Bad Religion Is Burning

Bad Religion have not only been America’s most exciting punk band for the last 17 years, since returning in 1988 with Suffer, but they’ve been the most lyrically fascinating as well. This triple threat of singer Greg Graffin and guitarist Brett Gurewitz’s superior songs, continually contentious lyrical matter,and Graffin's sensational singing has trounced their copious imitators. And since Gurewitz’s return to the band after a seven-year absence, they’ve seemed completely and totally invigorated---nay, "burning"--- with all that’s made them such a juggernaut of musical power on the one hand and consummate social critique on the other. How amazing it is, that they’re as inspiring now as they were on their 1981 debut EP or their classic 1982 first LP, How Can Hell Be Any Worse!?

        Indeed, with five of their first six LPs newly remastered and reissued, and a fierce new LP in The Empire Strikes First, there’s never been a more opportune time to speak with the two songwriters. As the title of the new LP implies, Graffin and Gurewitz have unleashed an LP brimming not only with their usual killer melodies and “ooohs” and “ahhhs” backing vocals, but their words have never felt more consequential than they do at this moment, 24 years into their long and respected career. And with a gold LP in 1994’s Stranger Than Fiction, they’ve proven their appeal to alternative rock fans in general.)

        As noted below, fans looked forward to The Empire Strikes First because it was certain Bad Religion would have a lot to say on the current charged political  climate, given their established perspective and long experience. Sure enough, as discussed in our #3 review last issue, the two have captured the apprehension of living under a hard-right Bush II administration for four years, one that inarguably betrayed every campaign vow of moderate Republicanism its leader made---while pursuing a religious slant so troubling it led the country's scientists to sign papers of protest. 

        Since these very topics were implicitly discussed on their previous eleven LPs, Bad Religion were bound to unleash the intelligent, unsuppressed, sarcastic rage of The Empire Strikes First. We spotlighted some of the lyrics last issue, like on "Let Them Eat War" ("that's how you ration the poor"), and the title track's "We strike first/And we're unrehearsed/Here we go ahead, this day's the greatest show on heaven and earth/C'mon and get your money's worth!" and "Even 10 million souls marching in February couldn't stop the worst/Ca-ca-ca-cacouldn't reverse." Additionally, the LP's centerpiece and fantastic radio single "Los Angeles is Burning" used the catastrophic L.A. fires of 2003 to critique shortsighted environmental manipulation (a specialty of Graffin's, with his Ph.D. from Cornell in evolutionary biology, though it was written by Gurewitz): "Palm trees are candles in the murder wind/So many lives are on the breeze/Even the stars are ill at ease." Other highlights include the plaintive plea of "Atheist Peace" (the opposite of fundamentalist extremism), its sister track "God's Love," and the related suicide bomber critique "Live Again---The Fall of Man."

        For Bad Religion, their music and songwriting process are completely intertwined; the two explain below how, now that their partnership has resumed, they use each other to vet their new songs. And since this is my fifth BT interview with them, going back to 1989, it's my latest chance to plead for a reissue of the disowned but now (interestingly enough!) more respected second LP 1983's lnto The Unknown. Once again I had little luck, even as the original vinyl copies of the LP fetch three digits. Sadly, songs such as "Chasing the Wild Goose" will remain unheard to all but the tiniest minority of fans.

        ln any case, the G&G boys have a lot to impart on a wide range of topics, so let's get to it. But pick up the new LP and 2001's The Process of Belief ;they'reproof of how punks turning 40 can still beat the tar out of groups young enough to be their kids, and how blistering and vital they remain. And check out the improved new versions of their early 1982-1992 LPs; they're wonderful and thrilling records too!

        This interview took place in the Epitaph Records L.A. conference room, with Gurewitz taking a long break from running that powerhouse label, and Graffin joining on speakerphone f rom his house in lthaca, NY.Thanks to Hilary at Epitaph for arranging this and setting up the speaker so that we could all talk together.

 

JACK: So let’s talk first about the new LP before we get to the reissues.

 

BRETT: I’m pretty proud of it, actually. It’s hard to make a good record that will satisfy fans without being the same record you’ve done for so long.

 

JACK: I said in my review that “Los Angeles is Burning” is kind of the “American Jesus” on this album, an instant single. I just heard it on the radio driving here, on 103.1.

 

BRETT: Cool man, thanks. I like that one a lot; for me the true joy of that song was having Mike Campbell play on it, from Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers. He does all the lead guitars and the solo---that kind of Easybeats’ “Friday On My Mind” [sings guitar part of the great Australian band’s 1967 #16 hit] part. So I’m really happy with how that came out.

 

JACK: Is that one of yours? My advance copy doesn’t say who wrote what, but I guessed that was you, from my experience listening to your songs.

 

BRETT: Yes that’s one of mine. If it’s shamelessly poppy, it’s probably me. [both laugh]

 

JACK: When I was here in L.A. six months ago, I was doing a Weirdos interview and their singer John Denney almost lost his house in those fires out here. He got back and there was a note from a fireman that said something like, “We saved your house.”

 

BRETT: Whoa!

