interview by Mike Madrid
I have a hard time drawing a distinction between believing in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, and believing in a Supreme Being that created the universe. I don’t draw any differentiation other than that there’s real power and real mind control associated with organized religion.
I was born in London. My father was a journalist working for The London Times. I lived in London for a few years after I was born. My father was also in and out of the music industry a great deal, so we moved around a lot. I went to a lot of different schools as a kid. I was never in one place for very long. It’s one of the reasons I tend to crave stability now as a grownup. It was something I didn’t have as a kid.
Kindergarten through sixth grade was probably the longest period of time when I was mostly at the same school. It was in the middle of Laurel Canyon in L.A., in the 70’s. When I think about the kids that I was going to school with at the time, I would say three quarters [were] from the “right” side of the tracks. There were all these kids who lived in the really nice neighborhood of Mulholland Drive and the surrounding area. Their parents were wealthy. I think Lenny Kravitz went to my school. They had the really nice houses.
As a kid it was very clear that I didn’t have what [the wealthy kids] had. Obviously I didn’t dress the same way that they did. I was way more ashamed of the way that I lived. It was bad enough that my house was like 1/8 the size of their homes. The people living in my neighborhood were borderline hippies. Funky houses, by comparison. I always wanted to stay at [the other kids’] houses for sleepovers. No one ever wanted to come to my house, especially once they saw it. On every level it was funky. My mom wouldn’t buy me Cap’n Crunch and all those sugar cereals. “Oh my god! Shredded wheat? Are you kidding me?”
I guess my environment was sort of unstable. My parents were alternative, counterculture and defended it until the very end. “This is our lifestyle, god damn it! Take it or leave it.” My parents were connected the music business. But as opposed to being the child of an entertainment lawyer, my mom worked at the creative services department at A&M Records. And my father an artist relations guy for Atlantic. He would actually go on tour with The Who. He would do all their drugs. And I remember finding out that my mom smoked pot when I was eight years old. I heard some kids at school talking about it in a derogatory way. And my mom felt compelled to defend why she did that. It was a huge “whoa!” My mom is not like the other moms! She drives an old beat up Volkswagen and smokes weed. As an eight year old that’s way scarier than it really is meant to be.
I was not raised religious at all. At a certain point you realized that another way that you were different is that you didn’t go to church, and your mom would make comments dissing religion. I think the first time I actually stepped inside a church was on a school field trip. I remember saying, “Wow, this is pretty fucking cool.” Three kids got right in my face and said you can’t swear in church. There were lots of Jewish kids that I went to grade school with, and they went to temple. It was just never really discussed all that much. I’d go to their houses—these really amazing houses. There’d be Jewish iconography around the house. But you were never proselytized to by Jews. These were West Coast Jews, it was a much more liberal interpretation of Judaism. It didn’t seem to be a big deal in their life.
My mom had a couple of affairs, which I didn’t find out about until way later in life. My father left my mom in 1973. [My younger brother and I were] living with my mom for a couple of years, until she met my stepdad. He was in the advertising and commercial illustration business. They got married in ’75. And then the environment that I lived in got even crazier. The active wild partying…It was always the same thing. We’d go to these parties. Some kind of nice house in the hills above Hollywood. The parents [would] find the bedroom furthest away from where the grownups were going to be. They’d put the kids in that room, plop us in front of a TV and close the door. There was stuff that was going on, and all you’d ever hear was banging or screaming every once in a while. You’d wake up on the way home at two or three in the morning. We had this green Toyota Land Cruiser. The door would swing open in the back. We’d have to pull over so my stepfather could roll his head out the back door and just vomit onto the pavement. (Laughs) Yeah. That would happen all the time.
