BY THE END OF THE AIN’T LIFE A MYSTERY TOUR, IT was obvious to everyone in the band that bringing Brian Baker into the fold had been a brilliant move. He was an even better player than advertised and could do things with a guitar that no one who’d ever played in the band could do. He also had professional rock experience that his bandmates, being new to the majors, didn’t have.
“When I joined Bad Religion,” Brian said, “I had the most major-label experience, I had the most tour bus experience. I had done big records with Junkyard. I had already done the major label, big studio, famous producer thing. Stranger Than Fiction was their first time working at that level. I’d already done that. It was familiar to me. I didn’t have any trepidation.”
In other words, the stage wasn’t too big for Brian. But he offered more than indie cred and big-league rock experience: he brought a welcome personal dynamic to Bad Religion. He was smart, sharp, and had a caustic wit that was endlessly entertaining—unless you were on the receiving end of it. Bobby, who lived for rock and roll trivia, was thrilled. “Wow, I’m in a band with a guy from Minor Threat!”
While talent and a solid work ethic are essential qualities for a touring musician, character is just as important. Professional musicians only spend a few hours together onstage per week, but the rest of the time, the so-called down time, is just as important to the longevity of a band. A sense of humor, an easygoing nature, and a short memory are essential to long-term sustainability and success. Character is everything.
“After playing a few shows with Brian,” Jay said, “we realized that we’d made the right choice. We couldn’t replace Brett, so we went and got a fucking great guitar player with a great backstory who turned out to be a really great guy. He became a guy that I really liked and cared about. We had a lot in common even though we were complete opposites. In all honesty, I think the weirdest thing about Brett leaving was that when Brian joined the band I got a brand-new best friend.”
Although Jay was sober, Brian most certainly was not. He enjoyed the rock star lifestyle and wasn’t shy about it. As Brian put it, “I wanted to do tons of blow, fly first class, and play huge festivals. I made the best of it and had a great time. I wasn’t a fucking mess. I wasn’t a tragic alcoholic yet.” Jay enjoyed spending time with his new bandmate even when Brian was drinking. “He had a great time all the time,” Jay said, “so I didn’t mind being around Brian while he was drinking and partying because it was fun. I didn’t have to drink to participate.”
Brian arrived at a time when Bad Religion’s popularity was growing. Much of this was predicated by their labels’ efforts to capitalize on the global commercialization of punk, but not without some backlash from fans. In Germany some enterprising punks sold crossbuster T-shirts with the caption “THIS ISN’T PUNK ROCK. IT’S SONY.” Despite the uproar, the increase in ticket sales and the size of the venues the band played in were significant.
For example, Bad Religion played a show at the Lisebergshallen in Gothenburg where the opening acts were SNFU and Green Day. “They hadn’t broken in Europe yet,” Bobby said of Green Day. “They were nothing in Europe. We were playing in Sweden and I remember walking in and thinking, This place holds six or seven thousand people. We’re not going to sell this shit out. Later that day there were eight thousand people in there.”
Immediately after the European tour, the band geared up for the first leg of the North American Stranger Than Fiction Tour. The six-week tour included two dates in Jay’s new hometown of Vancouver. In 1995 Bad Religion went to Japan for the first time for a series of shows in Osaka, Nagoya, Tokyo, and Sendai. A show in Sapporo was added because a devastating earthquake hit Kobe two months before the band was scheduled to play there. They also played two dates in Hawaii before heading home.
The band had logged the better part of six months on the road. They were spending a lot of time together on tour buses, in dressing rooms, and at hotels, and looking for ways to keep themselves entertained. One of the more surprising diversions Bad Religion became preoccupied with was NASCAR. While stock car racing might seem like a strange hobby for a bunch of punkers, there are a lot of similarities between a racing team and a rock band. Both have lots of expensive gear that they have to move around the country quickly and efficiently. Both require specialized technical skills in high-pressure situations. Both focus on a single event and when it’s over you pack your gear and move on to the next one. You’re in competition with your peers, but they’re also your community because no one understands the ups and downs of this strange world like they do.
