AS GREG AND BRETT’S PATHS DIVERGED, WITH Bad Religion going one way and Epitaph going another, they both fixed their attention on the future. But the former collaborators also spent a considerable amount of time looking back on the legacy they had created together. As Bad Religion’s songwriters, Greg and Brett had a reputation for being hyper-intelligent lyricists. They didn’t cultivate labels like the professor and the record mogul, but they didn’t shy away from them either. The way the two songwriters went about celebrating the band’s legacy after their breakup revealed they were no less susceptible to intense emotions.
Toward the end of 1995, Epitaph released All Ages, a compilation of Bad Religion songs spanning from How Could Hell Be Any Worse? to Generator, celebrating ten years of Bad Religion records. (Songs from Recipe for Hate and Stranger Than Fiction, even those that Brett had written, were left off because they no longer belonged to Epitaph.) All Ages also includes two live tracks, “Do What You Want” and “Fuck Armageddon… This Is Hell,” that were recorded with Brian Baker during the Ain’t Life a Mystery Tour the previous year. From a business perspective, All Ages was a way for Brett to put a “best of” album in the stores at a time when Atlantic and Sony were spending a lot of time and money marketing and promoting Bad Religion. Releasing All Ages was a smart move from a savvy entrepreneur, but it was also a way for Brett to exercise creative control over a decade’s worth of material.
Meanwhile, in the Bad Religion camp, The Gray Race was released in February 1996. After a few shows in California, Bad Religion immediately went to Germany to kick off a series of European club shows. In an effort to recapture the magic of their first European tour in 1989, they played at smaller, more intimate venues across Europe for performances that were more like album release parties. Their German fans rewarded the band for starting the tour in Europe by making the album’s first single, “Punk Rock Song,” number six on the German charts. The Gray Race was also a strong seller in Scandinavia. In fact, The Gray Race was Bad Religion’s best-selling album outside of the U.S.
These dates were only the beginning of their longest and farthest-reaching tour to date. After two weeks in Europe, Bad Religion spent the next seven weeks traveling throughout the United States and Canada. Greg was a regular, if not religious, reader of the band’s fan mail, and was aware of the many fans who complained that Bad Religion had never played in their town. The band spent that spring playing venues all over North America, hitting many cities for the first time.
After a month off, Bad Religion hopped around Europe, North America, Asia, and South America for the rest of the year. They came home for a well-deserved rest over the holidays before flying to Australia for another sold-out slate of shows. By the end of the tour, the band had played over 110 shows on five continents in under a year. They’d come a long way from playing frat parties and warehouse shows with their friends. They were a bona fide international act with fans all over the world.
The result of this extensive touring was an audio document that eventually took the form of the live album Tested. Like a scientist conducting an experiment, Greg wondered what it would be like to capture the sound of a Bad Religion show at various venues and then compare and contrast the recordings. Would the recordings reveal something useful that could be implemented in the future?
Greg was eager to find out. He packed his ADAT (Alesis Digital Audio Tape) multitrack recorder and, with the aid of the band’s soundman, Ronnie, was able to capture the Bad Religion experience in clubs and concert halls all over the world.
After listening to a few of these recordings, the idea of a live album began to take hold. Greg wasn’t interested in using overdubs and other studio effects to enhance the sound or trick the listener into thinking they were hearing a seamless live performance; he insisted on authenticity. By featuring songs from different venues, Tested became a “best of” The Gray Race Tour record. There’s no crowd noise. What you hear is Bad Religion at the top of their game playing twenty-four songs at various venues from Baltimore to Berlin, Melbourne to Montreal.
The album also includes three previously unreleased studio tracks recorded at Greg’s home studio in Ithaca: “Dream of Unity,” “It’s Reciprocal,” and “Tested.” The last takes its name from the notion that things that endure have stood the test of time, which certainly could be said of Bad Religion. The title also suggests that Greg felt The Gray Race Tour tested the band’s mettle in terms of endurance and quality control. Greg wanted quantitative evidence that Bad Religion was just as good without Brett as it was with him.
The album wasn’t released on Atlantic. The label wasn’t as enthusiastic about the project as Greg was and declined to release or distribute it. (Later, representatives from the label said they weren’t informed of the band’s desire to release a live album and claimed they would have approved it.) Bad Religion put the album out with Sony and Atlantic agreed to sell it in the U.S. as an import. Tested was released in January 1997 as a double gatefold album and CD with a twenty-page booklet from the tour.
