Interview with
Tony Reflex of
The Adolescents

Singer Tony Reflex talks about the importance of education, family, and giving it his all on-stage on the Adolescents' latest tour.

By Mark Prindle

Tony Reflex is the vocalist for the legendary California punk bands Adolescents and ADZ, as well as a teacher, a Flipside writer, a parent, and a billion other things. With the Adolescents reunited, touring, and celebrating the release of TWO new CDs in 2005 (the all-new album OC Confidential on Finger Records, and all-old compilation Complete Demos 1980-1986 from Frontier Records), I thought it would be a fine time to demand an interview. See below for the results!

My text is as bold as darkness. He's regular.

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Hey Tony!
What's going on?
I'm the interview guy!
Hi, interview guy! What are you up to?
Interviewin'!
Ha!
Just doin' that whole interview thing. What are you up to?
Trying to keep my kids out of trouble.
How many kids do you have?
Three.
How old?
Nine, six and almost two.
Are they all big fans of you? Do they like your music?
Yeah, they do actually. Yeah.
Really? Cool!
Yeah. Yeah, they're into it.
You have a concert tonight, right?
Yeah. I guess I better figure out where it is. I gotta be there in a few hours!
Who's in the band now?
Well, let's see -- the line-up these days is me, Steve [Soto], Frank [Agnew]. And Derek O'Brien, he's playing drums. And we have a rotating second guitar section. Right now it's being filled by Frank's son -- Little Frank.
Oh wow! How old is he?
18, I think. Isn't that wild?
Yeah, jeez.
We still had to be like his guardians and stuff for the first tour we did with him.
(voice of a child through the phone): Daddy, can you tell Daria to stop it?
Sure. Daria, stop it!
Heh.
She's buggin' you? Come here, Daria. (Tony talks to his children for a few minutes)
Hey, what should I call you in this interview? "Tony Reflex"?
Yeah, that's the name I use.
Okay. What happened to ol' Rikk Agnew?
Well actually Rikk's in a band right now called Poop.
!!!
But he's been around. He came down to one of our shows when we did a benefit for the flood victims. That was over in Ventura, and Rikk came down and played a couple songs with us.
What's the deal with the D.I. guy [Casey Royer]? Do you ever talk to him?
Oh, Casey? I haven't talked to him in some time. He's kinda angry with us.
Angry with you?
Yeah. He wasn't ready to leave yet, I guess, at the time. We actually let him go, and he had hard feelings. It's good since, you know, lately. But for a while there, he was kinda firin' on us left and right.
Why'd you let him go? Was he not showing up for practices?
Yeah, his commitment to D.I. was taking up a lot of his time, and because of that he wasn't putting much into our new material. Which at the time was new, but now is actually three years old. We've got a whole new record recorded that's about to come out.
Oh! Really? A whole new album?
Yeah.
Awesome. When is that coming out?
It comes out in... Uh, when's it coming out...? I guess it's coming out in May [2005]. We're supposed to go out on the road in July, so it's coming out in May.
What label?
Kung Fu. (Note: it actually wound up coming out on Finger Records)
Oh, yeah. They put out the DVD.
Yeah, yeah. So we have a 13-song album with them. And then Lisa [Fancher]'s got this 25-year anniversary thing going on with her label [Frontier], and so I talked to her and I said, 'Hey, I've got some old material. Why don't we do a collection of these demos that I've got sitting here?' And because it's her 25 years and our 25 years, it worked out pretty nice.
Are these demos from just the first album?
They're from all of them actually, all over the place. Some of them are really early, like about a half dozen really early, very, very raw, off a cassette tape garage rehearsal from when the band first started. Songs that nobody's ever heard. Well, people have heard them, but they've never been recorded or anything. They're from, like, literally, they're from... I think we last played some of those songs -- they left our set in about April or May of 1980.
Wow.
Yeah. So there's a handful of songs on there, 'We Can't Change the World,' 'Black Sheep,' 'We Rule.' These are songs that are really archaic. People knew about the songs, but, especially the kids now, they have no idea what these songs were or anything about them. And then some demos, the first demo tape that we did, which some of it has been released on the -- BYO put out a record with a couple of the songs on it. But that whole demo. And then a five-song demo we did. Just prior to our work with Frontier, we did five songs. And actually, the source tapes for that were lost but a collector happened to have four of the five songs on a pretty raw cassette. I located a pretty good copy of a 1980 version of 'Do the Eddie.' So those are all --
1980 version of what song?