The ideology of racing teams became a source of inspiration for the band and one of its organizing principles. “‘Fastest driver drives the car’ is a Darrell Waltrip quote from watching the Southern States 500,” Brian explained. “What that means is the guy who can get the job done the most efficiently and waste the least amount of time is the person for the job. That’s been our ethic and it’s stayed with us.”
This mantra applied to everything the band did on and off the stage, and cultivated a spirit of can-do bonhomie and adjusting on the fly that served the band well. It also encouraged band and crew alike to check their egos. The best way to hold on to a job was to do it well without causing a lot of friction. If not, it would go to someone else.
The band’s interest in cars and their crews also led to an unsettling discovery about one of their bus drivers, a good old boy whom everyone liked. He had a tendency to ride the brakes and wasn’t a particularly good driver. Brian also noticed he was constantly sipping on something, and Brian was fairly certain it wasn’t water. “I’m an alcoholic,” Brian said. “I notice these things.” Brian was convinced their bus driver was drinking on the job and driving while impaired. He brought this to the attention of the rest of the members of the band. They had a discussion with the driver and gave him an ultimatum. Brian recalled the conversation like this:
BAD RELIGION: Here’s the thing. We love you but you’re going to have to make a choice. You can stay with us and not drink, or you can go home.
DRIVER: Nice knowing you, boys!
Finding a new driver wasn’t a problem because Bad Religion was in demand like never before. That summer, the band went back overseas for a short European tour before joining Pearl Jam on their much-maligned Vitalogy Tour.
Pearl Jam had taken a stance against Ticketmaster and had boycotted the service and the venues that supported it. The band had to organize every facet of the tour, which required an enormous amount of effort. This took a toll on the band’s passionate front man, Eddie Vedder. When Vedder got sick, a number of the shows had to be canceled, upsetting fans. Despite these hassles, Bad Religion got to play in front of massive crowds for people who may not have been familiar with their music.
“The Vitalogy Tour was a big deal,” Greg said. “There were a hundred thousand people at Soldier Field and a hundred thousand people at Golden Gate Park. Some of the biggest shows we’d ever played.”
While Bad Religion was eating up the miles, Greg continued to write songs. As the sole songwriter in the band, he felt the pressure to deliver an album’s worth of material to Atlantic and he was fully committed to the task. Greg took a break from working on his Ph.D. to prepare for the new album. Bobby and Brian both flew out to Greg’s home studio, now called Polypterus Studios, in Ithaca to get ready for Bad Religion’s ninth studio album, The Gray Race. Hetson was unavailable because he was touring with the Circle Jerks in support of their own major label debut—and final Circle Jerks release—Oddities, Abnormalities and Curiosities, about which the less said, the better.
“Greg said, ‘I got some songs. Come out to Ithaca,’” Bobby recalled. “Brian and I went up there and rehearsed for about two weeks. Greg pretty much had the layout of what he wanted to do. We added our input to it, and it came out great. We had a great time doing it. It was all positive.”
The experience was new for Brian. Although he’d flown out to Ithaca before the Ain’t Life a Mystery Tour for what he called “vocal camp,” he hadn’t sat down with Greg to collaborate on new material. “I had never really written like that,” Brian said. “I wrote lyrics when there was no one else to write them, like in Dag Nasty because we didn’t know who was going to sing. But I never really thought of myself as a lyricist. I think I can do a pretty good imitation of a meaningful lyric because I’m not stupid, but when I wake up in the morning with an idea, it’s a guitar riff. I’m never thinking about what the singer’s gonna do.”
This was the exact opposite approach that Greg took when crafting a song. “The song comes from a feeling,” Greg said. “You have to somehow find the words to capture that feeling. The music is accompaniment. It’s the sound you have in your head to accompany melody, and the melody is secondary to the feeling. So finding the words is everything.”
