’m cool with it. I’ll take it.
Alright, the floor is yours. This interview is going out to a lot of folks. What do you want to say?
I want to leave people with the main point that we started this band with. It’s the idea that people are not a color of skin, or straight or gay, or male or female, or a nationality. We’re human beings and we have to see each other in that way and treat each other accordingly. We just came home from Russia; we were there for about a week. It was really interesting to go to Russia at a time where we are constantly bombarded by our media here telling us that we should be afraid of Russia. When we were leaving [the U.S. to head to Russia], so many people would say to me “Be careful over there.” And then we get there and we meet so many incredible people who are just like us. They want the same things. There are a lot of people who are just trying to make the world a better place. And sure, you can point to Russia and point to a lot of problems and oppression. But I would argue that we have a lot of the same things here. When it comes to politics and divisions that politicians try to put in place, they are all just political gains. As average, everyday citizens of this world, we have to be careful not to get sucked into the propaganda and rhetoric of our politicians. One of the main messages that we tried to put forward when we started this band was that our opinions are formed by a media conglomerate that is run by politicians and corporations that work hand in hand to inform the way we think and create divisions between us and the rest of the world. It’s so important to not buy into the propaganda that they give us. It makes me laugh when I hear our news media talking about the Egyptian state-run media or the Russian state-run media, because the reality is that our media works hand in hand with our government all the time. They talk all the time about what kind of stories they are going to run, the candor in the stories, what they are going to include in the stories. The information that Edward Snowden leaked was the result of the fact that he couldn’t get any media outlet in the United States to run it. They were having meetings with the White House and the White House was saying “don’t run it.” So the reality is that our media, our corporations, our government are all interlinked. They’re working for a purpose that is not the greater good of the world or you or me. They’re out for their own ambitions and their own profit. It comes down to the fact that we have to remember to treat each other as human beings and work together to make this world a better place.
