THE STORY OF THE EARLY L.A. PUNK SCENE TAKES place in Hollywood, but many of the scene’s prime movers were from the San Fernando Valley. One of the first L.A. bands to make its mark—the Dickies—was from the Valley. When Lee Ving started Fear he was living in Van Nuys. John and Dix Denney of the Weirdos, a band whose image helped put the L.A. punk scene on the map, hailed from North Hollywood, a short hop over the Hollywood Hills.
L.A. has always played fast and loose with its geography. The city’s many film and television studios have made use of its abundant sunshine to create the impression that downtown L.A. was a car chase away from the beach with stops in Hollywood and Beverly Hills along the way. But the reality is more nuanced, and always has been. The boys from Black Flag, for instance, grew up closer to the surf and the sand than the Beach Boys. Although Frank Zappa’s 1982 song “Valley Girl” suggests the Valley is a Hollywood-adjacent neighborhood that locates the Sherman Oaks Galleria as its cultural center, the Valley is actually a region of over 250 square miles and home to 1.77 million people.
The part of the Valley that Bad Religion came from was closer to the Ventura County Line than to Hollywood’s city limits. It was as suburban as suburban gets, and El Camino Real High School was a typical suburban school. It had a large open campus, a renowned football team and cheerleading squad, and a decent track record of sending kids to college so they could become productive members of society.
Improbably, El Camino Real was also the birthplace of one of the most influential punk rock bands in America. When classes started up in the fall of 1979, Greg Graffin showed up for his sophomore year with dyed black hair and a Black Flag T-shirt. Jay Bentley had cut his hair short and came to class with a T-shirt that declared “VIRGIN.” “I guess we’re it,” Jay said of the virtually nonexistent punk scene at the school.
The two sophomores had both gone to Hale Junior High, so they were familiar with each other. They had many mutual friends but bonded over their love of music. There weren’t any other punks at El Camino Real, but that would soon change.
Brett Gurewitz and Jay Ziskrout were both juniors and had already been in two bands together. The first, the Omega Band, never made it out of Ziskrout’s parents’ living room. They had a bit more success with their second attempt, the Quarks. They were a Beatles-esque group that leaned toward New Wave. Brett wrote songs, played guitar, and sang. Ziskrout played drums. Their one live gig was the afternoon talent show at El Camino Real.
Brett’s best friend, Tom Clement, knew Greg, who’d bragged to Tom that he was a really good singer. Tom had “gone punk” and was encouraging Brett to do the same by starting a band with Greg. “Tom was smart enough to see that his two friends would make a good team when he introduced me to Brett,” Greg said. “We were both nerdy intellectual types. Even though we were young kids, it was a meeting of the minds.”
Brett, however, was reluctant to take the plunge into punk rock. “I had long hair like Ric Ocasek or Joey Ramone,” Brett said. “I was getting ready to go punk. Tom had already gone all the way. I had a homemade T-shirt that said, ‘FUCK YOU, I’M A LONGHAIR PUNK!’ I was afraid to cut my hair. It was a big deal back then.”
Tom introduced Greg to Brett at El Camino Real. Brett knew Greg’s older brother, Grant, but had never met Greg. From the very beginning Greg was drawn to Brett’s experience. “I would always tell Tom, ‘I want to be in a band so bad!’ but in my brain there was just no way because I didn’t know anything. How do you make a band? So, when Brett and I got together, I looked up to Brett because he had all of the equipment. He had knowledge that I didn’t have about how to make this thing work. He had the know-how.”
Or, as Brett put it, “I had a PA.”
Despite the fact that Greg used to tease Brett about his long hair, their desire to make music together solidified that spring when they went to the Hollywood Palladium together to see the Ramones. Brett was so inspired by the show that he wanted to start a band right away. “I know this is a bit of a cliché,” Brett said, “and the Ramones are considered the Johnny Appleseeds of punk, but in my case it’s truly what happened. Before the Ramones all my musical heroes were either virtuosos or rock stars. But when I found the Ramones I instantly thought, This is something I can do.”
