Smash!

“A group biography of ’90s punk rock told through the prism of Green Day, The Offspring, NOFX, Rancid, Bad Religion, Social Distortion, and more”

Read an excerpt from Ian Winwood’s book, Smash!, here!

Excerpt from Chapter 1: MORE A QUESTION THAN A CURSE, HOW COULD HELL BE ANY WORSE?

It was in a recording studio above a chemist’s shop that Bad Religion were told they weren’t very good. After months of practicing, the band entered Studio 9 on the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Western Avenue in Hollywood to lay down the six songs that would comprise their self-titled debut EP. The facility’s in-house producer looked them over and asked if they were a power trio. The four members looked at each other and answered, “Sure, why not?” The studio technician listened with growing skepticism as the group ran through their small collection of short songs. With a frown of disapproval he delivered his verdict. The compositions weren’t finished, he said. Some of them needed choruses. And where were the guitar solos?

The fact that at this stage in their development Bad Religion were about as capable of executing a guitar solo as they were of playing Chopin’s “Sonata no. 2 in B Minor” was beside the point. Between them, Brett Gurewitz and vocalist Greg Graffin had each written three songs that when combined clocked out at a blush over nine minutes. Two of these songs, “Politics” and “World War III,” were as fast as anything produced in the name of Southern Californian punk rock. In their eyes, their hirelings’ bewilderment at these efforts marked him as being yesterday’s man.

Greg Graffin, Brett Gurewitz and bassist Jay Bentley formed Bad Religion in 1980. The trio were students at El Camino High School in Woodland Hills. Gurewitz was seventeen, while Graffin and Bentley were two years his junior. Drummer and fellow student Jay Ziskrout completed the fledgling group’s original lineup.

Although they didn’t yet know it, Bad Religion had at their disposal a talent that would set them apart from other bands of their kind. An émigré from Wisconsin, as a student at Lake Bluff Elementary school on the north side of Milwaukee, each morning before class Greg Graffin would sing in the school choir. Under the tutelage of teacher Mrs. Jane Perkins, he and his fellow prepubescent choristers would gather in their school’s music room and sing songs from the radio and, when in season, Christmas carols. The unforgiving hour at which these gatherings took place was mollified by the fact that the students were given ten minutes in which to play records by the Beatles and Led Zeppelin on the school’s superior stereo system. In due course, Mrs. Perkins noticed Graffin’s talents and a bursary to a summer music camp in Madison soon followed.

“We were singing songs from Stevie Wonder and James Taylor and we would perform the songs of these artists when the parents came to the concerts,” Graffin recalls. “I was often chosen as the soloist, so I’d be singing these songs from the radio with Mrs. Perkins accompanying me on the piano. I never thought of myself as a particularly gifted singer. In fact, I just assumed that everyone could sing the way that I did.”

They couldn’t. Over time, Graffin’s soaring and authoritative voice would become one of Bad Religion’s defining characteristics; the band would also learn how to deliver three-part harmonies. This, though, would take time. As heard on their debut EP, the group were just one of many from Los Angeles County whose chief currency was the energy of youth. Their sound was unvarnished and sometimes ungovernable. Musical arrangements didn’t exist and their technical chops were no more than rudimentary. What they did have, however, was an instinct for melody that has endured for almost forty years. Even at their most incendiary, Bad Religion’s sound is never wholly divorced from pop music.

For Brett Gurewitz, the release of his band’s svelte debut recording would change his life in two ways. The first would steer a course toward becoming one of LA punk’s most charismatic and interesting writers. (“Brett is probably the most talented songwriter in punk,” says Fat Mike, himself no mean composer.) The second would see him develop into an astute businessman, not to mention punk rock’s most influential tastemaker.

In 1980, Bad Religion decided to eschew the complications of finding a label on which to release their eponymous debut EP by founding their own. In doing so they avoided the ignominy of being ignored by the majors and the frustrations of signing with a small independent. The label that now housed them was given the name Epitaph, an operation established and owned by Brett Gurewitz. Its first release carried the catalogue number EPI001.

For the start-up capital required to get his record label off the ground, Gurewitz tapped up his dad. Duly, Richard Gurewitz—know to some as “Big Dick”—lent his son fifteen hundred dollars without much hope, one would imagine, of ever seeing a return on his investment. With this, Bad Religion and Epitaph were off to the pressing plant, while “Mr. Brett,” as he is sometimes known, was on his way to becoming an impresario.

Despite Bad Religion’s status as their label’s one and only artist lasting for little over a year—Gurewitz’s would release the Vandals’ Peace Thru Vandalism EP in 1982—the company and the band for which it was formed remain synonymous.

In the year following its release, EPI001 sold a modest but not discountable five thousand copies. This tally was aided by Greg Hetson, who as the guitarist with the Circle Jerks occupied a space higher up the punk rock food chain than did anyone in Bad Religion. To this day, this hockey-loving rhythm guitarist remains one of the most recognizable and enduring figures of the LA scene. One night, Greg Graffin and Jay Bentley met Hetson at Oki-Dog, a stay-open-late hot dog joint on Willoughby and Franklin in Hollywood. Graffin had with him a cassette of his band’s music that he gave to the guitarist. Along with his thanks, Greg Hetson promised that if he liked what he heard he would make sure it was played on LA’s Rock Radio Show, broadcast in the vampire hours on the country’s most influential radio station, KROQ, on which he was to be a guest that coming weekend. This promise was honored.

