Interview with Tony Reflex of
The Adolescents
April 2005 -- Page 2
Page 1 - Page 2

Now, what role does the mercury play in this shot?
You know, I'm not exactly sure. My understanding is that it's used as almost like a base to carry it. (To his wife) Do you know what the mercury's even used for? (Back to me) It's a preservative to keep it from going bad.
Oh! Oh my goodness.
(*Pause while Tony's wife speaks to him*)
Oh, so it's for cleansing, to prevent the exposure to things like air or whatever that the germs have. It's a preservative. So, you know what? I have a feeling that in time, truth has a habit of getting out. People start to research shit. When I talk about things that are important, these are the kind of things that I consider important. To me, that's a pretty significant thing. Will someone write a song about it? Well, they probably will now. You know? They probably will now. And I think they should. Those are the kinds of things that I think songs should deal with.
Yeah. You should write about it. Have you written about it?
On the next record that's coming out, there's a song called 'Monsanto Hayride' that I wrote about a year ago about the Monsanto Chemical Company and the dumping of poisonous pesticides into the Anniston area and their bullying of farmers as they developed these Frankenfood seeds. They had a lawsuit where some seeds blew into a neighboring farmer's lot. Well, he benefitted from that and they sued him for like copyright-type infringement. For blowing seeds. It's not like he intentionally grabbed them or whatever. But this is big business, agricultural bullying stuff.
      Who the hell knows what they're doing to the kids? Those growth hormones that they've injected into those cows to get them to produce that milk -- think about what it's going to do to an eight-year-old girl who's been drinking it her whole life. What's it going to do to a child? These are significant things. I think this kind of stuff makes the 'Super-Size Me' -- and I think that kind of stuff is great, I think it's really important that people expose food chains for what they are -- but I think that's the tip of the iceberg. I think there's a lot more going on underneath than anybody either wants to know or is capable of really comprehending. I just wonder how much stuff will come.
       But yeah, I write stuff about it and I write songs about this stuff. And I try to make the songs very catchy, because you know what? I want a person to hear one of these songs, to sing along with it, and then when they think about what they're hearing, I want to challenge them. Like, 'You know what? This is going on.' It's in our power to do something about this, to inform one another. The internet is not for selling t-shirts. Rock and roll bands are not about selling merchandise. I'm sorry, it's not about selling a product, it's about selling a social ... To me, it's a social movement. It's not a political movement; it's a social movement. It's a movement of people that can't accept what they see and they do something about it.
      There's this clever little postcard from some hippy group that I just got which is the best thing in the world. It said, 'If I'm not at home accepting what I can't change, then I'm probably out changing what I can't accept.' I love that. It's a very, very powerful statement. And I'm going to inform people. I'm going to talk to people, I'm going to tell them where to find out about what Wal-Mart does, you know? I'm going to say, "You as a woman or as a child who is female, you should know about this company."
       I'm not going to tell you what to think; I'm going to tell you to go look at what they do. But don't accept this because you see a Wal-Mart in every city and because their prices are so good. Don't accept that that means that they're fair. Don't believe that that's necessarily a good thing. Look into it, find out about it, learn. Educate yourself. Take a personal stance: I either accept what a store like Wal-Mart does, or I can't accept it. And if I can't accept it, what am I going to do? I'm going to tell other people about it. Just say, "You know what, if you're a woman and you want a job promotion, you're sure as shit not going to get one at Wal-Mart because whether they're going to admit it or not, they've got a policy that's going to keep you down. And if they're going to keep you down by gender, they're going to keep you down for your ethnicity, they're going to keep you down for your religious or political views."
       It doesn't matter what that is; if they'll do it to one segment of our society, they'll do it to a lot more. They got caught for the hiring of undocumented labor for janitorial services. The first thing they said? 'Oh, well we hired these people' -- 'THESE people,' I love the way that that was laid out -- 'from an agency. They were freelance workers.' That's a way of saying, you know what, it wasn't important to us whether or not they had a legal or illegal work status here; what mattered to us was that we could get this particular group of workers in here to work cheap. And to me, there's something really, really wrong there. There's something wrong with that. This is why there were people like Cesar Chavez out there working. That's why we have unions, for that very reason. Because people are exploited by business if they don't organize in some form. I'll just keep going on. You better stop me now.