The three teenagers agreed to meet at Jay Ziskrout’s house for a rehearsal. Brett brought a song he’d written called “Sensory Overload.” Greg had written a song on his mother’s spinet piano called “Politics.” They taught each other the songs and practiced them in the living room. When they had the songs down cold they made a tape recording.
They couldn’t have known it then, but this rehearsal established a precedent for how the band would make music together for the next forty years. Brett and Greg would each write songs and bring them to rehearsal. They weren’t riffs or melodies or bits of music, but complete songs with lyrics and titles. Then, when the band got together, the songs would evolve as the various musicians provided feedback. The manner in which Brett and Greg share their songs has changed over the years with the development of new technology, but the methodology has stayed the same: the songs are written independently and brought to the group for refinement.
Brett was impressed with Greg’s talent and determination. “That very first rehearsal when we didn’t have a bass player,” Brett recalled, “I brought a song and Greg brought a song. Greg taught me his song on guitar. I taught him how to sing my song. We played them and they went well together.”
Although everyone was happy with how the rehearsal went, they wanted to know what they sounded like with a bass guitar in the mix. The following Monday at school, Greg enlisted Jay Bentley, who remembered the conversation like this:
GREG: You’re going to play in our band.
JAY: Okay. I have a guitar.
GREG: We already have a guitar player. You’re going to play bass.
JAY: Okay. I don’t have a bass.
GREG: Here are some songs we wrote. Can you find a bass?
JAY: Oh, fuck. Okay.
This, too, established a pattern for how they recruited band members from their immediate circle of friends. This speaks to how small the L.A. punk scene was even in 1980. According to Jay, “There was no one else to ask. I was already there.”
Jay pleaded with his parents to buy him a bass guitar. “There was a lot of bargaining. ‘I’ll mow the lawn three times! I’ll take the trash out forever!’ My stepdad was a big Sears guy. So we went to Sears and bought a bass. It was a three-quarter jazz bass, a kid’s bass. I didn’t know shit about anything. So I got a three-quarter jazz bass and rented an amp from the guitar shop down the street.”
Being new to the bass, Jay didn’t know how to play, so he mimicked what Brett did during rehearsal. He quickly figured out the notes that corresponded with the barre chords and followed along.
Jay felt intimidated during that first rehearsal because he was a total neophyte and Brett and Ziskrout were older and had been in bands. “These guys aren’t fucking around!” Jay said. “It was go time. I think we only had three songs so we played them a hundred times. I wasn’t any good but it was fun.”
But what Jay lacked in experience he made up for with an abundance of enthusiasm. Even though Jay didn’t know how to play his instrument, Greg liked what he heard. “When [Bentley] came to our next rehearsal to play in [Ziskrout’s] living room, it sounded so great with a bass.”
After rehearsal they immediately discussed when they were going to do it again. But first they had to come up with a name.
“We were sitting in my mom’s living room,” Ziskrout recalled, “wondering what to call the band. We threw out all kinds of crazy names. I think it was Brett who said, ‘How about Bad Religion?’ We all loved it because the name went well beyond just religion. It was a reaction against adopting a system of thought. Here’s what you’re supposed to think, here’s what you’re supposed to believe. Our ethos was in opposition to walking through life like sheep.”
The name resonated with Greg even though he had very little exposure to organized religion. “I was raised in a household that was devoid of any religious training because my mom was scarred by it. I didn’t get any influence from religion. I didn’t know the stories of the Bible. But I would say I was spiritual because when my teacher assigned Herman Hesse, I really enjoyed it. When my teacher assigned Thoreau, I loved it. I found myself driven to study nature and Buddhist philosophy. That was far more interesting to me. At those early rehearsals we didn’t have a name, but when we became Bad Religion it made sense to me.”
Brett felt an immediate kinship with his younger classmate, Greg. “We were quite lucky that we found each other,” Brett said. “I would say that I was agnostic at a very, very young age, even though I had some religious training from my parents, which was really just for traditional purposes so I could have my bar mitzvah. I found myself to be profoundly skeptical of it. I came out of that not as an atheist, because I was always very interested in philosophy, but as an agnostic and possibly a pantheist. Most kids read Siddhartha in junior high and don’t like it. I was really engaged by that kind of thing and Greg was too. I was into Western philosophy and the philosophy of the East and was skeptical of the religious training that I was exposed to.”
