The Last Time I saw you guys was at the Fun Fun Fun Fest in 2007. I was surprised at how well your set translated to an outdoors, festival setting. Is there anything you do differently to prepare for festival dates than you would with a club date?

We don’t do anything differently. We play the same whether there’s some big festival with thousands of people or a little club with 50 people. I think it’s a little weird. We don’t play a lot of festivals…we’ve been playing big shows since pretty early on. Back in the 80s the shows at the Olympic used to be four or five thousand people but it was always at night and its always a little weird to me to have punk rock in the daytime. I don’t mind the outside so much, but its just weird to play in the daytime when the sun’s out.

The reason I ask is that you are doing a punk-rock festival rounds of sort with The Riot Fest, The Fest, and the Fun Fun Fun Fest. Are there any bands in particular at any of the fest that you’re looking forward to seeing or anything you’re looking forward to?

Well we’ve played all three before and we’ve had a really good time playing all three so the fun thing about festivals for us is that you get to play with a bunch of your friends and that’s one of the big things when we’re on the road. We like to be able to play with good bands that we’re friends with…that’s always fun.

At those festivals NOFX is playing at the Riot Fest, 7 Seconds is playing all three of them with us although I don’t think they’re playing the same days as us which is unfortunate because we always like playing with those guys. I know Cock Sparrer’s playing. We played with those guys in 2003 at one of those Wasted Festivals out in Blackpool, England. That’s interesting to see. We’ve got Off With Their Heads playing a bunch of the dates with us, and they’re playing so that’s always good. Leatherface is playing the fest…I haven’t even looked at all of the bands.

Sometimes you get so busy doing stuff and drinking that you don’t get to see everybody and some of them have multiple stages or multiple clubs which makes it next to impossible so you end up just saying ‘aw screw it I’m just gonna drink and hang out.’

I’m trying to grasp everything that comes in this box set.

I think people, you know, you tell them about it and they say ‘oh that sounds interesting’ but when you finally pull it out and show it to them they finally get the grasp…

The idea was it’s our twenty-five year anniversary, which of course was a couple of years ago, but we said ‘let’s do what we do best’ which is a compilation. Well its really hard getting bands to get us new songs for compilations these days especially the bigger bands because they go in the studio and record them for a record and they’ve only got so many songs and they need them for the record.

So then we though, ‘well why don’t we just get people to cover songs from the BYO catalog?’ Because we’ve got so many bands and so many songs, and I think we’ve got over one thousand songs to choose from. And from what everybody tells me there’s a lot of influential songs and bands on all of these different records.

But then of course we were faced with the ongoing dilemma of the music business and record labels of people downloading music and not buying records, and not paying for their downloads a lot of the times so we thought we could make a documentary because that’s hard to download. So we enlisted Jeff Aluis and Ryan Harlin who made that Bouncing Souls documentary a few years back and then went on to make the NOFX Backstage Pass on Fuse TV series. So they made a documentary about the label, the band, and pretty much the entire Southern California punk scene from the early 1980s all the way through today.

And then we thought that still you could download both of them so we came up with this idea to make a book. Its sort of a companion to the movie with stories from me and my brothers and a bunch of our friends, people in bands, and people that were there. We’ve got photos and all sorts of things that didn’t get included in the movie…because it really goes longer than 25 years and it talks about us growing up and how we got into punk rock and the early days of the punk scene in LA. So there’s a double LP, with colored vinly, a CD of the music, a DVD, and the book for $50. A pretty good deal.

We also have a smaller version for people who don’t have turntables. Its just got the CD and the book’s about half the size. It’s the same book, its just a smaller version of it. And that one sells for half the price - $25.

Is the documentary more focused on BYO and Youth Brigade or is it more all encompassing of the LA scene in general?

I could never say that its all-encompassing because I don’t think anybody could ever cover everything and I think that it’s a problem with some of these other movies that they try to do too much.

I think its specifically about Youth Brigade, BYO, and the Stern brothers but if definitely shows our part in the history and development of the punk scene and the movie interviews a lot of people that were involved back then and it talks about us, it talks about the scene in general, it gives an insight as to what is often overlooked - which is really, to me since the early 1980s the biggest punk rock scene in the world continually and has produced some of the biggest and best punk rock bands in history, in my opinion.

