TSOL Singer to run against Ahnold and others for Governor of California

California's Hot Ticket
Arnold's Running. So Is Arianna. So Is Everyone. Welcome to the Show.
By Hank Stuever
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, August 7, 2003; Page C01
BURBANK, Calif., Aug. 6
.... Jack Grisham is swerving through freeway traffic, talking to us on his phone, having just returned from filing his requisite 65 signatures.
He lives in Huntington Beach, in Orange County, and he's late picking up his daughter. He's a 42-year-old punk-rock singer who, off and on since the late '70s, has fronted the band TSOL. (A name that originally stood for "True Sounds of Liberty.")
Forget Richard Nixon, "The O.C." or the deep pockets of Newport Beach. Orange County is also the cradle of anarchic, distinctly Californian, punk-rock roots that emanated from an apocalyptic beach culture. It is somehow fitting that the candidate generating the most buzz from there this week would be lumped in with such seminal thinkers as Black Flag and the Dead Kennedys. In that first punk heyday, Grisham sang songs like "Abolish Government/Silent Majority" and "World War III" and "Property Is Theft." He left the band in the 1990s and worked lots of manual labor jobs -- roofing, digging ditches, construction. When he rejoined TSOL in 1999, they recorded songs like "Sodomy" and "Terrible People." When he hurt his back last year -- a surfing accident exacerbated some construction-related injury -- and couldn't work, and couldn't get help, he became apoplectic about the state of the state.
"So one of my friends said to me, 'Are you a convicted felon?' " Grisham says.
"I said, 'No, not convicted,' and he said, 'Well, then you can run for governor.'
"And I'm serious," Grisham says, refusing to mix stories of his punk life with his political campaign. (Even so, let's give full disclosure: TSOL has a new album coming out next month.)
He's had dozens of friends die or disappear because of drugs or alcohol. He's spent some nights in jail. He's been battered and torn. He surfs. He wishes he had health care for himself and his family. He is Mr. California.
"One thing I got a little upset at was all these people saying that the recall election is going to be a 'madhouse.' Well, oh no, God forbid!" he says in mock horror. "I think it's just what we need. It's a chance for every citizen to get involved with what's going to happen next."
Only nobody knows what happens next. Grisham has lots of punk-rock-inclined volunteers wanting to help him campaign, only he's still figuring that part out. And what if he wins? He says he'll have to hire businesspeople to show him how to run a state budget. Also, he likes to wear sandals instead of shoes. But these are minor threats to his bigger vision:
"I have just as much experience as Ronald Reagan did when he became governor of California," he says. "My whole thing is that there's California the business and then there's California the people. I'm just tired of seeing people who work so hard just to get by wind up getting hurt. You know that Verve song, the one with the line that goes 'I want to hear a song that recognizes the pain in me'? (We don't remember that one. But continue.)
"That's what I'm thinking of, doing this. I just want to recognize that people are hurt. . . . [The state] put this new budget out and who got the worst of it? People who need health care."
Meanwhile . . . If you want to register to run for governor and you live in Los Angeles, you need to drive south along the Santa Ana Freeway, past a hypnotic array of power lines and telephone wires, exiting in Norwalk, wending your way through a particular kind of afternoon drabness and traffic -- the L.A. you never see much on television shows....
....
The beaches are crowded. Everyone's grabbing for their piece of whatever California is to them. Everyone would like to own it, for a day.