Having said that, there was a point where that became kind of cool. Once I got old enough to become sort of interested in drugs—probably around 12 or 13 years old, seventh or eighth grade. The point where pot stopped being scary and started becoming interesting. My stepfather made a fairly decent living, and the quality of the homes that we lived in got a lot better. I stopped being embarrassed to bring my friends over. My parents would throw these rager parties, and I’d get to invite some of my friends. Once it became clear to my friends that “anything went,” I became the kid with the “cool” parents. They would actually want to go to these parties. You could go get a beer out of the fridge and no grownup was going to yell at you. And that lasted probably until I was about nineteen and ready to move out.
It wasn’t until much later in life that I realized that all that behavior was not something to be that proud of. This is not the way that it should be. Particularly once I realized how it affected my brother. The ripple effect is that you raise kids and are more or less training them to act that way. And if you can handle it that’s one thing. But I know too many examples who didn’t handle it, in my life, including my brother. I think I’ve taken more of a hard-line attitude towards things like that, the older I get.
I started reading Mad magazine, probably by the time I was seven or eight years old. I was probably reading them a little bit younger than they were designed to read. I would read every single issue, cover to cover. Deeply cynical. “Everybody is lying to you. Don’t trust anybody. If there’s any semblance of authority—advertising, Madison Avenue, the government, the Church—they’re lying to you.” I believe there was actually a great deal of anti-church things that would pop up in Mad magazine from time to time.
I think my dad took me to see Monty Python and the Holy Grail when I was nine or ten years old. At that point, I got all their records, and I would sit there and listen to these things over and over and over and over. And again, they took the piss out of the Catholic Church, the Church of England. And then you start watching the Monty Python TV shows. Merciless to anything religious. They just made the whole thing just completely preposterous and ridiculous.
So if that’s your only exposure to this stuff, it’s not surprising to me that by the time I started being more aware of organized religion, I was already deeply suspicious. Not only was it not a big factor in my life, it was something to be distrusted almost immediately. No personal experience. I didn’t know pastors or priests. It’s just everything coming at me at that point—from a non-religious household to movies to Mad magazine to everything else that was going on. I think I’d already rejected it years before it was even put in my face, which really wasn’t until I was a freshman in high school.
We left Laurel Canyon when I was in the sixth grade and we moved to the San Gabriel Valley. Pasadena. My parents thought, “I know, let’s send him to this ‘college preparatory’, all-boy Catholic school down the street. Yes, it’s a private school, but he’ll get a better education.” So I ended up at St. John Baptist de la Salle High School as a freshman in 1979. A Catholic school. This was like getting chucked into the deep end of the pool.
I remember second or third day of class in this religion class you had to raise your hand and tell the teacher whether you were a Catholic or not. And there was me and one other guy who were “decline to state.” And the teacher said, “It’s OK if you’re not Catholic.” But I didn’t make a big deal about it. I was hoping he wouldn’t notice me, because I felt completely out of place. Once again, I’m over here with my own point of view surrounded by Catholic boys who had been going to all-boy Catholic schools their whole life. Who are really into this shit. And they were all psychotic.
Most of my teachers were brothers. I basically went from being somewhat suspicious of religion to having to actually sit in a class and learn all about the Bible from the true believers. And I got an A. (Laughs) Because the first year, going through a lot of the Old Testament, you’re basically learning about an interpretation of this period of time. I remember at the time thinking, “Well, this isn’t that hard. You basically just have to remember all the sequence of events.” And then on the test check the box “and the water turned to blood.”
I knew what “atheist” meant, because there was this Christopher Lee vampire movie—I think it was Scars of Dracula. I remember there was a character in the movie who has to tell this priest that he was an atheist. The priest says, “You mean you deny the existence of God?!” And I’m thinking to myself, “Yeah, I do too!” And in the end, that’s the guy who ends up saving the day and killing Dracula. So I think I already self-identified as an atheist at that point.
So that was freshman year. Got through the whole class. Got an A. And then we moved to Colorado, where I was surrounded by a lot more “Christian” Christians. All these angry white people who are really into Ronald Reagan. By that time I’d already moved from Mad magazine to National Lampoon. So, the cynicism is getting harder. The distrust and suspicion of everything is getting worse. The punk rock thing had started to kick in. You start actually listening to lyrics of Sex Pistols songs, and you start taking pleasure in sticking your middle finger at people who you view to be uptight. You’ve already sort of figured out, “Over here are the Jews, and over here are the Muslims, and over here are the Catholics, and over here are the Christians. And they’re all full of shit.”
