Brett Gurewitz: Bad Religion, Founding Epitaph Records, Early Punk/Hardcore & The Shift to Spotify

1994, huge year for bad religion. But you leave the band. By the time I leave the band, the snatches come out. Epitaph records was completely blowing up. But also, Epitaph was requiring just everything I had to figure it out. No one ever told me how to make a company. Major labels were circling me. Oh yeah. Trying to buy the company. I was offered $50 million for half the company. Holy shit. BORNOR STORIES OF THE SKY BORNOR STORIES OF THE SKY BORNOR STORIES OF THE SKY BORNOR STORIES OF THE SKY BORNOR STORIES OF THE SKY BORNOR STORIES OF THE SKY Hello, welcome. It's our Lord time. How you doing, Bo? I'm doing so good today. Colin, who do we have? Special day. It's a special day for us, special day for you all. It's a rare treat here. We're live and in person once again in sunny California, at Brain Dead Studios in Hollywood, California. We've got with us today one of my favorite songwriters to ever live, to ever grace this earth. A punk rock pioneer. A San Fernando Valley legend. Epitaph records founder, bad religion co-founder, Mr. Brett Garowitz. How are you, sir? Good. Good to be here. Thanks for being here. Beautiful day. January, the sun is shining. The moon is shining. How you doing? Feeling good? Ready to pot it up? Let's pot it up. Hell yeah. Let's, how's 2025 for Epitaph? How's 2026 looking for Epitaph? Epitaph was crushing in 2025. 2026 looks even better. We've been on a roll, feeling, it's a lot of fun. Things are going well. New drain just came out? New converges coming out? Just dropped a track Friday? Is that fully Epitaph? Yeah. Wow. Death Wish does the vinyl. They've been on Epitaph for years. A lot of people don't know. In fact, well I won't reveal that here, but off camera I'll tell you something about that. And New Joyce Manor is about to drop. Yeah, you're a big part of that, right? Yeah, I produced that one. Wow. Yeah. No kidding. Yeah, I haven't produced a record since the last Rancid record, so that was fun. Oh. Welcome back. Wow. Let's go back in time here. Let's fire up the flux capacitor. Tell me about growing up in the West Valley. Yeah. And where you learned, discovered your passion for music and how that led to punk music. Ah. Well, I mean, I always loved music, you know, from being a really young boy. Although, you know, none of my parents are musical and the slightest. Really? Yeah. Really? My dad's got tin ear and no rhythm. And I don't know, my mom can sing happy birthday, but that's about it. Thanks. My dad can't even sing happy birthday on key. But he was on record as being very supportive. Yeah, yeah, we'll put a pin in that. Yeah, it's coming. But yeah, but I always loved music as a kid. Like, when I heard music, it would drive me crazy. I always loved it. And sort of, you know, just grew up listening to my parents' eight track tapes and AM Radio in Los Angeles, 93 K H J. Wow. So, you know, just grew up like a regular California kid on probably, you know, like a lot of Beatles and Zeppelin and Jackson Fie. And Jackson Fie and, you know, whatever was on the radio. Sure. And always loved it. Always had songs going through my head, always humming songs. And I don't know, the first record I ever bought was Cosmos Factory by Creedence Clearwater. Wow. It was Bangor. Yeah, and the way I bought that one is my mom said, hey, do you want to buy a record? And I said, yeah, she's going to Sears. Yeah, I said I could go with it. And so I went to one of the big kids on the block and I said, my mom's letting me get a record. What should I get? And I think Cosmos Factory was new at that time. It was mid-70s or something. So he said, get Cosmos Factory. You know, so. Wow. Anyway, yeah, so that was my first record. You never forget that. Yeah. Did you take anything away melodically from CCR? Well, I mean, those guys are such, they had so many great songs. But I'm sure I did. But I mean, they were so bluesy. Big time. And but I will tell you an anecdote that I've not shared elsewhere that just, it just really is something that was a full circle moment for me much later, in my 50s. But Greg Hetzen, who was a foundational member of Bad Religion. Big part of the band. He texted me a picture of a page of a book. And he said, dude, check this out. This is from John Fogarty's autobiography. John Fogarty, the singer of Freedom's Clearwater, who I grew up on, my first record. And in the book, it was the part of the book where he was reflecting about when punk happened. Whoa. And he said, well, a lot of people won't remember that punk was really a reaction to disco, which that's not all it was, but it was if you were there, you know, because it used to be punk rock t-shirts that said disco sucks with a safety pin or whatever. And you can argue that, like, as was heavy metal, as was hard. Yeah, yeah, for sure. For sure. But that's what Fogarty said. And he said, and I never really got into punk rock, but there were a few good songs like Sorrow from Bad Religion. That's a good song. And I was just like, I read that, and I was like, holy shit. One good punk song, and it is Sorrow. It's the one he mentions in his autobiography. Wow. And I wrote that one. That's awesome. And, you know, it is, it does have the sort of the DNA of like a credence or a big time, like a classic rock song in the chord progression. When you take away the drums. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. The chord changes. It's got an Americana feel. Yeah, to your point, their music is in the DNA of a lot of American rock music. Yeah, yeah. It just is. But the fact that, like, he knew my song. Incredible. It was really powerful for me. Beautiful. Yeah. So how does that lead to punk music? And what is punk music when you find it? Ah. All right. Well, so my path was, you know, I discovered just popular music on the radio. And then I discovered like popular rock music. Sort of my first crush was like rock and roll crush was Elton John when I was about, I was 13, that was 1975. So it was like he'd put out Hunky Chateau and it was goodbye Ylvric Road, really. And that was sort of like, I was still in elementary school, but it was the sort of the peak of glam rock, right? And so Elton John was this gateway for me to like David Bowie and Alice Cooper and this glam thing that was happening. Now I wasn't doing that because it was like the big teenagers were doing it. I was like, but, and then, you know, one day when I was, you know, probably in the late 70s, I walked into a local record store, which as a fellow Valley Kid, you'll know, Licorice Pizza. And they had their import section and they had their, and the punk records were like mixed up with the import section. But I was used to check things out. And the guy in the store goes, Hey man, you've got to check out this record. And it wasn't an import, but he gave me the Ramon's first album. And yeah, as for many people, that was sort of the genesis of my punk rock transformation journey. Yeah. And that's not that long before bad religion would exist, it seems. No. When you were a kid, when you were a kid three years, you know, when you were seventh grade, 10th grade seems really far away. Yeah. No, it was, you know, bad religions first record came out in 80 or 81. We made it in 80, but I think the seven inch probably dropped in 81. Well, let's get to that. How do you, Greg and Jay, both went to El Camino with you. Yeah. So, you know, punk rock didn't exist in the Valley at that time. It was, it was in Hollywood. It was in the city. And, but... Who, who, who would that have been at the time? Like what bands were the bands? The punk bands that preceded us were like, you know, the first ones that happened at the time of the Ramon's were like the Screamers and the Weirdos. Weirdos. And then Social D would have been one of the bigger local kind of things for... Yeah, they were, they were the same wave as bad religion. And we played our first show with them. But yeah. So, in my school, I knew of one guy who was into punk and it was my friend Tom Clement. And me and him were good friends. And then we knew this guy, Jay Ziskraut. And Jay introduced me and Tom. No, no, no. No, no. I was friends with Jay Ziskraut. Okay. I was also friends with Tom. Tom introduced me and Jay to Greg Graff and Jay Bentley. And they were in our high school also. But we were... They were great... They were great younger than us though. Okay. Right. And Tom introduced us and said, hey, you guys, you know, Brett plays an... Brett and Jay play instruments. You guys should be a band. Literally, he came up to us in the quad and introduced us. He made this up. Yeah, Tom did. Yeah. In fact, there's a song about... I think it's, you know, I Give You Me, Give You Nothing on Sufferers. Big pit in that song. Yeah. It's about Tom Clement. Wow. But long story short, there were five punk rock people at El Camino Real High School on Valley Circle. Four of them. It was me, yeah, me, yeah. Four of them were bad religion, you know. And there was Tom. Okay. And I mean, Tom was a troublemaker, man. He was a crazy kid. Okay. I was pretty crazy too. Me and Tom were best friends. Crazy how? Just like juvenile delinquents on a lot of drugs, getting in a lot of trouble, vandalism. Longboard? I kind of gave up skating when I started taking up music. Really? I did too. Yeah. Same thing. You had to save those ankles, you know? I was just on to the next thing. I was skating as like when I was a little grom, but when I was in high school, I was about electric guitars and getting loaded. Amen. Does Tom know what he did? Tom's not with us anymore. Did he ever? No, he knew, yeah. He knew that he helped assemble this band that would go on to define a new band. Oh, he couldn't not know. I mean, we still, like, you know, he was, he'd go to shows with us and he was around for a while. When is the first time you hear Greg sing? At our first rehearsal. So, you know, we sat there in the quad and I said, like, I said, well, I play guitar and Jay Ziskraut said I play drums and Bentley said, well, I play guitar. And I said, I guess I was the pushy