WHEN HOW COULD HELL BE ANY WORSE? came out in 1980, Mark Hoppus, Tom DeLonge, and Travis Barker of San Diego’s Blink-182 were eight, five, and five years old, respectively. Nevertheless, they asked Bad Religion to join them on the Mark, Tom and Travis Show Tour in the late spring and early summer of 2000. Blink-182 specialized in a fast, melodic, and radio-friendly style of pop punk, and their 1999 album, Enema of the State, had been a huge hit. Their brand of irreverent, and at times highly sexualized, lyrics was extremely popular with young fans, many of whom hadn’t been born when the boys from the San Fernando Valley were practicing in the Hell Hole.
While their fans may not have been familiar with Bad Religion, Blink-182 certainly was. They had opened for Bad Religion on a few occasions and praised them as an important influence when they were high school kids playing in their parents’ garages. In fact, at the band’s earliest rehearsals it jammed Bad Religion covers.
Like every punk band that signs with a major label, Blink-182 was criticized by its fans for selling out, and magazines like Punk Planet ran articles criticizing the band’s blatant misogyny. Inviting Bad Religion, who had also faced criticism for signing with a major label, was a way to bolster Blink-182’s punk credibility. As for Bad Religion, they saw it as an opportunity to play in American stadiums and arenas with crowds comparable to those at the European festivals they played every year.
However, in order to participate in the Mark, Tom and Travis Show Tour, Bad Religion would have to postpone the dates for their spring mini-tour of the West Coast until later in the year when they embarked on a considerably longer North American tour.
The Mark, Tom and Travis Show Tour began on May 11 in the San Diego suburb of Chula Vista and ended on July 2 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The band was blown away by the money Blink-182’s corporate sponsors put into the production. Still, there were die-hard fans from both camps who were against Bad Religion opening for the intellectually inferior Blink-182.
Bad Religion’s drummer wasn’t one of them. Bobby understood the historical context of what the band was trying to accomplish. “You’re trying to reach out to people you never thought would like you,” Bobby said. “Like the Ramones opening for Black Sabbath, Jimi Hendrix opening for the Monkees, or even Prince opening for the Rolling Stones. It’s kind of the same thing. People booed them, but these are shows you never forget. At the end of the day, the Blink guys treated us well. I’m happy with that.”
Wherever they traveled, Bobby was interested in the rock and roll history of the region they were visiting. Sometimes this meant taking a side trip into or out of the city, like when he visited the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with Hetson. Other times it meant taking the tour bus on a detour, such as the time they went to the Rose Hill Cemetery to see where Duane Allman and Berry Oakley were laid to rest after dying in motorcycle accidents a year apart.
On the Blink-182 tour, the band was driving through Georgia for a show in Atlanta, but they didn’t have to be there until late in the afternoon. Bobby asked the bus driver if they were going through Macon. When the driver enquired why he wanted to know, Bobby mentioned his desire to see the grave of Berry Oakley of the Allman Brothers Band. The driver enthusiastically agreed to take them.
The driver, who was a southerner, had called ahead so that when they arrived at the cemetery the driver’s sister, her husband, and a cousin were waiting at the gates with a pickup truck. They drove Bobby, Jay, and the driver right to the graves where Duane and Berry were buried side by side. The driver was moved by Bobby’s interest. “‘That’s respect,’” Bobby recalled the driver telling him afterward. “‘I never met anyone who liked the Allman Brothers, especially a shitty band like yours.’”
After the Blink-182 tour, Bad Religion had a month off before they began to promote The New America in earnest. One advantage of having spent so much of the summer playing with Blink-182 was they were well rehearsed and had the new songs down cold for the European tour. The New America had peaked at number 88 on the Billboard 200. The album also concluded the band’s relationship with Atlantic. “It was a clean break,” Greg explained. “They said, ‘We’re done with the contract.’ We never presented another album to them, and they never asked for one.”
At the conclusion of the South American leg of The New America Tour, morale was low. No one was particularly happy about how the band’s relationship with Atlantic had petered out. Although there were no hard feelings between the label and the band, the experience of recording The New America under such unusual circumstances had left a sour taste in the mouths of some of the members. Could the end of the contract trigger the end of the band? “I was really mad that we might actually end on this fart,” Jay said.