Of 'Do the Eddie,' another one of our old, old, old, old songs. Then we have two songs from a 1986 demo that we did at the Casbah, right before we recorded our second record, that Lisa had actually forgotten that she had, but I told her, "Look, you've got to go find those tapes. It's on there." Before D.I. did, we had recorded 'Richard Hung Himself,' which was actually an Adolescents song that Casey and I had written.
Oh, man.
Yeah. We're using one of two takes, so that's on there as well. So it's an interesting little --
So you were responsible for a song that Slayer covered on that CD then. What did you think of that?
(Chuckles) That was great. Another thing that's coming out this year is -- I don't want to call it a tribute record, because I don't really consider it one. More like a reworking of the blue album by a lot of different bands. We worked really hard to get Slayer to do 'I Hate Children,' but it just didn't come together.
Oh.
It would've been just Godzilla, but...
Has that come out?
No, it's actually coming out right about the time our record comes out.
Jeez, so you have three pretty cool things coming out this year.
Yeah, it's a busy year for us. That'll have like Pennywise and... It's the blue album reworked by NOFX, Pennywise, Bad Religion, Dropkick Murphys, Fu Manchu, Alkaline Trio, Pulley and the Briefs, from up Seattle way. The Offspring. It's going to be a pretty gnarly little record. So it's actually the first Adolescents record, but every track will be cut by a different band.
Let me ask you this. I have all the ADZ CDs, and I like them. And I have all the Adolescents CDs, and, well, you know, Balboa Fun Zone isn't one of my favorite records but I like the other ones. But very few bands had the ability to put out an end-to-end punk album as amazing as that first Adolescents album. Now, are you too close to the project, or can you still listen to it and go, "Wow, these songs really had something. This was really..." That record, it's a classic. I mean, every single track is so perfect. It just captures the time, and it's...
You know, we were intentionally clever sometimes, but I don't think we were really aware of .... We knew that we were involved in something really, really special and really, really important. I don't think we realized when we were doing it that it would transcend the way that it did. We thought that it might transcend counties, but we certainly didn't think it was going to transcend states or countries. And we sure as shit didn't think it was going to transcend generations. You know what I mean?
      We knew the Los Angeles punk rock scene in 1980 and '81 was like a really important thing. We knew that. But I don't think that any of the bands really understood what the long-term effect of it was. We were just doing it. We were in it and we were living it and we were doing it. We didn't realize that there were literally tens of thousands of kids from then to now that were speaking the same language that we were. We just didn't realize it. And when I listen to the record, sometimes I listen to it and I just think that it's ... I wish that I'd done some things a little bit differently, but ultimately I also realize that if ... having recorded ... I'm sorry, just a moment ...
(*Children have been screaming in the background and Tony turns away to tend to the situation*)
What's wrong?
She's got very long hair and he keeps wrapping his hand up in it and yanking it.
Ow!
You heard her. Stop that! (*Talks to child briefly about going to bed soon*) She's being two right now. But anyway, we didn't really think about it in terms of what other people would think. We were in a kind of survival mode, and when we made the record itself, I thought it was a pretty desperate cry from a group of very, very, very misunderstood kids. At the time, I didn't realize that there were a lot of people that felt the same way. And feel the same way. But when I listen to it now, I certainly see what the appeal is for other people. For me, it's like I love the songs. I've played them and they've been part of my life, so they are historical for me. They've been historical documents; that was a piece of my life. I didn't realize that people would feel the same way. Does that answer your question?
Yeah, yeah, it does. How come you weren't on Balboa Fun Zone?
Actually I left the band in the middle of a tour in about 1987 or so, '88, right around there. I'd gone out on a second US tour with them and in the middle of the second US tour, I got in a pretty big argument with the tour manager. I wanted him to leave, but he was really running the show and we needed him there. He booked it, he put it together, he had the contacts. But the problem kind of culminated in me trying to drop about a five gallon jug of grape juice on his head when he was asleep. It was good for me to go home at about that time. So I went back, and that time I just realized, "You know what, I'm not having very much fun. I'm arguing with everybody and I've got things that I've gotta get done and I'm not getting them done." I was troubled with the situation, and in this band we'd really have, at any one time, three people trying to run the show. And at that time, there was about eight. So it was just nuts. I just wanted to do something else. When I listened to Balboa Fun Zone then, I just laughed. I thought it was just absolutely horrible. I laughed and I said, "Ha ha, that's what you get for doing it without me."