In spite of their different approaches to songwriting, they made it work. Brian brought musical ideas he had stockpiled over the course of the tour. Greg picked some of the riffs he liked, and they made songs out of them. A change here or a suggestion there would transform a hook into something greater. Brian estimated he contributed to a quarter of the songs on The Gray Race in some meaningful way.
“I love the song called ‘Nobody Listens’ that we collaborated on,” Brian said, “and also the song ‘The Gray Race.’ But some of my favorite songs on that record I had nothing to do with. I just play them. ‘Drunk Sincerity’ is one that I really love that Greg already had.”
The bulk of the songwriting was done by Greg, and he approached it as rigorously as he did his academic work. “When it comes down to it, songwriting is self-control,” Greg explained. “Most of what you spend your day doing, you have to throw away at the end of the day. It’s not good enough. You think it sounds cool, but it’s just not good enough. It’s hard work. It’s not fun. It can be torture, but when you get a song right it’s the most life-affirming thing. It’s pure elation.”
For Greg, the writing of The Gray Race was an intense experience, and in interviews he referred to it as the band’s most emotional album. Although it’s not a concept album, the title track serves as an organizing principle for the rest of the record. The gray race is the human species because we are the only species on the planet that can see things in terms other than black-and-white, e.g., fight or flight, kill or be killed, et cetera. Humans can perceive a middle ground that encompasses a wide range of emotions like love, empathy, kindness, and other altruistic impulses, i.e., the feelings that give life meaning. Despite this ability, our species continually creates systems that encourage (if not enforce) a black-and-white duality to existence that is responsible for war, sickness, starvation, and a host of other maladies that could be prevented if we worked together as a species. The album’s message is simple: either we have to create new ways of coexisting in the world or we are doomed to destroy one another.
Songs like “Them and Us,” “Empty Causes,” and “Nobody Listens” expand on this thesis. “Punk Rock Song,” the most upbeat-sounding song on the record, is ultimately the most pessimistic:
This is just a punk rock song
Written for the people who can see something’s wrong
Like ants in a colony we do our share
But there’s so many other fuckin’ insects out there
“Punk Rock Song” is a protest song that’s aware it’s preaching to the choir. It’s also one of the few instances when a Bad Religion song expresses frustration at those who can’t see that something’s wrong. In other words, punks in name only. The song suggests it’s not enough to buy tickets and T-shirts; you have to do more. If you’re not working to improve our shared environment, then you’re part of the problem. To drive the point home, the final verse is a catalog of statistics that illustrates the way the gray race fails itself and how we fail each other:
10 million dollars on a losing campaign
20 million starving and writhing in pain
Big strong people unwilling to give
Small in vision and perspective
One in five kids below the poverty line
One population runnin’ out of time
Once the band was satisfied with the material, they worked with their management team to find a producer for the album. They decided to go with Ric Ocasek, the front man for the Cars. Ocasek had worked with punk legends Bad Brains and had recently done the breakout album for Weezer. Most importantly, he was an active producer and talented songwriter, which was very important to Greg.
“I think Bad Religion albums always need collaboration,” Greg said. “Everything is collaboration. When Brett left, I knew I was going to need someone to fill his shoes and be a songwriting advocate, but also a critic. Someone who could steer the creative ship. And Ric was great at that.”
Given the position that Greg was in, it would have been understandable if he insisted that he was captain of Bad Religion now. He very easily could have hired a producer who would follow his lead in the studio. To his credit, Greg sought out someone who was both experienced and esteemed and could be counted on to provide constructive criticism. Greg understood he couldn’t do this on his own.
Bad Religion began recording The Gray Race in October at Electric Lady Studios in Greenwich Village. The studios were built by Jimi Hendrix in 1970, and countless legendary artists had recorded there over the years, from Led Zeppelin to the Clash to U2. Greg was invigorated by the newness of it all.
“I was thrilled to be working with great people,” Greg said. “We had a good manager. We had a great label. We could just go down to Rockefeller Plaza and pop in at the label. It was a thrilling time for me. I had two young kids, and they’d come down and visit me in the city. It was a blast.”
