THERE WAS NO QUESTION BAD RELIGION HAD created something extraordinary. With Suffer, not only had the band returned to form, they’d surpassed their own expectations, and reclaimed the attention of the punk rock community. Seven years is an eternity in pop music, but to punk rock enthusiasts who dutifully read their fanzines and ordered records and tapes through the mail, the return of Bad Religion was cause for celebration. While sales were slowed by Suffer’s delayed release, they picked up again after the accolades started rolling in. More proof that Suffer had “put a dent in the universe” came from the band’s peers.
Brett learned there was a new demand for his services as a recording engineer. One of the first bands to come calling was NOFX. Fat Mike, NOFX’s singer and bass player, loved the sound that Brett had captured on Suffer and wanted to make an album with him. Brett recorded Liberal Animation at Westbeach and offered to put it out on Epitaph, but the band opted to release it themselves. When NOFX eventually signed with Epitaph, it was rereleased after S&M Airlines and Ribbed as the third album of a three-record deal.
“I had a lot of energy back then,” Brett said. “I was a kid. I was a workaholic. I would work all night long. I don’t know where it came from but I was clean and sober and I was driven. I felt like I was on rocket fuel. Suffer did well. Westbeach was doing well. I kept signing bands, each one doing better than the last. I was working nonstop, seven days a week. I would work sixteen- to eighteen-hour days.”
The rest of the band shared Brett’s enthusiasm and they had a strong desire to do it again. “With Suffer, we knocked it out of the park,” Brett said. “We needed to show that it wasn’t a fluke. We’d done a good record once and lost our minds. Now we had to show that we were trustworthy.”
While Brett was keeping busy at Westbeach, he and Greg continued to write new material. Though the songs weren’t coming at quite the same pace as they had the previous year, it didn’t take long before they had written enough material for a new album. Bad Religion played a few shows that spring, including a gig with NOFX at their old stomping grounds, the Reseda Country Club on Sherman Way.
The venue began as a drugstore in the fifties and then a rock venue in the seventies run by Steve Wolf and Jim Rissmiller. Everyone from Metallica to Tom Petty to U2 played there in the early stages of their careers. By the time Bad Religion was playing at the Reseda Country Club on a regular basis it was a shell of its former self. “They weren’t high class,” Jay said. “Everything was kind of run-down. The chairs were fucked up and the carpet was torn up and the lights didn’t work. That seemed to be the kind of place that we’d end up. If we ended up in a nice place with chandeliers we’d think, We don’t belong here. This is too nice for us.”
On April 29, 1989, Bad Religion played with Scream at a VFW hall in Phoenix. Pete remembered that Scream was due up onstage but no one could find the drummer. “Everyone was like, ‘Where’s Grohl? Where’s Dave Grohl?’ I went out to find him. I didn’t know who he was but me and their roadie found him in their van. He was passed out.”
Pete roused Grohl and Scream played its set. Afterward, Pete had a conversation with the inebriated drummer that would prove prescient:
GROHL: You gotta go to Europe.
PETE: What are you talking about?
GROHL: Trust me. You’ll be huge in Europe.
PETE: Who are you?
Little did Pete know that Bad Religion’s booking agent, Doug Caron, had already pitched the idea to Brett. Doug believed there was demand for Bad Religion overseas and urged them to go. After their less than stellar experience on the road in the United States, they weren’t in a hurry to do it again in Europe, where they didn’t know anyone.
But Doug was persistent. He’d taken the Vandals to Europe and they’d had a good experience. Eventually, Bad Religion relented and decided to go. “He did a good job of managing our expectations,” Brett explained. “Doug said, ‘Don’t expect anything big. You can tour, but don’t expect to be huge.’”
While it’s true they didn’t know anyone in Europe, Bad Religion was far from an unknown quantity overseas. Epitaph’s main distributor in Europe was a Dutch company called Semaphore. “I was shipping a lot of records overseas,” Brett said. “I was exporting fifty percent of what we were producing. If we sold ten copies of a record here, we sold ten there. But I didn’t know exactly what that meant. I didn’t know if we were really big in one place, or if we were kind of big in a lot of different places. I really had no idea. It was hard to tell from the fan mail because it came from Spain, Italy, Germany, and all over Europe.”
