Category: | Interview - Internet | Publish date: | 7/3/2007 |
Source: | jr.com | With: | Brett Gurewitz |
Synopsis: |
Brett Gurewitz's Punk Arsenal
by RNYK
jr.com, July 3, 2007
Not everything Brett Gurewitz touches turns to platinum… or even silver. Or whatever metal ranks just above Formica. Nor does he care. “In the ’80s, I never imagined Epitaph as anything but an outlet for the little garage band I was in,” he recalls by phone from the label’s office in Los Angeles. Twenty-seven years and millions of dollars later, Epitaph Records is thriving and Gurewitz’s “little garage band”—Bad Religion—have just released their 14th studio album, one of their most compelling to date. While hewing resolutely to the melodic punk course the band has charted since 1980, New Maps of Hell finds the ever-youthful dogs displaying plenty of new tricks and tweaks. Their triple-guitar attack is even more refined than on 2004’s The Empire Strikes First. Likewise, the band’s signature harmonies have gained a good deal of grandeur. Best of all, principal songwriters Gurewitz and vocalist Greg Graffin are working together more closely than ever.
“Greg and I still don’t co-write lyrics much,” says Gurewitz, “but we collaborated musically throughout the record. Some songs were written in the traditional Bad Religion way, where one of us delivers a song pretty much fully formed. But we wrote together a lot. ‘Honest Goodbye’ was largely a collaboration, along with ‘Before You Die’… a lot of the tunes, actually.”
Thanks to producer and engineer Joe Baresi, who first worked with the band on Empire, New Maps balances defiance and opulence beautifully. Sure, Bad Religion get a little laid-back from time to time, as on the aforementioned “Honest Goodbye.” But only by comparison with the faster, harder tracks. Even the bittersweet, mid-tempo rocker maintains an intensity beyond the ken of most musicians half the band’s age.
“We really like working with Joe,” enthuses Gurewtiz. “I’m a fan of his, a fan of his engineering work, everything he’s done with Queens of the Stone Age and Tool, going all the way back. Plus, he’s the mellowest man in rock. I think he did a great job of maximizing the aggression and making the record sound good without making it sound super-produced.”
What it does sound is exceedingly club-friendly, continuing a tradition that dates back to Stranger Than Fiction’s “21st Century (Digital Boy).” LCD Soundsystem fan Gurewitz’s manifest, affinity for club music goes back even further… speaking of Epitaph releases that have yet to go tin.
“The way [Suicide Girls compilation] The Black Heart Retrospective came about,” reveals Gurewitz, “believe it or not, is that I was hanging out at my house with David Ogilvie from Skinny Puppy, Trent Reznor, and my friend Atticus Ross, a producer who’s worked with Nine Inch Nails and all kinds of other people. Ogilvie had made this friend of mine this killer mix CD of all these killer ’80s Goth club tunes. It was such a fun CD that I said to David, ‘I would love to put out a comp like this, but I’m not an expert and you are. Why don’t you executive-produce it?’ But we needed a face or an angle, so I thought, ‘What if it was a Suicide Girls comp?’ We’d already done the DVD together and had a great working relationship. I thought maybe they could play it at club nights. It was an ill-conceived notion ’cause it didn’t sell anything. But we enjoyed making it, and the Suicide Girls liked it. At the end of the day, it was just a fun distraction.”
Less distracting, perhaps, and more inspiring to the rebellious masses, was the clutch of Noam Chomsky releases Epitaph dropped at the turn of the century, before the groundbreaking linguist, MIT professor and political dissident extraordinaire moved on to Alternative Tentacles. (For a dude who’ll be 80 next year, he’s punk as f*ck.)
“Our history goes back to the first Gulf War,” notes Gurewitz. “Tim Yohannon, the founder of Maximum Rock and Roll—may he rest in peace—called me up and said, ‘We’re doing a split 7-inch with Noam Chomsky to protest the war. Can you come up with a song or two for the other side?’ I’m a fan of Chomsky’s writing, so I said ‘sure.’ But it was Greg who stayed in touch with him. He’s the letter writer.”
While, like Chomsky, they remain committed to fighting militarism, intolerance, religious fanaticism and all-around ignorance, Gurewitz and Graffin approach politics on New Maps more subtly than on previous releases, to the extent of not even directly mentioning the war in Iraq. But their allegories are far more effective than any amount of preaching. “Cracked vertebrates stacked by the wayside,” Graffin sings on the Gurewitz-penned “Heroes and Martyrs.” “An ultraviolent call summoning both poet and thrall / The inveterate blind seeking daylight / Our heroes and martyr / Present two points of view / Which deity you’re praying to?”
Their continued insistence on rattling the gates of Empire as loudly as possible keeps Bad Religion relevant—no mean feat for a band that’s been around for 27 years. “What I attribute it to,” says Gurewitz, “is that Greg and I have been lucky enough to maintain, through our entire musical career, other occupations… that haven’t beaten the worldview out of us. A lot of people are idealistic as teenagers, I think, then they go get a square job and it just kinda beats them down and they lose their idealism. But Greg’s an academic. And I get to listen to bands all day. Since we’ve never been through the beatdown process, we’ve had the luxury of hanging on to our idealism through the ripe old age of our 40s. I feel very lucky that way.”