 

JACK: It seems like there's this stupid environmental policy where the developers and city planners just say “Screw nature, we’ll put millions of people in the desert where there’s no water and steal all the water from everywhere else"--- like the way L.A. stole the Owens River [see the late Mark Reisner’s 1993 book, Cadillac Desert; the American West and its Disappearing Water] and later the Colorado River. "Then later all the placed that are natural firewalls, we’ll tear those down and build tract housing.” Is that an underlying message behind the song?

 

BRETT: No, it's just one. It’s a very deep song and actually a political song. That’s probably the top level, which is that L.A. is burning literally and does so terribly every two years. [Note, a week after this interview there were new wildfires south of Cerritos in L.A] We just lived through the worst case of it, and the disregard for nature and the hubris---the overbearing pride, if you will---of culture. On the other level, it’s a comment on the way that people in this country have their world view tilted by the way reality is depicted on television, and using L.A., the media Mecca, as the setting for a story about that.

 

JACK: I was really looking forward to getting this record just for the lyric sheet. Your band has always made me think about things of that sort, and this is a particularly crucial time for such issues, obviously, with the Iraq war and the Bush administration.

 

BRETT: I’m pretty proud of the lyrics this year, and I also think Greg’s are some of his best lyrics ever. He just wrote his [doctoral] thesis this year, and he had a lot of notes and thoughts that were still very fresh that he could draw upon because he defended his thesis this year. His lyrics were more concerned with those kinds of issues about belief and religion. My lyrics were far more political. But it makes for a nice dynamic on this record.

 

JACK: Which are both intertwined at the moment!

 

BRETT: More intertwined now more than ever! They're two topics that have always been intertwined in our work---right from our first 7-inch. It was a little less sophisticated back then, but it still made for a good brew.

 

JACK: I connect Greg’s new song “Atheist Peace” to songs over the years like “Bad Religion,” “God Song,” and “The Voice of God Is Government."

 

BRETT: As we touch upon these timeless topics that we use every couple of years in the new record, rather than it getting stale, it almost feels like, at least in terms of Greg’s writing, he’s really refined it, made an art of it. If you have an "Atheist Peace" instead of a religious war, it’s quite brilliant. Who would have thought about it other than Greg?

 

JACK: A lot of interviews I’ve done lately, with The Pernice Brothers and Killing Joke and Poster Children and Modest Mouse… With such totally different bands, we don’t introduce the topic, but they’ve all been going to leaps and bounds to say how moved they are by this being election year and how they want to do everything they can to be involved in the process and get rid of the current administration. My thought was, where was a lot of this comment two years ago, before the Iraq war, when the administration took office and showed its hand, so to speak? Bad Religion was one of the few bands that was speaking out back then, on The Process of Belief, especially on “Kyoto Now.”

 

BRETT: That record was written before 9/11 took place. And 9/11 was the reason that political dissent was silenced. Everyone was afraid to express anything negative about this country in the weeks and months just after 9/11. We, on the other hand, with our long history of dissent, did not hesitate. The record was critical of the U.S., but written before 9/11, and I actually watched it [9/11] in the studio while I was mixing The Process of Belief, so it was already too late to comment on the current events. The interviews we did the week of 9/11, we weren’t in any way pulling back, as most people were back then. It’s only just starting that it’s more acceptable again. I think the country’s never been more conservative or more nationalistic than it is now. In my lifetime, certainly not. It’s a swing to the right that’s more extreme than I’ve ever seen. I can only hope that it’s a pendulum and that the bright side will be that when it swings back left, it will swing back to compensate even farther than it’s ever swung. I don’t know if that works that way in politics.

 

JACK: There’s such a power and money dynamic involved here, with the forces of big business and big money siding with the Republicans for the most part [since their policies are tacitly more favorable for the wealthy and powerful], that you wonder if there’s forces preventing that from happening?

 

BRETT: I think there definitely are, and I think the current administration and the conservative power brokers are extremely sophisticated manipulators in the media, better than anyone before them. Certainly Karl Rove.

 

JACK: These people make Ronald Reagan look like a piker.

 

BRETT: I’m telling you. No question. And George Bush.

 

JACK: One of the things I found interesting is when the Iraq war began, I couldn’t stop playing the Generator record you made back then. [both laugh] Now of course, that record’s been newly reissued, with the two main tracks I’m referring to [“Heaven is Falling” and “Fertile Crescent”] as bonus tracks, so that they’re there on the new CD even twice, in case you missed it the first time.

 

BRETT: It’s good for you to mention that, because we opposed the first Gulf War, a popular war, which was actually sanctioned by the U.N. and did have an international coalition behind it, which this one did not. At the time I had my reasons, but I just didn’t feel that it was worth risking American lives to restore monarchy.

 

JACK: Most people don’t mention that aspect.

 

BRETT: It had nothing to do with democracy. We basically put a king back on his throne.

 

JACK: An oil sheik regime.

 

BRETT: Yeah, we put an oil sheik back on his throne. Well, the real interesting thing to look at it was…We had a Bush in power: the economy was fucked, he was cutting taxes for the rich and attacking Iraq. Now, it’s 12 years later: the economy is fucked, we have a Bush in power. He’s cutting taxes only for the rich and he’s attacking Iraq. It’s like, “Whoa! Wait a minute here! Is this deja-vu, or does nothing ever change in the U.S.?”

 

JACK: I’m just glad that he doesn’t have a son. [both laugh]

 

Brett: No shit! I guess the only other real difference is that there is no cold war anymore for this one. And it's much more dangerous to go out there unilaterally attacking helpless countries.