Before they set out to test the waters in Europe, they convened to record their new album. They started recording No Control in June 1989, less than ten months after they’d made Suffer. For the first time in their career, they were returning to the same studio with the same lineup. Brett was determined to show the world that Into the Unknown was the outlier, not Suffer. “I remember very clearly what I was thinking: We can’t make the same mistake we made with Into the Unknown. We might have done that once, but we’re not doing it again. How Could Hell Be Any Worse? was a great record, people loved it, and then we blew it with the follow-through. We came back and redeemed ourselves with Suffer. Now we needed to prove it wasn’t a fluke. Now we needed to follow this record up with another one that was just as catchy, but even harder hitting. I wanted to show that we were a bona fide punk band.”
They set out to make another record that did the three things they did well on their previous album: make it fast, make it aggressive, and make it catchy. “I realized you could buy a Ramones record and you knew what you were getting,” Brett said. “That’s what we needed to do. That’s what we should have done after How Could Hell Be Any Worse? I think smarting from Into the Unknown, even though I was one hundred percent responsible for it, really helped because I was able to learn from the mistake.”
Greg wrote the title track, and in it he returns to the familiar theme of the futility of humankind. Instead of warning the listener of the damage caused by our attempts to manipulate our environment, “No Control” takes the long view:
There’s no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end.1
When we all disintegrate it will all happen again.
From the human perspective, “No Control” is awfully bleak, but if we adopt the point of view of the geologist, the song is oddly liberating because it reduces the sum of our struggles to a petty drama played out on the human stage. If time is the great equalizer, and the geological record of the planet tells us that it is, then everything from our search for meaning to consumer capitalism is equally pointless. We can choose to feel bad about this, but there’s no point in that either.
These are heavy ideas for a song that’s a little over a minute and forty-five seconds long, but if you paid no attention to the lyrics, you could be forgiven for thinking the song is upbeat. The rhythm is up-tempo, the vocal delivery is almost jaunty, and the chorus has the quality of a sing-along. It’s a song that clamors for the listener’s attention. It’s tempting to view “No Control” through the lens of someone wrestling with big ideas about humankind’s irrelevance while dealing with the very real deadlines and demands of graduate school.
The new album also features one of Brett’s favorite songs, “Automatic Man.” “The song is about valuing agency,” he explained, “and noticing how in our daily routine there’s often an unrecognized element of automaticity. One day I was driving somewhere, and I needlessly got off at the exit I’d always use to go to my recording studio and I thought, I’m a fucking automatic man. I was working so much I was totally lost in thought, and my body was doing the driving.”
The album contains a number of songs that quickly became fan favorites, perhaps none more so than “I Want to Conquer the World.” The song is another example of using satire to skewer your subject. For Brett, “it’s an ironic critique of nationalism and the idea of male machismo and patriarchy.” Obviously, he doesn’t want to “give all the idiots a brand-new religion” or “expose the culprits and feed them to the children.” The song takes shots at everyone from the high-and-mighty to the self-righteous and sanctimonious. But from the context of surf and skate culture, where the first hurdle is overcoming one’s own fear, the idea of “conquering” has enormous appeal. Conquering societies? Not so good. Conquering waves or a skate park? Radical.
It would have been nothing short of miraculous if the recording had gone as smoothly as it had during Suffer, but there were a few hiccups. Pete had trouble with the song “Sanity.” As he struggled to get the beat, the tension in the studio grew. He recalled Brett chiding him. “Aw, come on, Pete. The song’s simple! Why can’t you get the timing?” At one point Hetson became so frustrated he threw down his headphones and stormed out of the studio. Eventually, Pete ended up playing along to a click track, which was humiliating for him.
“There was a lot of pressure on me,” he said. “I always felt insecure about my playing with Brett. I felt I was one mistake away from Brett saying, You’re not in the band anymore!”
From anyone else in Bad Religion that would sound unrealistic, but it had happened to Pete before when he was asked to step away during the recording of Into the Unknown. In addition, after Suffer, band members openly talked about Pete’s limitations as a drummer in interviews. Although his lack of training was usually characterized as an asset, Pete felt like the weak link in Bad Religion.
