BEST FIT: This seems to me to be a song about wanting to change the world, in big and small ways that were affecting you at the time. There’s a lot of layers to it. What’s your reason for choosing it among your personal best?
EXENE CEVENKA: That's exactly what this song is. It's like “The World's a Mess; It’s in My Kiss”, but it's more about the bigger picture, “The civil wars and the uncivilised wars.” There’s nothing on this planet more uncivilised than a civil war, is there? A civil war is the worst war you can possibly have. All wars are bankers’ wars, as they say, run by the people in power. There are no real wars, there are only proxy wars and bankers’ wars. We all know this is true, right? Especially now. But when you think of a civil war, where people are rising up, brother against brother. That’s just the worst.
When I wrote that song, there was a lot going on in Central America, with the Nicaraguan Revolution and the civil war in El Salvador, where the US was funding one side and the communists on the other side were the good guys. I mean, if you’re backing sides, that’s kind of a hard choice to make, to support the communists because, oh gosh, that’s got its own problems. I also wrote it about the Middle East, with everything going on between Palestine and Israel, which is, ridiculously, still going on 40 years later. In a more horrible way now than ever.
There’s a line in this song that goes “Both sides are right but both sides murder,” and I don’t know what’s going on where you are but, in this country, there’s been huge eruptions of violence and demonstrations against Israel. People say those protests are pro-Hamas, but I don’t think so. I think people are just worried about all these people who are dying unnecessarily. It’s not pro-Hamas, it’s pro-peace. Like, can you please just stop killing people? I don’t fault anyone for protesting that. It’s a conundrum. People just want war to stop, but then they keep voting for the people who make wars happen. Oh my gosh, it’s such a mess, but that’s what this song is about.
Then, strangely, it goes into this whole thing about bands being played on the radio, because we had our own little civil war in music. All the English bands like A Flock of Seagulls and Duran Duran, and all those New Romantic bands, were getting played on the radio but almost none of the local bands in LA were being played. Sure, we could get played on Rodney on the ROQ at one in the morning, and other shows like that, but it felt like none of the LA bands were able to get any further than where they were, and, as it turned out, many of them were never going to.
Of the bands I mention in the song, I don’t know why I chose those bands, which were all hardcore bands. I don’t know why I didn’t choose bands like The Weirdos and The Plugz. I think I just wanted to draw a line of distinction between how different it was to play bands like Duran Duran versus Black Flag. But even The Ramones weren’t played on the radio nearly enough, you know? That verse is asking, again, “Why are things like this? Why can’t they be this way and not that way? Why is it that only one side gets hurt? If one side is right, why aren’t both sides right? And why are both sides wrong at the same time?”
There are all just rhetorical questions. There are no easy answers to any of that stuff. “I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts” is me saying to myself, ‘Okay, just stop. Stop thinking about all this stuff and just tell yourself over and over again that it’s not happening.’ I hadn’t heard the term cognitive dissonance back then.
What do you think about toxic positivity?
I’ve never heard that phrase. I don’t know what it means.
It’s a similar thing, in that it’s when people reject or insist that other people reject thoughts that are in any way negative. Maybe you’ve heard the phrase ‘good vibes only’?
Yeah, yeah, I have. I think when bad things are happening and you’re under threat, the absolute worst line of defense is thinking ‘This can’t be happening. This isn’t happening.’ Like, no, pick something up and use it as a weapon! If something bad is happening, you don’t just stand there pretending that it isn’t. But I get it. I think a lot of people are stunned right now. So, toxic positivity is just when people refuse to admit that things are hard, that things are going to hell? Right, right. Because then you can’t do anything.
You later did some volunteer work to help the people of El Salvador. What’s the story there?
Yeah, I did. That was for an organisation called Medical Aid for El Salvador, and I think that it was completely illegal. It was a guy from a wealth Salvadoran family who’d had to leave El Salvador and came to Los Angeles. When I found out about this organisation I wanted to check it out for myself. I realised it wasn’t that far from my house, so I took the bus over there with my son in a stroller. I went into this office building and there was just one guy sitting there by himself, making cold calls to movie star-type people and other people with money, using a list that he probably got from some other organisation that was trying to help people. Let’s just say that. When I asked what I could do, he said, “Well, you can sit on the phone and ask people for money,” so I did. I was in the office for some days, and then I put on a fundraiser and played a show that raised about $4000.
The reason I did that was because all they were doing was trying to raise money for medical supplies. El Salvador didn’t have any aspirin, bandages, or anything. They were completely embargoed and blockaded. Nothing was getting into the country and people were suffering. Were they using the money to buy weapons? I don’t think so. I felt confident that what I was doing was helping people and not exacerbating war or friction, and I did that for as long as I could.
The band and I have done benefits for just about everything you can imagine, and always with good intentions. There was a show I did with John as The Knitters, at McCabe’s Guitar Shop in Santa Monica, trying to raise money for guitar strings. We also did a show to raise money for baseball equipment, because, in Mexico and Central America, baseball is huge, and sometimes that’s all people have. I’m a big baseball person, and I wanted to help people in any way that I could. It’s not like I wanted to overthrow anybody’s government, I just wanted people to be able to give a baseball to their kid for Christmas.
What's your baseball team?
The Los Angeles Dodgers, since the late ‘70s. I was a Chicago White Sox fan before that.
There’s a line in “I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts” about Woody Guthrie singing “about b-e-e-t-s not b-e-a-t-s,” which people have speculated is maybe a comment on how music in the ‘80s had changed from often being about social issues to becoming more obsessed with itself. What’s the significance of that line to you?
Well, I grew up in the Midwest, where the landscape was all cornfields and farms. There was a movement at the time to help family farmers to pay off their mortgage debts, and Farm Aid started a few years later with people like Willie Nelson and John Mellencamp organising. We had the mistaken belief that we could save the family farms, that people could live on their farms for generations and that everyone could eat healthy. That’s rapidly going away, day by day. At the time, though, that line was just a play on words. It was just a funny thing to say.