 

JACK: I wonder if the occasion of these reissues is a chance for you to rediscover some of your oldest records, or do you just normally play them anyway?

 

BRETT: No, I don’t normally play them, and I definitely have to rediscover them. What I found is that the one I really like is No Control. That’s the one that, if you go back through all of them, really held up nicely for me. I like them all OK, I’m really proud of my body of work, but I thought No Control was pretty awesome. That’s an overall really strong, consistent, high-energy punk rock record. Every time I sit down to write a Bad Religion record, I kind of revisit my old records...

 

JACK: And immerse yourself in your catalog.

 

BRETT: Yeah, a little bit, to give myself a sense of perspective.

 

JACK: On the Stranger Than Fiction record, I remember you wrote a song loosely modeled after an Elvis Costello kind of song.

 

BRETT: Maybe my favorite song I wrote. You’re talking about “Stranger Than Fiction?” Another one that I wrote which I tried to model after that kind of thing, although I’m not as great a writer as him, was “Atomic Garden.” I think “Stranger Than Fiction” was more successful, although I like both songs.

 

JACK: I always thought it was the strength of Bad Religion’s that it had influences beyond punk rock. It’s always shown in your writing more than modern punk bands that base of influence is so much narrower.

 

BRETT: Oh yeah, I almost never listen to punk rock. [both laugh]

 

JACK: I promise not to blow that up as a pullout quote. [both laugh]

 

BRETT: Thanks. I promised to be honest, though. I’ve always had diverse tastes. I listen to lots of kinds of music. You can’t listen to one kind of music straight for 20 years. Now with punk rock, we’re in the third or fourth generation of it.

 

JACK: 27 years after we bought our first punk records, I'm supposed to say I don't like what the kids are playing, because that’s the way it always goes. But it does seem fair to say that those playing punk today have less of that multi-dimensional influence, which makes their music more narrow.

 

BRETT: Right. I make it a policy not to say anything bad about the new crop of punk rock bands.

 

JACK: With your label, that strikes me as being both prudent and generous. What is it like listening to something like How Could Hell Be Any Worse these days, now that you’ve remastered and reissued it? You nicely namechecked it on the new LP, on “Los Angeles is Burning.”

 

BRETT: I’ve gone through some different feelings about it, but now I think it’s really cool. Maybe it’s because garage is so popular now, but we really sound like a garage band more than a punk band. I always used to think, “This sounds so crappy. It sounds kind of unprofessional and juvenile.” I used to feel that way years ago about the time of the Suffer record, when I tried to make that record sound better. But now when I listen to How Could Hell Be Any Worse, I think, “Man, that’s actually pretty cool!” I listen to it today and it sounds exciting and raw and I like it again. The remasters sound cool.

 

JACK: All of them I thought were upgraded.

 

BRETT: A lot louder, anyway. Digital dithering was just so crappy in like ’88, when we started playing everything on CD. It mostly sounded grainy and quiet. We actually dug out the master tapes, not the multi-tracks, but the two tracks, to remaster it.

 

JACK: Did you personally oversee that yourself?

 

BRETT: Yeah. It was fun.

 

JACK: You must have been like, 19 years old when you made the first album.

 

BRETT: 18. On the 7-inch, I was 17 and Greg was 15.

 

JACK: Damn! [Brett laughs] You were babies. It’s like looking at an old photo album and barely recognizing yourself.

 

BRETT: I know. Exactly. [Greg Graffin joins the chat, on speaker-phone from his home in Ithaca, NY]

 

JACK: Brett was just paying you a great compliment on your lyrics to “Atheist Peace.”

 

GREG: Oh, you were? Thank you, Brett!

 

BRETT: You’re welcome. You missed every word of it. [all laugh]

 

GREG: These are some of Brett’s greatest lyrics also on the album.

 

JACK: Ah, synchronicity! I think this one is even more lyric-intensive than your albums usually are. The lyrics just attack the senses; you both seem more inspired to write than ever.

 

GREG: Yeah, well I’ve heard that, too. One thing that I tried to do is to be very direct and concise, which, if you listen to an album like Against The Grain, that was almost the opposite approach---where I didn’t care about concision at all, and I really just wanted to try to get as many vocabulary words as possible in a song.

 

BRETT: Such as "rectilinear?"

 

JACK: Or "sepsis?"

 

GREG: I actually like the use of rectilinear on that. Anyway, I think it also has to do with the fact that I was doing a lot of academic writing last year, and that influences you to be concise.

 

JACK: Congratulations on your doctorate, by the way. I know you’ve been working on that for ages, at least since you put it on hold to start touring constantly like a decade ago.

 

GREG: Thank you very much. It’s been a long time since you’ve visited up here, but not much has changed except for now they call me doctor. Nobody has to; I don’t use it as a formal title.

 

JACK: So give us a concrete example of how that academic approach impacted this record.

