Bay Area rocker Stephan Jenkins has more on his mind than a ‘Semi-Charmed Life’.
Third Eye Blind not caught up in anniversary of breakthrough debut album
Third Eye Blind skyrocketed to prominence in the late ’90s, propelled by the omnipresent smash “Semi- Charmed Life” and several other MTV and radio-friendly singles. The Bay Area band’s eponymous debut album quickly went platinum — then double platinum, then triple platinum and so on. It eventually sold more than 6 million copies, making it one of the top modern-rock records of the decade.
Third Eye Blind is celebrating the 20th anniversary of that landmark first album with a tour that touches down Tuesday at the City National Civic in San Jose. I recently spoke with the band’s leader, Stephan Jenkins, who grew up in Palo Alto and graduated from UC Berkeley. The 53-yearold vocalist was on the road at the time of the interview, preparing for a show that night in Knoxville, Tennessee.
QThanks for taking the time to talk with me, Stephan. Catch me up on things, will you? Are you still living in the Bay Area?
AI live in the Mission and I have a Victorian and I ride my bicycle everywhere. I am San Francisco to the bone. I try to record there — it’s actually very hard to do — and try to participate in the scene when I’m there. But I’ve been on tour for long periods of time and then I go on big surf trips and stuff. But, yeah, San Francisco is my home, my culture. It’s very much my place. I’m very much of it.
QSpeaking of surfing, I hear that is a major passion for you.
ASurfing is to really my life. foundational It’s my connection to my friends. My friends are surfers and we relate to each other through surfing. Surfing is how I find my real sense of, like, aliveness and presence. There’s some kind of essential life energy that I get from surfing
QI like the sound of that.
AIt’s also part of how I give. I teach surfing to Marines who have PTSD — and other service members as well. So, it’s also how I share.
QThe last time I saw you was on the main stage at the 2016 Outside Lands music festival, leading Third Eye Blind in front of a massive crowd of fans at Golden Gate Park. It was nice to see such a huge turnout for the hometown heroes.
AWe actually set the attendance record for
that (stage) for the whole weekend. We had a bigger crowd than Radiohead.
QThat performance must have felt like one big victory lap for you guys.
AOh, it was exactly that! My band is really cocky — it’s just a really good rock band. We don’t play with sequencers. We don’t have backing tracks. We are not a MacBook Pro band. We have kind of a swagger when we’ve been on the road for a while. And that allowed us to change everything up that day. We went off a lot of verbal cues. My friend Minna Choi is in (the Bay Area’s) Magik Magik Orchestra and I just wanted to share this experience with them. And David Bowie had died a few months earlier. So, (Minna) put a choir together and I guesswe had about a
16-piece string (section) and we did a Bowie mash-up. Itwas so on the fly. And it made every single moment so immediate and new. When the field started to fill up, we were just kind of laughing like, “You are (expletive) kidding me.” So, we were in really good spirits.
QWhat a cool experience.
ASherry Wasserman, who is the head of
(Outside Lands promoter) Another Planet along with Gregg Perloff, gave us our big breakthrough gig, opening for Oasis, back in like ’96. She was there on the side of the stage. And
we actually just kind of laughed afterwards. It was lovely. It was great. I’m glad you got to see that.
QYeah, you guys really rocked it. I walked away thinking that the band sounds better live now than when I saw it a number of years ago.
AI think so too, depending on when that was. We are just really into it. We are very much against the grain. Usually when you see a band play at a festival — even if they have got bass, guitar and drums — they are playing along to 20 different tracks. They are really just sort of bearing witness to their own jams.
There’s a different quality when the tempo is breathing, because it’s not playing to a click track, and the band is empathetic to each other and everybody can really play. What happens is (the music) starts to lift up. And people start to lift with it. And that’s when you get the moment of, like, you are really not paying attention to yourself at all. You are actually completely in that moment.
Q I thought your audience at Outside Lands might be filled with somewhat older fans, who were in their 20s and 30s when that first record came out. But there were a lot of young people, who couldn’t have been more than toddlers when “SemiCharmed Life” hit.
A They weren’t born when any MTV stuff happened at all. I have no explanation for it. But our audience — they are like 17 to 30. And they pack the rails. They care about (2015’s) “Dopamine.” That was a big record for them.
It’s a different culture. And it’s not one that is associated with our MTV stuff. That’s a misnomer about this band. And it’s one that we just don’t care about explaining anymore.
Q It’s good to hear that fans are interested in the band’s broader songbook, because you do have a lot more to offer than just that first album. My favorite song of yours, in fact, is “Wounded” from the second record, 1999’s “Blue.”
A Thank you. I don’t have lists of favorites. But if I did, that would certainly be in my top 5. It’s certainly one of the songs I’m most proud of.
It’s kind of interesting now, that you bring that up, because we’re in this moment where sexual assault is getting paid attention to — at least some of it. We have a serial sexual assaulter in the White House who is given a pass, which I don’t understand. But Harvey Weinstein has made this now a topic.
And that’s what this song was wrangling with — about a friend who got raped. And about how we, as her community of friends, bring somebody back to wholeness and how do you get somebody to get the fight back in them.
Q It’s a powerful song.
A We were playing Florida or something. There was this young lesbian couple. And there was a light rain falling. And this was their song. You could just see it. I was looking at them as the song was playing and they were entirely engaged with each other. And they were like, “This is ours — this moment, everything about this, is ours.”
People ask me how do I keep songs new and how do I keep them enlivened. And that reflection energizes everything that I do — things like that.
Q You’re celebrating the 20th anniversary of “Third Eye Blind” on this tour. How has your relationship with — and feelings toward — that album changed over the years? A
I don’t write from a place of rationality or knowledge or self awareness. It’s more about reacting to things that make an emotional impact on me. There is a little bit of a sense of records telling me who I am. I don’t want to sound too Northern California. (Laughs)
What happens is you look at it afterwards — a few years later, a long time later — and you can see a person. And I’m no longer that person. We become different people. We change. And I look at that person who wrote that album and I have a lot more empathy for that person. I see somebody who is flawed. They are wrangling with those flaws and very much filled with a rage to live and on their own terms.
I kind of go, “Wow, I like that person.”