In Conversation: Jason Beebout of Samiam
Over 35 years and ten albums, Samiam have earned their legendary status. But staying together, as Jason Beebout tells it, can be a test of will.
Whenever we talk about the mid-’90s punk rock major-label gold rush, we tend to forget that there were multiple outcomes. Success ranged from the relative obscurity of Shudder to Think to the enduring ubiquity of Blink-182. Getting dropped was a band-destroying disaster for Into Another, but for Jimmy Eat World, it was an opportunity to make a platinum-selling record without label interference. Literally anything could happen. Even before Samiam’s Atlantic Records debut came out, there were already signs that things were amiss: Singer Jason Beebout recounted one such sign in the Autumn 1994 issue of Anti-Matter, when he told me about the way “Stepson”—a song he’d written about the complicated feelings he had towards his stepfather—had been so ruthlessly edited in the studio that it brought him to tears. But he was still optimistic. Clumsy was a great record then, and it still holds up today.
Sitting down for this conversation, a good 29 years since the first one, I realize how rare it is to be able to look back on a time with the clarity of a previously recorded interview. For the most part, Jason is still the same softhearted, easy-to-love person I became friends with so long ago. But as we talked about Samiam—the band he’s fronted for the last 35 years—it was also clear that time and experience has worn on him. Which is to say that there is another, far more subtle outcome of that major-label boom that I hadn’t considered until now: Some of us just kept going with our guards way the fuck up.
The funniest thing about you being late to this interview is that in the first interview we did for Anti-Matter, I asked you what you would consider the most important thing I should know about you if we were to become friends, and your answer was, “That I’m pretty much a flake and not to expect a lot from me. I’ve been chronically late ever since the third grade. I was the only kid in the third grade that was late every single day.” So I guess we can file that in the “haven’t changed” column.
JASON: I’m generally pretty punctual now! [laughs] Maybe it’s because this is a part of my life that’s related to my younger self, so I revert. But for work or for my kids, I’m like five minutes early for everything at least. My kids are insane about being on time.
How old are they?
JASON: They both just had a birthday. Jackson turned fifteen and Phoebe turned twelve.
I remember reading a story once about you being fourteen years old and living right outside of San Francisco and just hating your life, or at least feeling like all you wanted was to be anywhere else. That’s how old your kids are now.
JASON: Oh God, yeah. It’s kind of funny because where I grew up, it was a place that no one—not even people in the Bay Area—really knew. You’d tell people where you were from and they would go, “What?” For some reason El Sobrante became notable for being that place. People have heard of it now. You can see San Francisco from El Sobrante, but back when I lived there, most of the kids I grew up with had never been to San Francisco. It was that weird.
I have two godchildren in their twenties now, but I remember having this weird thought when they were your kids’ age that they wouldn’t have survived some of the things that I survived at their age. Do you ever get thoughts like that?
JASON: Yeah. You know, I wouldn’t call me and my wife helicopter parents, but we’ve been much more attentive and protective. [My children] didn’t have to grow up like I did. My parents never knew where the hell I was and there was never really much of a feeling that they cared. It wasn’t an issue that mattered. For me, it was like, once I crossed that threshold of getting out of the house on Saturday morning, I was off and I could do whatever I wanted for the rest of the day until I came home for dinner. This was before cell phones, of course. Kids now have a cell phone leash. I’m sad to say, but when my kids are out, I will look at Find My Phone and just see where they’re at. I guess it’s nice to have when you’re paranoid—and I’ve become more paranoid the older I’ve gotten—but yeah, there’s no comparison.
I went to CBGB for the first time when I was thirteen. People always ask me, “What did your parents say?” But it was like, they didn’t care about me. That’s why I was there [laughs].
JASON: Since they were born, cumulatively, my kids have maybe spent 24 hours without us—unless they were away at summer camp or something. They just haven’t spent that much time home alone because my wife and I are always home. If we’re not at work, we’re home. One of us is usually with them. Part of that is a sense of duty, but part of that is also what I want to do. It’s a weird thought, but when I go on tour for more than a week, I get sad. I get homesick. I miss my family. I want to know what’s going on here at home. It’s like a pendulum swing from what I grew up with.
There’s a part in our original interview where I asked if there was anyone from your youth who had left a major impression on you and you mentioned a drama teacher. It seems crazy to me that I didn’t follow up on this at all. Like, how did you wind up hanging out with your drama teacher as an adult?
