WHILE GREG WAS PURSUING HIS COLLEGE degree, Brett was getting an entirely different kind of education. As a smart, bookish kid, Brett thought he’d eventually end up on a path similar to Greg’s, but it didn’t work out that way. Although he didn’t graduate from El Camino Real High School and had gotten his GED, Brett didn’t see himself as a dropout. “I wasn’t really quitting school in my mind. I thought, I’ll go to junior college and I’ll take classes that I’m interested in and I’ll get enough units to go to a regular college. That will be my path.”
Brett enrolled in Pierce College, a community college in the San Fernando Valley, and took music and philosophy classes, but he didn’t really apply himself. “I just couldn’t conform to the academic program, so I always failed. I failed classes and started ditching and became a pretty heavy drug user.” Brett tried art school next and took classes in painting and color theory at Otis-Parsons in downtown L.A., but the results were the same.
“I didn’t really have the discipline to show up for that either,” Brett said. “The big thing for me was I was just very dissipated and didn’t have good work habits and was pretty wild. A lot of recreational drug use and going to shows.”
Brett’s parents, though supportive, were exasperated by their son’s failure to thrive. If he wasn’t working or enrolled in school, he needed to find someplace else to live. This seemed reasonable to Brett, who was now dating Suzy Shaw, who’d been married to Greg Shaw of Bomp! Records and essentially ran the label. Suzy was twelve years older than Brett, so living at home was seriously cramping his style. With Suzy’s help he got a job at Sounds Good Imports and moved out of his parents’ house. Brett found an upstairs apartment overlooking a gas station at the intersection of Moorpark Street and Tujunga Avenue in North Hollywood.
But the move that changed the course of Brett’s life was his decision to enroll in night school at the University of Sound Arts in Hollywood to learn how to record music. This was the missing link in his education. While everything else he was doing made sense to Brett, the skills he learned at the University of Sound Arts gave him a sense of purpose. He was learning the ins and outs of running a label from Suzy, gaining an understanding of the business side of things from his job at Sounds Good Imports, and acquiring skills as a recording engineer at school. Brett was essentially getting a crash course in the music industry. “I was a heat-seeking missile for this kind of information,” he said. The icing on the cake was that it all benefitted Epitaph Records.
At University of Sound Arts he became friends with John Gerdler, a musician from San Juan Capistrano who shared Brett’s passion for music and recreational drugs. They became roommates and, eventually, business partners. They had a strong desire to make records, but no clients. So when Greg approached Brett about recording the Back to the Known EP, Brett jumped at the opportunity to do it.
“I can’t say whose idea it was. I don’t want to take credit for that, but it was something to cut my teeth on because I was going to recording school, the University of Sound Arts, and I very much wanted to record something real. I will say I’m not proud of that recording at all. I had no idea what I was doing. I wasn’t really ready to do a recording. I’m always a little overeager. I jumped right into it. We made a lot of really terrible-sounding recordings in those days. Punk records were not known for sounding good. So it was fine compared to what else was out there, but it wasn’t a Thom Wilson production.”
On a personal level, Brett was eager to connect with Greg, with whom he felt he was losing touch. When Brett wasn’t at work or school, he immersed himself in the underground club scene—a scene that was as foreign to Greg as the rigors of academia were to Brett.
“The L.A. scene was exploding with new sounds,” Brett explained. “The kids from the punk scene were channeling beatniks, growing their hair out, taking MDMA, coke, and heroin. It was around that time that I discovered narcotics. It was quite the opposite of what my dear friend Greg was doing, which was going to UCLA. He was very centered and focused.”
Brett’s roommate, John, learned that an extremely wealthy distant relative had died and left him a small part of his fortune. With that money, and another loan from Richard Gurewitz, they decided to open their own recording studio. When Brett was recording Back to the Known with Bad Religion at Pacifica Studios, he noticed they had a little room in the back that they weren’t using. Brett approached Pacifica about the space and they agreed to rent it to him. He moved in his equipment and Westbeach Recorders was open for business.
Why Westbeach? “We were fuck-ups,” Brett said. “I had blue hair and John had track marks and we were always getting loaded. We weren’t people that could go into a bank and get a loan. We didn’t want to name it Snot Recording Studios. We wanted to name it something that would sound legit so that if we invoiced somebody they would actually pay us. At the time there was a studio called Westlake Recorders. Westlake was one of the biggest studios in L.A. Michael Jackson recorded there. We could never dream of ever being in a studio like that, or even affording an hour there. I said to John, ‘Well, Westbeach kinda sounds like Westlake…’ The idea being, if I met somebody at a recording equipment store, I could say, I’m with Westbeach Recorders. It might ring a bell because it sounds like Westlake and give us credit.”
