The Airborne Toxic Event’s Mikel Jollett on growing up in a ‘70s cult: ‘We didn't know what parents were’
Mikel Jollett has forged a stellar career as both the frontman of L.A. indie-rock band the Airborne Toxic Event and as a journalist for NPR, the Los Angeles Times, Men's Health, and Filter. He’s also a happily married father. But Jollett overcame incredible trauma to carve out this stable life, after spending his early childhood in the Synanon organization, an experimental communal society that eventually became one of the most dangerous and violent cults in U.S. history. Jollett, his older brother, and mother eventually escaped, but the damage was impossible to undo.
Now Jollett is opening up about that harrowing journey in Hollywood Park, the Airborne Toxic Event’s concept album — “I’m wholeheartedly embracing that term,” Jollett says — and his heartbreaking, stranger-than-fiction memoir by the same title.
“Synanon was very famous in the ‘70s,” Jollett tells Yahoo Entertainment/SiriusXM Volume. “It started off as kind of a drug rehab place, and that's where my dad went to get clean from heroin when he got out of prison. He met my mom there, who was this big free speech advocate from Berkeley — that type of intellectual/hippie/civil rights thing. So, they were very much star-crossed from the jump.
“The other important thing to note is that we didn't live in with our parents in the cult,” Jollett continues. “We were put into what was essentially an orphanage. We didn't know what parents were. We didn't know what a family was. My brother Tony was there nearly seven years. I was there about four years, and when we left there, this woman just showed up. We knew she was someone named ‘Mom,’ but we didn't know what that meant, because we had no context for knowing; nobody did, because nobody had ‘moms.’
“The idea of the cult was that we were to be these new type of people — these ‘children of the universe,’ is how they put it. We were to be society's children, and therefore our parents couldn't mess us up — which of course is a disastrous way to try to raise children. Psychologists will tell you that's how you create things called attachment disorders. That's early highly childhood trauma. That's neglect. So, this woman shows up and we escaped, because the cult had turned violent and they were trying to kill people.”
By this point, Synanon leader Charles Dederich Sr., in an extreme effort to dismantle the traditional family unit, had forced the married couples living at the commune to divorce and take new partners; the men were given mandatory vasectomies, and some pregnant women were even forced to have abortions. This was when the confused Jollett boys were scooped up and whisked away in the middle of the night by their “mom.” But life was even more chaotic and horrific on the outside after they escaped. The three lived on the run for years, hiding out first in Berkeley and then in Salem, Ore., subsisting on government cheese and the rabbits they slaughtered for food.
“I remember when we left and we were in Berkeley, we had a roommate, a man named Phil Ritter, a really, really nice man who lived with us,” says Jollett. “We weren't generally allowed to play outside, because there was this concern that the men from the cult were going to steal us because we were considered ‘their’ children, not our parents' children — which we didn't have strong opinions about, honestly, because that's all we knew too. You’ve got to understand, we didn't know from anything, any of this stuff. So, two men approached Phil with these masks on like bank-robbers wear. They had batons and they beat him up in front of me, and put him in a coma for a month. This happened about 10 feet in front of me. I was a toddler. It's one of my earliest memories.”
Jollett spent four of the last five years in his basement office/studio working on the Hollywood Park project, which came together after his father passed away. “[His death] hit me so hard, and I didn't know why it hit me so hard,” Jollett says. “Nobody tells you that about grief, that it can be confusing. … I didn't expect it. It felt like the rules of nature had changed. I went into a deep depression. I hardly left the house for nine months.” Eventually, when Jollett started writing, his found it difficult to convey the complexities of his family’s dynamic.
“Let me back up a little bit,” Jollett says. “When I was writing the book, I set out to write one thing, and then what I discovered is I remembered there was this little boy, who never got to tell his story. And it became really important to me to tell his story. He was being told his mother was a ‘hero.’ But his mother was a person with a mental disorder.
“It was like, ‘How do I explain?’ Because these things are complicated. My dad was an ex-con, he'd done time in prison, never got past 8th grade. He was a heroin addict. My parents were divorced when my mom was six months pregnant with me, and he left and he was with another woman the next day. You hear these things about him and you're like, ‘What a jerk! Oh, I see, so you were raised by a single mother who was a saint, and your father's like this horrible guy.’ But no, that isn't what happened. If those are the only facts that you knew, you might assume that. But my dad, as it turns out, was a wonderful guy. And he was a wonderful father. And I'd been born in a cult.
“My father was this faraway figure who, you’ve got to understand, was like Steve McQueen to us,” Jollett continues. “He rode a motorcycle. He had a black belt in karate. He had escaped from a Mexican prison. He was like the coolest dude that ever walked. He wore cafe jackets, black leather cowboy boots, this Jim Croce ‘stache and this big old white-boy ‘fro, gold necklaces. He liked to hang out at the racetrack. And he was great with us.” (Hollywood Park was an L.A. racetrack where Jollett created some of his fondest father-son bonding memories.)