The problems with the new album continued after they finished recording. Brett wasn’t happy with the way the record sounded, but it had nothing to with the band’s performance. In his quest to produce the biggest sound, Brett had recorded No Control through an Aphex Compellor. A self-proclaimed gearhead, Brett was always looking for ways to make punk rock records sound better.
“Bill Stevenson of Black Flag and the Descendents was in my studio producing Chemical People,” Brett said. “Westbeach was a widely used public studio at the time. He came in with a piece of gear by Aphex called the Compellor that controls the dynamics of sound. I thought it was cool. I had gear envy. So I bought one too.”
The Aphex Compellor worked as a combination compressor, leveler, and limiter, hence the name, and was part of a wave of new digital equipment flooding the marketplace. That didn’t necessarily mean the audio enhancer was a good fit for what Bad Religion was trying to do.
“By the early nineties you could make any sound out of anything,” Jay said. “You had drum machines and pedals and computers. It was a cool time but a terrible time. People were throwing away analog desks that would now cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. You’re being told, ‘That’s that old garbage. You need the new digital whatever.’ Well, maybe that analog stuff was better.”
When Brett ran the tracks through the Compellor, they sounded all right but when it came time to mix those tracks it was a different story. “After I was done, I thought, Oooh, maybe I shouldn’t have done that. It sounded a little weird. There was an artifact of compression called “breathing” that I thought I was hearing everywhere. But I salvaged it in the mix by going back to my tried and true gear and everything turned out fine. But for better or worse, I think it contributed to the sound of No Control.”
Just as Brett was always experimenting in the studio, he was constantly searching for new and innovative ways to get his music in front of fans. But sometimes those opportunities came to him. He was sitting in his office at Westbeach one day when Kelly Slater called.
SLATER: Hey, is this Brett?
BRETT: Yeah.
SLATER: My name is Kelly Slater and I’m a professional surfer.
BRETT: I know who you are.
SLATER: I’m putting out a surf video that I’m going to sell at skate and surf shops. How much would it cost to put your music in it?
BRETT: It won’t cost anything.
SLATER: Really?
BRETT: Put as much of my music in your video as you want for free. I would be stoked!
Slater wanted to make something comparable to the music videos that were airing on MTV but, instead of bands pretending to play music, it would have edited footage of Slater tearing up the waves. Brett figured that Slater had tried to get music from major labels that wanted an arm and a leg for it. Brett took the opposite approach and gave it away for nothing.
Slater became the most famous surfer of all time and his videos were no small part of his success. Brett recalled that after Slater’s video came out, “all the surf and skate companies started calling me for our music because they knew they could use it for free. To me it was a no-brainer. Whether it was surfing, skating, or snowboarding, our music was a perfect fit.”
The song from No Control that would reach the largest number of people was “You”—thanks to its inclusion in the video game Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2. In the game, players pick which skater they want to be and run through a course pulling tricks and stunts. During the game, the soundtrack plays on a loop in the background. The first version of the game only had eight songs, but Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 had three times as many, and Bad Religion’s “You” was one of them. This exposed a lot of young skateboarding enthusiasts, who might not have discovered the band on their own, to Bad Religion. Gamers genuinely liked the song. Bad Religion’s blend of hooks, hardcore, and harmonies was the perfect accompaniment to hours of virtual shredding.
“That was huge,” Brett said, “because when you play the game you’ve got a finite number of songs and you’re doing tricks over and over to the music. The music becomes the soundtrack to that period of your life.” It was a new way to market music to potential fans and proved to be the right music for the right audience.
But in the summer of 1989, even with No Control in the can, the band was still in the odd position of promoting Suffer. They played a show at Raji’s in Hollywood on June 20, and then they opened for their heroes the Ramones at the Warner Grand Theatre in San Pedro. They got the gig by volunteering their services to Gary Tovar of Goldenvoice for free. Although it was a great experience getting to share the stage with the legendary Ramones and playing in front of kids who had never heard of Bad Religion before, it was disappointing to see the Ramones play so poorly. “The Ramones were at the end of their run,” Jay said of the show, “and they were terrible.”
Except for a tune-up at the Reseda Country Club, the band didn’t play any more shows that summer before its European tour. On August 16, they flew into Amsterdam in the Netherlands. Greg recalled there were about 100 to 150 kids at their first show. Their tour manager kept harping on the fact that it takes time to build up a following. “You’re not going to be the biggest band just because you’re an American band.” But when they got to Germany it was a different story.