There was a growing feeling within the band that perhaps Rundgren had been too quick in his embrace of some of the technology used on The New America, and that Bad Religion would have been better served by a more analog approach. Others felt burnt out from the challenges of being on a label that didn’t support them.
As defeated as they felt, they weren’t willing to throw in the towel. There was a feeling of unfinished business, but everyone was so exhausted from spending most of the previous year on the road that no one knew what the next step should be. The tour had gone on for so long that Greg had started writing songs on the road, but he wondered if it made sense to work on them without a record label. Bad Religion was at the proverbial crossroads. For the first time in their long career, they didn’t have a label, and no one was quite sure what to do next.
The New America had a well-known and somewhat surprising detractor: Fat Mike of NOFX. The singer was very vocal about his feelings about the album and declared that it was not up to snuff. Brett believed Bad Religion’s decision to sign with a major label stirred up a lot of conflicting emotions, not just within the band, but also with the other bands at Epitaph. “My leaving the band became very polarizing for a lot of my artists,” Brett said. “It’s like a divorce: some friends are on team wife and some friends are on team husband, except in the most modern and open-minded divorces where everyone remains friends and has Thanksgiving together. We weren’t that enlightened, and in the moment some people were saying the band had betrayed me, they weren’t loyal to Epitaph, and going to a major was a sellout. I didn’t agree with any of that.”
Before they’d left for Hawaii to record The New America, Jay had gotten a strange call from Brett:
BRETT: Do you remember the Ramones’ thirteenth record?
JAY: No, I don’t.
BRETT: Me neither and I’m a huge Ramones fan.
JAY: What does that mean?
BRETT: You guys need to make a great record.
JAY: You can’t just say that!
Jay thought about this conversation a lot and wondered what it meant. Although Brett had retracted his critical statements about the band, was he implying that Bad Religion was no longer making great records? Did his comments reflect a desire to do more on the new record than contribute a song? If nothing else, it sent a message to Jay that Bad Religion’s legacy was still important to Brett. Jay decided to take it as genuine encouragement from his old friend and bandmate and leave it at that.
When they were preparing The New America for production, Jay had called Brett to ask him how he wanted to be credited on the album for “Believe It.” They had a pleasant conversation, and it felt to Jay that they’d moved on from the anger and animosity of the past, and that things were back on the right track. “It seemed like we were all okay,” Jay said. Things were going so well, in fact, that Brett came out to see his old band play on a few occasions during the North American leg of The New America Tour.
After the final show in Porto Alegre, Brazil, the band discussed their future before they went off in different directions, which were more far-flung than ever before. Brian was now back in Washington, D.C., and Hetson had moved to Texas. Only Bobby Schayer still lived in L.A.
Jay suggested to his bandmates that he go to L.A. and have a talk with Brett about Bad Religion returning to Epitaph. “What if I go meet with Brett? It seemed like Brett and I were the ones who had the biggest problem. If I go back and meet with Brett and sense any sort of weirdness with him, we won’t do it, but what if it’s great?”
It was a tantalizing proposition. Jay believed that Epitaph was where Bad Religion belonged. It was where they started and it was where they did their best work. Even if things were occasionally tense between Epitaph and Bad Religion, it would be better than their relationship with Atlantic had been. With Epitaph, both parties knew what they were getting. It only seemed fitting that they go back—if Brett would have them.
They all agreed this was a good idea. Jay flew to L.A. and spent a couple of days with Brett at Epitaph. It was immediately apparent that the past was the past and that Brett was willing to turn the page. Jay was surprised to learn that not only was Brett open to bringing Bad Religion back to Epitaph, he wanted to be a contributing member of the band.
“It was absolutely a no-brainer,” Brett said. “Of course, Bad Religion should come back to Epitaph and I should write the records with Greg like we did in the old days. What I’d realized through the process of writing ‘Believe It’ was I missed writing. I really enjoyed it. Not only that, but as a record executive I recognized that the band reuniting—not just with a former member, but with their former label—would be a story. It would create a moment and be a great opportunity to make a record and have everybody interested in it.”
