In Conversation: Chris Evenson of Sense Field
Sense Field spent their early days convinced the hardcore scene would reject them—only to become one of our best-loved bands. Chris Evenson remembers the late Jon Bunch as the engine that could.
Jon Bunch would have turned 54 years old this coming October 25th. His absence is still felt: As the singer for Sense Field and Reason to Believe, Bunch left us with both a powerful musical legacy and the endless stories of the lives he touched. He continues to be missed. But with almost nine years since his passing, I thought it was the right moment to approach his story with some of the added perspective of time. And few people are better qualified to speak with about this era than Chris Evenson, who was—from 1987 to 2013—Bunch’s most consistent musical partner. To revisit Sense Field and Reason to Believe, after all, is also to revisit Chris’s own life and work.
Easily the less gregarious of the two, Chris has always been happy being the quiet one. But while he openly credits Bunch with being the spring of hope from which Sense Field drew its water, it’s also true that Chris was an integral driver for the band’s creative and practical accomplishments. His approach to these things, in other words, has always been more workmanlike than attention-seeking, more hard-working hardcore kid than aspiring rock star.
“It’s ironic that I ever became a guy who got on stage and played guitar,” he tells me. “This is not my personality. I am not that guy. I don’t seek that kind of adulation out of it, or that notoriety. It’s only because I love music so much that I wanted to partake in this.”
I feel like I remember hearing that you went to your first show in 1982. Is that right?
CHRIS: I know, I’m old, that is a fact [laughs]. I was fourteen. I actually found the flyer and framed it. It was in March of 1982. I’d been into punk rock for maybe a few months by then, but only casually. Once I got into high school, I became friends with some of the local punk guys and they said they were going to see Bad Brains and Bad Religion—and that I should go. So I went. I think I had a mop-top haircut and wasn’t super cool looking. I mean, do you want to hear about it?
Sure. Tell me whatever you’re thinking.
CHRIS: Well, first of all, I had to tell my parents I was going to a dance because I was fourteen and they wouldn’t have been hip to [me going to a punk rock show]. Punk rock back then seemed scary. The show was down in this really grimy area of East Hollywood on Melrose. When I got there, there was a big line outside and a car across the street that was on fire. The cops were harassing all the punk kids. Like, I remember they went up to this guy in front of me who had a big, thick mohawk and said, “Hey man. Your hair looks like the hair on my asshole” [laughs]. I was just some dork from the suburbs. I was like, Jesus Christ, this is frightening.
Later, at the show, I slammed to this band called The Lewd, who were a punk band from San Francisco, and I got knocked out. I took an elbow to the side of my head and went down like a sack of potatoes. I was knocked unconscious. And when I came to, I didn’t really know where I was. I was scared. At that point the L.A. riot police came into the show to try to shut it down. That was a common occurrence back then. I was just so freaked out. But it was an awesome experience. I was kind of hooked after that because something about the scariness of it was kind of intriguing. It was fun to be scared.
That feels like a very outgoing story, but when I think about the Chris that I’ve known for over 30 years, I think of someone who is more unassuming than that. Were you a little more wild as a kid?
CHRIS: No! I was a shy kid. I was a totally shy kid. I didn’t drink either. I’d never even had a beer at that point. And that’s an important point because once I actually started drinking a little bit later, punk shows became a lot more fun—mostly because you kind of looked like you were more fearless, you know? Right before I got into punk, I was more of a preppy kid. I hung out with the preppy kids at school, the Polo shirts and that whole thing. I discovered punk bands like the Adolescents and stuff like that because they played them on Rodney on the ROQ here in L.A. And I liked it. So I started buying some of the records and meeting some of the people. I was still a quiet, unassuming, nerdy kid, but it was fun to be able to attach yourself to something that was cool. Or at least cool by association, in a way.