“I remember it as if it was yesterday,” Pete recollected. “Those clubs in Germany were run by punk kids and the government would help pay for it. It was like a youth center type of deal. I remember pulling up this dirt road and going over the hill and seeing thousands of fans lined up. What the fuck? Really? Maybe we’re on to something here… ”
There were so many people outside the club that they had a hard time believing they’d all come to see them. And these were the kids who couldn’t get inside. There were another one thousand waiting inside for Bad Religion to take the stage.
“It was a pretty good-sized place,” Brett recalled. “It had a capacity of five hundred or six hundred people. Maybe more. Some kind of a warehouse squat. I think it might have been a coal mine. I don’t remember what the fuck it was. All I can tell you is there were three thousand punks. They squeezed a thousand punks into that space and there were two thousand in the street that couldn’t get in. They knew every word to every song. They were singing so loud I couldn’t hear Greg. It was just mental. And our booking agent was like, ‘Wow, I had no idea!’”
“Talk about complete disbelief and appreciation,” Greg said. “We came into Essen and people were wearing our shirts and singing our lyrics. How do these people know this? And they were all so earnest. We did so many fanzine interviews and these guys followed us around with a video crew. They just wanted to document one of the old-school punk bands, but it was a rebirth for us.”
It didn’t take long for their incredulity to become a desire to put on a great show. Here was an audience for whom Into the Unknown had never happened. Because of the language barrier and Brett and Greg’s propensity for big words and big ideas, German fans had to work a little harder to understand the lyrics. They consulted their dictionaries and talked about what the songs meant with their friends. It’s possible they felt the lyrics more intensely than their American counterparts because they had to earn their fandom.
“European fans had so many obstacles to overcome,” Jay said. “They had to dissect every word to understand the meaning of the song. One fan confronted me after the show: ‘I hate you because you are American but I love your music!’”
Bad Religion had stumbled upon the audience they’d always wanted and they intended to make the most of it. The show in Essen marked the first of many sold-out shows in Germany that summer. Not only were the venues filled to capacity, but there were many, many more people outside hoping to get in. It was clear to Brett that the shows were grossly underbooked and they could have played much larger halls.
“We were huge there,” Brett recalled, “and there were crossbusters everywhere. That’s when I realized the power of our logo. They got it immediately and it just spread. Maybe because Europe is hundreds of years ahead of the U.S. in terms of secularization and the moment was right for it. In any case our logo spread far and wide. It was a meme before there was a word for that.”
The fans brought an incredible amount of energy to the shows and the band fed off of it night after night after night. Part of the reason for their success was that so few punk bands toured Western Europe in those days when the Berlin Wall was still standing. The Circle Jerks and Black Flag had played some gigs, but not a full tour. Bad Religion helped establish a network of venues, most of which were community centers with government funding but with professional sound and light systems.
“We were treated like kings, the people appreciated us, and we made money,” Greg said. “We didn’t come home broke. So we started a tradition of playing there. They’re some of the best fans in the world.”
For Jay, the European tour breathed new life into the band. It validated the work they’d done to get to that point and sustained their enthusiasm for doing it again. “It was everything,” Jay said. “If we didn’t go to Europe that summer, I just don’t see us continuing on. If you want to boil it down to fucking brass tacks, it was the financial reward for everything that we’d been doing. We finally got paid. I’m not saying that we were in Learjets, I’m saying that someone was actually coming to see us play. That was happening in California, but not at that level. It was just so obvious that these people were coming to see us. It was one hundred percent affirmation. The kind of thing that would drive you to do more.”
These European shows were captured and released in a live tour video called Along the Way. The video synchronizes recordings from fourteen different performances with audio taken from their seventh show in Germany, which was held at Kesselhalle in Bremen. The video also contains short interviews with the band members, including one where Brett goes into detail about his past struggles with drugs. The video, which was released in Germany in 1990, didn’t come out in the United States until the following year.
