Interview with Brian from Jodie Foster’s Army

- Hello, Brian! It’s a pity not many hardcore listeners in Russia know about Jodie Foster’s Army. In Internet there is also not so many information, there is only some about 1981-1984 years period. But I’ve heard the recordings of the band after 1984 (for example, the album «Concrete Waves»). Can you tell us about JFA. What is with the band nowadays?

Lately we’ve been playing local gigs here in California mostly. We played a great show with Battalion of Saints in San Diego not too long ago that was really fun. They were a great band from back in the day and it was good to play with them again. Right now the band is based out of Huntington Beach, California, but originally we were from Phoenix, Arizona. So we drove back to Phoenix in March to celebrate our 25th Anniversary. Michael Cornelius, our original bass player and Bam-Bam, our original drummer, came up on stage and played a couple songs with myself and Don, so it was the original band for a while… We played at a club called Hollywood Alley and then drove out to the Apache Indian Reservation and played a show at a skateboard contest there. We’ve always had a place in our hearts for Native Americans, because they are proud warriors and we were honored to come out and play on the reservation thanks to the help of our friend Doug Miles from Apache Skateboards. So basically, we’re just playing here and there and starting to write new songs for a new CD.

- Can you describe your local scene and people in the period of the JFA beginning? Did everybody really fight with hippy?

When we were first starting out in 1981, the punk scene was really small and there was no hardcore scene. So when we founded the band, we decided we needed to play hard and fast music that you could slam dance to and that would get you hyped to skate backyard pools. No one else was doing that in Phoenix at that time so we disrupted the “leather jacket punks” who just came to shows to pogo. That got us banned for life from more than a few clubs, but we eventually hooked up with Tony Victor, who booked shows at a wrestling ring called Madison Square Gardens in Phoenix (Mad Gardens for short), and we started playing a lot out of there. As for hippies, we didn’t really fight with them, but they fought with us. Back then, punk rock wasn’t really accepted like it is now, so because we were different than the status quo, we used to get hassled from just about everybody: jocks, hippies, cops, preppies, parents, teachers, you name it, they hassled us…

- Are you still keen on skate-boarding? What do you think about the fact that skate-boarding became an integral part of punk-movement for many people?

Still skateboarding every day. I throw a little surfing in here and there as well, now that I live in California. That was why we skated a lot of pools in Arizona, we couldn’t surf so that was as close as we came. Skateboarding and punk go together really well because both of them are outside of the norms of society. Plus, some good punk music is really inspirational when you’re skating a 15-foot deep bowl…

- What is the sense of «Jodie Foster’s Army diet» named «Cokes & Snickers»? It is rather harmful… Cokes and Snickers is all I eat/Cokes and Snickers is all I need/Health sucks, health sucks. – Is it still the same for you?

Don and Bam-Bam came up with the lyrics to that song. For a while, that was pretty much all we ate. The sugar rush made us really hyper, which was good for skateboarding and playing fast music. Nowadays, we’ve expanded our diet a little to include beer and pizza…

- Tell us about JFA concerts, please. I’ve read that in the beginning of ’80 a lot of nazi-skinheads visited punk-concerts and fought there.

The nazi idiots didn’t really come into the scene until the mid to late eighties. We hated them then and we hate them now. They really don’t have a place in punk rock because punk is about being whoever you want to be and they obviously think everybody should think the same as them and even be the same color as them, so I never really understood why they got into punk rock at all… As for our shows back then, they were definitely more chaotic than you see nowadays. We used to have people flying every which way, doing stage dives and slam dancing. These days, when people “mosh” (that’s a heavy metal term, by the way), it’s much different than the slam dancing we used to do. When they “mosh” they basically skip around together in circles, whereas slam dancing meant literally slamming into each other from every which way. There was no general direction that everybody was going. You could just as easily get punched in the back of the head as in the stomach by someone slamming into you… Also we were fortunate to play with most of the good bands of that time when we went on tour or when we played in Phoenix, so we played with bands like The Circle Jerks, TSOL, Black Flag (pre-Henry Rollins, which to me is their best era), The Adolescents, Social Distortion, The Big Boys, Agression, DOA, The Crowd, Agent Orange, Minor Threat, Void, Murphy’s Law, Warzone, The Meat Puppets, Sun City Girls, just to name a few…

- What do you think about US punk scene today?

I think the underground punk scene is alive and kicking, but the major labels have gotten a hold of the term punk and a lot of bands are recording the punk song but are not really living the punk lifestyle. Any time you start worrying about what other people think, like what you need to do to sell more records, you cease being punk. For instance I think the “pop punk” movement is a contradiction in terms. Popular music and punk rock to me are complete opposites. If you’re a punk band and your music is popular and being accepted by the mainstream, you must be doing something wrong.

- I like surf-music very much and play in the surf-band. As far as I know you also played surf-instrumental except punk, didn’t you? I don’t know other hardcore bands which played surf also…

Not too many other punk bands played surf songs other than Agent Orange. There were a few that did instrumentals though. We cover the “Flyboys Theme” by The Flyboys, which is a great instrumental though not really a surf song…

- Can you say some last words for our readers, please?

I’m happy to hear that punk rock is alive and well in Russia and I’m honored to do this interview and be able to speak to my Russian brothers and sisters. I would just say to keep the faith and remember that you can do anything you want to in this world if you work at it hard enough. Take care!

2006.

http://home.earthlink.net/~brianjfa/index.html