      But now I've listened to it without the anger that I associated with it then, and I think there's some pretty strong tracks. I think the opening and closing tracks are especially good. And I think the "It's In Your Touch" track at the very end of the record is probably one of my favorite songs that Steve Soto has ever written. It's a really good song. But at the time, I was too angry with them for daring to do it without me, even though I left and said, "You go ahead and deal with it." For some reason I didn't equate that with, you know, when you tell somebody that you're cool with it, and then you're cool with it or you're not cool with it. Of course, I wasn't as okay with it as I initially had felt.
       But I really liked that track a lot and I thought that the "Riot on the Beach" track was really good and I love the "Instant Karma" cover that they did. There were some shining moments, and I think that even had I been involved in the project, I don't think that the record would have been a strong record. I think that it definitely had its moments, but I think that at the time, the kind of material that we were writing just wasn't as strong as the stuff that we'd written before or since then. I think every band -- anybody that seriously makes music always thinks that the music that they're making at that very moment in time is the best music that they've ever made. And I'm sure that I'm guilty of that just as much as anybody else, but I really do feel that the record that's about to come out [OC Confidential] is a pretty damn good record.
I really liked the new songs that you played on the DVD.
Yeah, that's three of them. 'Lockdown America,' 'California Son' and 'Within These Walls.'
Yeah, all three of them were good.
Thank you. Oh, and 'Hawks and Doves,' I think that might be in there too.
Oh, yeah, I think I remember that being on there too.
Yeah, all those are on this record. I'm pretty excited about the record that we've done. Then you've got the one that Lisa's got coming out. I hope that when that one does come out it's looked at as it was intended, at least by me. My putting that out was strictly -- I think that the songs are great. You can hear the fury. There's no denying the intensity of the songs. And sonically it's very lo-fi. There's not much we could do because of the source material. But I'm really excited about the fact that somebody's going to put it out, whether it's a limited release or not. I'm just really excited that it's happened, because I didn't think that that was ever going to come out. Can you hold on for just a minute?
Yeah.
(*pause*)
So anyway...
Is it gonna be called OC Confidential?
Yeah. The new studio album is called OC Confidential, and the demos record is called Naughty Women in Black Sweaters. It's kind of a funny little title. And again, you have to kind of know the history of Fullerton music and the Adolescents in particular. There's an intentional inside joke there.
       The Naughty Women were a transvestite punk rock band from Fullerton who we all loved dearly, just a great rock band. Very, very punk rock; very, very fun. And they're a very funny bunch of guys. And the Black Sweaters were a group of girls that used to always hang around the scene; they were kind of the resident groupies of the early Fullerton scene. So we have Naughty Women in Black Sweaters. You can kind of put it all together and it has a whole new meaning.
       But even without that insight, the title's kind of funny on any level. But for us, when we did it we were all chuckling. They said, 'Do you have an album title?' I said, 'Yeah, how about this one?' And I threw that one out and they all just started to laugh. They're like, 'Oh!' So we have a good time. We still have a lot of fun. Fart jokes still make us laugh.
Do you have any plans to do any more ADZ releases, or is Adolescents really your main focus right now? I know you're busy this year, but...
Well, I do plan on doing more. It's just that getting those guys moving is really hard. Bruce [Duff] is a pretty busy guy, and --
You know, when I started getting these ADZ CDs, I recognized his name because when I was a kid I had a tape by Jesters of Destiny.
Oh yeah. He was a Jester, yup. You're probably one of the few people in this country that knows that. The Jesters had a wonderful following in Europe.
Did they?
Oh yeah. They were right on that new wave of metal that came out in the '80s, they were right on it. Yeah, the guitar player was Sickie Wifebeater.
Oh, yeah! I remember something in the liner notes saying, 'One of these guys is in another band. He doesn't want you to know about it.' Yeah, I remember. (Singing) 'Diggin' that graa-ave.' There were some good songs on there.