I guess I’ve always been the quiet type, the stoic one in the background. That was always my thing. And that’s probably the guy you knew back in the day. I don’t how you were with your band, but with Sense Field, somebody had to be the de facto leader, right? I didn’t want to be, but sometimes it was like you almost had to be because everybody else was so fucking scattered and nobody else wanted to take the reins. It was just totally dysfunctional. So I’d be like, “OK, fuck. I will just be the adult here. I don’t want to be, but I will.” That’s what they used to call me on tour: The Captain.
One thing I’ve started to notice lately is that whenever we talk about Gen X kids who got into punk, it feels there are two routes: The younger side of the Gen X spectrum, a lot of them came into punk through metal. But the older folks in the Gen X spectrum, a lot of them came in through new wave.
CHRIS: That’s me.
Right. Whenever you talk about your early love of music, you mention bands like the B-52s or the Go-Go’s—and I think that’s meaningful because these bands were actually kind of joyful. It was the epitome of fun. How would you say those bands informed your early relationship with punk?
CHRIS: Before I discovered some of the new wave bands—like B-52s, Go-Go’s, Adam and the Ants, Devo, and that kind of stuff—I wasn’t really into music at all. I was the youngest of four, so [my older siblings] all had music that they already listened to. Some of it was good. But I just wasn’t really into it. It wasn’t until I heard some of those bands that I got excited about music, because it sounded fun, it was weird, and it felt like it was mine. That was the music of the time. Punk was going on, but that was still a little more underground, so it would take some more time for me to find out about it.
Some people say that new wave was just the commercial, family-friendly version of punk, that it was watered down. But a lot of the early new wave stuff was very weird! You cannot tell me that Devo is not a completely bizarre, avant-garde, and confrontational band. As were the B-52s in their own way. They seemed like outsiders, and I felt that because I wasn’t the cool kid either. I was the quiet kid that nobody noticed. So it felt like something to latch onto that set me apart.
The other thing I think about when I think about the B-52s or the Go-Go’s is that there is a clear female and queer aspect to what both of those bands did. Were you conscious of that?
CHRIS: I can remember playing B-52s for some people and how my “normal” friends were put off by Fred Scheider’s vocals [laughs]. They had somewhat of an affectation to them, I guess. But that didn’t bother me. I thought it was cool and different and I liked that about it. I was somebody seeking an identity, you know? There was something mysterious about what they were doing, and it felt like the people were strange and outsidery, so I felt a kinship with them in that way. I don’t know what specifically appealed to me, but I liked that it was fun and colorful and joyful—all those kinds of things. At the same time, I also liked a lot of scary music after that. I mean, one of my favorite bands was Discharge, and they are completely different from that.
Sometimes I feel like people look at me like I’m weird when I talk about how I was into new wave. They’re like, “OK, yeah, whatever, dork.” Because I do talk about that kind of stuff! When I first got into the B-52s, it was during the Wild Planet album, which is their second one. I used to play that every day. Literally, I would come home, put it on, and play it every day. It just seemed like it was my thing. My brother had Bread and America. My older sister had Bowie and stuff like that. And I loved Bowie, but Wild Planet was mine.
If I put this inside of your musical trajectory, it makes sense. Because when you started Reason to Believe in 1987, I wouldn’t say that you guys were the most hypermasculine band in hardcore [laughs]. Obviously, you gravitated more towards bands like 7 Seconds. Is that how you thought about what you wanted to do?
CHRIS: It’s funny because when I hear it now, I hear the 7 Seconds influence, but that is totally not what I was trying to do! But it’s so obvious when I hear it now. I liked 7 Seconds, but I wasn’t trying to do that. I’ve just never really been into that macho knuckledragger kind of music. That’s not my thing. People would make fun of me sometimes. I remember even Jon [Bunch] and his friends, when I would put on music in the car that was some of the weirder L.A. punk stuff that leaned a little more feminine—or maybe there was a gay element, I don’t know—but they would rag on me for that. I was just like, “You guys don’t know shit. This is the good stuff. You’ll figure it out one day” [laughs]. And they did, later.