No no no! What I wanted to ask was -- I go through these phases, and I'm just curious -- With so much selfishness and so much greed and so many people behaving in evil ways and not blaming themselves for it, how do you not be depressed all the time? Or get to a point where you go, 'You know, we're all going to die in the end anyway, I'll just try to be happy and keep my family happy'?
Well, I'm generally a pretty positive person. I do get down, I do battle with negativity, sure, and I think we all do. But it's just a personal commitment to say, 'You know what?, I can't accept the status quo. It's not acceptable.' That doesn't mean I'm going to take this out on my co-workers; it's not their fault. I'm not going to take this out on my kids; it's not their fault. I'm not going to take this out on my wife or my husband; it's not their fault. I'm not going to take this out on the guy that's working his ass off for six dollars an hour because he put the wrong sauce on my food, OK? I'm not going to freak out about somebody who makes an unintentional mistake like he cut me off. It's just in the way that you maybe can say, clearly, 'I'm sorry.' I'm not going to let my situation influence me so that I take it out on my brother or my sister. That's not going to work. To me, that's not acceptable.
       I've been really upset at myself if I find myself acting in a way that I shortchange them or I treat them, you know -- it's so basic, it's such a basic, golden-rule kind of thing. I'm not going to be so proud that I can't apologize to somebody if I've done something -- and I recognize it -- that is offensive. If I say something or do something because I'm in a pissy mood, I'm going to take every possible opportunity to find that person, locate that person, and apologize for my own behavior. If I start by accepting my own behavior and taking responsibility for it, then I can't expect some company to take responsibility for their behavior. But I'm also not going to allow another person or another company to lie to me about their behavior. I'm going to call them on it, say, 'You know what, this isn't right. This is not right, and if this is how you're going to act, I'm not going to use your services. I'm done.'
       I've been dealing with this nightmare for almost ... with talking, and me walking through situations with technical support people for more than sixty hours in the last two weeks. And it's frustrating. But if I find myself even getting short, I'll say, 'You know what, I'm sorry, this has been going on for a long time and I'm going to go ahead and do this step and this step, and I'll call you back later.' Because I recognize that right now this person on the other end of the phone is not to blame for my computer's problem. And it's just a fucking computer. It's not worth me ruining that person's day. It's just not worth it. So I do think about it, and I try to be like that. I try to be like that.
See, that sounds like me, and it makes me really happy to hear about other people like that.
People think you're stupid when you act like that; they think we're naive. We're not.
Yeah! What in your life -- you know, I've never actually looked at this in myself -- but what in your life has made you like this, whereas other people grow up and become cynical, or think it's fun to just be sarcastic all the time, or just get pissy.
I guess it's a defense mechanism. My feeling is they probably do that because it's their survival mode, and in order to survive, they feel that that's what they have to do. They don't see that they can make a conscious effort to be another way, and so they accept that if that works for them, they're going to be that way. I run into people like that. I've been in bands with people like that, I've worked with people like that, I've talked with people like that, I've met bands that are like that. Generally if I have somebody around me that's like that, I'm not going to get into a verbal spar with the person. I'll just get up and leave.
       Because I learned when I was about twelve years old that there were really two kinds of people. There were the kinds of people that would build me up, and there were the kinds of people that would tear me down. And when I found that the kind of person that would tear me down was influencing me, I was in the worst situations and I was in a crisis where I was depressed, where I was aggressive. And I realized that that's not a place I want to be.
       I don't think I'm going to make the world a better place by destroying another human being. And I certainly can go out in this world and say, 'I think it's wrong to shoot another human.' To me, that's wrong. I think that it's wrong to drop bombs on people when children are starving in my city. I think that's wrong. It's wrong to invest billions of dollars into rebuilding a country that we've just demolished. That's wrong. When the state I live in is in such a financial crisis that it could go bankrupt at any minute, that's wrong.
"You know what you need though, is education." Education. All Bush talks about is education. So what happens? People get educated and there's no jobs.
