Subscribe to RSS
Interview with Youth Brigade’s Shawn Stern
Interview with Youth Brigade’s Shawn Stern
Interviewed by Diego Silva
Transcribed and Edited by Tanya Tonon
Punk legends Youth Brigade were in Toronto on September 29th on tour with the Bouncing Souls. Having screened their BYO Records documentary ‘Let Them Know’ at the NXNE Festival earlier this year, they decided to host a private screening and Q&A session at the Trash Palace. When we arrived at the Trash Palace, the DVD for the screening of ‘Let Them Know’ was missing. To kill time, we watched the 80′s punk classic ‘Another State of Mind’ chronicling Youth Brigade and Social Distortion’s tour across the US and Canada. Finally, the movie began, and immediately afterward Shawn and Mark Stern came into the Trash Palace for a Q&A. Due to a very obnoxious and ignorant attendee, we did not get the cahnce to ask too many questions at this time, instead, we sat outside of the Opera House with Shawn Stern for the interview. Check it out:
BBtBB: Congratulation on the movie, ‘Let them Know’. It premiered at North by North East and you played the festival too, right?
Shawn Stern: Yes we did. We played the night before at Bovine at 2a.m. I don’t really remember it because I was so drunk and I had to get up and do the screening Q&A at one o’clock the next day and I was hung over the whole time.
BBtBB: I’m glad I waited to do this interview then! (laughs). You guys have been around for about 29 years now, it’s been quite a journey. After watching the movie, most of the questions I wanted to ask are being thrown out the window because there is so much more substance to learn about now. You guys have gone on quite the roller coaster ride. How would you describe the journey?
SS: Roller coaster is good. We just never really planned anything out, things just happened and the next thing you know we’re doing this or that. We started playing music because we loved music, my grandfather was actually the one that suggested it to us. I grew up playing piano when I was younger, then I moved to California and started surfing a lot. My grandparents were visiting one summer and we were bored because there were no waves so we were sidewalk surfing – that’s what we used to call skateboarding in those days – and my grandfather said, “Why don’t you pick up a guitar and start playing some music?” That sort of inspired us when we were about fifteen or sixteen. It just grew from there. We played music, heard about punk rock and checked it out. We decided this was our thing. It’s kind of amazing that we were able to pull it off.
BBtBB: Do you think if you actually had planned it out and gave yourself a direction where to go, would you have lasted this long?
SS: I have no idea. I think that there are people that do this in a business sense and maybe they’re more successful in that sense but we never looked at [music] as a business. We deal with the business part because that’s the world we live in, it’s a necessity even though we don’t give a shit about business. We’re having fun and that’s what matters most and for people to be able to see what we do and like it. People that have been there from the beginning are bringing their kids out to the show and kids now are singing songs that we wrote twenty years ago.
BBtBB: BYO has had its ups and downs as a record label. Where is BYO now and how is it balancing the band and the business?
SS: These days I don’t know how labels survive with digital downloads, which is why we put this box set together. Mark and I are running things day-to-day, we have one other person that works with us and she holds the fort down back in Los Angeles. Ten or twelve years ago we had ten people working for us.
BBtBB: So it’s a smaller production but you’re still pushing new bands to come out.
SS: Yeah, we always check bands out but at the same time with the digital revolution anyone can put a record out, or at least put their music out on the web and get 10,000 people or more listening to it that have never heard you before. Record companies will either become obsolete or they have to try to adapt.
BBtBB: With the digital age and people wanting one song at a time, do you find that the seven-inch split is making a comeback where people will want to buy limited songs?
SS: I don’t know? I think vinyl’s got a resurgence but maybe it’s gone up 5-10 per cent over the year. Album sales have gone down fifty to eighty per cent a year for the last four or five years so vinyl doesn’t come close to that. Our digital downloads are going up maybe twenty per cent a year but it still doesn’t make up for the c.d. sales, so you have to figure out new ways of dealing with this. Bands make their money now almost completely from touring so you have to adapt. What labels are trying to do is sign people and get their digital, their publishing, a piece of their merchandise and touring. Being a musician and running a label, I see it from both angles but why should a record label get a piece of that? Distributors are asking for digital. What the hell are they doing with digital? They didn’t do shit so why should they get a piece of that? They’re all going to be obsolete. For sure the record stores, at least the chains will. I don’t mind the chains going out of business as long as the small record stores are still around. In some ways it will go back to the way it was in the ‘70s and ‘80s, which could be a good thing. We’ll see, things are slowly working themselves out.