 

GREG: A song like “Atheist Peace,” I don’t think I could have written years before. I kind of shied away of the concept of atheism, even though we danced around it quite a bit. I find it to be a perfectly reasonable alternative. I think another thing is the level of confidence I have in my writing, and having a foundation for my beliefs that's at an all-time high. That doesn’t mean I’m ripe for an epiphany, and of course I’ll find that everything I believe in now is bogus some other day. They make a lot about graduating, moving on to another stage in life, and all those formalities of higher education. But it changes you. I’m sure any experience in any kind of institution is similair; when you pass a certain point, you just feel like a different person. All I can say is that this writing process felt a lot different than any other album, even during the time I was getting my bachelor’s degree or my master’s degree.

 

JACK: I was telling Brett how much I wanted to hear what you guys had to say about the current climate---it being a crucial time in our history, much different from, say, any other of the last 24 years your band. [Greg laughs] Songs like “Kyoto Now” show that you were speaking, even before 9/11, about the current administration’s policies. Now it seems like you have a few more friends out there joining you in your dissent. It seems like the music community is finally starting to wake up to their responsibility to speak, beyond just their opportunity. I imagined you guys chomping at the bit when you wrote for this record, judging from the thoughtful and sometimes sarcastic outpouring in songs such as the title track.

 

BRETT: Well, I can’t say I was chomping at the bit to write a record about the most dire state that my country’s ever been in my lifetime. It almost makes me sad that I’m able to write this record, to be honest. When I set out to write a record this year, I knew what the theme had to be for me. What you said before about bands that are becoming awakened to responsibility: I’m not sure that it’s a musician’s responsibility [per se], but Bad Religion has always been of the mindset that music can be a force for social change. We’ve never taken the fact that we have a voice for granted. We always try to use it as an important privilege, to say things that we thought needed to be said, rather than just singing about a girlfriend.

 

JACK: Or opportunity.

 

GREG: Well, opportunity, obviously, yeah. It’s a great privilege to be in a position where people are going to listen to what you have to say. Brett and I think the primary responsibility is just more to ourselves, to putting out quality material.

 

BRETT: There’s no question about it.

 

GREG: I think Brett and I made a considerable effort this time to try to outdo The Process of Belief; we wanted to show people that that wasn’t just a fluke because Brett was coming back to the band, we were going back to Epitaph, we finished our major label play. It wasn’t a fluke, it was a spark of rejuvenation in the band and this is kind of a continued evidence.

 

JACK: I thought The Process of Belief was the better of the two albums, but I agree with you about that spark. I devoted 1000 words to that in my review of Process, and I feel it in both LPs, that having the original collaboration restored, has really put a hot foot in the band. In that Process review, I talked specifically about all the different concrete and discernible ways in which Brett adds to the group. He makes a good thing much, much better, both as a second, competing writer, as a backing vocalist –

 

BRETT: As a lover and a friend. [Greg laughs]

 

JACK: Right! Ha ha. And his production expertise, too, and his way of making records. I feel like the band is hitting all cylinders in terms of its impact both musically and lyrically again.

 

GREG: Yeah, I agree with you.

 

JACK: A song like the title track, “The Empire Strikes First,” which, by the way, I think is a virtual rewrite of “American Society” by Eddie & The Subtitles... [Greg laughs]

 

BRETT: It’s “Everything Turns Gray” by Agent Orange. A virtual rewrite!

 

JACK: I’m sticking with the Eddie----you even use the same chorus word, “drown”----but a sentiment like isn’t commonly expressed now in music or the arts. You said you didn’t look forward to writing this record, Brett, but to draw an analogy, I don’t suppose Picasso “looked forward” to painting Guernica either.

 

BRETT: I think that’s a happening analogy as an artist!

 

GREG: I never thought about it like that. The spontaneity of making art has to be acknowledged because if you try to set out to do something, usually you fuck it up. And a lot of it is...

 

JACK: ...Square-pegged into a round hole.

 

GREG: Yeah. [laughs] A lot of is you have a feeling, a sentiment, and you try to capture it in as many words as possible. Or in Bad Religion’s case, in as many words in two minutes as possible.

 

BRETT: I look forward to writing every record with a mixture of dread and anticipation, partially because when I sit down to write, I don’t if I’ll be able to write something good. I’ve been very fortunate that I usually can crank out a couple of tunes that I think are decent----that kind of takes the pressure off me and I can relax and write. The first song I wrote for this year that I thought was pretty decent was “All There Is.” That’s one of my favorites. The first song I wrote on Process was “Sorrow.” It’s very weird, because as a writer----just the writing process itself----is very un-Bad Religion, because it’s very irrational. For me, it’s like I have to put myself in a vulnerable limbo to create a good song. That’s the spiritual writing process.

 

JACK: The personal events in your life, you’ve been able to filter in----like “Two Babies in the Dark” 12 years ago, Brett, inspired by your becoming a father. And it must inspire Greg to know that Brett's going to come up with six or seven songs and you have to keep up with him musically and lyrically----which you didn’t have for the seven years he was out of the band. And likewise for Brett.

 

BRETT: He kicks my ass!

 

GREG: I’ve always said that the main reason that we have these good collections of songs is because Brett and I both know that the first person who’s going to hear our ideas is our partner. Brett knows I’m his number one fan and I think he’s a fan of mine. It puts a big burden of responsibility to try to impress him when I write something.