“Oki-Dog was this twenty-four-hour place that punks would hang out at after shows,” remembers Hetson. “I don’t know if Greg believed me when I said I’d get them to play it on the show, but I meant it. That’s just the kind of thing that we all did. Everyone had each other’s backs. So I gave it to ’ROQ and said, ‘This is a new band from the [San Fernando] Valley’ and they put it on the air. I think it was a demo tape that probably ended up being their first single. That’s how I met them and we just kind of became friends after that.”

In order to record the full-length album that would soon follow, like many bands of their standing Bad Religion were forced to become creatures of the night. Ten months after the unveiling of their debut seven-inch single in January of 1980, that autumn the still-teenage band took a freshly minted collection of songs to Track Record in North Hollywood. Over the course of the next four months they recorded the collection that would emerge, oddly, more than a year later under the title How Could Hell Be Any Worse? If this schedule sounds lavish, it wasn’t. The studio may have been bona fide to a degree beyond the group’s most elaborate dreams, but in recording their album while the rest of city was asleep, the teenagers secured Track Record’s services for nigh on nix. And while it’s true to say that How Could Hell Be Any Worse? was recorded over three months, the sessions comprised short blasts of manic activity rather than a diligent twelve-week slog. The bulk of the album was tracked over just two nights in November of 1980; half of which tracks were mixed during the intervening day.

Following this initial flash of activity, the band departed the studio for their rehearsal room—otherwise known as the “Hellhole,” a fetid space that doubled up as Graffin’s mother’s garage—in order to write yet more songs. This process was delayed by a fit of pique from their eighteen-year-old drummer. Irked by the belief that his bandmates were failing to pay due respect to his contribution to the cause, Jay Ziskout gave notice to quit with no notice at all. Such was the speed of his departure that he walked out without his drum set. His replacement was Pete Finestone, a friend who might loosely be described as the band’s roadie. Hectic practice sessions followed as the group attempted to complete the writing for their album while bringing the playing of their newest member up to code. Bad Religion returned to Track Record in January of 1981, and over the course of a weekend completed the twenty-nine minutes and fifty-four seconds of music that would comprise their first twelve-inch vinyl release.

To say that How Could Hell Be Any Worse? is an improvement on the EP that preceded it is an understatement. It is, for one thing, untypical of similar albums from this period. Generally, punk records from teenage bands who spent their days beneath the sunshine of Southern California tended either to revel in their own brattishness or else try hard, and sometimes very hard, to shock. Bad Religion did neither. If not quite sophisticated, the music is nonetheless both confident and advanced. The band’s bold and perhaps reckless decision to produce the record themselves may have harvested mixed results—listened to today, the sound is somewhat swampy—but this instinct for self-reliance would in time serve them well. The album’s two best tracks, “We’re Only Gonna Die” and “Fuck Armageddon… This Is Hell” (a song that is much better than its title suggests), written by Graffin and Gurewitz respectively, are sufficiently innovative as to dispense with the services of a chorus. By now attention was being paid to musical arrangement and song structure. More notable still was the emergence of their vocalist’s enduring lyrical style, a humane and sometimes good-humored pessimism far too dignified to ever descend to a hysterical pitch. In the lyrics to “We’re Only Gonna Die”—“early man walked away as modern man took control / their minds they weren’t the same, to conquer was his goal”—Graffin gives a clue as to the direction his intellectual pursuits were headed. Brett Gurewitz’s own lyrical style was also emerging. The obverse of his bandmate’s glass-half-empty point of view—in which the glass was often entirely empty, while in some instances there was no glass at all—it would be simplistic to say that the guitarist’s words act as a counterbalance to Graffin’s intellectualism. But it would not be wholly so. The days when Gurewitz could write a couplet of the quality of “I had a paperback crime running straight down my spine” had yet to arrive, but poetry in its embryonic form does flicker from the album’s lyrics. “There are two things you can do, one is turn and fight / the other is to run headlong into the night” are the options made available on “Into the Night.”

How Could Hell Be Any Worse? looks the part, too. Its back and inner sleeve are adorned by Gustave Doré’s illustrations of Dante Alighieri’s Inferno. The front cover is a monochrome picture of LA’s surprisingly drab topography, shot by the noted punk photographer Edward Colver from a vantage point in the Hollywood Hills. The sleeve was issued in fire-truck red and, in the days when LPs were the size of pizza boxes, the overall effect was striking. The title written in capital letters on the album’s top right corner is of course youthfully glib. By no measure can Los Angeles be described as “hell.” But relatively speaking, the thousands of people hermetically sealed in cars, the paucity of the pedestrian life, the absence of greenery and the city’s often melancholic stillness can make Los Angeles seem hellish. The fact that it keeps catching fire doesn’t help, either. But in ways that don’t wholly matter, the title the band bestowed on their debut album tends to present them as hysterical brats unable to distinguish between a place that is sometimes soul sapping and somewhere that is life threatening. (Gurewitz himself would later amend the question posed in 1982 in the rhyming couplet “More a question than a curse / how could hell be any worse?”) But the question is not wildly unreasonable. Even in sun-kissed Southern California, a new generation had discovered punk and were using its power as a reaction against the eternal foes of conformity and the threat of a quiet life.