After Germany, Bad Religion completed its European tour in London and headed back to the United States—just in time for the release of No Control. Jay started working at Epitaph to help out with their follow-up to Suffer. He wasn’t a paid employee at this point and had no formal duties. “I had a pickup truck, so that meant that I could go to Alberti pressing plant and pick up the records, the physical vinyl, and drive them to the storage locker, which was below the freeway.”
While Brett was occupied with the business of running a label, Jay helped out with the grunt work: fulfilling orders and moving merchandise. “In all honesty,” Jay said, “I saw going to work at Epitaph not as going to work for Brett but going to work for Bad Religion. Anything that I could do to help Bad Religion would help me because I’m in the band. So, I didn’t have to get paid. I would get paid down the road if I helped this process along. You do it because you believe in the product and later on you’ll be rewarded.”
In addition to the band and the label, Brett had something else on his mind. After he got clean, he started dating Maggie Tuch. Maggie had been seeing Hillel Slovak of the Red Hot Chili Peppers when the guitar player overdosed in June 1988. That summer, Brett reached out to Maggie and they supported each other in their efforts to stay clean, but they became more than friends. On September 10, 1989, they were married.
On November 2, Epitaph shipped twelve thousand copies of No Control. The success of Suffer translated to a large number of pre-orders for No Control, but as Brett well knew there were no guarantees. No Control sold extremely well and Brett had to work overtime to keep up with demand. Before he knew it, the record had sold over sixty thousand copies.
But Bad Religion was in a curious situation. They had just put out a new record and recently returned from a tour for their previous album, and they were in no position to go out and do it again. Greg was wrapping up his master’s degree in geology from UCLA and was unable to embark on another tour until the summer. The previous year, he’d been the recipient of the Bryan Patterson Prize from the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, an award that came with a modest cash prize and went to just one student nationwide per year. Greg was so focused on his studies, he wasn’t aware of the jump in Bad Religion’s album sales. He was busier than he’d ever been and had new duties as a husband to add to his responsibilities.
Nevertheless, Bad Religion maintained a tight rehearsal schedule and met at Uncle in Van Nuys once a week. It’s also where they discussed band business. “It was something we felt we needed to do,” Jay said. “We would get together and that’s when someone would say, ‘I talked to so and so. We’ve got a show two weeks from now.’ We would meet up and talk about this stuff and then practice, and that was how we planned out what was going to happen.”
Due to their limited availability, they didn’t have a booking agent in the United States. They picked up local gigs that Brett, Jay, and Hetson were offered when they went out at night to see bands play. Bad Religion was also on a short list of go-to bands that Goldenvoice reached out to when punk acts from around the world came through Los Angeles. For instance, in late November and early December Bad Religion played Santa Monica Civic with the Buzzcocks. Greg recalled that he met Eddie Vedder for the first time when he was working as a roadie for the Buzzcocks and the two struck up a friendship. Vedder was a longtime fan of Bad Religion who had seen the band play on numerous occasions in San Diego, but at the time Greg had no idea that Vedder was a talented singer in his own right.
Bad Religion also traveled to Tijuana to play at Iguana’s, a three-story club that had a short run as a rock and roll venue. It was located in a strip mall in the Tijuana suburbs but was just as lawless as some of the more notorious nightspots in the city center. “It was fucking crazy,” Jay said. “There were no rules. I would assume that it was mostly people from San Diego, but I know a lot of people from L.A. would go down there because it was so fun. It was a lot of people who came down to get fucked up and let loose, but it was super dangerous. There wasn’t really a drinking age. There was no security so people would just get onstage. There were grates in front of the stage where there may have been a fan at one point and I’d watch people fall into these holes. They’d just disappear. What the fuck happened to that guy?”
Although Iguana’s had a capacity of at least one thousand people, as many as three hundred of them wouldn’t be able to see the stage and shows were often overbooked. Despite the danger, Bad Religion loved playing to Iguana’s large crowds. “All of the shows were rad,” Jay said. “There wasn’t a show there that wasn’t rad. It sounds terrible to say this but there were broken bones and blood. ‘Fuck, did you see that guy fall off the third-floor balcony?’ It was just nuts.”
After nearly ten years and four studio albums, things had never been better for the band, but as they would soon discover, with an increase in popularity came additional pressure.
Footnotes
1. This line was taken from the eighteenth-century Scottish scientist James Hutton, the grandfather of modern geology.