 

BRETT: When Greg writes some tunes and plays them for me, he usually doesn’t know which ones are great and which ones are just good. [Greg laughs] He’ll go, “Hey Brett, I've got three or four songs. I don’t really know what to think.” And he’ll play them for me, and I’ll go, “Greg, two of those songs kick ass! And the other two are excellent Bad Religion songs.” He’ll say “Really?” And I’ll say “Just trust me. [Greg laughs] That first one you played me is amazing. It’s some of the best writing you ever did.” And when I say that to him, I set his mind at ease. I could hear one of his songs with nothing but piano and him singing, and I’ll know from one hearing that it is a great Bad Religion song. I can play him one of my songs and he can do the same thing for me, because he’s picturing it with a background vocal arrangement, with a beat, the whole thing. That’s one of the reasons we need each other, because frankly, the other guys in our band----not all of them, but most of them----I’ll play them one of my new songs in demo form, and they’ll be like “Uh.” I’m like, “What do you mean?”

 

GREG: “I see where you’re going with this. We can do something with that.” [all laugh]

 

BRETT: It’s very well known that we have a healthy competition that helps the records. I think what’s less well known is that we’re a support group for each other. [Greg agrees] A group within a group. We support and encourage each other.

 

GREG: Like you said, having all those years where Brett was out of the band and I wrote numerous songs… I was very prolific, but I didn’t have this input, and that resulted in a far less streamlined approach to the Bad Religion album.

 

BRETT: He couldn’t bounce them off me anymore.

 

GREG: Yeah. I learned a lot through that process, about the importance of A&R, and Brett is an expert at it. I’m not. You learn your shortcomings by doing. It’s weird, because I think I am a really a pretty good A&R person for Brett’s songs, because I think Ican picture myself singing them and I know how they’re going to be delivered. It’s usually when he knows it’s a good song that he wrote, that I just usually end up reinforcing that belief.

 

BRETT: I can’t tell it’s great until after Graffin sings the whole thing. I’ll sing along with my songs, but I absolutely detest my own voice. [Greg laughs; Jack thinks better of mentioning the Daredevils single or Brett’s solo turn singing on “20th Century Digital Boy] Greg will attest to this. When we finally get together, I put some of my guitar in his songs, and he puts his voice on my songs, it’s just a huge relief for both of us.

 

GREG: He’s harder on himself than I am.

 

BRETT: We both write independently. For the last two records we spent more time than ever getting together after we got the first core of ideas----we usually get together in a songwriting conference and do some recording.

 

GREG: We call it Bad Religion Summit Meetings. And it consists of Brett and I basically playing our demos for each other and then him putting guitar on my demo and me putting my voice on his demos.

 

BRETT: Then we do rehashing and refining.

 

GREG: That I think has aided tremendously, and that’s something we could never do in the early days. Even when I lived in L.A. right across town, we didn’t do that. Hey Jack, you know my mom right? I bought her a place out in the valley, so I’ve been spending a lot of time out there. So that’s helped the process.

 

JACK: I should mention I had breakfast today at Denny’s...

 

BRETT: [anticipating] Was Rodney [Bingenheimer] there?

 

JACK: Right! He ended up sitting at the table across. I introduced myself and said, “You interviewed me on your show once in 1981. I’m not sure you'd remember me.” But he did. He asked me what I was doing here and I said I was interviewing you. And he remembered the story of you giving him your first demo tape in 1981 and him immediately playing it on the radio.

 

BRETT: [claps and imitates Rodney] “Alright!” [all laugh] I remember that!

 

JACK: It’s worth mentioning because I’ve been rediscovering some of your earliest recordings of that time by virtue of these new reissues. It’s amazing how that stuff still holds up so well. How feral it sounds and yet not unpolished. You didn’t even have your tonsils out yet, Greg!

 

GREG: I got my tonsils out halfway through How Could Hell Be Any Worse. [all laugh] Weren’t there about six months between the tracking of How Could Hell, Brett?

 

BRETT: I can’t remember, man. I was too high. I have such a terrible memory of anything. I think [bassist] Jay [Bentley] would remember everything.

 

GREG: Yeah, exept when he was blacked out. Which were the Suffer years. He doesn’t remember Suffer through basically Against the Grain.

 

JACK: Many of your fans want to know why there aren't any bonus tracks  on these reissues, and I’ve replied that you released every song you wrote and recorded back then.

 

GREG: Back then we didn’t know what an outtake was!

 

BRETT: And the tapes that we had were destroyed in a fire. They were in a vault at Gold Star Studios, which is where we mastered it.

 

GREG: Is that true?

 

BRETT: Yeah. The How Could Hell tapes aren’t around anymore.

 

GREG: You know what, I’m actually upstairs in my bedroom now, and I have a closet with four two-inch masters in it.

 

BRETT: Oh, they’re at your house?! I always assumed that they’re gone. That would be awesome if you had them!

 

GREG: You know what, I’m looking at them right now. It’s “Faith in God,” “Eat Your Dog,”-----

 

BRETT: Dude! Let’s mix that shit again!

 

GREG: “American Dream,” “Voice of God,” “White Trash,” “Damned to Be Free,” “Fuck Armageddon,” “Doing Time,” “Latch Key Kids”... I think this is the album!

 

BRETT: Dude, we should bake those tapes, right? I’m sure they won’t play without being baked. We should bake it and we should dump it into a Pro-Tools HD rig.

 

GREG: That would be great.

 

BRETT: And then we’ll have it. That will be awesome!