Yeah. Yeah.
So what the heck happened to your voice between the first record and the second record? Were you just really young on the first record, or was it just all the screaming?
A little bit of both. When the first record was made, the actual recording was done in -- well, with the demos and the first album, that stuff was all done when I was like 16. My voice had actually just broke.
Ha!
No, really. It had just changed. Actually, on the very first recording that we did, my voice is actually in the process of changing right then, right about that first recording. So it was kind of hard for me to do some of the stuff because my voice kept cracking. And I didn't understand why it was happening; nobody bothered to tell me. It was just happening. I was a small guy for my age. I was 15 but I was very, very... I must have been 4' 11" or something. I was little! And in that year, from like middle of '79 to the middle of '80, I shot up about a foot. So I started very small but then I've grown. That's probably why I was so thin, because I was stretching. I wasn't filling out; I was going up. Then after the band broke up, I worked with a few guys from the Fullerton area in a band called the Abandoned, one of about four versions of it. I moved out to Glendora and re-established another band called the Abandoned out there, another one.
Did you do a record with them?
I've got a kind of collection. I did a record with the last lineup called 'Killed by Faith.' It was reissued on GTA [Grand Theft Audio] a few years ago with all the early demos, with like demos from '82 to '84. And then an album and about a half dozen live, pretty good quality rehearsal tapes. And in that period is when my voice really changed. Right about the 'Killed by Faith' record. What happened was we were rehearsing in my aunt's cellar, and I was singing out of a guitar amplifier so I couldn't hear, and I just kept pushing and pushing and pushing and actually wrecked my voicebox. So what you hear is how I sound. When I talk, sometimes it just varies. My pitch might be a little different, but my voice is always scratchy because I damaged my voicebox.
Oh wow!
Yeah, and it happened between the first two records. And it's the 'Killed by Faith' where it really just got bad. Now I've gotten to the point where I can actually sing, now that I can hear the tune. I couldn't before. I can actually hear it now and I can kind of stay in key and I can do a few shows without completely destroying my voice. But I've never had any formal training.
       And I have asthma on top of everything else, so a lot of the reason I even sing the way I do is I don't know how to breathe. I don't have a breathing technique. I don't know any of that. So things will come fast, because I've got to get it all out so I can catch my breath and then do the next line. Derek has been trying to show me, for about a year, how to have a pause, how to take a breath. I'm trying. It's a real conscious effort, but I never really thought of it as an instrument, I just thought of it as a device for throwing out lyrics and poems and ideas. Not really an instrument for music. I never really saw myself as a singer, but as more of an anthem writer or a sloganeer.
Does it hurt to perform?
Oh yeah. Yeah, it does. If you're looking for it, you can tell, because I'll actually pinch my head, the bridge of my nose where my eyes are, to put a little pressure on it to take it off the sinuses. But yeah, it definitely hurts a lot.
Why do you keep doing it? What drives you on?
You know, I don't know. I've done it most of my life. I really like to do it. I don't think anybody does the kind of music that I do for any other reason than that they really enjoy the music. Believe me, I'd make a lot more money doing a lot more things than I do doing this. For the amount of time, energy, and personal damage and risk that I put myself through, it really is a labor of love.
       It's not something that I take lightly. I take it pretty seriously, which is all the more reason why I think that when a band is too idealistic, they turn me off, whereas if a band is too career-oriented in music, they turn me off too. I don't think this is a forum for politics, and I don't think it's a forum for promoting clothing lines and cameras or instruments or whatever. I've gotten to the point where I've kind of looked at that from a lot of different perspectives and studied it. I kind of feel like there's got to be more to all of this than just the promotion of sales of whatever. So many big plugs are written into everything, you know, product endorsements everywhere. I get turned off when I see it in the music. The internet of five years ago and the internet of today are completely different things. And it's kind of a drag. And you can see that in music, too. It's everywhere.
That "seems completely designed to be played on the radio," real commercial sort of...
Right, right. Yeah, and it's true...
It tries to plug into obvious emotions, the same sort of...
Yeah.
Why do the politics bother you?
Why?
Well, because, you know, there are so many punk bands that are...
Well, I don't think that the politics bother me; it's that I don't really do well with somebody shoving an agenda down my throat. That really annoys me. You know what? Put an idea out there and let me make a decision, but don't make that decision for me. That bothers me. From any field. Anywhere.