Most of the songs included on Tested were written by Greg even though the album drew from material all the way back to How Could Hell Be Any Worse? Now that the shock over Brett’s decision to leave the band had faded, a feeling of mutual bitterness between the two founding members set in, and that may have played a part in Greg’s decision to leave many of Brett’s songs off of the album. While Brett had said uncharitable things about the band, Greg was careful not to take his feelings public.
“I never went on record as saying, ‘That dick! He left the band right when we needed him the most!’” Greg said. “I guess I’m arrogant. I thought, You want to fucking quit? I’m going to show you that we don’t need you. That’s arrogance perhaps. But you know what? It probably saved me from the pit of despair. Instead of taking a self-destructive path, I thought, We’ve got to kick it into high gear and make the best album we’ve ever made!”
Whether it was arrogance or a coping mechanism, Greg transformed his pain into a source of motivation. Although Greg understood why Brett felt like he needed to step away from the band, Brett’s criticism still stung. Despite the band’s relentless touring and promotion, The Gray Race did not sell as well as Stranger Than Fiction in the United States. However, the record did extremely well worldwide.
By this time Danny Goldberg had moved on and no longer had a hands-on role with recording artists contracted to Atlantic, but his opinion of the band hadn’t changed. “I think they’re one of the great American bands,” Goldberg said. “They didn’t have the pop crossover success of Green Day or the Offspring but their songwriting has real depth to it, even more so than some of the other bands that were successful.”
While Stranger Than Fiction was Bad Religion’s best-selling record by far, it fell short of Atlantic’s expectations for the album, which surprised Jay not at all. “My goal was to double our sales at Epitaph,” Jay said, “and their goal was to sell seventeen million records. Those two things weren’t even close to being the same. When we didn’t sell seventeen million records, they were bummed. The climate for us didn’t change. The expectations changed.”
Seventeen million is a bit of an exaggeration, but the stratospheric success of Green Day’s Dookie, the Offspring’s Smash, and Rancid’s Let’s Go also contributed to the unrealistic expectations for the record. This created an odd dynamic: Bad Religion had never been more popular, and this newfound popularity had generated a wealth of opportunities for the band, but from the label’s perspective they were falling short.
“I think a lesser band would have thrown in the towel at that point,” Greg said. “We were banging our head against the wall. We’d been together for fifteen years and had inspired all these other multi-platinum artists. We took them on tour with us and Brett marketed their albums through Epitaph, but we weren’t sharing in the windfall. What were we doing wrong?”
It was a question that a lot of punk rockers were asking themselves, but few bands could claim the kind of influence that Bad Religion had exerted on the new wave of nineties punk. While it was true that Nirvana played a big role in ushering in the punk explosion of 1994, their impact is often mischaracterized. Nirvana changed the music industry by removing the barriers that prevented popular indie rock bands from breaking out. But Nirvana didn’t inspire the punk rock bands that soon became household names. Bands like NOFX, Rancid, and the Offspring were already out there, making records, playing shows, and hitting the road, and the band that inspired them was Bad Religion.
When Suffer came out in 1988, it helped resurrect punk from the dead and breathed new life into music meant to be played loud and fast. The album inspired a lot of bands from around the county, particularly on the West Coast, and changed people’s minds about what punk rock could be in the late eighties and early nineties. Suffer was both a stake in the ground and a road map for the way forward.
However, the band whose intelligent lyrics and uncompromising stance on a wide range of issues was not getting its due, even though Bad Religion practically invented the format that other bands were using to catapult them to success. Greg was right to feel indignant, but he recognized that if he were to discuss Bad Religion’s influence on the bands that were essentially eating their lunch, it would come off poorly.
“It would have looked like sour grapes,” Greg said. “But you know what? I always consider the long view and I have no regrets. I’m just glad I didn’t talk about it. We just clammed up, put our nose to the grindstone, and toured a lot.”
Still, when the time came to begin preparations for the next album, they did so knowing that the last two albums had missed the target Atlantic had set for them. Whether that target was realistic or not, there was now the distinct possibility that Atlantic could drop them if they didn’t deliver an album the label felt would sell well. Bad Religion’s deal with Atlantic had been structured so that their advance for the second record was larger than the first, and so on. But while the advances were going up, the sales were going down, which added to the pressure.
Because major labels were more concerned with blockbuster hits then doing right by their artists, they allocated marketing, promotion, and publicity resources to the bands at the top of the food chain. As soon as a band’s sales started to slip, the label stopped promoting them. There was also reason to believe Atlantic kept Bad Religion on their roster so they could use the band’s name to recruit other indie acts.