one. I said, well, I'm already playing guitar. So can you play bass? I said, okay, I'll play bass. And Greg said, I can sing. And you know, and so we had our first rehearsal at Jay Ziskraut's house. And his mom's living room. And he had a Ludwig Vistalite kit. It was sick. That's awesome. He had one. Yeah, I'm like, you know, this was, this must have been 79 or 80. And what were you playing? Oh, some piece of shit. I had, I had a, I don't know if it was at this time, but I had a electric guitar. It was Gibson's cheap version of their Les Paul. It was called The Paul. Yeah. It wasn't even, it wasn't even good enough to be a Les Paul. It was like, it didn't even, the wood wasn't even finished. It was like, you know, but anyway, and I remember like Greg, Greg said, okay, well, let's go, you know, play, let's have a rehearsal. And so I wrote two songs to bring to that rehearsal and Greg wrote two songs to bring to that rehearsal. And my songs were sensory overload and I think either drastic actions or bad religion, the special song. Okay, so that made, I mean, those made it. They all made it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the first few songs we wrote, and are those the first two songs you wrote in your life? No. Okay. But like, they're probably like the fifth or sixth. Okay. Sure. Okay. Where are you, are you pulling influences from to write songs to bring like, what are you thinking like, I want to do this kind of. So I was a music head, like as a kid, like I got high and listened to music. Like I didn't like, like as a really little kid, I did sports, but once I got into like, I would just listen to music constantly. And so I had a lot of, I had a lot of musical inclination knowledge or something, you know, but, but when I heard the Ramones, then I started getting into anything punk I could listen to. So, you know, I was listening to a lot of Nevermind the Bullocks, I was listening to a lot of the Ramones. Buzzcocks were a huge influence. I was listening to a lot of like a singles going steady and, and their other record. So because you guys are fast, you're faster than a lot of those bands and a lot of what was happening. Okay, right. Well, so those were my influences, but I knew that, right. So maybe I'm getting ahead of myself here, but by the time we formed the band, I'd been listening to punk. So, so like me and Tom were listening to the Germs GI. That was my favorite record. And Minutemen record, Black Flags, Nervous Breakdown EP. And so I was aware of the LA hardcore scene, right? Which was, I mean, it was brand new. It was just happening in that minute. Does it feel like it's so far from you? No. Being in the valley or is it? No, right. It was far away, but it was geographically. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it was a little bit far, but it felt like my music because it was people my age doing it. Yeah. And it was attainable. It was just so, it was, well, here's the thing that the Ramones made it attainable. Because when I had been listening to the Ramones, I was like, I can play that. I can do this. Right? Yeah. You know, I can't play like Mick Ronson. I can't play like Jimmy Page. I can't play like John Fogarty, but I can play like fucking Steve Jones or Johnny Ramone. Right? Like when I heard those records, I just started like writing songs. I just started playing this. I could figure out their songs. I could write my own songs. I mean, I was, people don't really know about this, but I was in a sort of a new wave proto-punk band before Bad Religion. We didn't never play to show, but we did a few rehearsals. We were called the Quarks because we were so small. We're such a small band of small things in the universe. So a little quark in your discography. Not quark. Quarks. Quarks. Even crazier. Yeah. It's really small. Very quarky, man. Intessimally small, right? So those are the first four songs you wrote. You did the airfare. You wrote the songs for the Quarks. And so I knew I could write songs, you know? Okay. But anyway, when does it become Bad Religion? That first rehearsal. In the quad there, we said, let's do a band. We did that rehearsal. Right. I couldn't have had the song Bad Religion because we didn't have the name yet, right? So that first rehearsal was with Sensory Overload and we played Jurassic Actions, right? And of my two songs. But that's the first time I heard Greg sing. And it's like, motherfucker, we sound good. We sound like a band, you know? But we knew we were going to be an LA hardcore punk band. It wasn't like, hey, you guys should be in a band. It was just, we knew what kind of band. We were thinking about the seven-park hardware that you'd be doing. No, we all knew what our favorite bands were, right? It was Black Flag. It was like the shit that's happening, right? The Germs Black Flag. So we were forming a hardcore band from day one. And so we knew how to play insanely fast, right? We were playing as fast as we could and aggressive. But I do remember when we started playing that I was shocked that I thought it was good. I thought