But the thing is, is an educated people can take the control away from the people that -- it doesn't matter how much money they have. The problem with our governor, for example, is not that he's a lying politician just like all the rest. I mean, he lied about everything he said he was going to do; that's not the problem here. The problem here is that the popular support that brought him into office is uneducated; they don't really understand what he was saying. It didn't really matter, as long as he ended it with, 'You're a girlyman if you disagree with me,' or if he ended it with, 'I'll be back' or any of the movie tie-ins that he said.
       You want to talk about the biggest tie-in in California history? This was way more than Ronald Reagan could've ever done. Arnold Schwarzenegger as the governor is probably -- Arnold Schwarzenegger Incorporated had probably a 2000% financial gain when he became the governor of the state. He's not hurting for money. I am. You are. But he's not. His DVD sales went up, his video sales went up, he's in the media every single day. And when you see Arnold Schwarzenegger's face on television and then you go to the store and you see Total Recall or the Terminator and you buy that, he just got the cheapest commercial ever made to sell that product.
       I would like to know how much of his own capital he puts into education, because I can tell you I put every single day of my life -- and I have for the last 24 years -- into educating other people. And that's just as a career choice. Before that, as the singer of a rock band and as a mouthy, active teenager, I've been doing it for 30 years. I've put my life into this. This isn't a little thing to me. I'm a very, very education-driven person. And I really, really think that the only way that any of us can grow, spiritually or economically, is to be educated. And I think that we need to be educated, not just by rock lyrics, but we need to be educated by people that we don't agree with necessarily. Because we need to know what we're up against. We need to know what we're dealing with, and we need to know what we're up against.
      There's a song by D.O.A.-- and I'm going to go right to a rock lyric -- there's a song by D.O.A. on a record that came out a few years ago -- not the newest one, the one that came a couple records back -- where they talk about the name-branding on shirts, companies, sodas, whatever. And they're saying that for parents, they're so slapped by it that they don't even know how to react to it anymore. And I think that it was one little lyric, and I read that and I walked away from this record with this whole different way of thinking about how marketing works.
       And what did I do? I started reading. I started getting books like Branded [by Alissa Quart], for example, which is an amazing book about the way that clothing manufacturers target teenage girls and literally brand them with their clothing brand as a social ritual. But what happens is they're being used to literally be spokespeople for whatever clothing line it is. They'll hire a 12-year-old girl for a questionnaire. It's what spyware does now on the internet; it tracks your buying habits.
Yeah, you know, I read about that a while back, about how companies would do this thing where they go to schools or malls and they'd ask, 'Who are the cool kids?' And when people tell them, 'Oh, he's cool, he's cool, he's cool,' then they go to those kids and get them to wear their stuff. Yeah, it's amazing. It's so sleazy.
Yeah.
What I was going to say about education... Well, first of all, I think you're selling Schwarzenegger short, because he did Kindergarten Cop.
Ha!
But aside from that -- now, I had some good teachers. I really did. I had some good teachers who led conversations outside the curriculum and so on and so forth, but do you think there's a problem with the education process -- how it's set up just to make kids memorize stuff? Or do you feel like there's enough leeway there for teachers who really want to actually teach kids?
Well, you know, one of the problems that I think education is facing right now is the standardization process. It creates a norm and a not-norm, and as much as I think it's necessary to test the quality of education and to make sure that kids get a basic grasp of materials or ideas at a particular point in their school career, it doesn't have to be so stringent and so cutthroat.
       And it's starting to look to me like it's structured almost the same way as everything else. The process of giving a designed test to every single kid in the United States and saying they need to hit these plateaus or they're not on the norm -- it's creating a lot of stress for teachers to make sure these kids hit these standards. It decreases their creativity and their ability to be a -- and I don't mean that I think that standards are a horrible idea. I think they're a great idea. But I think that there needs to be a moderation.
       I also don't think that a child should be taught nothing but the arts. I have seen examples of a child just being given a year of art, just different kinds of arts by a very talented artist. Artistic thinking is a whole different concept, but if you don't stay on top of making sure that they get math, science and reading concepts, the child goes to another grade and they start to fall. So I think there needs to be a balance. I think there needs to be a guideline.