Jollett, who went through therapy before writing Hollywood Park, now understands that he was “gaslit” by his needy mother — who, as detailed in Jollett’s memoir, frequently crossed boundaries of appropriate behavior and constantly dismissed his feelings as he tried to process or vocalize his trauma (in his teens, he made the decision to move to Los Angeles to live with his dad). She would even tell him that certain incidents — like the driveway beating of their roommate Ritter — hadn’t happened at all. “At 5 years old, I wasn't allowed to have a different opinion from my mother. I wasn't allowed to be sad, or wasn't allowed to feel anger,” he says. “She was the victim and the permanent child, and I was always having to be the caretaker. … Over time, I've come to realize that these sorts of narratives are very common in abusive households and traumatic households.”
Jollett no longer has any contact with his mother, who he now realizes had narcissistic personality disorder; he also realizes that he developed attachment disorder as a result of his toxic upbringing. But he says he’s tried to forgive his mom. “I don't want to harbor anger. I want her to have a healthy life,” he says. “There’s one part of me that says, ‘She has a disorder. It's not her fault.’ And there's another part of me that hesitates and says, ‘Well, she never apologized.’ And how can forgiveness exist in the absence of an apology, in the absence of reflection? It's hard to forgive someone for things they pretend never happened.
“I'm tempted sometimes to think she suffered the most, but I don't really think it's true,” he continues. “It's just kind of one of those lies that die hard because they seem to be true. And there's all this ambiguity around forgiveness. The disorder makes it impossible for her to see her mistakes, to reflect upon how she's hurt others for her to offer sympathy or empathy. And that was the really thing that was hardest to live with … So, the question is not ‘Can I forgive her?’ Yes, of course I could, instantly. The question is, ‘Can she understand the pain she inflicted and thus ask for forgiveness?’ But not out of an impulse to feel better, but out of sympathy for the people she hurt? And that question has been answered over and over again, for years on end, time after time. And the answer is: No, never. Not once. Ever.”
Both Jollett and his older brother turned to drugs and alcohol at an early age to cope — “When I was 12, I was already getting high, ditching school, smoking cigarettes, drinking, doing all the childhood delinquent stuff” — and there were times when he feared they were both destined to become addicts and career criminals like their dad. But ironically, it was his troubled childhood — specifically his need to constantly earn his emotionally withholding mother’s approval — that led to him becoming an artist… and, in a full-circle moment, led to Hollywood Park.
“Orphans tend to have two responses to being orphans. One is to withdraw. And I think that's what my brother did,” explains Jollett. And then the other response is become these ‘super-children’ where it's like, ‘La la la, I'm going to dance for you because I need to be loved!’ Somewhere in your mind you think, ‘If I don't entertain people, I have no worth.’ That was literally the first lesson I ever was taught. The first thing I ever learned about life is that people leave. You wake up in the middle of night, and there's no one. When you're sick, there's no one. When you cry, there's no one. There's the people who have this fierce love for you, which is what a parent is supposed to have, and they're just not there.
“And so what you learn is, ‘I’ve got to get those people on my side. I can dance, I can sing, I can say smart things. I can sound like I'm super-precocious. I can try and take care of when I can get up at 5 a.m. and try to take care of the household. I can take care of this really depressed woman. I can try and make my brother happy. I can keep my alcoholic stepdad at bay.’ And you're doing all this because you're scared of being alone.”
As both a musician and music journalist, Jollett eventually found kindred spirits, especially when he got to meet two of his idols, the Cure’s Robert Smith and the “James Bond of the misfits,” David Bowie. “Robert Smith’s big advice to me was: ‘Don't be normal. Normal is everything that's horrible about life. I can't stand the idea of normal,’” Jollett recalls with a chuckle. However, his conversation with Bowie, during an interview in 2003, went deeper.
“At one point [Bowie] said, ‘I just wonder if it's sometimes hard for someone of your generation to believe in anything.’ And I was sitting there — I had been born in a cult, that was born of the potential movement of the ‘60s that had chaos, that had gone into violence. I was raised in poverty in Oregon, on food stamps and government assistance by a highly idealistic ex-hippie single mother. And I had tried my hardest to get out of that childhood through overachieving. And I was like, ‘Yeah, it's hard to believe in anything, because it all fell apart and everything that we were told was true. It turned out to not be true.’
“And so, we had this oddly paternal moment, where he kind of looked at me and was like, ‘Are you guys going to be OK?’ And I was like, ‘I don't know. I'm not sure.’”
Read more on Yahoo Entertainment:
Rose McGowan on shaving her head, ‘breaking up with the world’ and why Hollywood is a ‘cult’
Why Butch Walker's 'love story about hate' might be the rock opera America needs right now
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The above interview is taken from a portion of Mikel Jolett’s appearance on the SiriusXM show “Volume West.” Full audio of this conversation is available on demand via the SiriusXM app.