“I think there were a lot of bored middle-class kids who had time on their hands and who hated the image that the powers that be—parents, teachers, society—wanted to put on them,” says Noodles, known to his parents as Kevin Wasserman, the guitarist with The Offspring. “It was a reaction against clean-cut kids, good grades, nine-to-five jobs, two point three children, a wife and a white picket fence. That was just bullshit. People would go and work for Boeing, or some other defense contractor, which was a big industry in Orange County, which I think lends itself to a lot of the conservative attitudes here. And people just wanted to rebel against that. It’s just not how real people are. Punk rock in Southern California may not have come from the poverty that you hear The Clash talk about. It was different from that. And it didn’t come from playing shows on the Bowery [the site of the punk club CBGB]. But punk rock here did play in very poor parts of the city. You weren’t allowed to play the upscale clubs that had dress codes and girls in thongs serving drinks. Punk rock was relegated to the back-alley clubs. Or you would hire VFW halls in the middle of the desert. A lot of times the bands would be playing in burned-out warehouses in LA. So we did have that element of punk rock as well. But, yeah, a lot of the kids who were playing in bands grew up in really middle-class suburbs.”

If Bad Religion’s first twenty songs offered a glimpse of the towering influence its creators would in time exert, it was only a glimpse. But from these tiny acorns all manner of things would grow. In 1982, the band could at least content themselves with the knowledge that a copy of How Could Hell Be Any Worse? had taken up residence in the homes of ten thousand listeners. The group may not have been on their way to the top, but at least they were on their way to somewhere.

This forward momentum lasted for precisely twenty-two months and eleven days. On November 30, 1983, Bad Religion put their name to an album that is now regarded by those who know it, or at least know of it, as being one of the most peculiar releases ever unveiled by a punk rock group. Into the Unknown is a soupy, keyboard-heavy curiosity that would be entirely discountable were it not for its loveable precocity. A wordy oddness that its authors continue to embrace is also appealing. Not unpredictably, in 1983 the album’s waiting public either failed to understand what it was Bad Religion were trying to convey in such snappy songs as “Time and Disregard” (Part 1, Part II, Part III, Part IV), or else couldn’t stand it. The punk magazine Maximumrocknroll wrote of the record, “Into the Unknown and out of the window.” In a spirit of droll consolation, Greg Hetson half attempted to comfort Greg Graffin with the words “Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke.”

“The punk scene at [that] time wasn’t very attractive to us,” says Graffin. “The drugs and violence had taken their toll, which were things that never interested me anyway. I was always in Bad Religion for the music. When we started playing punk it was a thriving social scene. It was a feeling that you were part of something… But from 1983 to 1987 the punk scene was completely dismantled. At best it was a loose conglomerate of various types of people who were interested in various types of music. And there was no central meeting point for the punk scene anymore. The police had closed down a lot of places because of the violence and the drugs. It was hard even to play in a punk band. Consequently, Bad Religion didn’t have a central focus at that time and I think that’s manifested in [Into the Unknown] itself. It wasn’t a focused album; it was all over the place. It’s easy to write it off as being just an attempt at a new style of music. But if you look at it in the context of two songwriters [Greg Graffin and Brett Gurewitz] who really loved music and felt free to experiment, it makes a lot more sense.”

Asked today, Mr. Brett will say that Epitaph printed ten thousand copies of Into the Unknown, of which they sold none. This seems statistically unlikely, but popular lore does have it that many, many thousands of copies ended up piled high in Jay Bentley’s garage. As if this weren’t odd enough, the fact that at the time Bentley was no longer a member of the band makes it only more so. The only time Bad Religion have played any songs from Into the Unknown live was at a concert attended by thirty people at the Mabuhay Gardens club in San Francisco. Realizing that punk rock shows at the time were drawing crowds of similar numbers even at venues such as the now venerated Cathay de Grande in Hollywood, Graffin began to lose faith. He was also fully cognizant of the fact that no one cared about Bad Religion’s curious new album. The decision was made to leave Los Angeles for his home state and a place at the University of Wisconsin. By doing so, for the next five years the band in which he performed fell into a slumberous state from which they would only occasionally emerge.

No one could have predicted that by effectively ceasing to exist, Bad Religion were opting for the wisest career choice available to them. Between the end of 1982 and the spring of 1987, the group played live fewer than twenty times. A creature of near total hibernation, this slumber was so profound that between November of 1982 and September of 1988 just five songs were recorded, one of which was an old song (a retooled version of the eponymous track from their eponymous debut EP). When in February of 1985, Bad Religion reconvened to record what would be for many the reassuringly titled Back to the Known.

Be sure to pick up a copy of Smash! to read the rest!