it was going to suck. It shouldn't have been good. It shouldn't have been good. No, it should not have been good. It really was. Like the first minute, you know what I mean? Yeah. I think, so like our first show, we probably only had seven or eight songs, you know? And that was, we got invited to play a garage, like a warehouse party. And that was with social distortion. And we played it. And I remember Tom said, you guys are actually really good. Don't break up. That's what he said, you know? Which we followed those instructions. For a little while, right? We didn't break up. So let me ask you, you've used punk and punk rock and then hardcore punk rock and then hardcore. In that order, since we started talking, how at that time were you distinguishing between the two sub-genres? There was punk and then there was hardcore. And hardcore, we didn't call it hardcore punk. We just called it hardcore unless you'd never heard of punk. You sure? Yeah, right, right, right. If I was just playing it to my mom, I would say it's hardcore punk. Mom, I know you're listening. That's the difference. But yeah, punk was slower and it wasn't as pissed off and it wasn't as confrontational. But hardcore was, you know, it's the difference between porn and hardcore porn, I guess. Yeah, sure. It's more. So the confrontational hardcore aspect is what leads to the name Bad Religion. It was just kind of a fuck you. Well, yeah. It's not that we were thinking we have to be confrontational. It just had to be harder. It had to be more aggressive, faster. It couldn't be the spoons or something. It had to be the quarks. It couldn't be the quarks. It had to be the bad ones. It wasn't about fun. It was about full commitment and aggression. I mean, you're bound to get to the question in this podcast. I'll just go there now. What is punk? Right? Because if you're going to be more of something, then we have to know what the something is. I think you know it when you hear it. Yeah. Right, right. That's the Louis Armstrong answer, which is, well, if you have to ask, you'll never know. So there's that. That's a good answer. That's how we describe jazz. Of course. But I think punk itself is a refutation of the idea that you need permission to be a creator. Whoa. I love it. It's saying you don't need any credentials. You don't need any experience. All you need is a desire to express yourself, and we refute the idea of permission. Wow. That's true. That's what punk is. That's what the Ramones were doing. We're not virtuosos. No, we're not good looking. We just want to fucking rock. We're going to fucking do this. And they fucking did it well, and they sort of opened that door for the whole generation of punk rockers. They opened the door for hardcore punks to take that even further. And that's what it was more of. And I think punk said, you don't need permission. You don't need permission to open the door. And hardcore said, there is no door. So well said. Prolific. Incredibly well said. So yeah. It was just ... And that's something that's, I think, important to document, and I think a lot of people know it, but a lot of people also don't, that what we call hardcore today started in Los Angeles. It didn't start in Detroit. It didn't start in New York. It didn't start in London. I think the first British hardcore band was discharged. And that was 1982. But it started in LA. And then it went to DC and then Chicago. And your approach maybe perfected it. And then New York perfected it again. Well, that's your opinion. What would you attribute to being the first hardcore record? Is it out of O.G.? No. I think, well, so the first punk record that was sort of pure chaos, all the rules are gone, was GI by the germs. But it wasn't a hardcore record. But it was a spark that lit the hardcore movement. Black Flag invented hardcore with the nervous breakdown EP. That was it. And I was there, trust me. Nothing came before it and nothing was ever that hard. No shade on negative approach. To me, then a lot of bands in LA put out hardcore punk records. Bad Religion did it. Adolescence did it. But I think the one that sort of perfected the template in terms of how fast, how tight it can be was minor threat. And so those first two minor threat EP's, I think were sort of the pinnacle of the form for me. Anyway, and then a lot of great hardcore records after that. We'll bring those up again a little later for something. The crossbuster. How soon after the name does the logo come in the form? Really fast. So we had a band meeting in Jay's living room throwing out a bunch of shitty names. Don't ask me to say what they were. They're embarrassing. But we ended up with Bad Religion. Can we have one? One embarrassing band? No, no, no, no. No, I mean, they're so bad. Off camera, maybe I'll tell you. But thank God we didn't pick any of those. We wouldn't be here talking to them. But we came up with Bad Religion and that was auspicious, especially for me and Greg as songwriters because even though we love punk rock and we love rock music, we're also kind of deep down we're nerds