While Brett was indeed sincere in his interest in Bad Religion’s musical legacy, he was also serious about his commitment to Epitaph, which had grown in Bad Religion’s absence. Brett loved writing songs and he wanted to make a record with Bad Religion again, but he had no interest in touring. Could they work out an arrangement where the band would come back to Epitaph and Brett would contribute creatively but not tour?
This seemed like a win-win situation for Bad Religion because it meant the person putting out their records would have skin in the game. Not only did Brett want Bad Religion to do well from a business standpoint, he wanted to make great records. And who knew how to make great-sounding Bad Religion records better than Brett?
“So we had a situation,” Jay said, “where here’s a guy with a label who doesn’t want to tour but who wants to write songs. It dovetailed nicely with our touring operation.” Brett’s reluctance to tour wasn’t going to be a problem because the band already had two world-class punk rock guitarists in Greg Hetson and Brian Baker.
“The first thing they did after Brett came back,” Brian quipped, “was they decided that I should stay. That was really the watershed moment.”
But could they make this work? Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys was the most famous example of a creative contributor who didn’t tour with his band, but in all of rock and roll there wasn’t much of a precedent for having a band member who wrote songs and was in charge of the label but didn’t actually play with the band.
Jay didn’t think this was so strange. To his way of thinking, it was far more remarkable that Bad Religion had stayed together after Brett left in 1994. Considering what was going on at the time in the world of punk music, it would have been easy, if not expected, for one or all of the band members to jump ship. No one did, and by sticking it out together something remarkable happened: they matured.
“The funny thing is when Brett came back,” Jay said, “the scenario hadn’t changed at all from 1994 when Brian came into the band. Nothing had changed. What changed was our ability to deal with scenarios that at thirty we couldn’t. We were emotionally immature and didn’t know how to say, You’re a great songwriter. You don’t have to come on tour. You have a label to run. We can figure this out. We’ll hire Brian and make it work. We couldn’t get our heads around that. Everything was all or nothing until it finally blew up.”
After twenty years, they’d finally figured it out.
But in Porto Alegre, Brazil, Bobby blindsided them. He informed his bandmates that he would not be going on the final leg of The New America Tour in Europe. He had been dealing with a painful shoulder injury that would require surgery if he was to continue as Bad Religion’s drummer. His doctors were advising him to stop playing altogether because, even with the surgery, there were no guarantees he’d be able to play at the same level again. Rather than go through an expensive surgery and a lengthy recovery and still not know if he’d be able to cut it, Bobby decided to call it quits.
“What did me in at the end was two things,” Bobby said. “My arm was killing me, and I was burning out. I just stopped being a fan of the music. When it started to be about lawyers and accountants, you kind of lose sight of what made you a fan in the first place.”
Bobby was wearing down—physically and mentally. Being a professional rock drummer is like playing catcher in baseball. You’ve got more gear and more responsibilities, and it’s the most physically demanding position on the field. Your body breaks down faster than everyone else’s around you. It’s a grind. Brian put it best: “Drummers wear out.”
While opening for Blink-182, Bobby had an epiphany: “I accomplished everything I wanted out of being in a rock and roll band. I got to tour Europe. I got to play England. I got to play CBGB and the Whisky. I got to put out records, and I took care of my family.” But for Bobby, a lifelong Angeleno, getting to play the Los Angeles Forum was a dream come true. “Even though we opened for Blink-182,” Bobby said, “after playing the Forum, I could die happy.”
It was important to Bobby to leave the band on his own terms. So, instead of having surgery on his rotator cuff and going through a potentially long rehab that would have left the band in limbo, he decided to bow out gracefully.
“My last words were, ‘Thank you,’ not ‘Fuck you,’” Bobby said. “That to me was the perfect way to end it.”
Once again, Bad Religion needed a drummer. Before they set out on their European tour in the summer of 2001, the band arranged auditions and brought in musicians who could do more than play punk rock songs. “Brett saw it as an opportunity to get someone with a higher level of technical skill,” Brian explained. “Bobby’s a great drummer, but he’s a Clem Burke drummer. He’s a Tommy Ramone. I think Brett was more interested in a different kind of musicianship.”