       To me, there's more to it. I want something that's not stupid. I want music that's intelligent, I want lyrics that are intelligent, I don't want just to be bombarded with one idea. I want something layered, I want something thought out, I want something intelligent. I want something with good rhythm in the writing, I want something with good metaphors, I want something with clever plays on words and little idioms. I want something clever and I want it set to a music style that I can listen to and not be turned off by. But I really don't want somebody to just throw a lot of political rhetoric at me that doesn't have any structure and thought.
       If you're going to do it, do it like Bad Religion. If you're going to do it, do it like that. Put it out there, but do it strong and do it well. Don't just stay on one thing. If you read their lyrics, they really run a gamut of ideas, and while I don't always agree with Greg's position on things, he's got an amazing mind and an amazing voice. I don't dig bands where every song is just the same and the message is just negative and down. Gimme something else, gimme a little more. Make it interesting for me. I'm old.
Ha!
I've heard a lot of this already.
Yeah, it's hard not to notice that when a punk band's trying to be political and they're not really that up on things, they all say the same thing. They kind of base their opinions on the opinions of Crass or the Dead Kennedys.
Right. And it's dated. You know what? The Dead Kennedys were a fantastic band in their time. The name Jello Biafra was a clever name. And there was a statement there. And songs like 'Police Truck' and 'Holiday in Cambodia' -- those were great songs, they're good tunes. But just to take the stance and not have the song structure, man, it's a waste of time. Or just to have the song structure but not have any position. That doesn't do it for me either. I could name a lot of bands I don't like, and the reason is because they've got this really, really blatant pop sensibility and they've got nothing to say at all. That doesn't work either.
Do you still work with autistic children?
Well, I do, a little closer to home than I ever thought I would, but yeah, I do still work with autistic children to some degree.
What do you mean a little closer to home?
Well, it's a little closer to home than I ever thought it would be.
Really?
Oh yeah. And that's not a bad thing.
But what were the odds on that, though?
Well, you know, I don't know. I have some serious questions for the medical community about the inclusion of mercury in the shots that they have to give the children right off the bat.
Oh my goodness.
We'll see what happens, but they've known as far back as twenty years that what they swore were minute amounts of mercury that they include in these vaccinations for the flu or for hepatitis B or A or C or MMR especially, because that's one that all the kids get, that MMR shot ... MMR is put together, it's one dose for three things.
       And my wife stays a lot more current on this stuff than I do, but I always thought that she was a little overly cautious about spreading these shots out. I thought, 'You know what, give him the whole thing so he's done.' One shot and the kids feel better rather than spreading those out. But she's researched it pretty well and over time what we're learning and what's starting to show up in places like the Los Angeles Times now -- so certainly you go into semi-credible sources -- is that the amount of mercury that they're putting in these things can't really be considered safe.
       If a fish is contaminated with that much mercury and we're told, 'Don't eat this fish that's coming out of the Pacific Palisades area because it's full of mercury,' and the amount of mercury that's in that fish is the same amount of mercury that children are injected with and newborn babies are injected with to carry this vaccination, as a serum for the vaccination, then what the hell is going on?
      Some children that these studies kind of lean towards are more susceptible to getting autism than others, and for years they've been looking for a genetic link. And I'm sure that there is one, but now more and more is starting to come out about the amount of mercury and mercury poisoning. Considering the injection of a poison like mercury into a developing nervous system, and these are mandatory shots! You don't have a choice. You don't say 'No' to an MMR shot. If your child's going to go to school, your child's going to have to have an MMR shot. I have a feeling that we will see in the next 10 or 15 years a class action lawsuit that's going to make what happened to cigarette companies look like ... like ... I'm sorry to use such a wrong term, but it's going to look like kids' stuff.       Because I think that sooner or later, some of these drug companies are going to be brought to task on this mercury thing. And I think it's going to be a big one. I think it's going to be as big as what went down with the cigarette companies. It's going to be huge. It's just a matter of time. They knew. There are documents from twenty years ago that said this probably isn't a good idea. And once something like that happens, once that sort of stuff starts to come out, other stuff starts to come out.

CONTINUED ...

Interview with Tony Reflex of the Adolescents
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