By the time I got [back] to California in 1982, I was probably sixteen years old. I had a tennis partner [who was] just about as hardcore fundamentalist as you could get. He liked to take Chick publications and put them in the bathrooms. [Chick Publications produces fundamentalist Christian pamphlets in comic book format] By that point I had started to develop opinions, and I liked to engage in conversations with this guy. He and I would get into really long, drawn out conversations about why he was right and I was wrong. And his argument fundamentally came down to “If I’m wrong, I’ve only wasted this life here on earth. If you’re wrong, you’re going to be damned to eternity.” And that was it. Every day was a variation on that argument, for three or four months straight. I sort of enjoyed his company on some really bizarre level. But he didn’t change my opinions on anything. Cynicism trumped everything.
I married my high school sweetheart. [She] was raised in a secular family until her mom got divorced and became a Jehovah’s Witness. So I’ve got a mother-in-law who’s a Jehovah’s Witness. On my wife’s side is a family of eight Mormons. [My wife] is about as hard-line atheist as it gets. So she just sealed the deal. We wouldn’t be together if we didn’t see eye to eye on that.
When I was twenty, there was no semblance of a plan. I was working at a sheet metal shop, doing manual labor for six bucks an hour. It was literally, “What the hell am I going to do?” My stepfather was in the advertising business. We had family friends that were all in this business, and I kind of fell into it. Helping somebody out as a summer job. That was in 1986, and I was 21 years old. And I’ve been working in that business ever since.
I do think Freud had a point. I think at the end of the day we’re basically animals, and we are conditioned. I don’t think babies come out of the womb believing in God. I think they’re taught this. It’s what they’re surrounded with. I’m a byproduct of the first twenty years of my existence. If your entire life has been Monty Python, Mad magazine, National Lampoon, the nihilistic films of the 70’s, etc, etc, etc, it’s no wonder you came out like this.
Religion is very odd to me. I’ve heard stories about people who have had some sort of divine event while walking down the street. Hasn’t happened to me yet. Nothing’s come along that’s shaken me to that level. I’ll flippantly say that I don’t believe in Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny either, because to me it’s all the same thing. You’re a little kid and you’re told that Santa Claus comes down the chimney. You never had any evidence except that the presents were under the tree. And you completely buy into it until at some point the bubble pops. The Tooth Fairy, Easter Bunny, Santa Claus—it’s all bullshit. And at that point, you never believe it again. You don’t go back to believing in Santa Claus. No one ever has that happen about God because it’s too ingrained in the culture. I guess that’s where the concept of faith comes in, right? People do not have empirical evidence that there is the existence of a Supreme Being. But for whatever reason, they have faith that he or she exists. And they’re fine with that. I don’t really talk about this so much with people my age. If it comes up, I’m comfortable. I don’t say, “Well, I’m a secular humanist…” because I don’t even know that the hell that means.
On some level we’re just evolved monkeys. I think that we went through a period of time when people were clubbing each other to death. It was probably a good thing that some people were saying, “Hey, you know what? The best way to control the populace is to try to instill some sort of ‘moral compass’ to keep them from continuing to beat the shit out of each other.” Having said that, I do think that the Golden Rule is perfect tenet to live your life by. The concept that “I’m going to treat other people the way I would like to be treated” can also be a byproduct of anybody who’s got a somewhat developed sense of empathy. Which is what I think I try to do. Think about how the things that I do affect other people. Yeah, I’m not going to be killing people because I don’t want to be killed myself. That makes all the sense in the world to me. And I don’t think there needs to be anything religious about it. Has nothing to do with a Supreme Being or deity.