Before turning to the next Bad Religion record, Greg pursued a more personal project: a solo album that dealt primarily with the end of his marriage. His thoughts had moved away from politics and taken a more introspective turn. In an essay written for Details, Greg speculated on how his punk rock upbringing had prepared him to challenge dogma and question authority but had sabotaged his ability to maintain intimate relationships. Despite several attempts at marriage counseling, including while Greg was in New York recording The Gray Race, the Graffins divorced.
Greg poured out his heart in a series of songs written over the course of several years that explored everything from the divorce of his parents (“Opinion”) to holding out hope for reconciliation (“Maybe She Will”) to brutal self-recrimination (“In the Mirror”). Greg played the piano or acoustic guitar with the drums dubbed in after the fact. The album also includes “Cease,” one of Greg’s songs from The Gray Race, only this version is much slower.
Sad and soulful, the album isn’t a cathartic attempt to use a painful chapter of his life to spread his wings and show the world what he can do as a songwriter. Rather, the record, which he titled American Lesion, feels like the mournful howl of a man compelled to confront the reality of his divorce the only way he knows how. Everyone looks in the mirror every day, but few have the courage to sing about what they see there.
The album title is a statement about how capitalism turns everything into a commodity whose value is determined by the marketplace. Products that aren’t profitable, regardless of their artistic merit, are cast aside and considered a blight on the economy. The album’s art illustrates this idea with an American flag whose stars are replaced by dollar signs and whose stripes form a field of broken hearts.
Greg wrapped up the recording of American Lesion in time for Bad Religion to hit the road and return to Europe for a short three-week tour in June 1997. They played a number of festivals, including Go Bang! in Munich, where they opened for David Bowie and were joined onstage by Biohazard for a rousing rendition of “We’re Only Gonna Die.” But they also played smaller venues in Austria and France.
Never one to wait, Greg had already started working on material for a new Bad Religion record. In fact, the recording of Bad Religion’s next album commenced as soon as the band returned from Europe.
It was a confusing time for Bad Religion. On one hand, punk rock was providing the band with a steady source of income that allowed its members to do things like pay their mortgages, have health insurance, and take care of their families. On the other hand, punk rock had reached a plateau and was now more or less mainstream. More people were buying punk CDs, punk T-shirts, and tickets for punk rock shows than at any other time in the genre’s troubled history. As a result of this cultural shift, punk’s emphasis had moved away from its primal impulse to reject the status quo in favor of creating more commodities for the subculture to consume. That’s not what Bad Religion was all about. The members of Bad Religion were no longer teenagers (or even what teenagers considered young), but their message hadn’t changed. They were still calling for personal accountability in their own intelligent but uncompromising way.
Bad Religion did not survey the new punk landscape and try to come up with ways to broaden their appeal, but the punk community often reacted as if it did. The rise of the Internet allowed the band to reach out to its fans and inform them of what was going on, but it also permitted fans to provide feedback, which the band encouraged, read, and frequently answered. While many of the messages they received offered support for the band or contained questions about a song lyric or an upcoming show, many lashed out at them for changing or selling out.
It was beginning to feel like a damned if we do, damned if we don’t situation. Their label wanted them to be more like the bands cranking out hits; their fans wanted them to be more like the band that produced How Could Hell Be Any Worse? or Suffer or whatever album had brought them into the fold. Neither of these aspirations was realistic.
The band felt the best thing they could do for their new record was to go back to their DIY roots. After working with Brett in studio environments they were familiar with, their last two albums were recorded by people they didn’t know in places they’d never set foot in before. Greg wanted to get back to a simpler, more hands-on approach. What better place to do that than at home?
There was also a practical reason for wanting to record in Ithaca. After logging so many miles during their world tour, Greg was eager to spend more time in New York. In addition to his self-produced solo album, Greg had been producing more bands’ albums, including Unwritten Law’s Oz Factor for Epic Records, at his friend Alex Perialas’s studio Pyramid Sound. A well-respected producer of thrash metal, Alex had worked with a number of popular bands, including Anthrax, Overkill, Testament, and many others. With more experience under his belt and additional resources at his disposal, Greg pushed to make the new Bad Religion record in Ithaca.