JASON: His name was Roger Anderson. I was a shitty high school student. I stopped going to class in my sophomore year for the most part, so I got almost straight F’s just because I wouldn’t show up. But then, in my senior year, I got into drama and I fucking loved it. He was smart enough to see that I wasn’t happy, and that I wasn’t well-adjusted, and he just totally tapped into my brain and excited me. It made me want to be there every day. I would go to his class all day long. I would skip everything else and just spend the entire day in drama, and he didn’t care. He was fucking great.
When I got out of high school, it wasn’t like I was going to get a job or go to college. I was just playing music, so he was like, “Come back and be in the next play that we’re doing.” So I became this rando weirdo showing up and doing high school plays. He gave me a lot of confidence that I didn’t have. I was uncomfortable a lot when I was growing up, and he made me feel OK about that—which was fucking magic. He died shortly after that, and it’s not like I went on to an acting career, but he was just a person who actually took me aside and put some energy into me.
I would say the same thing about Tim Yohannon. He did the same thing. He made all of us, at that age, feel like we weren’t just useless non-jock, non-conformist suburban kids. He made us feel like there was other shit out there that’s way cooler, and that it’s OK to not have your shit figured out yet. That’s helped me go forward with the mindset of like, “Just keep your options open out there, because there’s lots of weird shit that might come your way that you might find really fascinating.”
What do you think captured your imagination about drama?
JASON: It’s funny because it was actually regimented. I never had any kind of boundaries growing up; it was more just punishment and being ignored. But with that class, there was someone who was the director, and you had to do things the way the director wanted you to do it. It was challenging. It was stuff that when you did it well, you felt it instantly. [Mr. Anderson] would just put you in a position to do something that made you feel like, “Oh my God, I just fucking did that and I feel like I succeeded.” The classroom would applaud and the kids that you were in class with would give you all kinds of props and it was amazing. That’s not something I got a lot of when I was that age.
I’ve often talked about how the first time I walked on stage and it felt like people were legitimately clapping for me, I was like, “I am doing this for the rest of my life!” [laughs]. Because, really, I’d never ever felt that before.
JASON: At the same time, it can feel completely embarrassing. It’s like being in the room when people are singing “Happy Birthday” to you. My generation is like, “No, thank you. No, no, no applause.”
OK, but that attitude reminds me of something else about that interview we did. We spoke in the summer of 1994. It was the era of Clumsy, and the vibe for your band was strong at that time. It felt like you’d have every reason at that point to be upbeat. But while we were speaking, you kept doing this thing that I wrote about in Anti-Matter recently—that self-deprecating thing.
JASON: That was necessary to survive in that period of time. You had to have that. Anything that was even slightly above “self-dep” would feel like bragging, and that’s uncomfortable. I mean, I see people who are my age or from my generation, and they do it to the point where it sounds a lot like just begging for a compliment. Like, “Oh, you’re not terrible! You’re great!” But it wasn’t necessarily false, you know?
Then tell me this. Twenty-nine years later, you’re in a different place with your life now. You can look back at that moment. What were you really feeling when that record came out?
JASON: I felt like there was a validation—and a validation of what, I don’t even think I knew. Because I didn’t feel like I even knew what I was doing. I didn’t feel like I’d grown so much or that I was such a better songwriter or we were such a better band that we deserved to get more attention or have this big machine behind us. But there was this validation of feeling like, “Oh, even your shitty little band is worthy of note. So now this big machine is going to try and get your music out to a lot more people and you’re going to be considered legit.”
It was kind of what you were counting on when you’re first starting to play music—like, you don’t have to be a virtuoso. You don’t have to be a lifelong songwriter. You don’t have to be Crosby, Stills & Nash to make a record, to play on stage, to entertain people. There’s a lot more to it. And there are a lot of people that would prefer to see whatever hack job I can throw out there than Crosby, Stills & Nash, you know? So it was cool. It was like, that’s a gamble. Maybe I can throw some chords together and sing some songs, and maybe people are gonna come see it and they might like it. So to have someone go, “Hey, we want to sign you to Atlantic Records,” it was like, wow. It wasn’t all a fucking joke. It makes you feel like what you’re doing is valuable. That’s what I felt then.
You had to be aware that the kind of cachet that Samiam had, even before signing with Atlantic, was enviable. Samiam were in that column of bands that people spoke about with reverence—game-changing, life-changing bands. Clumsy crystallized that for a lot of people, but it was already there.
JASON: But that just means you had a narrower appeal. That means you had something that people thought was unique. And that always meant you were doomed. People fucking loved Green Day from the day they first started playing music. I don’t care who walked in the room—if it was a jock or a sorority sister or a punk rocker who listened to Corrosion of Conformity, whatever. They would all go, “God, that’s a great band.” Same with Operation Ivy. But that’s never something we were.