The designer who created their logo won an award for his work. So Brett and John would refer to their business as “the award-winning Westbeach Recorders.” For Brett, “it was an inside joke. It had nothing to do with our sound.”
Westbeach Recorders was located on a little street called La Cienega Place where La Cienega and Venice Boulevards came together. The building had once been a domestic residence, so Westbeach was literally in a closet in the back of Pacifica Studios.
They had a studio, they had equipment, and they had a little know-how. There was just one problem: Brett was broke. “I didn’t have any money, but I knew what bands could be good to sign.” Brett approached his bosses at Sounds Good Imports about doing a pressing and distribution deal—what’s known in the music business as a P&D deal. He would sign the bands and Sounds Good would advance the money to manufacture the records and provide distribution. Best of all, Brett already had a record he could start with: Bad Religion’s How Could Hell Be Any Worse? Because Bad Religion’s debut was now out of print, it seemed like the perfect situation.
Sounds Good agreed to this arrangement and started paying Brett $3,000 for every band that he signed. It was a bit of a Faustian bargain because, while the band’s recording fees went toward paying Westbeach’s rent, the bands also expected to be paid. This would have been difficult to manage even without the chaos of his growing appetite for drugs, which was becoming increasingly unmanageable.
“To give you an idea of what my existence was like back in those days,” Brett said, “I would get my paycheck, go down to the check cashing place, get cash for it at lunch, go buy cocaine from my connection, come back to work before the end of my lunch break and my paycheck would be blown before that day’s work was done. Then I would go into my weekend going, Fuck! What am I gonna do?”
Brett started spending all his free time at Westbeach. Like Studio 9, he charged $15 an hour, which included the services of the studio’s engineer: him. “I was working two jobs and only making enough to pay my rent at home and in the studio and get high. I had no other money.”
Bomp! was putting out a lot of psychedelic garage bands at the time and Suzy steered some of those bands Brett’s way. He recorded the Morlocks, the Primates, and the Things. One of the stranger psychedelic acts he recorded was Sky Saxon of the Seeds. Greg Shaw of Bomp! knew him from Haight-Ashbury and the Sunset Strip. Saxon had gone underground after his involvement with the Source Family, which was a cult-like commune in the Hollywood Hills, but he came out of hiding to do a month of recording at Westbeach. Brett had to pick him up from the motel where he was living, drive him to the studio, record all day, and then drive him back before heading home to his own apartment in North Hollywood.
Brett remembered it as an interesting time: “Sky Saxon was a beautiful soul, a beautiful guy, I think his real name was Richard, but he was a real acid casualty. He had long hair and this silver lamé cape. Ten watches on each arm with each one set to a different time like he was a time traveler. He claimed he could look in your eyes and discover your true universe name. So he did that with me and it was Starbolt.”
Keith Morris got wind of the nickname and made sure that it stuck—not that Brett was opposed to it. When Brett performed multiple roles on an Epitaph record, he would sometimes ascribe the engineering duties in the liner notes to “The Legendary Starbolt,” as he did on the Bad Religion albums Suffer, No Control, Against the Grain, and Generator.
Brett also worked on projects with his friends in the wider punk community. He recorded Thelonious Monster’s Baby… You’re Bummin’ My Life out in a Supreme Fashion, a veritable who’s who of what Brett referred to as “the luminaries of the Hollywood freak scene.” K. K. Barrett from the Screamers, Dix Denney of the Weirdos, Keith Morris of the Circle Jerks, Angelo Moore of Fishbone, and many more all made guest appearances on the record, and that doesn’t include the guest producers. “I was in that mix,” Brett said. “That was my world. We were partying together.”
All-nighters were not uncommon at Westbeach. On one occasion Brett did a seventy-two-hour session with Stiv Bators, formerly of the Dead Boys. “He brought in this thing called a Fairlight CMI,” Brett recalled, “which was a state-of-the-art digital synthesizer from the eighties that had thousands of string sounds. He was doing post-punk in the Lords of the New Church. He was into speed and I was into coke. We were just listening to these string sounds, trying to pick the best one, but when you’re gacked out of your mind and you’re on the seventy-fifth one, at some point it just spirals into sheer insanity. You can’t even tell what you’re hearing anymore.”
Sheer insanity was quickly becoming Brett’s modus operandi, but this was getting to be a problem because just about the only person who didn’t know about Brett’s drug use was his girlfriend, Suzy. Although they shared a number of interests, drugs weren’t one of them. To maintain his relationship with Suzy, he had to keep his behavior a secret. Westbeach gave him a place where he could do his drugs without Suzy finding out about it, but it was getting harder and harder to keep his life as an addict a secret.