Not to take anything away from the early scenes in New York or London, and you can go back and forth about who started it, and those scenes were a big influence on us, but after that initial explosion in the mid 1970s LA became the place and has been really, to me, since then. We’re still drawing thousands of kids to these shows and you don’t really get that anywhere else.

As an LA native, something that’s always bothered me is how much LA tends to get overlooked in not just punk rock, but in music and art. People tend to see Hollywood and not much else.

I love this town. I’ve grown up here. It’s a huge influence on our lives and there’s so much great stuff that comes out of here but I don’t really care that it gets overlooked - I mean I think it deserves more credit but I think the fact that the bands do as well as they do and that the punk scene as strong as its been over all these years is a testament to the fact that we must be doing something right. And I don’t really worry too much about the press - journalists don’t always know everything and a lot of times they don’t know anything at all.

You know people make fun of this town. You watch a ball game and how many times do you hear people chant "Beat San Francisco" or "Beat New York" or "Beat Pittsburg" or "Beat Chicago" they always say "Beat L.A." Everybody’s got a think for L.A.

Earlier this year I was a Mets/Dodgers game in a Dodgers hat in New York and somebody asked me why I wasn’t at Michael Jackson’s funeral.

There’s a lot of crazy stuff that goes on here - no doubt but that’s not by any means all that goes on here….You wanna make fun of Hollywood? I don’t care….The people that people don’t understand is that America’s greatest export is its culture and that comes from two places: Hollywood and Madison Avenue…I guess some of its warranted, there is a lot of crap coming out of Hollywood, but there’s a lot of great stuff too.

Speaking of LA. Outside of the big ones - Black Flag, X, The Germs etc. What bands from that era don’t get enough attention?

Well its funny, because I like The Germs and all, but had Darby Crash not died, they probably wouldn’t be getting the attention that they do because I saw The Germs may times and they were not anything all that special. They were special in what they were doing hadn’t really been done at that time, but their music isn’t really all that spectacular.

X were an amazing band…they were a big influence. Obviously Black Flag, The Circle Jerks, TSOL, The Adolescents are definitely big influences that get overlooked….The Adolescents in particular…you ask Fat Mike and he’ll tell you that so many Southern California bands copy this style that Rick and Steve played….the guitar style of doing these sliding octaves that you hear on so many of the poppier bands from the late 80s and 90s…..People remember the ones that get famous, not the ones that may have been the main influence.

Was there ever a band that you remember seeing that nobody else has ever heard of, but it was a big deal at the time?

I mean I remember going to shows at 17, 18, 19….The first band we saw was The Dickies and that made my jaw drop….I had been doing to concerts sine I was 14 or 15 but rock concerts. I had seen Led Zeppelin, John Winter…I’d seen Stanley Clarke, and Chick Corea and all this jazz stuff I’d seen a lot of different music. But the thing about all the rock bands as great as they were technically - and I loved a lot of the music was they were kind of removed you from what were living sort of day to day as kids. The music was awesome but it was music that we got stoned to, you know? It didn’t make you think about anything other than ‘wow I’m really high right now.’

When I saw the Dickies and started going to punk shows it made me think about a lot more…the music was being made by kids - other kids that were my age or not much older than me…..it wasn’t at a big stadium, or a big arena where I had to sit in a seat…..

But F-Word and The Deadbeats are two bands that probably get a little overlooked that were pretty amazing andThe Screamers were pretty awesome. They never released an official record, but they put on some crazy shows. You look at it now and you’re like ‘OK’ but if you were there and you were you drinking and getting high and 17, 18 years old it was pretty amazing stuff at the time.

How involved are you in the local LA scene now? It seems like bands are playing in Echo Park and Downtown instead of Hollywood now.

I go check bands out. There’s this place called the Blue Star. We’ve seen Off With Their Heads a few times. This project has taken us three years, so I haven’t been going out as much as I used to. I go to Alex’s bar in Long Beach a lot to see bands. I mostly go see bands that I know or bands that I’ve met on the road or somebody has told me about that I should go see.