      But I don't think that standardizing the whole state or the whole country is the answer, and I think that it actually gives too much power to the testing people, to the publishers of those tests. And if you research who's making these tests, where are these tests coming from? Who is the company that analyzes these tests, and who's making the money? [A: Educational Testing Service (ETS)] Because somebody's making a great deal of money on these tests that they give once a year and that a lot of schools are bullied into achieving higher and higher and higher every year on. Somebody's making a great deal of money on that, and the politics of what's going on with those publishers concerns me not only as an educator, but also as a Californian. Who are they lobbying? Where did their money come from, where does their money come from, and why are they allowed to have so much power over the education of the kids in this state? Who is this publishing company?
       Because I'll tell you one thing. If you find out who the publishing company is, you start to find out who more of your schools are going to be buying publishing materials from. It's a big business. If a textbook is 40 or 50 bucks and you require five of them for a kid, that's $250 a set per child. And the publishing companies become very competitive in trying to get those things out, to make money -- big money, millions of dollars! And it's something that people don't think about.
      Every once in a while, we get a naysayer. I'll run into somebody who will be highly critical of me because I'm active in education -- that somehow by the fact that I sing and sang in a punk rock band, then I could not have a career. I do music because, really, there's a freedom in the songs; it's how I can express myself best. I can't get that anywhere else. I take it very seriously. You asked me why I do it even though it's killing me -- and it is, it's destroying me physically -- but it's something that feels very, very important.
       In this arena, I can say to people, 'What are these standardized tests about? Who are these publishers? Who's doing this?' And it challenges kids. It challenges kids and adults to go out and find out who's running this thing. It's been going on for a long time. Who's making the choices? Who's making the money? Whose money is behind this? Where is this coming from? Who are these directives coming from? I feel bad for a teacher who has lost the passion of this job. I do; I feel sorry for him. Because I think that this is probably one of the most important jobs that human beings can have. I can't think, to me, of a more important job.
      And I really don't see, even as a musician, I don't see myself as just the singer of a band. I've never seen my role in the community as that. I've seen myself in the music community as a historian, not just as a singer. And that really came from years of people asking me questions about the blue record and about the social climate of Orange County in the '70s and the early '80s. And I realized, what I do is more than just sing a few songs. I'm really a historian with a great deal of knowledge about the past, and still very, very active in this social movement that revolves around the alternative rock scene.
       I think punk rock as an ideal has really morphed into something a lot bigger than it used to be. There's a certain responsibility with bands that do have the arena to use the arena to promote social change and justice, not just to rant about how bad the government is. I'm sorry, once you've dismissed the democratic system completely, what've you got? Once you've done that, the people that you're trying to get to change their ways have turned you off completely. It never comes into them otherwise. You have to know how to achieve a change without making your opponent defensive or walk away from the game. There's a way to do it. You totally shut them down if their whole thing is like, 'You know what? It doesn't matter. I can't change anything anyways.' Once the 'I can't' has entered the person's vernacular, that person's not going to be able to change a damn thing. They've already accepted it. But I can't accept that.
       I meet people all the time that are frustrated with their job and I say, 'Get a new job,' or 'Change this about the way that you deal with this part of your job so that you can do better at the job that you've taken on.' Rather than just finessing it or just going into work and hating the job. I think that's so unhealthy. A person that goes into a job that they hate every day, if they don't have an objective or a way to correct the issue that they've got, they will live in misery. That's just the most destructive thing I can think of, the most destructive personal thing I can think of.
Who do you teach now?
I teach kids that are in fourth and fifth grade now. And I've done these grades for some time. My credential is to teach in that grade level and to teach special education.
Now, there are two songs that I wanted to ask you about. One is 'Communication Unbound.' It's based on a book?
Yes, it's based on a book. It's actually based on a book by a guy named Doug Biklen that came out about maybe 1994 about the the idea that some people's autism kind of attacks their motor control and compromises it, and it could be the result of the autism or the autism could just be another element of what's going on, another symptom of whatever the disorder is. But essentially, autism impairs the person's ability to communicate effectively so that they either become angry or they have tantrums or they behave in a way that might appear goofy or bizarre to another person. Biklen had gone out to Australia and studied this lady in Australia -- Crossley I believe was her name -- and they had been using a typewriter, a keyboard, to fill a page with communication from non-verbal adults that had been called severely retarded for their whole lives. And what they found was that by giving them some support or resistance against the hands, they could actually counter the involuntary spasms and the person could type messages on a keyboard.