Brett’s attempts to synthesize what he was learning and seek answers to life’s bigger questions set him apart from other students. To Ziskrout’s way of thinking, the band was an extension of those interests. “Brett was a philosopher before most kids started thinking along those lines,” Ziskrout said. “He was always giving me books to read.”
The name Bad Religion provided a framework for the kind of band they wanted to be. It established an organizing principle and immediately made their position clear on a number of social issues. For Greg, the name “Bad Religion gave us a point of view,” he said. “We were angry young men, there was no question about it, and as punks we needed to be against something. Whether we had a legitimate right to be angry as white kids in America in 1980, I’ll leave that for others to decide, but we were. It’s easy to do a post hoc analysis as to why we called it that, but it turned out to be very fruitful for us, in more ways than one. The name really allowed us a wide breadth of themes.”
“If your name is Wasted Youth,” Brett added, “it’s tough to stay on message when you’re fifty-five.”
Even more eye-catching than their name was their logo: A cross with a slash through it. Brett came to rehearsal at Jay Ziskrout’s living room with the drawing on a piece of cardboard, exclaiming, “I got it!”
Greg immediately realized they had something special. “I knew right then that was the one.”
When Brett fleshed the logo out, he intentionally used red, white, and black, colors associated with the swastika, the symbol of the Nazi Party. “It wasn’t uncommon to see people wearing swastikas in the early punk scene,” Brett said. “I thought kids were probably wearing it for shock value, but I wasn’t comfortable with that, and I could never wear one. The red, white, and black crossbuster is a strong, shocking icon. As a young Jewish kid, it was something I could wear that was equally shocking as a swastika.”
In a relatively short period of time they’d settled on a name and a logo, but they also talked at length about how they wanted to present their ideas and how they wanted the band to be perceived.
They agreed to keep practicing, but the intensity of their rehearsals made it difficult to stay in one place for long. They went from Ziskrout’s living room to Brett’s garage, but the neighbors complained. They tried Jay’s house and someone called the cops on them almost immediately. “We finally settled on Graffin’s garage,” Jay said, “because that seemed to be the only place that we couldn’t get kicked out of.”
That had as much to do with Greg’s mother, Marcella, as it did their neighbors in Canoga Park. Marcella trusted her sons and didn’t put down a lot of rules. “I didn’t judge that way,” she said. “They were just kids. When they transitioned into the band it seemed like it happened overnight. I had to move all my stuff to one side of the garage. I didn’t ask too many questions. I would rather they be there than someplace else.”
Despite having been raised in a religious family, Marcella wasn’t offended by the band’s name. “I loved it,” Marcella said. “I really did. When the kids were asked why they named the band Bad Religion, they would say different things. What Greg said to me and to others was that anything could be a Bad Religion. If you give up your sense of independent thought and you’re not thinking for yourself, then that’s a Bad Religion. Well, of course, that appealed to me. I didn’t have negative feelings about the name at all.”
That said, there was one incident involving Jay Ziskrout that left a sour taste in her mouth. “I didn’t care if they were in the house. For the most part they were not destructive. But one of Greg’s friends was making himself at home. Not only was he going to the refrigerator and getting milk to drink, he was drinking straight out of the carton!”
There were also complaints about the noise. The boys tried to appease the neighbors by dampening the sound with egg cartons and foam—with limited success. “I was always impressed by the things they were doing,” Marcella recalled. “Not necessarily by the level of noise, although the noise never really bothered me.”
Brett christened their practice space by spray-painting “WELCOME TO THE HELL HOLE” on the wall inside the garage. “The Hell Hole was the name that made sense,” Jay said. “I don’t think it had a whole lot of meaning. It was the fucking Valley. It was a million degrees in the garage but we didn’t care. We would take off our shirts and sweat for hours and hours and hours until it got dark.”
They continued to write songs and experiment with their sound. “It just kept going,” Brett said. “At our next rehearsal, Greg brought another song. And I brought another song. That’s how we did it.”
