During his spoken punk history lessons, Joey always asks the audience the following question:
“Back in the old days, who’s the person who was most responsible for punk rock? Any guesses?” Audience members always respond with names like Johnny Rotten, Joey Ramone, Jello Biafra and so on, but…
“You’re all wrong– the person most responsible for the spread of punk rock was Ronald Reagan. The guy was such an asshole, he had bands named after him, he had albums named after him, every punk band back then had his face on at least one poster, with a gun pointing at him. We had three or four like that.” Joey then sings a refrain from one of DOA’s contributions to the anti-Reagan canon, Fucked-up Ronnie: ‘You’re fucked up Ronnie, you’re not gonna last, you’re gonna die too, from a neutron blast.’
“Now some people might say ‘Oh, you should lay off of him now, he’s got Alzheimer’s.’ Well I say, you know what? This guy never laid off of anybody. He fucked around every single person he could: women’s groups, unions, gays, you name it…”
Joey’s opinion is unlikely to have changed since Reagan’s death a few months after this interview.

FP: There’s a lot going on these days, and it reminds me of growing up in the late 70s/ early 80s, nukes and Reagan… I totally agree with your bit about Reagan.
Joey: Yeah, every time I do that bit, once in a while someone goes “Reagan!” but most of the time they answer “Johnny Rotten” or some punk rock figure. But it’s pretty obvious that it takes something like that to energize you. I’m a bit older, I grew up watching the Vietnam War, and that’s kind of what really politicized me, because the war was completely uncensored. You’d see monks burning and people holding their guts in with dinner plates. It was really disgusting, and it was on TV every night at six o’clock.
The Americans and the coalition, of course, figured out how to censor that and have smart bombs going off with the first Gulf War in 1991. They realized that it was a public relations disaster to have that kind of Dennis Hopper, Apocalypse Now-type character roam free with a camera. And now they take it one step further, with this embedded journalist…
FP: Or in-bed journalist…
Joey: Yeah, embedded, in-bedded, whatever, right?
FP: They get all sympathetic with the marines, seeing how hard they live.
Joey: Yeah, though I do believe it’s wrong for people to direct their anger and frustration at them. Especially because someone in the army is usually coming from a poor background, you’re eighteen or nineteen, you get out of school, and you don’t have many better choices. But it’s the guys pulling the strings at the top that you still have to criticize, you and I know that, right.
The worst thing is that you’re supposed to go over there for three months, or six months, now your tour of duty is doubling. That’s what makes the situation really fucked up… it’s possible for them to get blown up at any given time, and they’re going, “I could tough it out for three months, and I’m supposed to tough it out for a whole year?” It’s going to be like all the guys who went to Vietnam, lots of them lost it, or ended up fucked up on junk and stuff like that. It’s not good, there’s no way around it. They should have turned it all over to the UN months ago.
FP: Whatever they’d turn over now is much worse off than the way they found it. The resistance only gets more organized and more motivated with time.
Joey: Well, again, the parallel between the early 80s and now, it’s really striking, also to the Vietnam War, those are my two points of reference for today. The counter-culture of the late 60s, the artists, musicians, painters, they sort of led the protest against the Vietnam War. It wasn’t the U.S. government that stopped it, it was the American people. Politicians are only reactive to the forces around them like everybody else is. They go by polls, campaign donations, that’s what runs their life, so if they see, “Everybody thinks we should get out,” then that’s when they start considering it. So they gotta get some puppet in there, do their dirty work for them.
And they stole the election, they want to get in there and get this one too, right. They stole the election by disenfranchising every single black person in the state of Florida, and having the guy’s brother in charge was a pretty handy thing.
It’s a really key time down there now. If Bush gets another term, besides starting another war somewhere else, one of the things he is going to do is name Supreme Court justices. Some of them have to retire soon, and of course he is going to try and get three arch-conservative ones in there, and in the long run, because those judges last the length of five or six presidents, they are amongst the most powerful people in the world.
FP: Some of the ones Reagan put in there gave Bush the presidency today.
Joey: Yeah, so if they can stack the Supreme Court, then maybe they can bring up Jeb Bush or someone like that for the next election.
FP: There is even a George Bush the third, not Jeb but the third brother’s son, I think. He’s 32 now, does speeches for the Young Republicans or something and is totally being groomed for politics.
Joey: It’s like royalty, like the Kennedys, same thing as the old Europe.
FP: We’re also seeing the same enemies from the 80s, the Christian right, it was kind of like the heyday for them back then. Also for them embarrassing themselves, like Jim Bakker.
Joey: Yeah, it totally fell apart.
FP: I don’t know if you agree with this, but from what I see, even looking at the people who showed up last night to see you speak, a wider spectrum of people now are busy resisting all this.
Joey: From personal experience, we played quite a big anti war rally in Vancouver before the [Iraq] war started, 10 000 people showed up, and it was a cross section of everybody. I totally remember the anti nuke demos of the late 70s/ early 80s, we’d get 50-60 000 people out in Vancouver trying to stop like American war ships from docking in Vancouver. We knew that USS Ranger and some of these ships had nuclear arms and stuff like that. So yeah, you need a big cross section, you need grandmothers, you need teachers, as well as punk rockers.
