How did you earn the nickname Giant J?

I’m a large character. It started from years back. I don’t wanna promote fistfighting, but I’m a little guy that will probably kick a big guy’s ass. I always wanna be as big as possible. Everything about me and what I’m doing is bigger than it should be.

“Giant J” has nothing to do with THC?
The joint part of it…no. But that would kick in at any moment because there is always a joint hanging out of my mouth.

I’m really confused about your ideology. You guys are from the Northwest, but then you were a band in Southern California, but now you live in Las Vegas. Meanwhile, you are funky, but you’re also positive punks, but also Rastas—
When you get into Black Flag or the Circle Jerks or the Sex Pistols, they weren’t necessarily negative. Maybe during their time they didn’t have a Hot Topic making their style cool. They were perceived negatively, but when you get into what they were telling kids to do, they weren’t negative. “God Save the Queen” is negative, but it is an issue for that time.

[The author contemplates possible positive meanings of the Sex Pistols sarcastic anthem "God Save the Queen" and supposes that, in a way, that anthem could be interpreted positively had the Sex Pistols not represented (and lived) total nihilism).] So you’re saying there’s a positivity in the negativity of the message?
There’s a negativity to be found in that moment, but that negativity was spawned by…the government of their time…I don’t think they were trying to say that we need to live in a world that’s worse than the one we live in now. I think they had rightful complaints and were singing in hopes of changing that.

We have a song called “Fight the World” on our first album. People take it as a negative thing…if you don’t hear what I’m talking about, you can put negative overtones on it. But it’s not negative. I want [kids] to fight back. I’m not saying they should grab pitchforks and put in it in the chest of every guy with a suit. [I'm saying they should] be Thomas Jefferson.

But you are also Rastas—
We just happen to have dreadlocks. I am not a Rasta—I’m not an anything. My mother is a Buddhist, my dad is a Green Beret. I’m on both sides of the fence. I’m fully willing to take a deep breath and tackle problems like a logical man. If you’re a drunken asshole at a show, I will knock you the fuck out. I don’t have a religion. I don’t believe we have answers to “What are we here for?”

What about your geography?
I’m from the West Coast. I’m from Southern California…We love reggae, but we appreciate the white boy’s West Coast. Jack Johnson, Sublime…that’s reggae, but if you take that shit to Jamaica, they ain’t having it.

Our ideology is tattooed on all of our arms. “Think free, live free.” That’s a vague statement trying to do a interview about it. I know that’s a cliché, but it’s a cliché because it’s true.

So you’re a positivist. A humanist.
We’ll take that.

But what about Vegas?
This band started as a joke to open up for another band. The joke became my fantasy lived out.

Southern Cali was my home, [but] I owned a 1,000-cap venue called the Old Shipwreck in Tacoma. [Giant J relates the FunkyJahPunkys epic genesis story: the head chef of the Old Shipwreck is "Mr. Black," the FJP's guitarist. After the band formed, it relocated to Southern California.] I got home and was looking for the scene I grew up in. The scene I was looking for wasn’t there anymore. We started playing where we could—playing Vegas once a month—and we found it here.

Some of the most hippie motherfuckers that I deal with are here in Vegas. There are drum circles in Red Rock. Vegas is a huge melting pot. It’s a loving community that I dig a lot.

We don’t live on the Strip. We’re not down on the Strip hanging out looking for hookers…we live on an acre 8 miles from the strip. One of the houses is for the band, the other is for my wife, mother-in-law, and daughter. We all work together and live in one place and make it possible. Once a month, we host a PCP Family Barbecue to prove that Vegas isn’t the question you asked. [Author's note: "PCP" doesn't refer to the popular arylcyclohexylamine derivative, but to Pacific Coast Pirates, the FJP's Vegas-based record label.]

If I’m ever down on shit to write about, I just go to the strip on a Saturday night. I just go see the people that didn’t mean to spend their mortgage. When you put that much greed and sin all in one spot, you see some visible negativity. The best negativity is at the gas station at Stateline. That’s where you see the losers really losing. You see a poor guy with his wife and kids and see how bad every decision he made that weekend turned out.

I think I’ve been in that gas station a couple of times. [Author's note: this is, literally and figuratively, true.]
I haven’t had a drunk in nine years. I was a full-blown ulcered alcoholic at 22.

How’d you get out of it?
Hitting rock bottom. Seeing as bad as I could foreseeable be while knowing I had so much love and opportunity available to me.

I grew up in a Partyville, I knew the right people. I could do anything I wanted. My brother was older than me and involved in
selling everything. I partied hard. I love drinking to this very day. God, I wish I could have a drink…Alcohol owns me, bro. I drink a 12-pack of nonalcoholic beers at every show.

That’s hardcore.
We tell every venue to have it. I’d love to have a real beer, but I’d have 12 shots of tequila afterward.

How did you guys get involved with Ice-T for the song “Corporate Takeover?”
One of the bands on PCP—a band called Colombyne—has a 400-pound rapper Pauly Mac used to be with 187. He lives in Vegas…he’s a nephew of Ice-t. Ice put him through college. That was the personal connection that made this possible. Ice-T gave me a small chance for people to notice…if not for Ice,
you wouldn’t be talking to me from Washington, D.C.

[Author's note: Giant J is right. The author---a huge fan of Body Count, O.G. Original Gangster, the film New Jack City, and the survivor of a mosh-related injury incurred at a Body Count show at the Trocadero Club in Philadelphia in December 1993---received a press release from PCP Records in re: Ice-T's appearance on the FJP song "Corporate Takeover," contacted Giant J in the hope of interviewing Ice-T, and only requested to interview Giant J after finding his lifestyle, ideology, and general modus operandi, if not his aesthetics, diverting. In this small way, Giant J is a postmodern American hero: He, an artist who desires attention, has found a found a way to get it, and received it.]