The band moved into long-term rental apartments at Fiftieth and Third. As the group’s musical historian, Bobby was quick to point out this wasn’t far from where Dee Dee Ramone had worked, first as a construction worker and then as a street hustler.
The band’s newest member loved everything about the experience. “I was living in an apartment in New York City,” Brian recalled, “and recording in one of the most famous studios in the world with an incredibly great producer and cool dude, who was also in a pretty amazing band. Things were firing on all cylinders and I was living the rock and roll fantasy. You’re in Manhattan, you’re going out for drinks with other musicians down in the Village after a long day in the studio. It was the stuff you read in books about rock and roll bands except it’s your band.”
It helped that Ocasek was a fellow guitar player who appreciated Brian’s talent. They liked a lot of the same music and Brian was a great admirer of the Weezer record that Ocasek had produced. “He was very laid back,” Brian said. “He was confident and knew exactly what he wanted things to sound like, but he wasn’t an asshole. He’d done it many times before and had written a lot of big songs. We got along well enough that he asked me to be in his solo band afterwards.”
The experience of writing and recording The Gray Race validated the band’s decision to keep going after Brett left. Whatever doubts they had about losing a founding member and creative contributor were fading in the rearview mirror. They’d had a series of successful tours, written an album’s worth of new material, and were having a quintessential New York experience—all while the band’s popularity continued to climb. This suggested that the abruptness of Brett’s decision to leave Bad Religion mattered more to them than it did to their fans.
“Brett’s departure didn’t cripple us,” Greg said. “We can talk about everything that Brett and I had in our relationship that was special, our partnership as songwriters, and this bond that we had as intellectual companions, but if you want to talk about business, the fans don’t pay attention to that. To this day you can ask our fans ‘Who wrote that song?’ and they’ll say, ‘The singer.’ They don’t know. They don’t know who wrote what. They just love the music. They don’t care about the songwriting.”
Perhaps the only member of the band who didn’t have a great experience during the recording of The Gray Race was Hetson. During the period when Greg, Bobby, and Brian were collaborating in Ithaca, Hetson had sent them a demo with two songs on it. Bobby strongly encouraged Hetson to fly out to Ithaca for a few weeks. “You should come up,” Bobby said. “We need you here.” But Hetson replied that he was still tied up with the Circle Jerks.
Greg had already written ten of the songs for the new album and was working on more. He also didn’t think too highly of Hetson’s songs, one of which wasn’t even complete. “They weren’t appropriate,” Greg said. “They weren’t Bad Religion songs. They weren’t even Circle Jerks songs.”
That wasn’t going to fly, especially with Brett gone. Greg put a great deal of blood, sweat, and tears into the songs. Never one to take his responsibilities lightly, Greg was intensely focused on writing the best songs he could so that loyal Bad Religion fans wouldn’t notice Brett’s absence when they listened to the new album. There was virtually no chance he was going to lower his standards to appease Hetson.
The situation came to a head at Electric Lady. Hetson was adamant about putting one of his songs on the album. The band felt that if Hetson wanted to contribute to the album, he should have accepted Greg’s invitation to come to Ithaca—like Bobby and Brian did.
But Hetson wouldn’t budge. Greg diplomatically suggested that it was the producer’s call, but also added there probably wasn’t room for Hetson’s songs at this late stage in the game. Hetson abruptly left the studio. They were scheduled to begin working with Ocasek the following day, and they had their final rehearsal without Hetson.
In the morning they held a band meeting, and Greg revealed that he’d talked to Hetson, who informed him he was going to quit the band after they finished recording the album. The band agreed that if Hetson was going to quit, he should leave now. They gave Hetson an ultimatum: if you’re at the studio tonight, we know you’re in the band; if not, you’re out. Hetson showed up, and that was the end of that.
The band wrapped up recording in November and the members went back to their respective homes. Whereas once all of the members of Bad Religion had lived close to one another in the Valley, now they were spread out all over North America. Greg went upstate to Ithaca, Jay flew to Vancouver, and the three “newest” members of the band—Hetson, Bobby, and Brian—returned to L.A.