Interviews

Youth Brigade

Interview with Shawn Stern on Nov 5, 2009 by

Interview with Shawn Stern, vocalist and guitarist of Youth Brigade and president of BYO records

By: Amy Meyer

PB: How did the idea for the documentary come up? You’re doing a lot already, what made you say let’s do a movie, too?

SS: We started talking about how the 25th anniversary is coming up, what should we do? Mark (Youth Brigade drummer/younger brother of Shawn) and I both said, hey let’s do a compilation, that’s how we started the label. The way the music business is right now, it’s such a mess with everybody digital downloading; we thought what can we do to get around that?

PB: Yeah, so people would actually want this.

SS: Or at least will pay for it, so that’s how we came up with the movie. We’d seen the Bouncing Souls documentary and thought that was really cool and that we should do one too. So we came up with that idea, but of course that can be downloaded as well. So we thought what if we made a book and put everything inside of the book? You can’t really bootleg a book and voila, there we go.

PB: How long did it take you to actually put it all together? How long was this idea in the making?

SS: About three years. It’s our 25 year anniversary, but its a couple years after our 25 year anniversary. My brother was freaking out - we’re not going to get this out by our 25 years and it’s going to look really stupid. I said, you know what, if we put out something that’s not that good, people aren’t going to remember it. They’ll be like, oh they put that crappy thing out versus if we spend time and put something good together, they’re never going to remember that we didn’t put it out our 25th year; they’re going to remember that this was really good. No one’s going to care

PB: So start to finish, book, film, recording, everything was the three years? You got the ball rolling as soon as you got the idea?

SS: We started asking people and lots of people said they’d love to get involved, actually getting them to record, ehhh. That’s one of the reasons why we opted for bands covering songs on the label. Trying to get bands to make new stuff is like pulling teeth. It made sense, it was a good idea, and I think it came out really well. The guys we talked with about making the movie, that took a couple years, too. They started working on the NoFX passport around the world thing and followed them around all these crazy countries. They were just about done with ours when they started on theirs, so that put ours on hold. We were in the meantime getting the record together and starting to work on the book. It was a long process.

PB: How did you find the time to do it? Running the label, playing shows, setting up punk rock bowling, and you still put the movie together.

SS: Mark and I were both doing major construction on our houses all at the time of the recession. It took me three years to deal with that, it was just gnarly. That’s why BYO didn’t put a new release out for 2 years. Entering that time, the music industry just went down, down, down, down. It was kind of well, we’re already committed to this project and the music business is shit and now we’re in a recession, so hey everybody go out and buy a fifty dollar box set when you don’t have any money or a job! It wasn’t the best idea, but everybody loves it. You have to get people to open it up and see what it is because people are like, what the hell 50 dollars, but once they do they seem to really love it.

PB: So it’s 50 on the website and 25 today?

SS: No, there are 2 versions. There’s a big one, the fifty dollar one, which has a double album LP, DVD, and the CD of the songs. The 25 dollar one just does not have the LPs and the actual book is smaller. The same stuff inside, but the big book cost a lot more money to make.

PB: I was actually really surprised, how did you get Hot Topic on with this project? I saw in the front they had it on display with Black Flag t-shirts and I was like really? I’m not used to seeing punk rock stuff on an end cap within plain site of the entrance.

SS: I think it’s awesome! I know Hot Topic has a bad rep amongst so called real punks and shit, but ya know what, chain stores are all going out of business, and the buyer at Hot Topic is a huge punk fan. He understood this project, super good guy, Jay, and said, ‘yeah fuck we’ll take a bunch of them.’ That pretty much nailed us to put this project together. People should go out and buy it at Hot Topic, really.

PB: Obviously you write a lot of positive songs and after seeing the movie, you see there was a lot of violence in the punk scene back in the 80’s, both with police violence and sometimes just crazy violence in the pit. Was it ever hard writing positive songs when some awful things were going on in the scene or did that kind of fuel the fire?

SS: We try to look at the bigger picture, not dwell on the stupid, mindless bullshit. It’s what I like to call the fuck or fight syndrome. Youth, adolescent males have a lot of testosterone, so they go out and what they would like to do is get laid. Since most of them can’t because they’re clueless, they end up taking all that excess testosterone and beat the shit out of each other. Most of them realize it’s stupid and eventually they get over it. I didn’t take it personally; I just figured hey punk rock has a lot of positive things to offer so we’ll talk about that.

PB: What’s been the biggest challenge all these years? After seeing the movie it’s apparent the band has gone thru a lot of shit, I mean hell, one of your brothers left the band.