Over the next several months, Jay, Hetson, Bobby, and Brian came out to central New York to write songs and record tracks. Sometimes they recorded at Pyramid Sound, other times they worked at Polypterus Studios at Greg’s home. Compared to the previous record, the making of No Substance had a decidedly different feel and reflected a more laid-back approach. As with The Gray Race, Greg collaborated with Brian on several songs. “I came in with musical ideas,” Brian said. “Greg had songs in his file, as was his way, that were completely his.”
Unlike with the previous record, they didn’t work off demo tapes. Instead, they arranged the songs as they went. It was more spontaneous than previous Bad Religion albums with plenty of opportunities for collaboration. Jay is credited on a song, and Hetson contributed to two. After the completion of The Gray Race and American Lesion, fears as to whether Greg could shoulder the songwriting load on his own had subsided. Surrounded by talented musicians, engineers, and producers who brought their skills to the table, Greg felt inspired by their collaborative spirit.
“To me it was always a creative outlet that everyone was allowed to participate in,” Greg said of the making of No Substance. “I was willing to offer the creative freedom to anyone. I sort of looked at it as a loose consortium of people who came together to share our creativity. That’s a lot different than those who run things with an iron fist. It’s kind of like a family in that sense. It’s important to acknowledge that making a record is a privilege and not something that you have to maintain control of at all costs. I think that’s the secret, or part of it, to our longevity.”
In other words, the fastest driver drove the car.
In September, they took a break from recording No Substance to play a series of shows at smaller venues throughout New York. All of the shows were five dollars a ticket, and they issued a special-edition T-shirt to commemorate the “tour.”
Afterward, they returned to Ithaca to put the finishing touches on No Substance. When they were done recording, the album was sent to Chris Lord-Alge in L.A. to be mixed. Lord-Alge was a renowned audio specialist who, along with his brother Tom, had worked on some huge records that produced massive hits. Bad Religion was pleased with his efforts, and the consensus was that together Greg, Ronnie, Perialas, and Lord-Alge had succeeded in re-creating the early Bad Religion sound while continuing to make full use of the band’s talents by experimenting with various styles and tempos.
In interviews Greg explained that No Substance addressed his concerns with a culture that was becoming increasingly superficial. People were overly focused on trivial concerns to the detriment of their social conscience and political awareness. No Substance, he hoped, would serve as a wake-up call.
Each song on the album tells a story about a facet of American history and expands on Greg’s interest in combining the aggression of punk with folk storytelling and pop sensibilities. “The Greatest Killer in History” paints a grim picture of the American military-industrial complex and specifically names Edward Teller, who, along with Robert Oppenheimer, developed the atom bomb.
“The State of the End of the Millennium Address” expands on the opening of “The Voice of God Is Government,” a song from their debut album, in which a fake evangelist preaches, “Neighbors, no one loves you like he loves you…” But instead of launching into a hardcore song as “The Voice of God Is Government” does, “The State of the End of the Millennium Address” continues in the mode of a spoken-word piece that would make Jello Biafra proud, delivered over a soundtrack of churning guitars.
In “The Hippy Killers,” Greg waxes nostalgic about L.A.’s punk scene. The song isn’t about Manson-like suburban assassins, but the kids who killed off the Flower Power generation with “good days during horrible times.” Greg was very much interested in connecting punk to the tradition of protest music. The title track, “No Substance,” exemplifies the style of message-driven punk ballads by bands like Sham 69 and Stiff Little Fingers that were so inspirational to Bad Religion in their early days.
As the band members went their separate ways for the holidays, Greg soldiered on. American Lesion came out in November 1997 with little fanfare. No singles were released, and promotional copies of the record were issued without any kind of explanation. That month Greg played three solo shows for American Lesion at the Knitting Factory in Brooklyn, the Haunt in Ithaca, and the Viper Room in Los Angeles. Greg performed a mix of songs from the album as well as soulful acoustic versions of a few Bad Religion tunes like “Struck a Nerve,” “Punk Rock Song,” and “God Song.”
The record drew support from friends like Jack Rabid of The Big Takeover in New York and former drummer Pete Finestone in L.A., but the album didn’t crack Billboard’s top 200 list and didn’t get much traction at radio stations. The public was caught off guard by these sad, slow songs.
Although Atlantic had offered Greg an advance on the album, he turned it down in favor of greater creative control. He’d written all the songs and played all the instruments, and then released the record as if he were still on an indie label that lacked the resources of a major. By going back to his DIY roots for this gritty, heartfelt, and intensely personal album, Greg’s message was clear: take it or leave it.