      And of course it was no accident; it's like the Prometheus legend -- the idea that all of a sudden there was this weight lifted where these people could talk about stuff for the first time in their lives and could communicate where they never could before. And they could say, 'I've been called retarded my whole life. I've been punching myself in the face because I'm so angry that this happened.' And when you've got no voice at all, how are you going to act? You look at a kid; how does a kid act when they don't get their way, when they don't know how to tell you what they want? They fall down and scream loudly for it, they lie down and scream. They don't have the ability to communicate. They have these adults that would do the same thing.
      With Communication Unbound, essentially what happened was that these theories started to come over to the United States. And in the United States, the reaction was ... there were two types. One, there were knee-jerk reactions that anytime somebody typed something out and it's in written print, that means it's true. That's not necessarily so. But all of a sudden, there became a lot of uproar and a lot of people became very concerned about who's guiding the hand. Is the person providing support to the person with autism guiding their hand? They called it the Clever Hans -- you know, where you train the horse to do a certain thing and it would hit the desired response but have no comprehension at all of what was really going on. So Biklen went up against a lot of resistance.
      A lot of studies have discredited his work, but there have been a number of incidents and instances where a person with autism is actually shown -- it's known that the ideas that are coming out of these keypads are generated by the, and I'm doing quotes here, the 'severely retarded person.' Most recently, a gal over in the Whittier area who they just did a documentary on -- she's going to college, and she's got autism and uses facilitated communication to communicate. And I believe that all they have to do to give her enough resistance, you know, not holding her arm or her hand to get her to type, is to just hold a small piece of her shirt at the shoulder. So the typing comes from the woman, it's not coming from some educator guiding her through it. But it's just a process and it takes time, it takes a lot of time.
      When I was in the studio, I wrote that song and I realized that there a lot of people that really thought that some of the people that I was working with, that their lives were not very useful and they weren't worth very much. And I realized that the ability to communicate and to -- when a person or a child that was perceived to be severely retarded is able to communicate a basic idea, all of a sudden the people around them treated them better. And it made me feel really, really bad that the quality of a person's life was based on their intelligence, and if they were more retarded, somehow their value wasn't as significant as a person who could show that they weren't retarded. And that bothered me. That bothered me a lot. And this didn't come from the education field; it came from outside of the education field, the way that people responded in writing and in their debates and their journals, their education journals. And I realized this is a sad thing -- that a person's worth and the quality of a person's life is based on whether or not another person perceives them as having retardation.
       Just to kind of wrap this whole idea up, I really feel that it's not an individual that's struggling with learning or a person that is perceived as having a disability or being mentally retarded that is the problem here. The problem here is they've got all kinds of ability, and we just don't know how to tap into it. We don't know how to extract what they can do. But they're a human being no matter what their physical condition or the state of those little blips on the radar on that poor woman that is in Florida [Terri Schiavo] -- the quality of that person's life shouldn't be based on their intelligence, but the quality of our lives should be based on our ability to communicate with that person and to make that person comfortable and to make that person feel like they have value. Get me going on that husband who wants to pull the plug on his wife in Florida and I'll just go into a whole different, a whole other situation. That one really gets me worked up.
He did it, didn't he?
He what?
Didn't they say he could do it?
Yeah, they did. And, again, quality of life issues here. They don't see her as having a viable quality, because they say, 'Well, she's non-responsive.' I don't know. I saw the video footage, and I can tell you that with intensive work that they would be able to demonstrate that that woman is in there. Because I could see it, I could see it. I could see it in her eyes in the video footage that I saw of how she smiled and reacted to her family that that woman, somewhere deep, deep within her brain, she recognized these people. And if she didn't know 'this is my mother,' she recognized that these people were treating her well and they were treating her like she was worth their time. It breaks my heart that this husband is allowed to dictate whether or not her life is worth living.