I always said that Reason to Believe didn’t fit the mold. I mean, we played fast and we played hardcore, but it was definitely on the melodic side. It’s funny. Sometimes I wish we were more contrived in the way we went about making music because I would get envious of other bands for going for a thing. They had an audience in mind. And I don’t think we ever really thought about the audience. We just hoped an audience would find us. We did whatever felt good in the moment, whether it was cool or not. I mean, I don’t know if you can hear it on the Reason to Believe album, but Jon and I were listening to a lot of Dickies records and stuff like that, and at the time, I wanted to write hardcore songs that could maybe bring in some of those elements.
How long were you friends with Bunch before Reason to Believe?
CHRIS: We had him sing on a really rough demo in ‘87, and I probably knew him for a couple of years by then. He and a friend of mine met a friend of his at a show and then bonded over their love for SSD—even though, at this point, SSD were in their metal phase. But they were like, “We don’t care! We love SSD!” [laughs]. So I ended up hooking up with some of Jon’s friends and started playing drums in their bands, because drums was my first instrument. There was a band called Active Response, one called Persistence; it was all very posi-core. It wasn’t until Reason to Believe that I tried to play guitar.
Jon used to get up sometimes at band practices for the other bands and jump on to sing. And I would notice that he would actually try to sing notes and hold notes and things like that—maybe because he was into 7 Seconds and Scream and stuff like that. And I thought, OK. That’s what I want. I didn’t want somebody who was just going to spit out words. So eventually I did a little recording of my own, this little crappy demo, and I asked him to sing on it. That became the first Reason to Believe demo, which is very, very rough. But I had the pleasure of hearing it the other day for the first time in 30 years, and it was like, holy shit. It’s so clear that Jon had never really sung a full song before. It’s very apparent. And Revelation may end up putting that thing out, which is scary. I’m torn because it feels like, do I owe it to Jon to not let the world hear this? [laughs] Do I just let the world hear what a sixteen-year-old version of Jon sounded like, or should I just say, fuck it? It is what it is. It’s a snapshot in time of what he did when he was just starting out.
I wanted to talk about this transformation that happened between Reason to Believe and Sense Field, because whatever happened between those two bands must have been major. Just to contextualize, I only recently discovered Sense Field’s first three-song demo, which I didn’t even know was a thing…
CHRIS: …of Sense Field?
Yes. It was a three-song tape recorded on a four-track with “Trip Poem” on it, “Today and Tomorrow,” and another song that never came out anywhere else.
CHRIS: I honestly don’t even remember that [laughs]. Maybe I blocked it out.
Listening to it was kind of a revelation because it’s so different from even the two self-released CDs that came later. Like, this version of “Trip Poem” sounds like 10,000 Maniacs [laughs]. I guess I’m just trying to imagine what the internal conversation was like when you started Sense Field, because this demo is wild.
CHRIS: I think that we were doing Reason to Believe and we just kind of felt like that [‘80s hardcore] world was dying. Rodney [Sellars] had recently come back into the band, and he has a different background than us. He was into punk, too, but he was also into Pink Floyd and all this other shit. The rest of us weren’t. So a lot of that was his influence. “Trip Poem” and “Today” were his; a lot of those songs were his. We kind of deferred to him in the early days a lot. But we were developing that stuff in a bubble. We weren’t playing out live at all. We never did anything. It was all done in a practice room, totally in isolation. It wasn’t until much later that we started reintegrating ourselves into the hardcore scene, and that’s why we were such a weird fit when we got there. It’s almost like we went into hibernation and just came up with this stuff that had no connection to our past, no connection to anything. We weren’t doing anything that had any basis in what was going on outside of our little world—and it showed.