and we're both interested in science and philosophy. It's random, I know. And so Bad Religion was a great name because it was right about all kinds of things that were different than what other punk bands write about. Makes you kind of wonder what is that? What does Bad Religion mean? Exactly. But anyway, so we came up with Bad Religion and then next rehearsal I came to the, you know, and I was a creative kid. I like doing music and poetry and creative writing and art too. I used to draw, including making flyers, but even before that I used to just draw pictures. So I went into my little art table at home and I came to rehearsal with a crossbuster. Next rehearsal. Do you know how many detentions you handed out with that? How many what? How many detentions you handed out across the country for the next? So I feel so grateful for that. A lot of bodies soiled. A lot of beautiful stuff. Yeah, but you know what, I mean, I have to say, it was interesting, I think probably the greatest punk logo of all times got to be black flag because it's nothing. The bars. Yeah, the bars are so just... They're everywhere too. You see them in ferns, on the streets, on buses. I was obsessed with the Dead Kennedys logo when I was a kid. Great logo. It was one of those ones that I would try to draw over and over. Yeah, DK is another one of the great ones. I'm obsessed with it. And Circle Verse Guy. Well, but that's not as strong because you can't draw it. You can't draw that. Anybody can do it. The crossbuster is, if you've got a hand, that thing can come in. But yeah, so that crossbuster logo is this kind of thing where it's spread across a world like wildfire, just because it's not just easy to draw and recognize, but it's also international. Yeah. Like if you... The crosses recognize all over the globe. After we dropped our seven-inch, we started getting fan mail from fucking Italy and Spain and Netherlands and Germany. 81. I had no idea, but I think the crossbuster logo for a generation of kids who were growing up under... It just hit them. They were like, oh my god, you could do that. And there's another side of you can't do that in that time. Is there blowback around you and around the world for the band name and the logo? No, not really. I mean, I think we were too small in the beginning for there to be blowback, but the people who liked it were connected by it. And so Fritz Quadrata Pro, when I say those words... I just stole that bold. Fritz Quadrata Pro. Fritz Quadrata Pro bold. Yeah, I just took it from Black Flag. Okay. Yeah, my favorite punk. There we go. Yeah. So... Oh, is that the font? That's the font. Yeah, no one's ever asked me about that, but yeah. I bought it. I've spent $40 on it. Well, it has to be... I've done a lot of our subtitles with it. It has to be this font. This is the punk font. And we went to the Punk Rock Museum in Vegas and it's the Black Flag... It's Fritz Quadrata Pro. And he went, I think that's the bad... Yeah, it is. It's great. It has to be. It's killing. I think there's no effects. No effects has used it before. So, how did you come time to put out the first seven? Some punk band should call themselves Fritz Quadrata. It's pretty good. There's a birthhold stage. Or a punk singer. Yeah. It could be Fritz. That's good. Fritz Q. Fritz Quadrata, baby. How you doing? Nice to meet you, Fritz. Fritz Quadrata. So, it's time to put out the first bad religion single, seven-inch. What gave you the idea to do this to yourself? Did people think you were insane? And how do you logistically go about starting a record label in 1981? Right, yeah. I wasn't starting a label. We were just... We were a band from the valley and we were putting out our seven-inch. Back then, a lot of bands put out their own seven-inches. So, that was common. Yeah, it was common. That's what you did. It was kind of like trying to get your... Using DistroKid to put your thing on Spotify. But a lot harder. You had to come up with like, you know, a thousand bucks. Wow. Approximately. That's like $500,000. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it was, you know... And so, anyway, I basically borrowed the money from my dad. Big Dick Garowitz, right? Yeah, his name is Richard. Richard. In the 50s, when he was a kid, you could have the nickname Dick. Yeah. Because Dick wasn't a bad... You know, what didn't mean penis, it meant, you know, it was like a cool name like Dick Tracy. Totally, yeah. Yeah. Now, he calls himself Richard. Okay. Is he credited in the... He's credited thanks to Big Dick, yeah. Let's fuck him off. Let me thank him, yeah. That's awesome. So, he made Epitaph happen. That is very cool. It's very fair. We were, you know, my dad was proud of me because I was doing something, you know, I was doing something on my own and taking some initiative and he said, he lent me the money. And we weren't... I wasn't starting a company. But we wanted it to look official. And some bands, right, like adolescents, were on frontier, you know, records. Right. In Indy. One word. And Black Flag was on SST, you know. Yeah. And