SS: Yeah, that part is so sad. I think the challenge is that we try to run a label and be a band. When you go on the road the label suffers, when you get back the band suffers because you’re working on the label trying to help bands. We did it all during a time when punk rock wasn’t making much money. Then when it was making a lot of money, we did okay, but we never got that anchor band that was drawing tons of people. Epitaph had Bad Religion, then NoFX, then Rancid, and Pennywise and shit. When Mike started Fat he could take bands out on the road with NoFX. We never really got to that point and it was a little difficult. It’s all capitalism and capitalism sucks, what are you going to do? We did our best and I think we managed to eke our way thru all the shit.

PB: So now that you’re done with the movie, and after you do this tour and everything for it, are you going to focus more on the band again or more on the label again? That seems to be an ongoing struggle with you guys…

SS: The world of record labels has changed so drastically. I don’t know. Going out and playing is the most fun. I don’t know if bands really need a label anymore when they can just put their shit on Myspace. We’ll work on what makes us happy and what people respond to. If we can help other bands we will, but it’s a little more difficult these days.

PB: What was the last BYO release, well other than this documentary?

SS: Uhhhh… The Briefs DVD, which came out about two years ago. So yeah, it’s been a couple of years.

PB: Speaking of it’s been a couple of years, if you look on the BYO website under Youth Brigade’s bio it states you guys are “currently working on a new album that is tentatively scheduled to be released in 2005.” Now that you’re done with the movie and nothing is really going on with the label, are you guys going to work on a new record?

SS: I hope so; I mean we wrote the songs for the split with the Swingin' Utters in a week.

PB:  Yeah, it’s been about 10 years since that’s come out.

SS: Exactly, I’m well aware of that! Yeah, I hope to.

PB: With all the challenges and hurdles you’ve had to jump, what has been the most rewarding thing about going the punk rock route with your life?

SS: First of all, we work for ourselves, so if there’s surf we just go surfing. The other thing is when you tour, basically what you’re doing is going to a town, they’re going to throw a big party, you’re going to get paid to play music, which you love doing anyway, and get drunk and party with a bunch of people. Then you get up the next day get to do it all over again; it’s a great way to travel. Hopefully you’re inspiring people and getting them to think about stuff and hopefully getting them to do things with their life that they may not have done, and that’s pretty rewarding right there.

PB: Since when did you become a four-piece?

SS: February we did some shows with NoFX for the 25-year anniversary tour.  Johnny is in a band with Joey called Old Man Markley, which is a punk blue grass band. Actually, we met them from their old band, Blue Collar Special. We’ve known both of them for awhile and Joey was pushing, ‘we should get Johnny in the band, he’s good.’ We said sure, makes my life easier, less that I have to do, so why not? It worked out really well.

PB: Do you think you’ll ever play a show with the other Stern brother? (Adam Stern, original bassist) Does he still do his movie stuff?

SS: Yeah, he makes a lot of money working on CGI. We did the premiere in LA right when this tour started, we screened the movie and played with 7 Seconds and Swingin’ Utters and Adam got up and played three or four songs. He’s always prepared to jump up, but he’s got a good job doing something he enjoys. I can’t blame him; he makes a lot of money.

PB: Do you ever struggle with money then since you mentioned the music industry has kind of gone to shit in regards to people buying records?

SS: Things are tight, but we (him and brother Mark Stern) were both pretty smart in the 90’s when things were going well and we invested money.  

PB: Does your youngest brother (Jamie Stern of Royal Crown Revue) still do anything with music?

SS: He works on TV. He worked on “Dirty Sexy Money” and now he works on a new show called “Flash Forward.” He’s a production coordinator, so he has to deal with all this bullshit all day, every day.

PB: Is your mom still like ‘you boys, when are you going to stop doing that punk rock?’

SS: You know when she stopped? When I bought a house.

PB: What is the best thing about being in a punk rock band, what do you love that keeps you here today? It’s been 25 years, that’s a fucking long time to keep doing anything.

SS: It’s this community of people that we’ve been hanging out with for all these years. I just think that we’re super lucky to be able to do something we love. Punk rock has been such an amazing and inspiring thing for so many people. You see when we play, it’s not just old people. I’ve been doing a lot of interviews over the last month or so and some people ask questions like, ‘Montley Crue or one of these hair bands, they’re together and get all these old fans, is that what you get?’ I say God, that’s sad and depressing. If all we drew was a bunch of fat, old, bald guys, I would have hung it up years ago. The fact is that this music reaches across generations, so I just figure we must be doing something right that some kid in high school now can relate to songs we were writing back in the 80’s, so that pretty much inspires me to keep doing it. A lot of these newer bands have nothing to say, they’re just kind of boring.

Youth Brigade

BYO Records

Review of "Let Them Know: The Story of Youth Brigade and BYO" by Chris Park