Music

THIS EXISTS: Pennywise singer's double life as a punk rock super-spy

by Tyler Munro

Every week, This Exists uncovers and explores musical peculiarities that exist in the dark corners of the internet, sometimes just outside the mainstream. Today we take a look at the environmental causes of Zoltán Téglás, leader singer of Ignite and Pennywise.

Zoltan “Zoli” Téglás is more than “that dude who replaced Jim” in Pennywise. He’s more than the mouth piece for melodic hardcore stand-outs Ignite. He’s an awesome vocalist, but if you’re reading this you probably already know that. But have you heard about his other job as an activist super-spy?

Zoli takes environmentalism and animal rights very seriously, and rightly so. In 2009 he started Pelican Rescue Team, noting that “we have a boat and a trailer. We’re like an ambulance. We go out in the Ocean, we look for birds.”

It’s good, honest work and it’s something he’s obviously passionate about, but as he’d tell me before Pennywise’s set at D-Tox Rockfest, his extra-curricular activities are starting to get in the way of his music career.

“If you really want to do a band full time, you’ve really got to focus on being full time. Every day I’m out rescuing because no one else is doing it. This is the hard duality I’m running into right now.”

Pennywise was supposed to put out their new album at the start of this year, but with reports that the vocals haven’t even been started, it’s looking more and more like we won’t see anything new from them until 2012. Ignite hasn’t released anything since 2006’s Our Darkest Days.

“The struggle is between doing music and spreading awareness or actually getting your hands dirty,” he says.

Want an example of how Zoli gets his hands dirty?

“We busted this restaurant for serving whale meat in Los Angeles called The Hump. I went undercover and I busted it.”

He says he was working out one day when he got a tip about the restaurant from someone who knew he’d done work with Sea Shepherd. So how does one bust a whale meat operation? For starters, as Zoli tells it, you’ve got to have a way of recording your operation. But what happens once you’ve stuffed the undercover cameras down your shirts?

“We ordered but they wouldn’t serve us, so I got the guys from The Cove, the movie The Cove, and we did this whole thing. We got funded by this other guy who put down like ten grand because it’s like a thousand dollars a plate to get served whale meat. We had Japanese girls show up with us, Japanese vegan girls. They had to go through and eat all the food. Raw horse meat, they had to eat live octopus…they haven’t eaten meat in twenty years. They were eating the meat because the chef was watching them. Then you order the whale meat at the very end. It’s the delicacy, six hundred bucks a piece or something like that. We were filming the whole thing.”

They took a sample of the meat to a lab in Seattle and, after testing, it was revealed to be meat from a Sei Whale.

Mission accomplished, right? Er…eventually.

“We did it four more times and we finally got US Fish and Game to bust them. The distributor just got busted as well.”

Hey, Bono…what have you done lately?

You can read more about Pelican Rescue Team and Sea Shepherd by clicking on their respective names.