I’ve talked about this before, and it bears repeating because I don’t know that it’s ever happened in exactly the same way, but that fulcrum between the ‘80s and the ‘90s—between the first two full decades of hardcore specifically—for me and for a lot of people, it felt like when the clock struck midnight on 1990, everybody was just lost. We didn’t know what the fuck was going on anymore. Everyone started growing their hair out or wondering why we were still straightedge or just having this identity crisis that happened en masse.
CHRIS: That’s absolutely true. It felt like the party was over for punk and hardcore; all of that stuff just sort of disintegrated and nothing had coalesced yet into a new thing yet so there was a major identity crisis. All the late ‘80s bands seemed to be morphing—like Uniform Choice, who we toured with, they wanted to be The Cult. 7 Seconds had kind of become U2 in some respects. You kind of forget that everybody was adrift.
Sense Field didn’t try to take the early stuff we were doing back into the hardcore world. We just thought, “All right. We’re on our own now.” We just figured we were trying to do something from scratch, and that we didn’t have a scene to fall back on.
Tell me about that period for a second, because it feels really drastic to retreat from the only community you ever knew. Where exactly did you see yourselves existing?
CHRIS: I don’t know. I think we just thought that we were doing something so different from what we had done before that nobody in that world would accept it, or they would think it was lame. So we were like, “Let’s not even try that because they’ll just hate it anyway.” We used to play random weeknight club dates around Hollywood. We’d play to five people on a Tuesday. Those early days were all about begging our friends to come out and see us because we were determined to make our way without relying on our old world—mainly because we believed those people would think we sucked. We really didn’t think hardcore kids would take to it. Little did we know that some of our softest stuff was actually the stuff that some of the old hardcore crowd really started liking.
How did that change? What made you realize that you were wrong?
CHRIS: I don’t remember what show it was, but we got booked on more of a hardcore show. It wasn’t like everyone liked us, but there were people who liked it. And it felt like home; it was the world we came from. Suddenly it just made sense—like, why are we trying to get away from this? Why are we fighting this? We had to have enough faith in what we were doing. And once we did that, it started to click. That first little five-song CD made its way to Revelation, and the people there liked it. But we really went about this the hard way.
You had to have been aware of the way Sense Field was perceived during the Building era, though. There was this persistent narrative about how going to a Sense Field show was like a “religious experience.” I heard that all the time.
CHRIS: See, I never heard any of that! [laughs] I mean, I was aware that we’d gotten more popular and that things seemed to be coming together more, but I always felt like we were going out there and playing like it was us versus the crowd. I’m not saying it was hostile, or that we were going to war or something, but just that… There were always people to be won over. I felt like we needed to re-prove ourselves every time, or even win people over when it was our own damn show. And maybe that’s just a weirdness in me, that I couldn’t just enjoy a good thing. They say you never know when you’re in the good times until years later and you realize, “Oh shit. I should have enjoyed that more.” I never did. Those beginning years kind of scarred me to some extent.
One of my most indelible memories with Jon, which I’ve written about before, is from when we were on tour together and he came into the Texas is the Reason van on a drive. You guys had just signed to Warner, things were going great, and I said to Jon, “What happens if the band doesn’t make it? Where do you go from here?” He just looked at me like I had asked the most ridiculous thing. He said, “We will make it. We’ve worked too hard. We’ve put everything we have into this.” I mean, talk about confidence. Or maybe it was more this sense of speaking into the ether to try to make it real. Am I to take it from what you’re telling me that this wasn’t a position you necessarily shared with him?
CHRIS: No. Honestly, Jon was the true believer. Jon was the impetus for the whole thing. He’s the one who drove the ship. We did a lot of the things we did because Jon believed that we could do it. I’m much more cynical. I’m a product of my upbringing. I’m used to disappointment. So a lot of times I was just like, “OK, I’m going to believe you.” If it were up to me, we would have never gotten out of the garage. Jon was the one who connected with people. He was just one of those people who had a positive outlook and just believed—whether it was justified or not. Jon was a spiritual guy, you know, and that kind of lends itself to this kind of belief without evidence. It was faith. And maybe some of it was that he wanted to will this into existence. But his momentum is what carried us along. And I must have believed on some level, because I put my faith in him and what he believed in spite of my own skeptical nature. We wouldn’t have done anything if it wasn’t for Jon’s belief in us.
