"Dude, I thank my lucky stars every day," exclaims Lars Frederiksen, sitting on the floor of his bedroom under a gigantic Motorhead poster. "This is what I have: I have a band that makes music that I love, that I would buy even if I wasn't in the band. I'll never go hungry again. I'll never have to worry about having a roof over my head again. I have a yard and a TV and a VCR. I have stability. Some of that is materialist stuff, stuff I never had before. But the important thing is: I have unconditional love from my band. They're my three best friends in the world. We hang with each other every day, whether we play or not. The music is almost secondary. I know we're going to be together in ten years."
Lars serves three functions in Rancid: Exalted Guardian of the Sacred Enthusiasm; Master of the Barre Chord with an Occasional Short Solo; and designated Interviewee. If he was just slightly less enthusiastic, if he had an ounce of this-is-mine-and-not-yours in the brain under his orange mohawk, it would be easy to envy the guy. He's 24 years old, he has lots of cool tattoos, and large entertainment conglomerates have been pulling trucks full of money up to the small, one-story house that he shares with a couple of buds in a working class district of Berkeley. He and the rest of Rancid-Tim Armstrong on guitar and vocals, Matt Freeman on bass and Brett Reed on drums-of course turned down the trucks full of money. They liked the indie punk label Epitaph, for whom they'd recorded their first two albums (Rancid and Let's Go) and now a third, ...And Out Come The Wolves, that, in this post-Nirvana age of Green Day and the Offspring, ought to make them monsters.
"It was the right spiritual move," says Lars. We just go by the gut, and that's what our gut told us to do. We love Epitaph, and we love the bands on Epitaph. NoFX, Pennywise, the Offspring-those bands are family to us down there. And that's what Rancid is: a family."
That's also what people sense in Rancid, even more than the adrenalizing, sing-along rock and roll. People might admire it, might envy it, might try to commodify it and resell it at a profit. They all want it.
"Everybody in Rancid gets treated equally," continues Lars. "Everybody's a team player. Everybody gets the job done. I love the ideal that we do everything as a band. `There's power in a union,' to quote Billy Bragg. When you organize to get better conditions for your life, that's punk rock."
Lars came by his worldview the hard way. "'Cause I'm working class, dude. I know what it's like to work. My mom worked 13 hours a day and collected welfare to keep me and my brother alive. Never took anything for herself. If somebody wants to give me that, l'll take it, but I have to give it back in some way. It's like in punk rock: You listen to the Subhumans, to GBH, and you get all this information. Suddenly you're thinking, `Fuck, I don't have to go to jail. I don't have to kill old ladies. There's this, another possibility.' I think Rancid is putting that back. If I'm helping some kid in Bumfuck, Nebraska, and all he's got that he can relate to is that Rancid album, which is the way I was, that's what it's all about."
Metaphorically speaking, Lars grew up just down the road from Bumfuck in Campbell, California, a working class suburb between Santa Cruz and San Jose. His father left home when Lars was three and remains something of a sore topic. In school, Lars took to reading, devouring The Grapes Of Wrath by the age of nine, but soon lost interest when he realized the teachers were ordering him to read. Into this void of boredom and resentment leaped a neighborhood kid named Sean, who spiked his hair and dressed like it was Halloween every day.
"I think I was searching for a surrogate father and my brother and Sean sorta became that, except that they were these 16-year-old kids. All I wanted was to be just like them." That meant listening to the Ramones and the Sex Pistols when everybody else was listening to Led Zeppelin. As punk developed, he went to all the shows in San Francisco, but his taste ran more to the English "oi" bands than to local acts like the highly dissonant Dead Kennedys and Flipper.
At 16, Lars dropped out of high school and took up the guitar. One of those proud-never-to-have-taken-lessons kinda musicians, Lars played along with albums by the Ramones, Stiff Little Fingers and Kiss ("Hey! They modeled themselves after the New York Dolls, and I never met a punk who didn't like the Dolls!"). At first he just tried to hit the notes, make some musical sense, then figured out they were playing barre chords most of the time and concentrated on them. Reversing the normal learning process, he subsequently discovered open chords.
After a brief stints with the UK Subs, Cajones and Slip, Lars joined Rancid shortly after they released their eponymous first album in 1993, just as the music biz was figuring out, almost two decades late, the commercial viability of punk. Since Rancid was the real thing-real street punks in one of the most energetic and musical bands extant-their fortune was made, even if they didn't think much of their potential fortune.
"The only way I can afford this place is by splitting the rent with two roommates," says Lars, gesturing around the small living room piled high with equipment cases. (Lars plays Epiphone Les Paul copies, his theory being that they are cheaper and smash more easily than Gibsons. He uses a Marshall JCM 900 amp with a white strip of tape across the control panel, with the settings marked on it: 3-1-4-1-8-10-5-8-0-8.) "Money, dude, I never had it and I don't care about it. The only thing we care about is playing."
