Culture
Anti Flag’s Pat Thetic on touring, dream collaborations, and ‘The Lies They Tell Our Children’
By: Nicholas Kobe
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COLUMBUS (WOUB) – Anti-Flag has been a major force keeping the political heart of punk music beating. Since forming in 1988, the band has been musically innovating, participating in activism, and has released 13 studio albums, including 2023’s “The Lies They Tell Our Children.”
WOUB Culture’s Nicholas Kobe interviewed founding member and drummer of Anti-Flag, Pat Thetic before the band plays the Sonic Temple Festival in Columbus May 25.
Listen to our interview with Pat Thetic on-demand by clicking play in the Soundcloud widget above. Find a transcript edited for length and clarity below. This conversation contains explicit language.
What would be like your one sentence description of what Anti-flag is?
Pat Thetic:
We are an unapologetic leftist punk rock band.
Nicholas Kobe:
I think that’s a very good way to put it. The big thing for you guys recently, obviously with your tour, but also your new album that just came out earlier this year, a few months ago, The Lies They Tell Our Children. How are you feeling about that?
Pat Thetic:
It’s awesome. When you record a record, it’s a very personal experience with the four of us in a room doing our thing, writing our music, and trying to, concisely express things. Then when you get to play live shows, it becomes a very public and community thing. My favorite part of the rock and roll experience is the community part of it. To play songs that we really believe in that have something important to say, and to do that in a community of people where everybody is singing along and everybody is sort of on the same page is a pretty awesome experience.
Nicholas Kobe:
Obviously politics have changed a lot. Has there been any change in the way you guys write about it?
Pat Thetic:
The only thing that has changed is we’ve become more skilled at getting to the nuance of what we’re trying to express. When you’re young and you’re angry at the world and you see the injustice in the world, you just sort of scream out loud, which is an important experience. I’m not diminishing that in any way. I think it’s very valuable. Some days I still take solace in that experience, but, as we’ve gotten older, now we look at things like redlining and we look at things like the difference between how awesome it is that there is a vaccine that we can all use and keeps us safe, but the reality that pharmaceutical companies are still some of the enemies of our culture and our community by price gouging and economic terrorism. Those two things are hard to communicate in a three and a half minute punk rock song, but they’re also things that we think are very important to talk about in things that we need to address and that people should be aware of.
Nicholas Kobe:
Absolutely. And how, how do you go about the process of determining what big concepts you want to tackle, and then getting it down into like a three and a half minute song?
Pat Thetic:
It’s not always easy. And some days we do it better than others. And some songs we do better than others. It’s really trying to make it interesting because if you write a song and nobody cares, and it doesn’t have a catchy chorus, then it’s not interesting to anybody and you might as well not have written a song. A lot of it is song craft to try and figure out how we can talk about an issue and also make it interesting and creative that people want to sing along with. If you hear me talk about it, it sounds much more disconnected and technical. But the reality is the rock shows are pretty fun and people connect with the songs pretty easily.
Nicholas Kobe:
Have you, so you felt that like the community you guys have created with your lyrics and music in general has always kind of been on the same page as you guys?
Pat Thetic:
It’s not a community that we’ve created. It is a community that is out there that we are a part of. There’s always been people who are like “the way the world is right now is not good for me, and it’s not good for the people around me. And it can change.” And that’s the, one of the amazing things about the US culture is that there are a whole bunch of activists who think, “you know what? We can tackle these tough issues like climate change. We don’t just have to wait for the government to do it.” And one of the things that we’ve learned over the years of being activists and being in a rock band is if you put people in the streets, things change. There’s no difference between a rock show and a protest. If you get enough people to get on board with an idea and put them in the streets, politicians change, begrudgingly, and usually against their own beliefs, they will change. The thing that we’re always trying to do is make sure there’s enough people who can be in the streets to make those changes happen.
Nicholas Kobe:
How important do you think it is for rock to stay political even into this time and age?
Pat Thetic:
I don’t know whether rock music has to be political. That’s not for me to judge. That’s the music that is interesting to me. For us, it’s not rock music, it’s folk music, it’s, town criers. It’s people who were seeing the world that was in front of them and realizing that it’s not the way that it needed to be and believed that if enough of us can come together we can create a closer version of the world to what we want it to be. If that’s not your vibe, if you’re not into that as a musician or an artist you should sing about whatever you wanna sing about. But for us, that’s interesting. That is something that drives us. Obviously we are just one of those links in the chain of, of music. There are a bunch of people who were before us, and there are a bunch of people who will be after us that hopefully will carry the message and move it further. It’s not our job as aging rockers to be at the forefront of politics. There is a new generation of bands and activists who are gonna be there, and we’re gonna support them because we believe that we have done good work, but there’s a lot of work yet to be done.