If I’m honest, I remember telling my band after he left the van that day that I was concerned about Jon. I just thought that position is a very difficult one to take. Growing up in New York, we knew all the bands that signed, and we knew how difficult it was when some of the people involved realized that it wasn’t going to go anywhere. That realization can be difficult to accept. Did that true believer thing concern you as well?
CHRIS: It absolutely was concerning. Jon had a childlike attitude towards some things. That believer thing can be a very dangerous thing, because when it doesn’t happen—what happens? And when it didn’t happen for us, when we decided we were going to break up the band in our last go-around, Jon kind of went off the rails from where he was. When we were a band, Jon was always super focused, super professional. You remember him. He was bringing his juicer on the road, he was taking care of his voice as best as he could. He didn’t drink, he didn’t smoke, he didn’t do any of it. But once we realized this was the last go-around, he just let it all go. That’s how he dealt with it. It was just like, OK, fuck it, I’m going to do it all now—and that’s not healthy. And it wasn’t healthy for him. I never believed the way he did, so I didn’t have that far to fall. It was a disappointment, yes, but in my heart, I knew it was a long-shot. It was a win-the-lottery kind of long-shot.
At what point did you start thinking about a Plan B?
CHRIS: As soon as we stopped doing music I had that come-to-Jesus moment of: What the hell am I going to do now? I didn’t want to end up like so many ex-musicians working a minimum wage job, just toiling away. So I went back to school and finished my degree and got a regular nine-to-five job that paid better. And that’s what I do today.
It’s funny because it seems like the smart thing to do, but a lot of people were disappointed in me for doing it, you know? Even my own family: “You’re not still going to go after music? What are you, giving up on your dream?!” It’s like, fuck, I thought I was doing the responsible thing here! [laughs] By that point I was in my mid-thirties. I wasn’t a kid anymore. I know that sounds young to me now, but at the time, in that world, it felt old. And it felt like we’d given it our best shot. It felt like we’d better get out now.
Which is completely strange to me because not even a year before you broke up, you actually did have a minor hit in “Save Yourself.” Were you just so fucking exhausted that it didn’t even register by that point?
CHRIS: The last tour we did was exhausting. It wasn’t fun anymore. It was a grind. And up until that point, it had always been fun and exciting to me, you know? It’s weird in retrospect. The label put resources into “Save Yourself.” It actually did really well in certain regions and became one of the top songs on a lot of radio stations around the country. But that’s not everything, right? Fans from radio aren’t really fans. They come and go real quick. As long as your song is on the radio, that’s great. But as soon as that goes away, those fans are gone. It just felt like it was time. From the time we started to that point in time, it was maybe a dozen years. It seemed like an eternity. It wasn’t going to happen.
Was Jon fully on board with breaking up?
CHRIS: He agreed, but he started to unravel a bit. There was this whole idea of, “Oh my god, I’m not going to be able to do music for the rest of my life.” Making the last record was really difficult. It was pretty much just him and me trying to make that happen by the end. You could see that it was weighing on his mind because he wasn’t taking care of himself anymore. He was partying really hard. He went out to clubs all the time and did everything under the sun. He just wasn’t the same focused and hardworking Jon that he’d always been. And I think that’s because he realized it was coming to an end, and he went into a kind of self-destructive phase. It was hard to watch, you know? There was a lot of conflict between the two of us then. Sadly, we were never close again after that, and we actually didn’t even speak for many years after that.
Were the Revelation anniversary shows the only reunions that you ever played?
CHRIS: Yes. We did two Revelation shows, one in L.A. and one in Chicago.
Were there still open wounds there?