Greg added “World War III” and “Slaves” and Brett wrote “Drastic Actions,” which was his tribute to the Germs’ song “Shut Down.” Brett also wrote the iconic “Bad Religion,” which the band refers to as their theme song, but back then it served as a mission statement that outlined their core principles and explained the meaning of the band. Consider these lyrics from the first verse:
Spiritual era is gone, it ain’t coming back
Bad Religion, a copout that is all that’s left
This is a direct commentary, not so much on the decline of spirituality in America, but on the rise of the Moral Majority and TV evangelists like Jimmy Swaggart, Jerry Falwell, and Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker shaking down believers for cash donations. But if the first verse is a condemnation of the role of religion in society, the second verse makes it personal:
Don’t you know the place you live’s a piece of shit
Don’t you know blind faith through lies won’t conquer it
Don’t you know responsibility is yours
I don’t care a thing about eternal fires…
Listen this time it’s more than a rhyme
It’s your indecision
Your indecision is your
Bad Religion…
The shift to direct address at the end of the verse leading into the chorus is nothing less than a call to action for the listener to take responsibility for their beliefs. It’s both a challenge to think for yourself and a warning of the perils of “blind faith.” The line “Listen this time it’s more than a rhyme” is postmodern in its self-awareness, which reinforces the urgency of the message: we’re not in peril from the “eternal fires” of hell or even the lies of false prophets, but our own lazy thinking. Rather than railing against organized religion, the song rallies listeners to clarify what they believe. Figure it out for yourself, the song urges, “it’s not too late.”
Although the band was in its songwriting infancy and its members were all teenagers at the time, the song has a level of sophistication that was rare for hardcore bands of this era. While the music is relentless in its drive to make the listener feel something, the lyrics encourage the audience to not just think, but think critically.
As the band became more proficient, the Hell Hole became a hangout for the band’s punk friends in the Valley. Sometimes kids would drive out from Hollywood to watch them rehearse as word about Bad Religion spread through punk circles. But it wasn’t a party scene. Kids would come by after school and leave before dinnertime, when Greg’s mom returned from her job at UCLA.
Interestingly, it didn’t occur to the band to look for a place where they could play in front of a live audience. They only had six songs and, due to their habit of recording their garage sessions, were keenly aware they had approximately ten minutes worth of material.
“We used a boom box,” Jay recalled. “We just recorded it like that. It wasn’t very good but in all honesty it gave us a sense of how long we could play for.”
Even with banter between songs their set would be no longer than fifteen minutes, which wasn’t enough. Instead, they recorded a demo.
They went to Studio 9, which was located in the Hollywood & Western Building, and had seen better days. While businesses on the ground floor continued to operate, many of the units on the second, third, and fourth floors had been abandoned. Rooms without doors. Windows without glass. Several Hollywood punk squatters called it home and the walls were covered with graffiti.
Amidst this chaos was Studio 9, a one-room recording studio with a low-end eight-track. It cost $15 an hour to record and that came with an engineer. Greg remembered it was a wild-looking place. “There was graffiti everywhere,” Greg said. “Not just the studio, but everywhere. There were all these empty rooms with graffiti on the walls.”
The walls were adorned with the names of bands that had passed through or were squatting there. So Bad Religion decided to follow suit and leave their mark. “We got some spray paint and started spray-painting Bad Religion all over the place,” Brett said. “Which was pretty stupid.”
Jay also participated. “We went into one of the empty rooms and painted Bad Religion on the wall. I guess it’s not smart to paint Bad Religion on the wall when the name of your band is Bad Religion.”
The session didn’t take long. They only recorded a few songs, but it was the first time they’d been somewhat professionally recorded, which proved to be an exhilarating experience. When they were sitting in the mixing room listening to the playback, Brett got so excited that he jumped out of his seat, and his foot accidentally struck the glass surface of the coffee table, shattering it.
“Sorry,” Jay said. “We’ll totally pay for that.”
As exciting as the session was, for Jay it was something of a revelation. “Oh my god! I’m terrible! I was missing notes everywhere and I couldn’t play that fast. It was the first time I heard how bad I was.”
