Auntie Christ
Life is But a Dream (Lookout!)
An interview with Exene Cervenkova
by Margo Tiffen
Who is in Auntie Christ?
On the record it’s me, D.J. Bonebrake, who used to be in X, and Matt Freeman from Rancid. We did about 15 shows in California with that lineup. Now Matt’s been replaced by Janice Tunaka who’s going to be touring with me. Matt might come back to play guitar in the spring. He doesn’t like to tour, he’s toured too much. Janice sings with me, which is really cool because I like having two women singers.
How did you get together with Matt?
I started working on the songs and with the concept of the band last summer. I asked D.J. if he wanted to do it with me because we didn’t want to do X anymore. It was just too held up with other things. Tony, the guitar player, quit. I was trying to change the direction of X and turn it into a band like we were when we started out and I met with some resistance, so I quit. I met Matt at a party I had for a series of records that I put out. I actually met Matt at the same place I met D.J. about twenty years earlier. I just asked him if he knew of any good bass players. Someone suggested that I ask him because he knew so many people and he loved X so much. He said he’d do it as soon as Lollapalooza was over because he had some time off, which I never dreamed he would do. He worked really hard to make time for this. He grew up listening to X , so he played really well with D.J..
Do you have problems being a very influential woman in the punk scene?
I have a lot of problems with people not knowing who I am, not giving me credit, or thinking that Debbie (Harry) and I were just these bimbos. Now people think that music started with Courtney Love, that everything she did was completely original and they don’t know who Babes in Toyland are, they don’t know who I am. It’s kind of a drag. I don’t follow the trends, that’s why I didn’t make an electronic record. I didn’t try to sound like Beck. I didn’t get the Chemical Brothers, I didn’t get the Dust Brothers. I just did what I do best. It’s not a very respectful position to be in with the public because they recognize success as the only talent. If you’re not successful it’s like, get with the program. There’s a local college radio station here, KXLU, which is Loyola University. I know a woman who’s had a show there for at least 15 years. I was going to go on her show, but they won’t add my record to the playlist and they won’t give it to her so she can play it. The program director is like nineteen years old. The woman went in there the other day and there were all these records in the hallways stacked up everywhere and she asked,”what are you guys doing, reorganizing the library?”, and the girl goes “no, we’re having a garage sale. We’re gonna get rid of all this stuff because no one ever plays it.” It was the whole history of L.A. music like the Dead Boys and all these singles that were worth a couple hundred dollars, things that are very rare. She was aghast and she asked them why they were doing this. They were like “well, we need to make room for more stuff.” What’s really weird is that I’m forty-one and this woman Stella is like thirty-five. We both have kids. We’re supposed to be the ones saying “turn that off, it’s so threatening” and they’re the ones throwing out the threatening stuff and keeping the really conservative stuff. Stuff like Pavement that’s slower and more singer/songwriter. We’re the radicals and I think there’s something really wrong with that. I don’t understand.
Are there any bands today that you think are doing something different, that you respect?
There are a lot of bands like that. Unfortunately, only a few are officially sanctioned. It’s really annoying because it’s the same thing that happened with X. We were the official punk band that all critics could love and put on their list of the most important bands of the Eighties, the most important band to come out of the punk scene. Now you see it with Sleater-Kinney and you see it with Beck and you just go – god, I was one of those horrible people that the critics loved. I was one of those people that prevented others from being heard because the only band they were told to listen to was X. Everyone was compared to us. The main critic at the L.A. Times listed Geraldine Fibbers as one of the top ten albums of the year, owing to the sound of early X and her voice being like mine. They gave me a terrible review in the L.A. Times and I’m just like – you know, there’s this band called Auntie Christ who actually does sound like X and the singer does resemble Exene but you won’t even fucking listen to it because it’s punk rock and that’s not valid. This guy is sixty years old and he wants to seem very cutting edge so he wants to make sure that everything is hip and new and it’s just all major label garbage. It doesn’t have any reason to exist. We had a reason to exist, we came out of something revolutionary and all these other bands are just bands to be bands. We tried to overthrow the established order of conservative garbage and tried to tell people to think for themselves. That the audience and the band was the same person and there was no elitism and all this stuff. Now it’s back to that in spades, even more than in the Seventies. The underground is so conservative and so fucking square they should be fucking ashamed of themselves. It’s like there is no underground, there is no alternative, it’s just hideous.