I’m definitely talking about something different. Like, those bands were popular and people loved them, but I’m talking about people who were emotionally invested in your music, in your lyrics, in a way that I can say with certainty that I’ve never heard anyone ever say to me about an Operation Ivy song. It’s a deeper connection.
JASON: I mean, yeah, I guess it’s obviously a different angle that we’re coming from. And maybe if it’s not instantly catchy, if you pay attention, you might find something you get attached to or that you relate with, that you can feel deeply. But at the same time, when you walk into a room and you start playing a song and everyone in the room starts dancing, that’s also pretty visceral. Maybe it’s a lot more of a slower burn for whatever we do, but I don’t want to say that people feel what we do more deeply because I don’t think that’s fair or true. I think people get really affected by Green Day or Operation Ivy or other bands on a different level. But it’s a more universal appeal.
I don’t think we’ve ever tried to appeal to a more broad audience. Maybe sometimes we’re influenced by things we hear and we do things that, in some cases, sound more commercial. But we’re not capable of pulling that off. We’re still not quite there. That’s not “self-dep” by the way, that’s just being analytical [laughs].
It’s interesting that you specifically bring up Green Day and Operation Ivy, because I’d consider [your old band] Isocracy to be a part of that Gilman Street trinity.
JASON: Isocracy was entertaining, but I think it bothered a lot of people that we got a lot more attention in Maximum Rock’n’Roll than some other bands that I think were more musically interesting than we were. I wouldn’t say we were influential musically in any way at all. People tell me how much they love Isocracy and I’ll be like, “Wait. Did you actually go to a show? You’re not saying that because you bought the 7-inch.” I think there’s probably only a thousand people who came to see an Isocracy show ever in the history of the band—total.
Obviously, Green Day and Op Ivy and even Rancid for that matter, they’re great and they’re your friends and I’m sure you’re happy for their success. But were your feelings ever more complicated than that?
JASON: Oh, totally. They still are. I’m super jealous. I always have been. I’ve been jealous of bands that aren’t as good as us, but that have that ability to just have what they have—the bravado and the talent. Even now, I’m fucking 53 years old. I can sing pretty good. But I’m not the most scintillating person to watch crossing left to right on stage. I’m not jumping off the drumset and twirling a disco ball. I’ve never been able to do that. Bands that do that, I’m always like, “Damn, that’s a fucking exciting performer right there, man.” That’s fun to watch. So that’s something I’ve always been jealous of. When they got huge it was just like, “See? They’re fucking great.” I’ve felt like it was a shortcoming [of mine].
One of the things we couldn’t foresee in 1994 is that after Clumsy, you’d go on to record a follow up for Atlantic that they wound up holding in limbo for at least two years. Forget the band for a moment. Tell me about that period for you, as a person.
JASON: I’ve never been much of a forward-looking person. I’ve always been in the moment. Living in the moment has never been difficult for me. But especially then, what was happening at the moment was all I could focus on. Sergie [Loobkoff] worried a lot about what was going on with the next record. But we were still looking forward and going around the world playing shows. As much as I wanted the record to come out, we were still playing the songs from that record so it didn’t matter to me that much.
I don’t want to say never, but for the most part, I would say that 98 percent of the time, I haven’t been paid for [album] recordings. So it wasn’t like I was losing money because the record wasn’t out. It didn’t matter that much to me if the record was in stores. At this point, I’m almost offended when I see my records in the store and I see the price of the record. Fifty dollars for a stupid fucking record now? It just seems dumb when music is basically fucking free now for anyone who wants to put it out.
Sergie said in an interview once that he considers Samiam to have broken up in 2000, and then he talked about how you’ve kind of done more than most bands who are actually “together” since then.
JASON: Yeah, well, he—as well as the rest of us—is just too chickenshit to quit. You don’t want to be the first one to quit. Like, people [in our band] have died, you know? We’re at the point where we’ve lost members to death.
2000 was also the year that James [Brogan] quit. Was that the end of an era for you?
JASON: No, no. I mean, as much as I enjoyed that experience—going on tour with Green Day or being on Atlantic or having a big-time New York manager, that was neat. But along with that came shit that was really embarrassing. Like going on tour with Creed or doing dumb fucking radio shows, fucking awful shit like that. That was a part of the industry that James was interested in; he wanted to be in that big-time part of music. He actually saw Led Zeppelin play. He comes from a different era. He’s only a few years older than me, but he’d been playing in punk rock bands longer than I had. I think he had different ideas. He wanted to be in management—band management and music management stuff.