 

GREG: You know what’s weird about this, Brett? We have “Drastic Actions” in here, too.

 

BRETT: You probably have the EP too, then. We re-recorded “Drastic Actions” for the Public Service Comp.

 

GREG: Interestingly, it doesn’t have the [second drummer] Peter Finestone sessions, though it’s dated October 31st, 1981.

 

BRETT: We recorded that on Halloween? What?!?!

 

GREG: Yeah! [Jack laughs]

 

BRETT: I never knew that! That’s awesome! That’s a great little tidbit.

 

GREG: Because we got time. It was a holiday and everyone was off. We always got it from midnight to 6 AM.

 

BRETT: Let’s definitely digitize those and have fun with them.

 

JACK: Wasn’t there some talk about remixing the second album too? [Brett looks confused] You know, that album that shall not be named. [Greg laughs]

 

Brett: [Kids] Oh, you mean Suffer?

 

JACK: No, let me refresh your memory, kind sir. There's this album I bought in 1983, maybe it's in the back of that closet somewhere, Greg! [Greg laughs] A rather misunderstood record called Into the Unknown that I said in my review inadvertently pre-dated the 1990's alterna-rock explosion!

 

BRETT: [kids some more] Yeah, does it have kind of a goth-prog vibe to it? [Greg laughs]

 

JACK: Hmmm. It may have!

 

BRETT: Ah, it seems to ring a bell!

 

JACK: Although, with a careful remix some of that can be lessened.

 

BRETT: Hey Greg, I came up with a title of a record that we could do: How Could Into the Unknown Be Any Worse. [all laugh loudly]

 

JACK: You should remix the whole album without synthesizers. There are some great songs on there, and it's a pity it's the one record of yours your fans will never hear if you don't reissue it in a manner that makes it more palatable.

 

BRETT: [playing with Jack's words] Some of that soloing was the most misunderstood music of its time. [Greg laughs]

 

GREG: I did an interview earlier and I was asked, "Are you embarrassed by any of your music?" I said, "Well if you think about what you were doing at the age of 15, you probably don't have to recall it, because it wasn't recorded for posterity." [Brett laughs] Everything I did is staring me in the face every day. About 50% of it is purely embarrassing. On that album there might be some stuff that isn't embarrassing.

 

JACK: Like "Chasing the Wild Goose!"

 

GREG: Yeah, that's not totally embarrassing. There's a song on there that sounds like Jerthro Tull mixed with Genesis with R.E.M.

 

BRETT: "Time and Disregard?" [yes] What about the one that sounds like Journey meets STYX? [Greg laughs] "It's Only Over When You Give Up."

 

JACK: Those awful bands wish they wrote songs that good! That's a great song!!!!

 

BRETT: Here, I'Il reveal something. This is some really obscure, arcane stuff which is perfect for The Big Takeover. Do you know what "Chasing the WiId Goose" is? It's my version of "Who WiIl Stop the Rain" [1970 #2] by Credence Clearwater Revival.

 

GREG: "Billy Gnosis" was [1976 #11] "Come On Take The Money and Run" by...

 

BRETT: ...Steve Miller Band. There's a Neil Young song on Suffer, but I'Il leave you to find it. There's more than one, but there's one that's very, very direct.

 

JACK: There's lyrical themes on that second album that you guys have unfortunately disowned that fit into the Bad Religion catalog quite well, though.

 

BRETT: Oh, all the lyrics, yeah!

 

JACK: [ecological lament] "Time and Disregard" has echoes on the new album on "Los Angles is Burning." And you could more indirectly link it to ""Live Again----The Fall of Man."

 

GREG: Wow. That's some good editorial sleuthing there. I never put those two together, but it came from the same person. "Time and Disregard" is about the environment. And "Live Again" is about suicide bombings.

 

JACK: I was saying to Brett that "Atheist Peace" revisits the old Bad Religion theme of the effect of fundamentalist religion on public discourse, solidly in the line of old songs on these reissues Iike "God Song," "Voice of God is Govemment," and "Bad Religion."

 

GREG: I think that's probably right. I've been wanting to save these things for many records and maybe I've finally found my groove.

 

BRETT: He found his voice.

 

GREG: You get better at it if you take it seriously. I hope this exemplifies some of my progress.

 

JACK: You mentioned "Billy Gnosis," and I'm still waiting for the Iatest installment of Brett's "BiIIy" chronicles.

 

BRETT: We were going to do another "Billy" song, and we were going to call it "The New War, Part 1."

 

JACK: The prequel.

 

BRETT: Right, we didn't end up doing it, 'cause we have enough Iong song titles as it is. We'II have to have another "Billy" someday. Kids on the [message] board want to know what Billy Gnosis means. It's basically my tribute to Billy Pilgrim.

 

JACK: [Kurt Vonnegut's 1972 novel) Slaughterhouse Five, yeah.

 

BRETT: The Vonnegut character. I use the name BiIIy in another song, but it's a more autobiographical song.

 

JACK: Sometimes I think he, that is you, Billy, stands for the ultimate punk rock misfit archetype that Bad Religion visits in its songs, certainly on The Process of Belief, and Greg, some of the songs you wrote on the last two LPs before Brett rejoined [No Substance and The New America].

 

BRETT: That's a nice way of putting it, sure.