Nicholas Kobe:
Over the past years that you guys have been a band you guys have stayed pretty consistent lineup pretty much through all the years. How have you guys managed that relationship?
Pat Thetic:
That’s a good question. We have a small record company that puts out bands. And, the value of a band is, three things. There’s the consistency of the members, how well they can fix a van, and how big their backdrop is. Those are the things that I look for in a band. We’ve been incredibly lucky that the four of us have been able to navigate the challenges of the last 30 years of life and still see value in the rock show and the experience. Just recently, Chris Head, one of the guitar players and myself had children. So that has added a different set of challenges to being on tour for six, to eight months a year. We’ve tried to find ways to navigate that and to be successful parents and be successful people in a band.It’s a challenge every day. But I think, one, we really actually enjoy each other. The four dudes plus the other guys who have been around us, it’s not just the four guys in the band. There’s six or eight of us who have been together for the last 20 years. I count them all as friends, and we also believe in the mission of the band and believe that things can be different than they are and are trying with every breath to try and make the visions in our head the reality in the world around us. Whichever member of the band you speak to, the music is a larger or a lesser percentage of the vision. For me, the activism and the political mission of the band has a larger percentage than the actual music. Music is a vehicle for me to get ideas out to people and to be able to talk to people. That does not mean to diminish that the music is very important. It is. But if I was just in a rock band that played solos for 20 minutes, that wouldn’t be interesting to me at all, and I would’ve been done 20 years ago.
Nicholas Kobe:
Has that weighing the importance of the message and getting the politics out there versus the music ever created conflict within the band?
Pat Thetic:
No, we’re talking percentages. If you look at the whole pie we are all very much on the same page, but it’s like some of the guys are like, “oh, I went and saw this band and I really like what they’re doing, and they did this with these chords.” And I’m like, “okay, just gimme the chords. I’m gonna play drums behind it. We’ll figure it out”. As long as we have a good message behind it, I’m good with whatever chords you wanna play. It doesn’t cause conflict at all. It’s just some guys are more focused on song structure than I am. If you are around rockers who have been in bands for long periods of time, we all sort of get our certain spaces. Chris Head does the artwork, I deal with the travel and the van and the truck. Each of us have different spaces that we inhabit within the band, which is healthy because I can’t do artwork, but Chris Head does amazing artwork, so absolutely. It’s good to have him manage that end of the thing.
Nicholas Kobe:
You mentioned that you kind of did like travel and stuff like that. What got you into doing that?
Pat Thetic:
You find a used van when you’re a little kid and find some money to buy it, and then it breaks down. Nobody told me how to change a tire. Nobody told me how to get the oil changed or change the spark plugs or fix the windshield. All those things you just sort of figure out as you go. While the other guys are sleeping, you’re the one who’s up in the middle of the night when the van’s on the side of the road. That was my mission.
Nicholas Kobe:
Would you say you’ve gotten pretty good at it over the years?
Pat Thetic:
I’ve gotten better, obviously a van in 1994 is a very different experience than a van in 2023.
Nicholas Kobe:
What other ways have you kind of seen like culture change around over the time you guys have been a band?
Pat Thetic:
We’ve seen a lot of culture change from the economics of the people who were at the shows to how bands presented themselves was very different than now. When we were young bands were trying to be authentic with the people who were coming to the shows. Now that is less of an issue with bands. They’re creating fantasy and the people who come to the shows are interested in the fantasy. That’s never been something that I’ve been into. There’s millions of things that have changed in 30 years of rock and roll that have had incremental change on punk rock.
Nicholas Kobe:
One question I had about your new record The Lies They Tell Our Children is that I noticed there’s a lot of features on this record. How did that come about?
Pat Thetic:
We’ve played with a lot of people over the last 25-30 years, and we wanted to have different voices, especially female voices on the record, because, that is something that is an amazing shift that has happened in the last 10 years, is that people are more aware that we need to have a diversity of voices in the in the marketplace of ideas. We’ve thought that forever, we just happen to be four dudes in a band. We want to have as many voices, being represented as possible. So that was a lot of it. Then they just have other people who are friends of ours. We were just like, “oh, wouldn’t this be great if we, if they were on the record too.” We have a bunch of people who are on the record, from Pink Shift, Bad Cop/Bad Cop and Rise Against. It’s always fun to have your friends be on your record.
Nicholas Kobe:
Any artists that you feel like in the future you’d be interested in collaborating with?
Pat Thetic:
I’ll go ridiculous. I think we should collaborate with Billie Eilish. I think that that would be good ,maybe Taylor Swift and Anti-Flag should do a song together
Nicholas Kobe:
Anti-flag (Taylor’s version).