You think the scene these days is worse than it ever was before?
I think there’s always going to be an underground that’s really powerful. There’re a lot of good bands out there. Unfortunately, we’ll never have what we had in the late Seventies because we have MTV now and we have this corporate intrusion into every aspect. The major labels and the radio hated us and they weren’t going to ever play us or sign us. So for four or five years people got to be totally experimental and underground without being imitated or impeding each other that much. Everyone got to be very original,there was this kind of powerful artistic strength, and all of a sudden everybody said “oh look, it’s X, they’re really amazing” and then the critics took over. It kind of alienated us in a way and it’s just very weird. I wasn’t a genius when I was twenty-three, if I’m a genius, I’m a genius now, but when you’re twenty-three that’s the only time they’ll like you. We didn’t know what we were doing. We were just playing music. The bands that are good now are good because they’re not gullible, they’re not buying into it, they’re not trying to be a major label hit.
Typically, what’s now considered the new punk movement revolves around the California/Bay Area punk sound. For the most part, it all sounds the same…
There was a clichéd type of punk that existed in the Seventies that exists now too. You’ve gotta be an artist. The original punk was people who didn’t really know what they were doing. Who either couldn’t play before or had played before but were like Billy Zoom who played rockabilly and only got into punk when he heard about the Ramones. His only musical experience was being a genius from the age of four up, but he found his artistic genius just after punk started. Or people like me who’d never sung in a band before. Now people are exposed to so much stuff. They know they want to sing like Tim from Rancid or play guitar like Billy Zoom. They want to sound like the UK Subs or DC hardcore, and it’s a formula, just like Mötley Crüe is a formula. The first person who did it might not have been a formula. Black Flag wasn’t a formula and the Circle Jerks weren’t really a formula, but they could be now just because people sound like them now. I have no regard for anyone who imitates anyone else in the arts. That’s why I played guitar on my records. I don’t really know how to play guitar and I didn’t want some guy who was gonna sound like Billie from Green Day. It’s not art otherwise and what point is there? Everyone in the punk movement originally made fun of art and they said they weren’t artists, that art sucks. I was always first and foremost an artist and so were the other people in X and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with declaring yourself an artist. Whether you’re playing guitar or making a painting, you’re still an artist. I don’t think it’s enough to shout really badly written lyrics and sound like somebody just to become famous. It’s a sheep mentality that people have and I wish it would go away. You need to turn off the alpha wave machine in your living room so you’re not receptive to everything that’s on there. If you bombard people with alpha waves, they immediately become receptive to whatever they’re seeing. Just this whole success/failure/loser corporate mentality that’s like – wear this, look like this, like this – everyone else does. People are so easily herded into these groups.
What do you think of spoken word as a medium compared to music?
I did my first poetry reading in 1975. Then I came here in ’76 and I started out at this literary workshop that was more like the Beats and those sort of people. It was ’76, the war had just ended, and the Sixties were just over. It was still hippieville in Venice and there were a lot of really amazing writers. I never stopped doing it and I did books and spoken word albums and everything over the years. Then, at some point in the very recent past, it became another one of those fake, hip things to be and everyone developed a similar kind of poetry slam style. The women all evolved into this angry daddy-why-did-you-molest-me thing, screaming at the audience. The men became kind of hip and sarcastic and funny. It’s just a sidetrack of writing. It’s an inconsequential moment as far as I’m concerned. I’ve seen a lot of really amazing writers and that’s first and foremost what I am, a writer. I have a lot of respect for it, but it’s not a thing you do for a career, to make money or because you want to be on MTV. It’s a thing you do because that’s what you are, and if not, then you shouldn’t be doing it. You have to be born with it. Luckily, I don’t think people are making money on it and so it won’t attract the wrong kind of people. Alternative music will attract those people before spoken word will, which is good. Money always attracts the wrong crowd.