 

JACK: Accordingly, I asked Brett what it's been like listening to the new versions of the old records. Is it like looking at snapshots of yourself from 24 years ago?

 

GREG: Not really. It might not have the same effect on me, because I play so many concerts a year, that before I go on tour, I go to my own private rehearsal and play them. It doesn't have a nostalgic effect on me, because every year when we play those songs, I sort of give them a modern flair, try to infuse modernity into them. But the thing that jumped out was the [new] sound. They sound great! It's reminiscent of analog recordings. That's a bygone era. I guess that's the nostalgic part. It's the sound of the turntable without the scratches.

 

JACK: Brett was saying how much he liked //No Control in retrospect, Iistening to these.

 

GREG: It's funny, because that album, when it came out, left such a bad taste in Brett's mouth, because he used a piece of outboard equipment that he hated that the guy talked him into. He was convinced that he had ruined the record. [Jack laughs] I think on hearing it again, he realized it's not ruined at all.

 

BRETT: No, it sounds pretty amazing. It sounds really punk.

 

JACK: I always thought of that one and Against the Grain together as one hour-long album, they're both so aggressive, so furious.

 

GREG: A lot of people call that the holy trinity.

 

JACK: With Suffer.

 

GREG: Yeah. So maybe today if we can continue this, we'll try to make a modern trinity with Process of Belief, this album, and the next.

 

JACK: An atheist trinity. [all laugh] What haven't I introduced that you guys would really like to talk about? What have you two been thinking about lately?

 

GREG: We're going on tour for the rest of the summer starting on Tuesday, so I can't say I've been focused on too many worldly things.

 

BRETT: Basically the Iraq war, and all these books that have recently come out that reveal what an impotent job Bush is doing keeping our country secure. And just frustration over the general vein of conservatism that seems to be flowing through what is traditionally been an anti-establishment counter-culture----by which I mean punk rock. It's really been weighing heavily on my mind.

 

GREG: Jack, you've been doing a lot of interviews----have you noticed that? 'Cause when Brett and I got back from the European press junket, I realized that almost every joumalist overseas asked me, and probably Brett as well, why there is such a load of bands that call themselves punk here that aren't willing to speak, or even state any opinion at all.

 

JACK: Right, most of the anti-war or anti-establishment songs I've heard have been coming from bands that aren't punk groups.

 

GREG: That's what they were saying.

 

JACK: Although the people you carne up with have been the exception----for instance, the new T.S.O.L. album. The Descendents had one on their new album.

 

BRETT: The people of our generation, right.

 

JACK: We all saw The Clash when we were kids, so that's ingrained in our outlook of punk.

 

BRETT: And some of us, like me, actually saw the Vietnam War on TV. We know what it's like. It's very odd for me to see young punk rockers who consider themselves dittoheads or fans of Rush Limbaugh. They consider liberal to be a dirty word, and yet they consider themselves punk. This doesn't make any sense. Liberals have been responsible for every meaningful reform in the United States in the last 100 years. What is punk about a reactionary conservative? It's almost Iike a bizarre, mutated version of straight edge that was never meant to be!

 

JACK: I said in an editorial once, that rock 'n' roll itself was the ultimate liberal outbreak, since it was soundly opposed by conservatives in the '50s. Black people made it, and we didn't want our white kids Iistening to that if we were conservative family-values types!

 

BRETT: Right. Good example! I find it very saddening and also very threatening and frightening, that punk rock, much of it now mainstream, has swung to the conservative side of the spectrum. Even when metal was mainstream, with groups like Def Leppard and Motley Crue, I'd very much doubt you'd hear these groups back in the '80s days of hair metal----I don't think you'd hear David Lee Roth sing how great Reagan is. [all laugh] Even that would have been shocking, and he wasn't even punk. I don't get it. I've spent an enorrnous amount of time thinking about it----I'll admit, this is what I do. I don't have any simple answers, but you asked me what I was thinking about. I heard kids say, "Hey, you should go to conservativepunk.com" or "Johnny Ramone is a conservative and he was in the first punk band ever." So there you go, punk rock has a "rich legacy" of conservatives. [Jack laughs] It's like "Hey dipshit, Joey Ramone wasn't a conservative." And the fact that Johnny was...

 

JACK: Broke up the band.

 

BRETT: Yeah! Nobody got along because of that. Joey, Dee Dee, and Tommy weren't. The fact that this guy was conservative had nothing to do with the fact that he could downstroke on his guitar so weII.

 

JACK: I once saw Joey Ramone sing at a [Iibera] Jerry Brown rally in Washington Square Park. He sang "Censorshit." So there goes that! [all laugh]

 

BRETT: Right, Joey was very liberal and Dee Dee too. They wrote the songs. There's no such thing as a rich legacy of rightwing punk rock. Unless you're talking about Screwdriver, and that's always been the ugly antithesis underbelly to punk rock that we've had to contend with it.

 

JACK: Yeah, but by an extreme minority, and rigorously opposed in England, when they became a white power band.

 

BRETT: Right, and nazi punks have always been opposed in the U.S., even when Jello [Biafra, Dead Kennedys] wrote that song [1981's "Nazi Punks Fuck Off'] back in the day.