Brooks Wackerman was the fifth drummer to audition that day. It was clear after just a few songs they’d found Bobby’s replacement.
The Southern California native was raised in Seal Beach and went to Los Alamitos High School in Orange County. Like his predecessor, Brooks grew up in a musical family. His father was a lifelong music teacher and his brother, Chad, was an acclaimed percussionist who had played and recorded extensively with Frank Zappa. As a result of his upbringing, playing drums had been a part of Brooks’s life for as long as he could remember.
“There wasn’t ever a defining moment,” Brooks said. “My family threw sticks in my hands as soon as I started walking. It became a daily activity in the house. I’d wake up, eat my Wheaties, and figure out my way around a drum set.”
Brooks started taking private lessons from a jazz and classical music teacher when he was just six years old. “I think there’s definitely something to be said for being a child and navigating around the instrument and not having an education,” Brooks said. “The classic example is Jimi Hendrix. If he went to the Berklee College of Music, he probably wouldn’t be Jimi Hendrix. I wonder what I would sound like if I didn’t have my dad who’s been a music educator for over sixty years. But I love how well-rounded my background was in terms of studying all these different styles because I had a grab bag to pull from and add something different to how punk rock is performed.”
With a foundation in Latin, jazz, and reggae, Brooks started playing in jazz bands in high school. But it was Brooks’s brother who had the biggest influence by exposing his younger sibling to the Sex Pistols and the Ramones, which opened the door to all kinds of punk, metal, and progressive music.
Brooks started his professional career in the band Bad4Good, which was managed by axe maestro Steve Vai. While he was still in high school, Brooks was recruited to play drums in the Huntington Beach punk rock band the Vandals, where he received a different kind of education.
“The Vandals’ bass player, Joe Escalante,” Brooks recalled, “threw the CD Stranger Than Fiction on my lap. He said, ‘You should listen to that.’ Stranger Than Fiction was my introduction to Bad Religion.”
Brooks left the Vandals and played with Suicidal Tendencies for two years, but he’d been a free agent for about a year when he got the opportunity to try out for Bad Religion. During all his time in the Vandals and Suicidal Tendencies he’d never shared the same stage as Bad Religion. “We played a lot of the same festivals,” Brooks said, “but it was always on different days.” In fact, the first and only time he saw Bad Religion perform before he joined the band was with Blink-182 at the Universal Amphitheatre, where he was struck by the difference in size between Jay Bentley and Greg Hetson.
Though Brooks was relatively young—he was only twenty-two years old—a number of musicians had recommended him to Bad Religion. “From what I heard,” Brooks said, “Travis Barker, Josh Freese, and Fletcher from Pennywise all threw my name in the hat.” Brett’s assistant called and asked if Brooks would be interested in coming down to Cole Rehearsal Studios. Because Brooks didn’t drive, his dad drove him to the audition.
The members of Bad Religion could see right away that Brooks had more than an impressive resume: he was a supremely gifted musician. “He was a child prodigy,” Greg said. “His family is a really talented group of people. Brooks helped elevate our sound and made us more modern.” Everyone was impressed with his style of play. “Brooks was an anomaly,” Jay said. “He was one of those super talented people who was going to make a mark on the world no matter what he did.” Brett said it most succinctly: “He was a dynamo.”
Brooks was so good, in fact, they worried he’d slip away. Once they ascertained that he was interested in being a full-time member of the band, they hired him on the spot. For Brooks, it was all a whirlwind. When he auditioned, he didn’t even realize that Brett was back in Bad Religion.
“When I first got the call, I didn’t put two and two together. I wasn’t under the impression that he was coming back to the band. I talked to him later on that week and he told me, ‘You know I’m coming back. I’m producing and writing.’ It was exhilarating to join the band at that time.”
With a new drummer in the fold and the remainder of the summer off, Bad Religion went to work on the new album. For the first time since Recipe for Hate was recorded nearly a decade before, the band assembled at the old studio at Westbeach Recorders to make a new record.