Kansas City Star article

Found this article a couple of days ago, Mike talks about his sons, etc.

http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansas...0856741.htm?1c

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werks,
great read

That was a pretty cool article, Thank you.

Trading in days

Hard-living front man for Social Distortion survives bad habits to live a new life

By TIMOTHY FINN

The Kansas City Star


His teenage son has inherited at least one trait from his father, and Mike Ness is doing his best to nurture it ? with strings attached, you could say.

?My son has started playing guitar,? Ness said in a recent interview, ?and he's getting really good at it. But we've got a deal now: He can play guitar, but he has to stick with the sax.

?He was introduced to music through the saxophone, playing blues and jazz. He doesn't realize now that the jazz licks he's learning are going to make him a phenomenal guitar player. I wish I'd had a jazz or classical background. I've seen what it can do.?

Since he taught himself to play guitar and then founded the punk band Social Distortion in 1979, Mike Ness has seen and done some things he'd rather neither of his two sons know about right now, things that involved hard drugs, brute violence and jail time.

That was way back then, before Ness went through drug rehab, found a way to make his marriage work and started acting like the father he never had. These days the guy who once sang, ?It's heaven and hell here; which one will I live today?? is making the best of a second chance and some 20/20 hindsight ? things that don't come to most people who lived the way he used to live.

Been there, took that

When he sees kids falling into the same traps and bad habits he fell into, Ness feels like he's looking at the wreckage of a violent crash he somehow lived through.

?When I see people actively doing the kinds of stuff I used to do,? he said, ?I can't help but get grateful that I already know what they're about to find out. They have no idea what's in store.?

Ness, 43, started finding out when he was in junior high, which is about the time he started rebelling against the strict upbringing his parents laid on him. He smoked cigarettes and dope, drank, skipped school and eventually started identifying with the punk scene that was emerging in Huntington Beach and Fullerton in Orange County, Calif.

?My parents were strict,? he said. ?My behavior was a form of rebellion. I rebelled against everything, including the music my father listened to.?

That music was old-time country, including his current idol, Johnny Cash. So Ness expressed his anger and resentment through his band and the scene around it. Social D's ?brief history? on its Web site includes some of the more notorious incidents, including a brawl in front of a club called the Cuckoo's Nest in which a guy bit off a chunk of Ness' left ear.

A graphic look at that lifestyle was captured in ?Another State of Mind,? a documentary of the band's first cross-country tour in 1982 with Minor Threat and Youth Brigade. (The film has since been re-released on DVD.)

A year later Social D released the album ?Mommy's Little Monster,? and the band started getting some national attention. Within a year the video for the song ?Another State of Mind? had appeared on MTV.

Ness, however, was in no state of mind to celebrate. In 1985 he admitted himself into a drug-rehab program, sick of the lights, the blackouts, the hangovers, the hospital and jail stays (and a three-day trip to a psychiatric ward). He has been clean since and deeply sobered by the experiences, which he wrote about in Social D's classic anthem ?Prison Bound?:

?Well, they say I'm bein' punished/And they say I can be reformed/But some day I'll return/Did they really think that this time it would work/You knew all along it wouldn't ??

He was wrong, though. Somehow Mike Ness found the wisdom to look back on his past ? as checkered and bloodied and black and blue as it was ? and see the light.

Rebel with a family

Every once in a while, Ness' son acts like a teenager and tries to out-rebel his father. Ness is always ready.

?He's 13, and there's a little bit of him that is starting to be defiant,? Ness said. ?But I have this way of dealing with it. I say, ?You can't rebel against me. I'm a rebel. I'm on your side.' That throws him for a loop.?

Given the resentment he bore for his parents, you might expect Ness to visit his father's sins on his own sons. Instead he broke the cycle. Chalk it up to hindsight and a better half.

?I don't always know what I should do, but I know what not to do,? he said. ?I find myself sometime acting just like my father. It's like, ?Whoa. Where did that come from? That's the same thing my dad used to say ? it's the same impatience my dad use to have with me.' So I have that measuring stick, something to gauge my own behavior with, and go, ?That behavior was a little unfavorable. I need to do something differently.' I also have a great wife who has no problem telling me when I'm acting like a (jerk).

?You know, family ? it's everything. The only downside about touring is, I really don't like being away from my family. I miss out on way too much.?

Old-school cool

Mike Ness has tattoos like Central Park has pigeon dung. These days he wishes he didn't.

?I got tattoos to be anti-social,? he said. ?Now people are getting them to fit in. I don't get it. I have a few friends who don't have any, and I tell them, ?You're cool now because you have none.' If you do something just because everyone else does it, you're not using your brain. I can't relate to that.?

You could say the same thing about much of today's punk scene, which bears little resemblance to the scene he leaped into 26 years ago. Social D isn't the band it used to be. The version that will come to the sold-out Beaumont Club on Saturday will be without guitarist Dennis Danell, who died of a brain aneurysm in 2000, and without longtime bassist John Mauer, who helped record the band's latest record, ?Sex and Love and Rock 'n' Roll,? but declined to join the tour.

Jonny Wickersham took Danell's place. Matt Freeman of Rancid replaced Mauer, but Freeman, who recently became a father, has since been replaced by Brent Harding.

Hard-core Ness fans will recognize Harding: He played bass when Ness was touring solo, rediscovering many of the old country and roots songs he first heard as a boy ? songs from his father's record collection. These days Ness sees more rebellion in old and long-gone country legends than in the neo-punk bands who have inherited Social D's legacy.

?I've been listening to the radio more lately, mostly to make sure they're still playing us,? he said. ?I can't help but think there's a lot more whining going on these days. I don't know. I come from a period where we were actively involved in revolution. It's not that way anymore. Times change, obviously.

?On the other hand, the past five years have been very fulfilling for the band, and nothing is more fulfilling than looking out there and seeing the old-timers who were supporting us during our early years, back when there weren't even 200 people in the room.

?It's also great to see the kids who have only recently heard about us. It's like we're legends in their eyes. They're like, ?Wow, we finally got to see them.'

?And that's just great. It gives me hope. Without the old school, there's no new. Without the new, there's no one to carry on the message.?

If he plays his cards right and keeps practicing his sax, a certain teenager out in Orange County could grow up to become one of those messengers, and he'll have his father to thank, in more ways than one.


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THE SHOW

Social Distortion performs Saturday night at the Beaumont Club in Westport. The Backyard Babies and the Street Dogs open. The show is sold out.