One thing I think is really lacking now though is the universities. There’s some radicalism out here, Montreal is a bit different, Concordia’s pretty radical, people there are causing shit all the time, but a lot of the schools now are pretty mild. When I went to Simon Fraser University in 1975 or whenever it was, I went there because, well, it was in my hometown, but also because it was a radical school. They caused a lot of shit, had a lot of sit-ins, taking over the school. The new thinking usually has to come out of the universities, right? That’s where discussion, debate, new theories, and how to change things comes out, always has been, right? I mean, English and French liberalism in the seventeenth century, eighteenth century and so on. But now, they are more like business schools, churning out commerce students.
FP: A lot of young kids are in it to get a big-money career. It sure seems like we can’t just pin hopes on the younger generation to change things just because they’re young. A lot of them are just interested in investment banking or whatever. I mean, there will always be specialists in life and that’s valid, but…
Joey: Yeah, it’s inevitable, when money is made out to be more important than learning the difference between right and wrong. And just like our society, you just have to watch TV, MTV, sitcoms, it’s all money money money, sex, idolization of pop stars. They take up all this editorial space writing about people like Britney Spears– in reality she should be washed up as a complete no-talent bum, but you know, once a week, in the Vancouver Province, they have a full page on her.
FP: What about the nuclear threat? In the 80s, anti-nuclear action was a big, primary thing. And I remember thinking during the 90s, when that was not an issue at all, that maybe when we got to the point where we totally forget about nukes, assume it’s all O.K., that it’s going to bite us in the ass. And now, it’s not the same as it was in the cold war but a lot of nuclear stuff is starting to ramp up again.
Joey: Yeah, there’s the whole Star Wars 2 thing, bunker busters…
FP: Also a bunch of terrorists with backpack nukes, if you take the rocket off the warhead, the smaller nukes actually fit in a backpack
Joey: Which is completely amazing.
FP: Of course, it turns out they fucked up when the Russians collapsed, and didn’t guard most of their sites, and a lot of that stuff just disappeared.
Joey: Also, not that there is no corruption over here, but in Russia it’s completely rampant with it. They’re willing to sell anything to anybody. The regular people are totally at the mercy of a high percentage of gangsters, from all walks of life, from business to military to the oil companies to entertainment… It’s pretty sad. But that’s one place I would love to go see. We tried to go there. We talked to a friend of mine, he took this band called Faust, a weird experimental type band, down to Bulgaria and Romania. I am completely fascinated going places I haven’t been, especially Eastern Europe, I think it’s really interesting, it’s like it’s been on this weird shelf for so long. So my friend says “Joe, if you go down there, basically you have to hire four or five gangsters to protect you and the gear from all the other gangsters who are going to try and rip off your gear, your passports, or maybe kill you along the way or beat you up.” So I don’t think we’re going to go there anytime soon.
FP: Regarding the nuclear issue, in the 80s I remember there was the Vancouver 5, they’d bombed a defense company…
Joey: Yeah, that was at Litton [Litton Systems, who designed guidance systems for U.S. missiles] in Toronto in 1982, and they phoned in a warning and the guards ignored it. In fact, there might have been two warnings, I’m not totally sure about that. And one person was seriously injured and I think they were lucky someone didn’t die.
But regarding DOA supporting the Vancouver Five, obviously Gerry Hannah, otherwise known as Gerry Useless of the Subhumans, he was one of my best friends that we grew up with. Dimwit, Wimpy and I all grew up within three blocks of each other in Burnaby. So that was one reason to support, the other reason was to try to make sure they got a fair trial and raise money and stuff like that. My stance on that at the time, and now, is that what they stood for was right, but the way to do it, I think, was wrong. I would consider myself more a follower of someone like Gandhi, though on the other hand, I also really admire someone like Nelson Mandela.
FP: For awhile he was considered a terrorist.
Joey: Yes, he was, and he had to fight really hard. Sometimes you do take these actions because it just comes up. But the thing to do is take the utmost care to make sure that nobody gets hurt. Say, like in Live in Seattle, at the WTO in ‘99. These newscasters were coming on and lamenting about the Starbucks and the other big companies who got their windows smashed in. I was laughing, thinking “Well, of course their windows are going to be smashed in, what, are these people stupid?” Why didn’t they board their windows up beforehand, they were an obvious target, of course they were going to be fucked with. But nobody got hurt. So I call that good clean fun [laughter.]
FP: Did you hear about the Exploited riot that happened here in Montreal a couple of months ago [fall 2003]?
Joey: I just saw a little bit on the news. As far as I can figure, it was a bunch of crusty punks, who overturned some cars.
FP: There was about 500 of them, actually. They overturned 35 cars, and set fire to about 20. About a dozen cop cars were totally destroyed.
Joey: Were the punks wearing balaclavas?
FP: Not that I could see.
Joey: Because when we had this riot in Vancouver after we lost the Stanley Cup in ’94, these idiots were standing on top of stuff and smashing things, and posing for the camera. Afterwards, the police went around to all of the TV stations asking for footage and seized it all, and started rounding all of these guys up and then charging them. So here’s a bit of advice to protesters, from Joey Shithead: balaclavas and scarves and bandanas are a good thing.

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