Matt Freeman is the only Rancid member who doesn't look like a punk. With his sunglasses and black hair greased straight back, he looks like a Fifties hipster, like he lost his way to the Sha Na Na reunion. His functions are threefold: Exclusive Driver Of The Van (Tim doesn't even have a license); Respected Eminence (although he hoists a beer now and then, he delivered the ultimatum to Lars to stop drinking when he joined the band); and Virtuoso Bassist. Indeed, he deserves to be the next bass hero. Certain other players may have more flash, but nobody now playing is better at doing cool stuff under a chord progression. He strikes an exquisite balance between counter-melody and propulsion. His basslines are so integral to the songs that he always gets a writing credit, even though he never comes up with riffs, progressions or lyrics.
"Yeah, Entwistle's my hero, I guess," says Matt in his Manhattan hotel room. "I also like John Doe from X. He's an amazing punk rock bass player. You don't really hear him on the records, but if you listen carefully, he has that style of dropping notes in from nowhere that totally make the song. And Harace Panter from the Specials, he was a big influence. But Entwistle would be number one.
GUITAR WORLD: You and Entwistle both had that high school band experience. Him on the French horn, you on the trumpet.
MATT FREEMAN: Maybe that had something to do with it. I always did well, and then I wanted to play bass because it was more interesting than horns. I had help along the way. I'm not completely self-taught. And I read the guitar magazines a lot. Whenever they did an article about punk, they'd get all these angry letters from tech geeks. Ever notice those guys aren't in bands?
GW: For a non-geek, you're technically accomplished.
Freeman: I admit I work really hard at what I do, but sometimes the shit just comes. And that's often the best shit.
Playing bass is the only thing I've ever been able to do well. That and drive.
For most of Rancid's existence, Matt played a Fender Jazz through an Acoustic 320 with four 15-inch speakers. But recently it started to rattle, and nobody could figure out why. Now that they'll be touring with roadies who can take care of the tubes, he's switched to an Ampeg SVT II. Unlike most of the prominent heroes in the bass pantheon, he plays with a pick (orange Dunlop mediums), not his fingers.
With his aqua-colored mohawk hanging flaccid out the back of his baseball cap, Tim Armstrong is sort of a disguised punk rocker as he consumes a slice and a Coke in this New York pizza joint. But only sort of, because his tattoos, his baggy muscle shirt and his plaid bondage pants halfway down his ass certainly give something away. His functions in Rancid are (again) threefold: Primary Songwriter, Primary Vocalist, Primary Visionary. A smart kid who reads slowly because of dyslexia, he barely graduated from high school. His father basically left the family (due to alcoholism) when Tim was young. Money was always a struggle, and he grew up with your classic case of poetic indirection, and just plain explodes with the sheer joy of rock and roll, the sheer joy of being alive when so many others are dead before their time. His best song is probably "Junkyman," about the perverted religious quest of addiction.
"That song is just so badass," Tim smiles. "A great song has nothing to do with how many chords you're playing. It's how you pace, how you play the chords when you play them. `Smells Like Teen Spirit' was just four chords over and over again. All timing and intuition. `Junkyman' is like that. Listen to how we were playing, and what Matt was doing underneath those two chords. That's the song."
GW: Do you ever have to tell Matt to calm down?
ARMSTRONG: Never, ever. I'm always telling him, `Dude, go fucking nuts.' That shit is so amazing.
Lars comes up with lots of ideas. He's my homeboy now. We stay in the same hotel room on the road, and we jam for four hours at a time. That's how `Junkyman' happened. We were just kicking it back in Salt Lake City, on somebody's front porch. I was playing the progression and he was playing the lead line, and boom! I carry a little tape recorder for that stuff.
Tim likes Hagstrom hollowbodies for the stage show. They feed back easily ("If Matt is tuning his bass, I just let go and make a little feedback song") and they're light ("I jump around a lot"). In the studio, he uses a Les Paul through a Marshall on the punk songs for all the reasons you'd expect. On the ska songs, he uses a Stratocaster with the pickup switch on the bridge and center with no distortion. "Two single coil pickups give you a full sound, not too trebly, but real chunky."
GW: So why did you turn down all those trucks full of money from the major labels?
ARMSTRONG: That's why we called the album ...And Out Come The Wolves. Staying on Epitaph felt like the right thing to do. Brett Gurewitz runs it, and he looked me in the eye and said, "Dude, I love your band. I love you guys." He meant it. I could see it. After that, while me and Matt were driving back to East Bay, I said, "Well, he loves us. That's more important than a million dollars."