       I can say about anybody on this planet that I know, once they got in an accident, oh, you know, 'So and so told me blah blah blah, go ahead and pull the plug.' And if I have a personal interest there like that man did ... he had a personal interest. He should have never been allowed to make this decision. Never. Yeah, personal interest. He should have been allowed to divorce her and move on if that's what he wanted and let the state of Florida take it from there. Let people who care about her life take care of her. But don't dismiss her because we, our society, can't communicate with her. We're the ones at fault here, not her. We need to figure out how to get to her because she can't get to us right now. If she could, believe me, she would. We are the ones at fault here. We are the ones that have to figure out how to get there. I feel really strongly about that, about life quality issues, especially when it comes to people with disabilities. I left the field of special education a number of years ago because I actually injured myself and couldn't do the job that I knew I needed to do, to be capable of doing the job that needed to be done.
Oh! How'd you injure yourself?
I fell. I fell. In Germany, I fell down a flight of stairs and I tweaked my back and I could no longer lift a person with cerebral palsy that weighed 70 pounds. I couldn't do it without hurting myself. And I realized I can't give this person as much as they deserve. I guess in a lot of ways I've been very, very hard on myself, but I feel that if I'm going to really be able to work with a person with palsy or a person with pretty significant orthopedic needs, I need to be able to manipulate them in and out of their wheelchair, get them down onto the floor so that they can exercise a little bit so they don't have to be stuck and seeing the world from one position all the time. I just couldn't do it. I couldn't do it, and I feel horrible about it.
       I love working with people with disabilities. I think they're some of the most uplifting and empowering individuals in the world, but I just couldn't physically do it anymore. And I love education, and I've just been really lucky. I've got credentials in more than one area so I'm not tied into any one type of role in education. Even if I left schools I could work in other areas of education. I'm multi-talented in the area. I've worked hard at it. I've put in a lot of personal time and a lot of personal money to learn more. I'm just very, very driven. I'm not a quitter.
I guess I...
Next song. What was the other song? Ha!
Well, my 90-minute tape's about up...
I'm sorry.
Should I put on a new tape? I should probably let you go. As long as you've got questions, sure. I enjoy talking, and I enjoy talking about education especially.
I should probably stop. This is going to take forever to transcribe. No, the other one was 'Stage Diving Daisy.' That really happened?
Yeah.
Does it happen often?
It does. Daisy, bless her heart, is a young woman from the Hollywood area who at the end of one of the shows started to razz me about being a teacher. And in the light of the suicide of Kurt Cobain, I realized that the role -- for the rebellious youth -- that I had taken was seen as the position of the enemy. And in this young woman's mind, I was. And she's not the only one. One of my own siblings felt this way, that I was the same thing as their parents. I was, to them, just as bad for being a teacher, which is one of the things that teenage kids rebel against. And I said, you know, what are my choices? Would you like me dead or if maybe I put a shotgun to my head and blew a piece of it off? Is that a better choice? Would it be better to be a drug addict? Because these are the choices that we all have to make. Do I want to do something to improve this world and myself, or do I want to do something to destroy myself completely?
       I have a great deal of respect for Daisy, because she came right up to me and challenged me, flat out. And I wrote that, and she was actually real hurt. I apologized to her for hurting her feelings, because it wasn't my intention. My intention was to make a statement to another generation that we have choices here. We can either do something to make this world a better place or we can do something to make ourselves palatable to other 'cool' people. And I'm happy to say that Daisy is now a counseler that aids runaways and kids who have been abused.
My tape just ended.
Oh good! At least we ended on an uplifting note.
Yeah! Well, thank you very much for everything. This was a good conversation! I know people like to read about their favorite bands, but you've got more to talk about than just your music.
Oh yeah, that's just one part of my life. I'm also a parent, a writer, an educator -- I try to keep my life very full. I'm happy that way. Where are you calling from?
New York City. Are you coming here?
Yeah! We'll be there in July. We're playing on July 15th.
Excellent. That's two days before my birthday!
Oh great! Well, call me or e-mail me a few days before that and I'll put you on the guest list.
Oh, I can pay for a ticket.
But I have a guest list that never gets used in New York. I only know two people there!
Do you know where you're playing?
I guess at Coney Island High. Is that still there?
No, that shut down.
Oh, they don't hold shows there anymore? I don't know where we're playing then. Hey, Doug Viklen did his research in New York.
Oh, did he? Cool. Man, I can't wait to hear all these new CDs you've got coming out! Okay, I'd better head on out. Have a good show tonight!
Thanks. It was nice talking to you!
You too.
Bye.
Bye.

March 4, 2005.

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