Agnostic Front believes in punk unity

By Nate Seltenrich

Back in 1984, four teenage New York punk rockers helped launch a musical revolution. They were called Agnostic Front. Their E.P. Victim in Pain established the band at the forefront of an emerging punk movement called hardcore. Already, their name was written in the annals of hardcore history. And that was just the beginning.

Nine albums and 18 years later, Agnostic Front is still going strong today. Three of the four original members have reunited after a series of line-up changes, and a new album was released last October, entitled Dead Yuppies. Currently, they are touring with T.S.O.L. and the Casualties for Unity Fest 2002, an annual worldwide tour originated and headlined by Agnostic Front that is now in its fourth year.

Sunday, I had the chance to talk with drummer Jimmy Colletti before their show at Slim's in San Francisco.

The Santa Clara: What's the Unity Fest all about?

Colletti: It's about bringing back together the hardcore and punk scenes. It's hardcore punk, it's one music. It's all the same music. Just because a band doesn't sound like another band doesn't mean it's not the same music. You know, Elvis didn't sound like James Brown, or whatever, but it was still rock and roll.

TSC: On the Agnostic Front Web site, you say that South America is your favorite place to play. Why's that?

Colletti: 'Cause I like the lifestyle there the best. They live the way we should live, so I like being there. I love the people, the people are so nice, so great. And just the way they live, it's so much better than how we're living. The way we're supposed to be living in this country is not the way we're living. We're working 90 hours a week. People sitting in front of computer screens in a cubicle, and if you complain about it, someone else is gonna take your job. Down there, getting ahead of everybody else isn't the most important thing. Friends and family are the most important thing, and socializing. I think that's what we're meant to be doing on this earth.

TSC: How did you get into Agnostic Front in the first place?

Colletti: I was in another band called Justified Violence. I was young. I was 15- or 16-years-old. Agnostic Front needed a drummer, and I became the drummer. Everybody knew each other kinda, from the scene, and they were having some tryouts, so I went. Back then there wasn't that many musicians. I was somebody in the scene that actually knew how to play the instrument. That, plus I fit in with the attitude. I may have been younger than everybody else, but I was the new crew at the time.

TSC: Why did you temporarily leave the band?

Colletti: Heavy metal. I don't like metal. The new guitar player Alex wanted to go metal, the producer wanted to go metal. I really had no say. I was a young kid. I didn't like it. The scenes were combining at the time. Like Slayer and Metallica started hanging out in the hardcore scene and started wearing hardcore shirts on stage, and Anthrax, bands like that. And so the metal kids were getting into hardcore, and the hardcore kids were getting into metal. Everybody tried to grab a bigger audience. And I liked punk. I like what I like. So I quit.

TSC: What are the band's plans for the future?

Colletti: Keep doin' what we're doin', you know? We play what we like, what we wanna play. We mix in punk, we mix it all in, we mix in hardcore, all together. To us, it's all the same scene. There's no difference. I don't wanna listen to a record that sounds the same, the same song, the whole record. I like it broken up a little bit.

TSC: How would you chracterize New York's response to the attacks on Sept. 11?

Colletti: Pissed off. Definitely pissed off. But back to normal, about as normal as New York gets. I think the rest of the country responded to it a lot different than we did. Most of the country was always like, "Oh, you're from New York, I'm so sorry." We took it as an act of war though.

TSC: What do you think about the new bands that are coming into hardcore?

Colletti: It's great. That's what this whole thing is about, the Unity Tour. We're all the same. We're outcasts that hang out in this scene. We're all the same people, whether you live in New York, or you live in San Francisco, you live in L.A., you live in the middle of the country, you live in South America, Japan, Europe, we're all the same. That's what this is about. Don't fight with each other in the scene. Don't keep picking it apart and making labels about everything. This is grindcore, hardcore, emo-scream music. You know, they do that. They think if you put a little label on it, you'll get an instant crowd. This is one music. This is one scene here, one voice.