CHRIS: The first Revelation show in L.A. was really nice. Everybody was really excited and it was like no time had passed. Jon was on his best behavior, and it was all cool, and it felt good. But then after that, he got the bug again for playing. Up until that point, he had been on a path where he went back to school and he was going to be a teacher. It seemed like he had put the band stuff aside and was onto the next phase of his life. But after we did that first reunion show, he was like, “Oh. I want to play again. I want to do that again.” And by the time we did the second reunion, he was a little bit back to that Jon that was there at the end of Sense Field, where it wasn’t that comfortable to be around him. Honestly, I sometimes think doing that first reunion show was the worst thing for him. He was on a better path before that. I wish we had never done that show because that was when he got the bug again and when he decided to do it again. That was his undoing.
The first band I was ever in, Fountainhead, was such a formative memory for me. But our singer, Bill Kiernan, killed himself in 2013. It created such a mark on that entire memory for me—and we weren’t together for a fraction of the time that you made music with Jon. I’m wondering what your memory of Sense Field is at this point.
CHRIS: It’s kind of problematic for me in a lot of ways. It’s not like I run away from it, but I don’t latch onto it. There were a lot of great memories with Sense Field, but you know, I never listen to it. I can’t even remember the last time I heard a Sense Field song. So in a weird way, it’s not like I flee from it—and it’s not like I don’t identify with it either—but I feel uncomfortable when I hear it. I don’t like to talk about it much with random people. I don’t know why that is. People tell me, “You should just be proud of what you did. You had some success and be proud of it.” But I guess I don’t take that to heart. I probably have an unhealthy relationship with it, compared to other people who are a little more well-adjusted.
It’s interesting because that doesn’t even sound like cynicism to me. It sounds more like an unwillingness to own the good stuff.
CHRIS: Yeah, I know. There’s obviously something inside of me that has a hard time doing that and I don’t know what it is. I used to work for this nonprofit organization where we had to do one of these psychological tests, and it pinpointed that the idea of being publicly embarrassed was my Achilles’ heel. That was the thing I tried to avoid at all costs. That’s why it’s ironic that I ever became a guy who got on stage and played guitar. This is not my personality. I am not that guy. I don’t seek that kind of adulation out of it, or that notoriety. It’s only because I love music so much that I wanted to partake in this.
I came up with the idea to do this interview when I realized that Jon’s birthday was coming up, so I wanted to end by asking if you could share a memory or a story about Jon that you feel best represents the person you remember.
CHRIS: That’s a tough one. Jon was a complicated guy. But I’ll just tell one anecdote about Jon’s belief, and how that could carry him through—and how it could almost take on a life of its own.
There was a point when we were on Warner Bros. where we were in a holding pattern. We were in this weird limbo between the tour we did with you [in 1996] and a year where we were just demoing songs and spending too much time not doing anything. So Jon and I just decided that we were going to go to CMJ that year. For the fuck of it. Just go to New York, spend a few days there, and go to shows and stuff. We went there and we didn’t have credentials. I paid for the flights and I think we stayed at our ex-manager’s house, but we didn’t have anything. But Jon just decided. He said, “Fuck it. Let’s just act like we belong here and we’ll get into any show we want.” So we actually did that. We just walked into every show, with no credentials, no nothing, just acting like we belonged—and it worked. We would walk right by everybody and they’d be like, “I guess they’re supposed to be here.” I cannot believe that worked. But that was Jon’s make-your-own-destiny, will it into existence, Zen-Jedi shit. He believed against all odds, and sometimes, it worked.
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This was a really moving read at times Norman. You did a brilliant job of approaching an undoubtedly difficult topic of conversation with your usual sensitivity and grace. Well done.
Lovely to hear from Chris about this and to see that demo - which I have never seen/heard before. I love Jon, the last time I saw him was with War Generation and even though he was having a blast playing - off stage you could see he was having a rough go of it. I miss his voice and I'm going to listen to some SF later today. Thank you Norm.