It seems like every religion is certainly trying to cram their version of the truth down everyone’s neck. I don’t understand when that became OK, but it seems like it’s been going on a really long time. People say, “We want things to go back to way they used to be. And therefore we want to make sure that kids continue to pray in school.” People can’t get abortions. Mormons trying to keep gay people from getting married, which I think is completely ridiculous. All people should be allowed to be as miserable as straight people. It makes me really angry when I read about this stuff. Those horrible fucking assholes in Kansas— the “God Hates Fags” people. Just sends me all over the edge. There doesn’t appear to be any empathy there. There’s nothing there that says, “Well shit man, maybe this thirteen year old girl got raped and doesn’t want to have her dad’s baby. Maybe these two people whose relationship is as valid as anyone else’s truly love each other and want to spend the rest of their lives together and have the same rights as everybody else.” Their versions of The Old Testament and the New Testament are so black and white. Plenty of whacked-out shit in the Bible that we’ve all agreed to let slide, but somehow we’re going to stick on this one. It would be laughable if it weren’t taken so seriously by such a huge chunk of the country. It drives me fucking nuts.
We’re not evolving, as a nation. And we just keep electing really dumb people to Congress. I guess we have a representative government so stupid people should be able to have elected representatives as well. It’s unfortunate. We can sit there and shit all over Islam with its 12th century religion. But I’m sorry, there’s not a huge amount of difference between the “God hates fags” people and a Sharia law that says that women have to wear burqas. But one’s taken seriously and the other’s isn’t. Islam is looking at us like we’re all infidels, and we think they’re all knuckle dragging animals that have no respect for human life. It’s all subjective. To me it’s all varying degrees of nuts.
I think I’ve made incremental changes in my behavior over the years. On some level I think my life has exceeded my wildest expectations, because I didn’t really have any. The house that I live in, the job that I have, what I’ve been able to accomplish professionally—a million times above any expectation that I had for myself. I’m trying, as I get older, to say to myself, “I’m grateful for my wife, and the friends that I have, and where I live, and where I work.” Even if I don’t believe it all the time. I think my brother’s death had a lot to do with it. [His brother suffered an accidental death after a struggle with substance abuse] That was an enormous perspective [shift]. I’m trying to find more affirmation in what I have right now as opposed to what I don’t. I watched my brother struggle with this, up until the end. He was never satisfied with what he had. It was always, “I need that other thing.” That’s how you can get to a dark place, really quickly. We had to spend two and a half months cleaning out his storage locker. All that shit that he hung on to that contributed to his depression and his suicidal tendencies. It all ended up in landfill. All that stuff we think is so important. I think Americans in particular get too wound up about a lot of crap, as opposed to appreciating that which they have at that moment.
As for the concept of an afterlife, I’m inclined to think it’s more like the last episode of The Sopranos. Where Tony Soprano is having a conversation and “Don’t Stop Believin’” is playing and the screen just went black (snaps fingers) halfway in the middle of a sentence. And that’s it. Someone flicks a switch and everything turns off. You know, it’s one of those things that I still think about a lot. You can’t possibly know unless it happens. I’m more inclined than not to believe this is probably all there is. So better make this good. I would rather live my life that way than imagine that I’m going to leave this planet and then start the whole thing over again on some level. The idea that there’s any kind of anything where we’re all sharing the same plane of existence and have to be around [one another]. It’s like being at Burning Man or something. [Laughs]
As I approach my demise, maybe at some point I’ll look at things differently. Who the fuck knows? Never say never. I reserve the right to waffle a little bit, but I doubt that I’m going to be one of those guys who is making peace with my “savior” as I’m on the deathbed. It’s just cheating. Hedging my bets. Let’s say ten “Hail Mary’s” before I expire so I’m not on the wrong list? [Laughs]
My attitude towards spirituality and life philosophies has evolved past the purely cynical, shitting on everything. I can totally disagree with it, but I don’t necessarily think you’re automatically an imbecile. At one point that’s certainly how I would have looked at things. I got a lot more willing to try and look at everything from all sides. This is a much sunnier version of me. [Laughs]