 

GREG: I think a lot of the kids are totally confused because they see pop punk becoming so popular, so mainstream----so then they think the only way to rebel against it is to be, "what's the most unpopular viewpoint that we could possibly express as a punker?" [all laugh]

 

BRETT: lt's to Iove the lord and vote for George Bush. [Greg laughs] It's very frightening when you have the leader of the free world with his finger on the button, with a strong conviction that everything he's doing is right, and yet he doesn't read books and he's a born-again Christian. So where does his conviction come from?

 

JACK: I don't even think he had a passport before he got elected. If he did, he sure didn't use it.

 

BRETT: His conviction comes from God. He prayed and God told him that what he's doing is the right thing That's where he derives his conviction. That's frightening.

 

JACK: That's messianic.

 

BRETT: Right word! And it makes the war a religious war, because it certainly isn't about Osama [Bin Laden]. The fact is we're doing nothing to deter Islamic extremists----in fact we're doing everything to foam it and rally their cause, while we sidetrack our effort to fight terror by invading Iraq and getting ourselves deeper and deeper into a quagmire.

 

JACK: That's completely the thesis of the new Richard Clarke book, Against All Enemies.

 

BRETT: Yeah, which I read.

 

JACK: I finished it on the plane out here. He was the counterterrorism guy for the last several administrations, for both parties, so he ought to know!

 

BRETT: I had to have my political pontification.

 

JACK: WelI, it's germane: it's all over your LP. As a way of wrapping this up, I was telling Brett how much I admire "Los Angeles is Burning," and I mentioned my thesis of the song as being a comment on man's hubris, thinking that we can outwit nature...

 

GREG: Ha ha! Yeah! That's right! Hubris!

 

JACK: ...with its complete lack of water sources, even after stealing the Owens River [a premise of the movie Chinatown as weII] and the Colorado ever since. And now there's tract housing where there used to be natural flrewalls. He was talking about how there was a deeper meaning in the song, about the shallowness of the news media and how it reports. And since we were talking about your other songs that hearken back to previous themes, I think "Los Angeles in Burning" hearkens back to another song on the new reissues, Generator's "Only Entertainment."

 

BRETT: Quite a bit! Yes!

 

JACK: The way the info-tainment has completely co-opted actual information in our society.

 

GREG: If you look to an average teenage kid during the Enlightenment period a few hundred yeaxs ago, and you look at the activities that they spent their time doing, it was dominated by reading----and of course today it's dominated by watching. That becomes "reality" for most people. How do they measure up to the images they are seeing on television and in the movies?

 

BRETT: What do you call it when the news media, rather than reflecting reality, actually conjures or creates reality? I would call it propaganda, I wouldn't call it reporting. I'm really excited about the new video we're gonna be doing for "Los Angeles is Burning," because one of the images----it's going to be an animated video----wiII be the TV cameras. And instead of capturing the fire, the TV cameras will be spewing fire. It will be a very interesting and metaphorical depiction.

 

JACK: This speaks to what you were saying about politics, that if kids are confused----not just punk kids----it's gotta be down to their wanting to be entertained by their information. And then getting a distorted view of information besides. It's a double play.

 

BRETT: I don't think you can blame the confusion on the media, though. It takes the very slightest arnount of initiative. With the Internet and the amount of information out in the world that's available today, there's no excuse not to be informed.

 

JACK: That's a good point. Although it does also require curiosity, in an age with an incurious president.

 

BRETT: Exactly! You know, the [deposed Tleasury secretary] Paul O'Neill book describes him as incurious.

 

JACK: I know, I read that one too. I like reading the ones by the Iifelong Republicans who served previous Republican presidents who were there in the inside of this administration, as opposed to some biased armchair pundit on either side. They have more credibility, despite all the usual attempts to discredit them. The administration seems so vindictive at being criticized and having their truths revealed.

 

BRETT: Me too! Why aren't the whistleblowers getting more attention? Not enough pay attention to right-wing whistleblowers, yet when a liberal president gets a blow-job, they're like "Hey, let's impeach him!"

 

GREG: I came across a book that you can read in only an afternoon. It's called Godless Constitution [The Case Against Religious Correctness, WW Horton, 19961]. This is by a history scholar [and Richard J. Scnwartz, Professor of Government] from Cornell, who's an award-winning writer [and Penguin editor of The Federalist Papers and the Thomas Paine Reader) named Isaac Kramnick [and fellow professor R. Laurence Moore]. It's a very short, Iittle book, only about 170 pages, and it shows how the founding fathers, the true American fathers, struggled and spilt blood, so that we would remove all rhetoric of religion from the country's founding 

documents. And how corrupted they would feel if they were alive today! [all laugh]

 

JACK: That's something I subscribe to myself.

 

GREG: That's one of the most precious and important American Iegacies, I think, and it's being trampled on.

 

JACK: Especially since 80 years later we're still fighting the Scopes monkey trial, about letting our public schools teach evolution. [See Edward J. Larson's excellent 1997 summary of the July 1925 trial, Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate over Science and Religion].You're an evolutionary biologist, Greg, so I know that it bothers you as much as me.

 

GREG: Oh, there's no better example.

 

JACK: Gentleman, Brett has a record company to run, and Greg, you have an imminent tour to prepare for. I thank you for your time. [Greg and Jack talk hockey for a few minutes and then hang up. "Pity about the Rangers," they agree.]