Pat Thetic:
Yeah. I think it’d be good. Yeah. Well, the thing that’s interesting about Taylor Swift is that she’s big enough to do over the record companies and redo her whole catalog. Maybe there’s actually some common ground between us and Taylor Swift.
Nicholas Kobe:
Going back to the early days, how did you specifically become a punk rock kid?
Pat Thetic:
I went to a show in an abandoned warehouse. There was a guy playing completely naked, hanging from the rafters, um, and screaming. And I was like, “you know what? This is my home. This wouldn’t happen in my high school. This wouldn’t happen in my parents’ house. This is something different. This is where I need to be.” When we were young, there wasn’t talk of revolution in schools. There wasn’t talk of things like Black Lives Matter, we got a very different education and I was looking for something that was more revolutionary and more ready for change. That wasn’t available in middle America, Pittsburgh. So I went searching for it. That was the joke when we were young, that I was always looking for my people. I’ve never really found my people, but I’ve found people who are closer to my people than when I was a young person.
You guys just got off tour and you are going back with some of the same bands later on this year. How has that touring experience been for you guys?
Pat Thetic:
<laugh>It’s been awesome. Uh, yeah. We’ve gone back to early 2000’s touring, cuz we were just out with Flogging Molly. They opened up for us in 2006. The Bouncing Souls, We’ve been playing shows with them since 95. So, yeah, it’s awesome. We were actually right when we were leaving the tour. We were having a nice chat backstage after the Souls had just gotten offstage. We were talking about how guys who have been in bands and girls, uh, of course cuz Venomous Pinks were there as well. There is a community of people, a fraternity, not in the horrible sense of fraternity, but in the, the most, awesome sense of fraternity. People who travel around, play music, sleep in people’s basements, navigate cat problems at people’s houses. There is a fraternity of people. Nobody understands unless you’ve done it.
What’s something you’re really excited about like, this (Sonic Temple) festival performance in particular?
Pat Thetic:
We actually do a couple festivals in Ohio. It’s always fun to play shows there. And it’s close enough to Pittsburgh that a lot of people from Pittsburgh will come out to the shows. But specifically the experience of being in a place where people might not have the same ideas as you, and to be able to communicate that. Most of the time by the end of the show, I’m not saying that people have adopted our ideas, but they have connected with the music that we are creating. Lots of times they’ve never heard our music but they can connect with the songs. That is important to us to be able to go out and speak to people who have never been exposed to our band. I’m not saying they’re gonna be revolutionaries next week, but at least their eyes are opened a little bit more to the point of view that we possess. So that’s always important. Sonic Temple is a fun festival and like I said, the Foo Fighters are gonna be there, so it’s gonna be a great show.
Nicholas Kobe:
Absolutely. It’s good to, you know, make music and be in a community, especially as you guys are so driven about getting a message out, you gotta get it out to the wider audience of people who may not know.
Pat Thetic:
We’ve always tried to find the balance of those two things because it’s fun to be in a small club or a hall for a thousand people and everybody’s on the same page, but you also have to do the work of being in an environment where not everybody already agrees with what you’re talking about. You can share some common ground, might be very small common ground, but finding common ground is important
Nicholas Kobe:
Historically, has that gone well for you guys?
Pat Thetic:
Um, yeah, it goes well some days, the days it goes really shit. But, um, yeah, when we were young, um, uh, we had to be escorted outta places the cops came because people wanted to kill us and beat us up and, you know, that doesn’t happen as much. Um, these days.
Nicholas Kobe:
Were those at like the bigger festivals?
Pat Thetic:
No, those were punk rock shows and cities like Jersey and Florida had a really high right wing population. The scary thing is there’s a lot of right wing momentum happening right now which is scary. We know things are getting sketchy out there again. The only way to combat that is to talk about it and have voices out there, um, denouncing it.
Nicholas Kobe:
The last question I have for you is kind of just looking into the future, what do you think is next for Anti Flag?
Pat Thetic:
I know very specifically that we’re gonna be home from this tour and then go take a little bit of break, spend some time with our family and friends, and then go back out on tour. We’re gonna be playing shows with this record for the next year and a half. Then we’ll do another record when we are motivated by the world around us to create new songs that have something interesting to say. There’s no rest for the wicked. We are playing rock and roll all over the world all the time.
Editor’s Note (7/26/23): After WOUB published this article, a woman leveled sexual assault allegations against an unnamed lead vocalist of a political punk band in a July 19 episode of the enough podcast. Although Anti-Flag’s lead vocalist, Justin Sane, was not explicitly named, shortly after Anti-Flag disbanded, deleted their social media accounts and official website. In a statement released by the band July 26 sexual assault allegations were acknowledged. Sane denies the allegations.]