I was more raised musically by Tim Yohannon and Larry Livermore. Coming from the suburbs of El Sobrante and finding a whole new perspective at Gilman Street and around town in Berkeley. That’s what excited me and made me want to be a different kind of person. So when James quit, that part of the band started to fade a little bit, like the whole aspiration of being more mainstream faded and it felt more OK to just roll back into that Gilman mindset.
In our first interview, you described yourself as “idiotically optimistic.” Which is interesting because so far in this conversation, I feel like you’re more hardened.
JASON: That’s the cynicism coming through thirty-something years of being in the grinder, of just being a dork that started a band with a couple of friends that had never played instruments before and having the audacity to go up and play songs in front of people. And then going from there to where I’m at now, it was a long progression, but there has never been any point where I’ve been like, “Now I got it! Now I know what I’m doing!”
But that feels like you’re erasing 30 years of actual experience. You’re not that “dork” anymore.
JASON: But being that person and coming from that frame of mind and then going through the ringer of this awful industry shit, where everywhere you turn someone is doing something gross to make money off of you… It just makes you not want to do it. I don’t really want to participate in that shit party, you know? I really like playing shows in front of people in towns where we have a fun time. I don’t want to go someplace just because the industry thinks you’re supposed to go there and it sucks. That’s fucking stupid and it’s not satisfying. I have more fun playing at my bar in Oakland two nights in a row for the same 150 people than I do playing at some big festival with some bigger bands and knowing that there are probably nineteen people that came to see us.
One of the stories that stands out in the original interview, and the one that people bring up most often, is the story about recording “Stepson.” I don’t know if you remember anything about it, but I asked you about the last time you cried, and you told me how you were in the studio making that song, and that there was this motion to edit the song, to cut things out, and you were getting really emotional about it because you created this thing that you felt had a purpose in its original form—and it wasn’t that anymore. Obviously, that song meant something to you.
JASON: It did, yeah. It was something I was going through at the moment, but also, even though that record didn’t really have a theme, there were definitely some songs that fit into a theme and I felt like I wanted them to make sense in my mind. So when that got changed, it just made me mad. I never really addressed those feelings or thoughts [about my stepdad] before. I mean, they were always there, but it was never something I had expressed to anyone before.
On a more major level, cutting it up was belittling the process that I used to write the song. It was like my point wasn’t as important as the box that it had to fit in, and I think that on some level, it was like, dude. This isn’t a fucking KROQ number-one with a bullet song. This is a song that I wanted to write that had special meaning to me and purpose for me. If someone likes it that way, awesome. If they don’t like it that way, I don’t really fucking care. It’s not going to get anyone rich. It’s not going to become a hit. I was aware of that, so it felt ridiculous to follow along with that false process.
Why didn’t you dig your heels in?
JASON: I didn’t feel like I had the place. That was the magical thing about that whole process. It was like, “Oh my God, you’re in the same studio that all these other big bands recorded in!” Or “You’re on a major label now. They’re spending all this money to record you and these people know what they’re doing. And they have a system, and now you’re a part of that. You’ve got to play along.” Almost right away I knew I didn’t like that process. I mean, I knew the guys in Green Day were kind of going through the same shit, but you’d never notice it because their songs seem kind of polished to begin with. Even when they were fourteen, they seemed polished. But I heard about the process with Rob Cavallo, and he was making them do things differently.
I was excited. I was excited because I felt like I was being given an opportunity to do something that I’d always wanted to do on a level that would allow me to do it all the time and not only as a hobby. So I was really eager to play along. But not so much anymore. I don’t think I’m that cynical, but I just don’t like bullshit. I worked really hard my whole fucking life to not succumb to a nine-to-five job because I wanted to maintain that opportunity to keep doing things the way I want to do it. So why fuck that up by falling into some other package deal?
I mean, I survived. I have a beautiful family that I really love. I’m happy where I am. And it’s not because I’m fucking loaded; it’s a constant struggle to maintain that. But I’m willing to do it because I get to do things the way I want to do them. And every time I get pushed into a situation where it’s boxed in or regimented, I fucking bristle. It makes me different. It makes me not who I am. But that means you’ve got to have a lot of moving parts and some weird things that don’t always work out. And it’s a little harder to do that when you have kids because they are counting on you not to be a fuck up. So I have to keep that in the front of my mind, and then also make myself available for those other stupid ideas that I want to continue with.
