The Punk Commodity

I am on the tour bus with Fletcher Dragge, the guitarist for Pennywise, who is half-drunk, confused and sipping warm Zima after a long day at the Warped Tour in Boreal.
"What happened in Wyoming?" Fletcher laughs repeating the question I just asked him. "Well I think it started out with some games of pool, right? I kept letting you win and you took about 400 dollars off me. I gave it to you, basically. So the next night at the show it was something like, ‘Okay, you took all this money off me, let’s wrestle.’" Then Fletcher proceeds to break down the play-by-play of me getting pummeled the first time I’d ever hung out with him. It’s an ugly story with me looking very bad. He tells it a lot differently than I do, but that’s to be expected. He is a 325-pound gorilla in a famous punk band and I am just a lowly journalist on assignment to get an interview with this Wookie from Hermosa Beach. He wraps up the trip down memory lane by saying what was going to happen to me if I’d gone to round two with him back in Wyoming; We were going to fight each other backstage at this hockey rink where the concert was being held, no-holds-barred, while he had his hands duct taped behind his back.
"I was so glad you backed out of that." He smiles in an evil sort of way, "You were really lucky because in that portion of the evening I was ready to do some damage to you. I was really going to fuck you up."
"Really?" I fake surprise.
"Not because I didn’t like you, but just because it was party time."
"So you’re saying you like me?" I retort.
"I didn’t say that."
And so it goes with Fletcher. Being in Pennywise has brought him lots of these crazy occurrences. Since 1988 when he teamed up with vocalist Jim Lindberg and bassist Jason Thirsk, Fletcher and his Pennywise army have slowly built an empire in So Cal punk that infuses craziness and drunkenness with a positive political message. Hypocritical perhaps, but it’s this combination of reality and insanity that Fletcher and Pennywise seem to walk. Right in the thick of this message is their latest album, Land Of The Free?, their seventh album on Epitaph Records, which has brought them to a new level of success even in this post-punk, nu metal era. Fletcher breaks it down nicely, explaining how radio has taken a liking to them, much to the band’s surprise.
"Take KROQ in L.A. for example: they’re playing a song of ours called ‘Fuck Authority,’ which is pretty cool. To be in a punk band for 12 years and to have your biggest radio station in the country basically say ‘We like what you’re doing, this is what Pennywise is about, we’re going to play it’ — that feels good. The record company picked a different single, "Divine Intervention," a more obvious radio-friendly, mid-tempo song. And KROQ was pretty into it, but Kevin Weatherly, the head guy at the station, went home and listened to the album over a weekend — which blew me away that he went home and listened to a Pennywise album with all the shit he’s got going on, and he came back and said ‘"Fuck Authority" rips, we’re playing it.’ Now, before all this was going on I was saying that "Fuck Authority" should be the single as well. At the time Brett Gurewitz, the head of our label said, quote, ‘It’s got an ice cube’s chance in hell, and you obviously don’t know what’s going on in the music industry,’ and I said, yeah whatever, and then bam, they’re playing it."
But Pennywise takes this all in stride.
"We don’t really even care about radio," Fletcher says. "It’s like our fans are our fans and that’s what makes us happy and that’s what makes us successful, like Jimmy says, ‘the radio is just gravy.’"
We then talk a little more about what everyone has been up to. Fletcher relates a story about partying with skateboarder Mike Smith (who, he points out, coined the Smith grind) a while back, in which everyone had taken a drunken oath to get a splash of Tabasco sauce in the eyes. "Yeah, so Mike starts to renege on the deal after we all had done it and I went bap, and got him really quickly, a little shot in the eyes with the Tabasco. So he just winds up and pickles me across the forehead with a beer bottle. Sent me to the hospital for four days. I had a hematoma on the brain. It was really fucked up. I thought I was going to die, was sure of it, for like 20 minutes. But I’m okay now. It was just really scary." Fletcher gets a little serious for a few minutes.
There is a story of him hitting an innocent person with a beer bottle years ago and sending him to the hospital for literally no good reason at all. "It was karma, you know, it took about five years to get back to me, but it did. And now I just dish out karma. I’m a karma donor." He elaborates, "And that’s the thing. That guy I hit with the bottle said to someone I know recently that the thing he regrets most in life is not sending me to jail for it. Forgiveness is a really good practice. You need to forgive people for their wrong doings. I’m going to call that guy and make him forgive me."
"Do you forgive me for kicking your ass?" I egg him on for no apparent reason.
"Hah! Do I forgive you for kicking my ass? I know what you’re trying to do. You’re trying to get me to attack you. That’s why you have the video guy here. I’m a total pacifist. Really, I’m not a violent guy."
"You seem a lot calmer than you used to be." I point out.
"Well" he laughs, "I’m not drinking Bacardi right now, am I?"
I am thankful for that. The business end of this guy’s violence is not something I want to experience again.
"What about punk rock?" I intend to steer things in another direction, "I mean, some people would say you don’t look punk."
"Well, I used to think back in high school that dressing punk rock was punk" he responds, "Because then you were setting yourself apart from all the other people, the football players and the A.S.B. president, and you dressed a certain way to let everyone know that you were saying ‘Fuck you.’ Now people who dress punk, that’s normal. It’s not a bad thing. They’re still making a statement and all these kids on the Warped Tour are making a statement, but the statement has become normalized." Fletcher’s evil smile flashes across his face again. "I mean, I’ve been thinking, and maybe this is that brink-of-insanity thing that you were talking about earlier…like maybe it would be rad if people just started to hack off their limbs — because I kind of heard a rumor that people started cutting off their limbs to be punk. Like in England or something, you know? Chopping off their arms and shit, and hands. That would be punk. That would be super punk."
"Would you line up for that?" I ask.
"I’ve been thinking about it." He says, dead seriously "I’d tell you my plan, but if I did, and then I carried it out, I’d get in trouble for insurance fraud. So I’m not going to tell you…but maybe someday you can come cruise on my yacht." He then takes a long drink of Zima from his plastic cup, his eyes squinting in mock, or total seriousness. It’s hard to tell, and with this fellow, one can’t put anything past him. I sure as hell wouldn’t.

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