BBtBB: People always say that things cycle in twenty to thirty years and that’s when things start repeating themselves. Being around for almost the thirty year span, musically, how do you think things have changed? What do you see in new bands that are opening for you guys? Do you see it coming back to that ‘70s and ‘80s mentality?
SS: In some ways but you can never go back. The internet and things like that has been the biggest, most drastic change and the way you’re getting music has completely changed. Kids don’t think about buying a c.d. for music and having a collection because everything is contained on one little ipod, which is genius. Why would I want to have all this stuff collecting? All my music is there in one spot, I could back it up on my computer. Awesome!
BBtBB: Yeah, the problem is they get it for free!
SS: (laughs) Yeah, they don’t understand the correlation of if you don’t pay for that music, bands cannot continue making that music dude. Someone said to me the other day, “You make all your money off touring anyway!” Yeah, but I don’t tour everyday of the year. It’s a lot of work and it’s not cheap to be on the road. That’s why bands are raising the price of shows, it never used to be like that.
BBtBB: Now less people are going to shows because prices are going up. Do you see a remedy to this problem?
SS: Unless kids decide they’re going to pay for their downloads, no. They’re going to pay for their free music by paying too much for the concert. We still sell stuff at the shows for reasonable prices. I think punk rockers are intelligent enough to understand the correlation. They tend to support artists a lot more than I don’t know… metal music? Those people are not the smartest people. (laughs)
BBtBB: People who are outside of the punk scene think the opposite. Punks are just brutes that don’t really know what’s going on but really it’s a tight knit community. You look at the wave of new music that’s coming out and it’s all shit, do you think that punk has evolved?
SS: For the bands that I consider punk rock I think it’s been great. The success of Green Day, Rancid and NOFX means that, not only Youth Brigade, but the bands on BYO were also able to do much better than they would have without that. There are some bands that came after that that call themselves punk and mimic NOFX and Bad Religion but in my mind they are all style, no substance. You can dress like punk rock and have tattoos and piercings and play songs that sound like those bands but if all you’re singing about is sappy, crappy love songs, you may as well be a boy band. A lot of them seem to be put together by major labels to try and make a formula and sell it to preteens. I think it’s pretty obvious that some of those bands whose fans were ten to fourteen, now find seven or eight years later that those bands are no more. Those kids that bought those records are now embarrassed to say they ever listened to them.
BBtBB: I was one of them! (laughs) There were bands that I listened to when I was younger that I am embarrassed to say I listened to them.
SS: The thing that is good about that is at least it was a gateway. You heard that stuff, all your friends were listening to it, it was easily accessible, sticks in your head and then it caught you enough to say, “Hmm, I wonder who influenced these bands?” When you do your research you find out about all those other bands and realize that this shit is even better than that shit because it actually says something.
BBtBB: You’re right. Do you think that things like kids playing guitar hero has been beneficial to music?
SS: I think as a game it’s great but when kids start to think they’re actually playing music, that’s not good. If you want to play music take the fucking time to learn how to play an instrument. Any short cut means you’re not doing what needs to be done. It’s not a virtual world, despite the fact that you might have grown up playing on a computer pretending it’s a virtual world, it’s not. You need to talk to people and get involved and play music and have fun. Don’t sit behind a computer screen all day long.
BBtBB: Maybe they should make a game where you have to push tour buses and find ways to make food money!
SS: (laughs) They [kids] wouldn’t do that. They want to sit behind a screen and play games, where it’s easy.
BBtBB: Going back to the label, what does the future hold for BYO?
SS: I have no idea. So far, people really love the movie and the box set so I think that will get people interested in the label. We’ll see where it goes from there.
BBtBB: If it does blow up, do you think it will come down to having to pick business over music?
SS: For me, as long as we can keep doing this and people can come out and support us, we must be doing something right. All I really care about is touring places where I can surf.
Gallery
0 Comments
You can be the first one to leave a comment.