Jollett, 48, is best known for his work with rock band the Airborne Toxic Event, which has released six studio albums and toured the world since forming in 2006.
In 2020, he published his memoir “Hollywood Park,” which dove into his experience being raised in Synanon, a Southern California drug rehabilitation program founded in the 1960s that over time morphed into a violent cult.
“People that are in cults don't know they're in cults, and I think that included my parents," Jollett told WAMC. "They had no idea. Like, my mom was trying to change the world, make it a better place, and my dad was trying to get clean off heroin. I think, looking back, it's like, we didn't have any idea. And then of course, those of us who were born there, you know, we didn't choose either. We certainly didn't want to live in a cult. We lived there till I was just about five years old. And it was, it was rough. It was a rough place to grow up. We were put in 'The School.' They called it 'The School,' which is kind of this Orwellian term, because it's not- It wasn't a school. It was- We never saw our parents. We were raised by strangers, we didn't own any possessions. And it was you know, it was an orphanage. We were essentially raised in an orphanage for our first five years of life. Had no idea what a mother was, what a father was, uncles, grandparents, we didn't have birthdays, Christmases, we didn't own any possessions. There was a lot of abuse. It was a pretty rough, it was a pretty rough place to grow up.”
Even when he and his parents finally broke away from Synanon, the cult followed.
“They were trying to kill people that left, and they were certainly intimidating and harassing people that left," said Jollett. "And so we kind of lived on the road moving from place to place trying to stay one step in front of the people who were coming for us. And then one day at our house in Berkeley, California, they found us, and they nearly beat a man to death, my mother's friend who was kind of like a father figure to me, in our driveway five feet in front of me. A terrifying, awful thing to happen to a kid. He ended up living, was in a coma for a month, and they got away before the cops came.”
The act of parsing those difficult memories and reifying them into art is at the core of Jollett’s talk at Williams, titled “Trauma and Creativity: How Your Experience Becomes Your Purpose.”
“Why is it that so many of these people who've experienced these kind of unspeakable things become musicians and actors and comedians and filmmakers and painters and dancers and that kind of thing?" asked Jollett. "What is it about the arts that draws people as a way of unearthing the relic of that trauma, dealing with their grief, to some extent performing for other people, to some extent soothing themselves, to some extent engaging their kind of dream life in order to understand these horrible things that happened to them. And that connection, I think, we all know is there. We all know that people who tend to be great performers and live this artistic life tend to have often dealt with serious trauma.”
Jollett says it’s a fine line between fetishizing trauma and mining it for a greater artistic truth.
“That’s what I don't like about a lot of the cult documentaries or the cult stuff, because a lot of it's about like, oh, wow, check out how violent is this cult was, look at these weird people in robes," he explained to WAMC. "It’s, I would use the term otherizing, turning us into an other. And yeah, fetishizing the violence or fetishizing all the oddball stuff. And like, that's not really where it's at, you know? There's plenty of people who grew up in the suburbs, in what from the outside seem like really nice middle class homes, that went through serious trauma. They had an alcoholic parent, they had a parent die of cancer, they had a narcissistic parent. They live, you know, Emerson said – or was it Thoreau – masses of men live lives of quiet suffering. I think there's so many people for whom this is true. And it's really, that was where it was at for us. These more banal things. It wasn't that we had shaved heads and wore overalls. It was that we were lonely. You know, we were just kids, and there was no one to pick us up when we were sick and we were locked in closets and we were abused in all these ways.”
As he prepares to address the students of Williams College, Jollett says he wants to encourage them to look inward for the unique voice – no matter how bizarre or weird – that they aren’t hearing elsewhere in culture.
“Follow that voice," he told WAMC. "And follow it wherever it leads and believe in it, believe that there's something down that road and that, particularly, if you've experienced trauma, that the takeaway is that it's really hard life. It's hard to have gone through the things that people go through, particularly kids go through. And that one decision you can make in life is to turn all that into something beautiful. And I would fully encourage them to forge their own voice, forge their own path, and do exactly that.”
Jollett’s talk will take place on the Main Stage of the ‘62 Center in Williamstown at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday. It is free and open to the public. Masks are required.