Sometimes I see bands as an opener and go ‘wow these guys are really good’ but there’s so many bands and there’s so many shows - I think there’s a small sort of DIY, punk, rock, backyard party thing going on that I’m vaguely aware of but I haven’t gone to check out a lot of the bands. A lot of them are sort of rudimentary, to say, but a lot of them have that spirit and you give them some time and the cream will rise to the top. I suspect will be seeing a new pretty interesting crop of bands coming to play clubs and stuff soon. But if you want names? No.

Was there ever a band that you had a chance to work with and you didn’t? Any regrets in that?

There’s a whole list of bands that we had talked to about releasing their records and for different reasons, most involving we liked the music or the band but we didn’t think we could help them at the time, or we had a difference of opinion over what they wanted to do and how we would’ve done it.

For example Suicidal Tendencies - we were talking to them about putting the first record out but [they] wanted to do things a certain way, and that wasn’t the way we wanted to do it….but they found Fronteir and that worked out great for them.

Sublime, Pennywise, The Offspring. Thom Wilson who produced our first record and the Royal Crown Revue record - he was telling us about The Offspring way back when they were just putting out 7 inches. At the same time I had met the guys from Sublime right around when they put out the first record on their own - it was a timing thing. The label had been dormant for a while…there was a few years where we took time off…and the label just put out the catalog we just weren’t singing any new bands or doing any new stuff….

Or in the case of Sublime. I really liked those guys and I knew Bradley was an amazing songwriter but I also didn’t want to deal with what I saw as potential problems with them being high all the time.

A lot of bands it was just timing, or we didn’t think we could’ve helped them. Pennywise had sent a demo….Jawbreaker, a lot of different bands. There were bands that we tried to put out records by but we couldn’t come to terms with like Anti-Flag, Screw 32, we talked to AFI early on - you know things work out the way they’re going to work out….

You get a lot of bands who say ‘we’re ready to work, we’re ready to tour’ and as soon as you’re getting ready to put the record out they’re saying ‘well where’s the tour bus?’ and ‘when are you gonna set up our tour? We wanna play to a thousand people.‘

Aside from the Nothington record coming out next month, is there anything else planned for the label?

Nothing is set for sure yet - hopefully we’ll do a new Youth Brigade record next year. We’ve been talking with Off With Their Heads about doing something - actually we’re supposed to do a split with them….We’d like to do more splits, just trying to get bands together is a lot of work.

You’ve been doing this for over 30 years. What keeps you inspired to keep on going? Both with the band and the label.

Well I think the fact that people are still coming out to the shows….we did an interview recently where the guy said ‘You guys are out playing like Motley Crue is back together. So is that what you get? The old diehard fans coming out?’ and I said ‘how sad and scary that would be to have a bunch of fat, old, bald men coming to our shows.’ I mean if that was the only people who came to see us I would’ve given up a long time ago.

We’ve had kids coming out to our shows since we got back together in the 1990s so there’s a lot of young kids - high school, college aged kids coming out. We’re reaching across generations, which I think is great. There’s people who were coming to see us during the 1980s who now are coming and bringing their kids so we must be doing something right I guess and that’s what keeps us motivated.

Do the label and the band still mean the same thing to you now as they did thirty years ago?

My philosophy is that I’m a ‘glass half-full’ kind of guy and I’m still very idealistic. I think as you get older you start getting a little more cynical or I like to call it ‘more realistic’ and your ideas are tempered but what can be accomplished and what can’t be versus when you’re younger and anything’s possible.

I still believe most anything is possible; it’s just a lot harder to accomplish some of those things. But I think we do this because its fun, and we enjoy it, and we’ve got something to say and there are people out there who seem to be interested and respond to it. I would hope they’re inspired by what we do. We’ll see as we travel across the country and up through Canada if that holds true….

I think the punk rock scene will just continue on. It changes its look or its sound or its feel or there’s new kids - but for me the idea always is fundamentally you gotta think for yourself, you gotta question everything, and you gotta try and change what you think is wrong in the world. And I’ve believed that since I was a teenager and I still believe it now.