Wearing it on his sleeve

Dave Brooks

John Fahnestock didn’t just wake up one morning and decide to be

bitter. He earned it.

After years as bassist for metal band Snot and multiple

disappointments with major record labels, Fahnestock has developed a

pessimism for the music industry that stretches beyond the typical

pop music scowl.

It’s not about hatred anymore. It’s time for destruction.

“The entire industry is full of liars,” he said. “They get you

really excited, and then they ruin you. All the sudden no one answers

your calls for a week, and the next thing you know, they’re telling

you that they’re going to sign another band.”

Such was the case recently with Geffen Records when the music

giant decided to pull out of Fahnestock’s latest project, Lo Pro,

after dumping nearly $750,000 into its production, he said.

Burned out and broke, Fahnestock decided to launch an artistic

venture that would bring the music industry to its knees: his own

T-shirt company.

Out of the ashes rose 313 Clothing, a T-shirt line first sold to

his rock buddies with profanity-laced diatribes on music executives

and the so-called “nu-metal” sounds of bands like Limp Bizkit.

“I recently had a booth at the National American Musician

Merchants conference and all these guys from rock bands were loving

the shirts,” he said.

Fahnestock’s Huntington Beach-based clothing line could be the

latest revival for the bad-mouth bass player, who’s studying Web page

building at Goldenwest College and living with his Playboy model

girlfriend Jolie Riberio. Most of the slogans on the shirts

capitalize on sexual innuendos, drug references and phrases he said

he would never want his mother to see.

He’s even dabbled into politics, creating a T-shirt with a picture

of a gun to the head of President George W. Bush.

“That’s been selling a lot lately,” he said. “I just sent two to

Texas the other day.”

One of his most popular shirts includes a picture of actor Robert

Blake and the phrase “Lovers are killers.”

“That design is based around the whole scenario of how people can

pretend to be in love with some one and then become this horrendous

freak,” he said. “There are so many cases in the public eye of people

murdering people they supposedly love.”

Fahnestock is ambivalent to the idea that people might find his

clothing line offensive, arguing that there is an infinite array of

T-shirts companies more offensive that anything he’s ever designed.

Not everyone agrees. The T-shirts have raised eyebrows with a

number of area religious figures, including Fountain Valley

Evangelical minister Anthony Ferlin, who called the T-shirt line “a

distasteful divergence into immorality.”

“I think this sends a message to youth that nothing is sacred

anymore,” Ferlin said, after reviewing the company’s 313merch.com

website. “How low are we really going to push our standards?”

Fahnestock takes the criticism lightly and said his clothing line

simply reflects his own twisted sense of humor and strange outlook on

life. He said he developed an anti-society attitude from growing up

in a small rural town in Pennsylvania and being forced to turn his

offensive T-shirts inside out by over-zealous security guards at the

mall.

“One of the first shirts I created for Snot was a black T with the

words ‘Security Guard’ written across the front and a big middle

finger in the middle,” he said. “I wish I had made it reversible so

that when they made you turn it inside out, it would still be there.”