What do you think about other musicians like Jello Biafra and Henry Rollins who do spoken word as well?
Henry used to open for me when he had long hair and he was reading the things he wrote. He was kind of shy and he would read and then he would say – well, the reason I wrote this… Then he would tell the story and everyone would go mad. It was so funny and so incredible and he’d get this huge response and then he’d read another poem and people would go yeah, okay. I think that’s how he evolved his style. He’s not a poet, he’s more of a Lenny Bruce kind of guy. Jello is the same. A band can only give so much information to people and the kind of information he wanted people to have, they oftentimes weren’t getting. That’s why he did “Nazi Punks Fuck Off.” I think that both of them evolved into what they really wanted to be. They have something they need to say and they find a way to say it.
What writers, novels do you enjoy?
Well, I read a book called Ishmael by Daniel Quinn that I liked. I like Elaine Pagan. She writes non-fiction. She wrote the Gnostic Scriptures and she’s a really brilliant scholar. I read Siddhartha by Herman Hesse which I hadn’t read before and I really liked that. I really like Zorenial Hurston. Mostly, though, I read more books about things like Gnostic scriptures and women’s issues. I think people are just really brainwashed, really docile, really controlled. I think that we’re living in a time of supreme science fiction. Pick up any science fiction book and it’s now. 1984,Fahrenheit 451 is now. The difference is this. You don’t need a government going around and rounding people up. We don’t have to set up that kind of government here that we set up in Central America with death squads and all that kind of torture and stuff. What works best here is propaganda and commercial capitalism but it’s still brainwashing and it’s still mind control and it’s still really scary. If everybody cut their credit cards in half and said we’re not going to buy anything for Christmas this year, we’re just going to make stuff like pies, you would find out what fascism’s all about in a big fucking hurry. I don’t take any stock in anything in the Old Testament or the New Testament. I don’t have any regard for it whatsoever. By the way, the Gnostic people, one of the reasons they were so hated and they were banished was because their whole idea was to add to everything Jesus said. Supposedly, we’re not supposed to add to the religious tradition. The New Testament is the beginning and the end of all religious doctrine. That’s it. The Gnostics believed that everyone had the capacity to add to the body of knowledge and spiritual adventure or whatever subject they were interested in. That was just the starting point and from then on people would become smarter and smarter because everyone would be contributing something to it. That’s what religion tried to stop, and that’s kind of what’s happening now. If you think UFOs are real, you’re crazy. If you think the environment is suffering and that the oceans are getting warmer, you’re crazy. If you in any way try to liberate people or add to knowledge, you’re crazy. If you’re not crazy, who are you and where did you get your information? You’re not allowed to trust your own mind. You’re supposed to leave it to experts, religious and political, and never contribute to liberating people or changing things or making things better. You don’t have that right.
What changes have to come about before we can move forward?
Well, you can’t fight the corporations, it’s impossible, but you can turn off the external information that you’re bombarded with; television, major label propaganda, Nike propaganda, McDonald’s, Disney, and all those people. Just turn inward and discover yourself and find your soul and become a spiritual being because then they are powerless over you. If everyone did that, the whole world would change in a minute, but they’re very smart because we’re tied into it. If you cut your credit cards in half, you can’t rent a car or a movie. If everybody does it then no one has jobs and no one can live and you’re fucked. You can’t overthrow the system without going hungry and not being able to drive your car.
I just wish there was more that we, as a collective, could do about it. I don’t really have any good basis for comparison because I didn’t live through the Sixties and Seventies when the prevalent feeling was one of fighting towards change…
All those people of the Sixties and Seventies, they did so much. Well, some of them might have become yuppies but the people who were fighting are not the same people who became yuppies. The people who were fighting are the same people who are fighting now. The problem is that your generation and the generation that precedes you didn’t do what those fucking people did. Weren’t you supposed to take over at some point? Aren’t you supposed to be marching on your college campus? Why aren’t you? Those people were so successful. They changed the entire health system of this country and the whole spiritual, gender and race structure of this country. Your generation will get a nice Republican president and they’ll find out what it’s like.