Photographs of the author by Darrow Montgomery

Skate rock (Think Sublime’s genetic material crossed with that of Minor Threat) is a lot like milt. Some people get a mouthful of the creamy white stuff and think, “So this is fish sperm. Not bad!” Other people take a bite, move it around with their tongues, and then say to themselves, “Oh god, I just put fish balls in my mouth.” They panic. They look for a trash can, a napkin, maybe some condiments to amend the taste. They crunch up crackers and squirt cocktail sauce directly into their gaping, fishy maws.  When that doesn’t work, they spit what’s left into their hands and shove it in their pockets.

Likewise, when it comes to seeing West coast skate music live, you either like getting involuntarily spanked by drunk white chicks with neck tattoos, pierced tongues, and exposed muffin tops, and jostled by aggressive white dudes with melanoma, trap muscles that touch their ears, and tattoos denoting their area codes/favorite Stephen King villains–both sets drugged and boozed to the hilt–or you don’t. God help you if you ended up–perhaps by invite–at the 9:30 Club last night for the Jagermeister Tour without prior knowledge that you were entering White Trash Central.

My accomplice and I missed openers the Supervillains, who’ve come a long way since playing house parties in St. Cloud, Fla., and jettisoning their trombonist. Smally is still on sax and Dom is still on drums and vocals, though they brought in some guy named Skart who has dirty dreads and loves weed to sing about, well, his dreads and weed.  (Full disclaimer: I was five years behind the Supervillains at St. Cloud High School, and after catching them live my freshman year, joined the Shoehorns–a short-lived Christian ska band–on trumpet. The ska stuff wasn’t for me–I just couldn’t tongue my horn fast enough!–but I did have the privilege of dating the Shoehorns’ bassist and a diehard Supervillains groupie for an entire month, at the end of which she asked me to choose between her and my penny loafers. I chose the shoes. She dumped my ass.)

Though we missed my hometown act, we made it just in time to catch Las Vegas rapper Big B perform “White Trash Life.” When he asked the crowd, “Where my white trash hoes at?”, nearly every guy in the club raised his hand in the air and then pointed down at the nearest female. I didn’t hear the part about the hoes, so I just waved my hands for the hell of it, which earned me a wary stink-eye or two from a group of dudes in fitted black ball caps and Tapout muscle tees.

Next up was Authority Zero, a Latin- and ska-tinged punk band from Mesa, Arizona, that’s been doing this whole music thing for, like, 15 years, with almost no one noticing (which explains why it’s constantly losing members to the Air Force and other Fuck-It-Time-To-Grow-Up jobs). After running through a catalogue of maniacal punk numbers, the band played “One More Minute,” the Sublime-ish alt-rock radio hit from 2002’s A Passage in Time, but declined to launch into their anti-Iraq War cover of Wall of Voodoo’s “Mexican Radio.” The highlight of the set was Jason DeVore’s rapid-fire vocals and stage monkery on nearly every song, which earned him mad props from Pennywise’s Jim Lindberg, who is too old to jump around and likes to sing really, really slowly.

Which brings us to Pennywise, the wizened grandfathers wise godfathers of California skate punk. Aside from a guest appearance by Minor Threat bassist/guitarist Brian Baker and a ballsy rendition of “Bro Hymn” (Next to Queen’s “We Will Rock You,” it is THE rev-em-up sports song), I was more interested in Lindberg’s between-song banter than guitarist Fletcher Dragge’s oversized and overamped three-chord chest-breakers. Unlike DeVore, who’s consistently espoused an anti-authoritarian political philosophy since 1994, Lindberg is all over the place. At the beginning of Pennywise’s set, he said he approved of Obama “so far,” and that he was definitely preferable to the “last eight years of bullshit.” Later in the set, however, he gave a shout-out to the military’s work in Iraq and Afghanistan, and encouraged the crowd to give a big hand to the men and women of the armed services who are “over there, kicking ass to keep us safe and free,” despite the fact the Iraq War is the bulk of George W. Bush’s political legacy, and  hands-down the stinkiest bullshit from the last eight years.

In between those pronouncements, Dragge and Lindberg riffed on white collar drones and “emo boys who wear their sisters’ pants.” Perhaps the sloppy mix of anarchism and hypermasculine nationalism is a West coast thing, but it just seemed so…not punk. A drone’s a drone, whether it’s sporting Brooks Brothers and a Blackberry or camouflage and an M-16. Then again, the no-neck crowd might have gone apeshit–and not in a good way–if Lindberg had openly criticized the military. The band’s one attempt at inspiring political activism came when Dragge announced–not two songs before “Fuck Authority” from 2001’s Land of the Free?–”This song is for one of you fuckers, hopefully you’ll make it into the White House.” Isn’t saying “Fuck the government, unless we’re the government,” kind of like, I don’t know, Ronald Reagan famously arguing “Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem”?

Hawaii dub-rockers Pepper went on last, wandering onto the stage covered in sweat and wearing nothing but board shorts, and did their best to disperse the angry white-dude vibes by shouting “Poonani,” and “If you fight now, you can’t fuck later,” and flashing the triangle/vagina sign. The feel-good members of the crowd quickly caught on, bobbing their heads like a flock of pigeons and shouting “I love pussy!” while the dudes in Tapout shirts left for the curb outside to suck down some nicotine and compare choke holds. The set’s only downfall was that it was loud enough to harsh my buzz.