It does feel like you’re carrying that experience with you. There’s a heaviness there. So maybe this goes back to how you said Sergie was too chickenshit to quit. Are you actually the one too chickenshit to quit?
JASON: Obviously, yeah [laughs]. I’m not going to be the first! You quit. I’ll burn it down before I quit.
Do you feel like you take it for granted?
JASON: Not at all… I mean, I guess I do on some level because if I took it too seriously, I think it would have been gone a long time ago. If I really put a lot of weight on everything that happens musically or with relationships in the band or with the history of the band, I would have quit a long time ago. But if I don’t put too much emotional value or energy into it, it’s just a hobby.
When you released “Lights Out Little Hustler,” you put out this statement about the lyrics of the song where you say something similar. You described the song as being “about becoming emotionally detached and creating obstacles to keep people from being close to you.”
JASON: If you put all your thoughts and feelings into something and it fails, you’re crushed, right? And then what do you do next? There are a lot of decisions to be made right there. But I hate decisions. Just kind of skating along… that’s way more comfortable [to me]. I think if you put too much pressure on any one thing, you kind of fuck things up. If we had stayed in the mindset that we were in from ‘94 to 2000, like, “We’re gonna make this fucking work, man! McGathy is going to sell this fucking song and we’re going to be on tour with these fucking bands and people are going to see us and we are going to hit it!”… One, it would be ridiculous. And two, I’d have been miserable. That’s not me. I’m not a go-getter. I’m very passionate about the things that I want to be passionate about until I’m not—and then I don’t want to have to fucking deal with it anymore. I’m happy I had that opportunity and I’m happy that I got to see what that was like. I don’t know what would have happened if suddenly we had put out that record and sold a million copies. But it didn’t. It never has. And I don’t expect that it ever will.
I will say that the one thing I learned from [making Stowaway] was that I can do something that’s going to make me happy if I just take my time. In the past I don’t think I really cared enough to make that happen; I think I just tossed a lot of shit off. But this time, I did a lot of thinking about it and worrying about it. I was very careful about what I put out, and I’m pretty happy with it. I think being self-critical on some level is hard, but if you’re motivated to get to an end result that you’re going to be happy with, then you’re on your own team, you know? Sometimes you get self-critical and you’re just stopping yourself, and that's where I was for a couple of years. It was like, “Don’t even try, dude, because you’re just gonna do something that’s gonna bum you out, you’ll be embarrassed about it for the rest of your life, your kids are gonna laugh at you”—all that kind of stuff. And then I got past that.
I noticed you use the word “embarrassed” a lot. Where is that coming from? Like, who would embarrass you?
JASON: I don’t think anyone would necessarily walk up and go, “That was a stupid song.” It’s just my own expectations. I feel like I know what I’m capable of if I put the effort and time into doing it. But when I don’t, when I just throw something out there, I find that embarrassing. I feel like I should try harder to be more careful about what I present to the world. I don’t think everyone should just record everything they think of and toss it out there.
I’ve spoken with friends that are fathers who have told me that they’ve become way more conscious of the quote-unquote “legacy” they’re leaving to their kids, the breadcrumbs they’re leaving behind that will make them look at their dad in a particular way.
JASON: There is that, for sure, but I’ve always felt this way. I want to be better. I have aspirations of being really good, you know? I don’t try hard enough and that’s embarrassing. It’s embarrassing to know you could do better but you don’t. You’re letting yourself down, and that’s what I call embarrassing. I’m embarrassed by my shallowness. I would like to be a more thoughtful person, and often I’m not.
Samiam has been a band for 35 years. I would think that losing the band at this point would be like losing a loved one.
JASON: I would miss playing. I love seeing the guys in my band, but we don’t live close to each other so it’s not like we hang out. We don’t have band practice. I don’t know if I would see them more if we were broken up. I don’t know. Sergie has had like nine other bands besides Samiam. So has everyone else. I’m the only one who’s been dedicated to this project—or been too afraid or lazy to try anything with anyone else. So I don’t know what I would miss. I don’t know if I would see that as closure, like, “Oh, the band finally died. Good job, you finished something.” Or would I be sad? Would I start something new? I don’t know. I just know that I appreciate that we can still go some places and play a show and be lucky enough to have a decent amount of people show up to watch us play. That’s really fucking fortunate. I don’t know how that happened.
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I just want Jason to know, I love his band so fucking much and they have meant so much to me over the past 30 years. Just saw them in Denver a month back and they were so great. Even with the altitudes.
Thanks for this. Awesome interview. I must've listened to "Sky Flying By" a million times when Soar came out.