Nevertheless, they walked out with a demo tape. But later that night Brett received a phone call from the studio manager.
MANAGER: Hey, you sprayed graffiti all over the place, didn’t you?
BRETT: Yeah.
MANAGER: Well, you can’t do that. That’s vandalism. You gotta come out here and clean it up.
BRETT: Really? Because there was already graffiti everywhere.
MANAGER: Well, we don’t know who did that, but your name wasn’t up all over the place before you got here.
“I’m sure we didn’t have to do this,” Brett said, “but being stupid kids, we went back to Hollywood and covered up our graffiti.”
The experience motivated the band to go back to the Hell Hole and write new material. Now that they’d had a taste of recording, they wanted to make a proper record—just not at Studio 9. They’d made a punk tape in a punk studio, but now they were interested in making something that actually sounded good. This desire to make music that was hard and fast but enjoyable to listen to set Bad Religion apart from its peers. Over the course of their career, their quest to make a perfect-sounding record would seesaw between an aesthetic and an obsession.
Through Ziskrout’s drum teacher, they found a modest studio in the garage of the producer’s house in Thousand Oaks to record their six-song EP.
For Brett, the experience was occasionally baffling. “We had no idea what we were doing,” he confessed. “We had no idea how to make a record. We just had songs and we wanted to record them. Other punk bands made seven-inch records. We knew it was possible to do it. It never occurred to us to maybe get thirty minutes worth of music and play a show first.”
Jay was still learning how to use his equipment—and how not to use it. “My little three-quarter jazz bass was a sunburst bass. Black, orange, yellow. I decided I wanted it to be all black because black was way cooler than sunburst. I went to the garage and all I could find was a can of flat black. I sprayed the back of the bass and it looked like rubber. Fucking cool. So I sprayed the front of it. I sprayed the fret board and the strings and the headstock. I didn’t realize what I was doing!”
“He did it right before we went to the studio,” Greg added. “That’s how we got our unique sound on our first EP.”
They brought the recording to Gold Star Studios in Hollywood, an iconic independent recording studio at Santa Monica and Vine, to have it mastered. This was a big step up from Studio 9. Phil Spector had learned the art of recording at Gold Star and used its unique acoustics to create his legendary Wall of Sound. The Ramones’ End of the Century, released earlier that year, had been recorded by Spector at Gold Star.
When they arrived at the studio with their recording, they were greeted by Johnette Napolitano, who was working the reception desk. Johnette was helpful and encouraging and offered all kinds of advice. It didn’t hurt that she had purple hair and an affinity for punk.
Once she heard the record, Jay recalled that she was even more forthcoming. “‘You know, when you guys do your LP, instead of hiring an engineer that comes with the studio you should have my boyfriend produce it.’” Johnette’s boyfriend was her bandmate Jim Mankey, who, along with his brother Earle, was one of the founding members of Sparks. Johnette and Jim were in a band together called Dream 6 and they would go on to form Concrete Blonde.
Johnette’s enthusiasm gave the band a boost, but for Brett, being in a professional studio was a transforming experience. “The first time I saw a real studio, I was in love. That set the path for me. Not everyone has this reaction, but when I saw those rows of buttons and lights, I went nuts. I loved it. I thought to myself, This is for me, I have to learn how to do this!” He was eager to learn from more experienced musicians, especially those who didn’t look down their noses at punk.
Once the songs were mastered, the next step was to get the EP made into an actual record. Brett looked in the phone book and found a record pressing plant. With a loan from his father, Brett got the record made, but it was going to take some time. It was the fall of 1980 and the EP wouldn’t be ready to be released until early the next year.
Since they were putting out a record, they needed a name for their label. Greg and Brett came up with the name Epitaph based on the King Crimson song of the same name. The chorus of that song—“Confusion will be our epitaph”—suggests the label name was an offhand way of saying they didn’t know what they were doing. Nevertheless, they’d made great strides as a band in a short period of time. They’d written some songs, recorded an EP, and made a demo. Instead of being offered these opportunities, they’d created them for themselves. Aside from rehearsals at the Hell Hole, the only thing Bad Religion hadn’t done was perform in front of a live audience. It was time to play some shows.