we didn't want it to look like we weren't on a label, but really we weren't. There was no label. Right. So, we said, oh, what should we call it? You know, what should we put on here? We should call the label. And so, Greg and I were big fans of King Crimson. Yeah. And they have this song called... I can't remember if the song's called... But the lyric in the song is, confusion shall be my epitaph. And we thought that was really cool. Wow. It was a cool word. And it's the words on your tombstone. So we... Let's call it epitaph. And then the graphic designer who made the cover for me, because it was called epitaph, he came up with the tombstone for the logo. That's an E, right? So that's how that all started. It's on a lot of good shirts. How is the reception to the seven inch? How many do you press? Yeah. I'm a bad historian. There were two pressings. I can't remember exactly how many of each one. I think the first... I think we made like 500 of one of them and 1500 of another, something like that. Really small numbers. Flying on the shelves? Did that seem like... Oh, I'm sorry. Did that seem like a lot at the time? No. I just didn't know anything. I just thought like... When I first made the first batch, maybe I made a thousand, maybe it was 500. I just thought like, this is how much money I have to make them. Got you. It's what I had for it to get everything done. And I hope we can sell all of them. But it wasn't like flying off the shelves. Basically I had a car and there were like five record stores within driving distance that would let me put the records in their store on consignment. So I would drive to Z records in Long Beach and give them five and I'd drive to Moby disc in Van Nuys and give them five. RIP, I think that's long gone, right? Yeah. And I would drive to Middle Earth records in Downey, I think it was, and give them five or seven. Hell of a trek for five, seven records. Yeah, no. So I was just driving around and putting them in and I think Licorice Pizza took some, the local one. And then I'd wait a week or two and then I'd drive around and I'd back to them and they'd say, yeah, we could use some more. Wow. So then I'd put more in there. And like, so that's how it went. Huge. Yeah, we went through, we did go through all of them. And oh, and then what happened was that the guy over at Moby disc told me that he would take some boxes of them because Moby disc, he was involved with a distributor called Gem Distributors. And so, you know, they didn't fly off the shelf but they probably sold them over a few months. But the reception was really good. I didn't do a mailing or anything but there were like music writers who would buy things from those stores. And we actually got reviewed in the LA Times and it got a good review, you know. And finally a band from the Valleys. Yeah, I guess people ordered them from the stores and mail order. And so we were starting to get fan mail from like other states and the country. So it just happened. You're not even... No, people liked it. People liked the record. And people in the LA liked it. Yeah. So we started playing shows with other bands and then, I mean, it's a well-known story but we were friends with the Circle Jerks and we were friends with all the bands. So Greg Hetz, well, I always say Greg Hetz and walked the record upstairs to Roddy on the Rock at K-Rock but Keith Morris says it was him that did it. So I really don't... It was Greg. I can't remember. It was so damn long ago. But one of the Circle Jerks walked our... Oh, this is before this... Oh, sorry. Yeah. Okay. Before the 7-inch came out, we had the tape of the 7-inch. And one of our friends in the Circle Jerks walked it up to Rodney on the Rock and we waited out in the car and we were listening to Rodney on the Rock on the radio while he walks up there. And he played it on the radio. So... And Rodney liked it. And so... So that worked immediately. And the song Bad Religion started getting played on Rodney on the Rock. And you may not know this but... So back then there was no punk rock on the radio and it was even hard to find punk rock records. So, especially ones from England or New York. So what Rodney would do is he'd play like the best song from all the punk bands on his show. And his show was like on weekends and midnight, right? And so all the punks would record his show. It was like a two-hour show. So everyone had all these cassettes of Rodney's shows and that's how you would discover new punk music, right? And so if you got played on his show, so suddenly all the punks have our song. They're all trading it around. And they have Rodney. Rodney, he called us Bad Relgeon. They go, all right, that was Bad Relgeon. Oh my God. What? Yeah, I mean the first time he ever said... That maybe saved you in that one instance there. Yeah. But anyway, so we started getting popular in the scene because we'd gotten played by Rodney and we were on a bunch of people's mixtapes of punk. And that really helped us. And then the Seven Inch came out after that. So that informed the success of the Seven Inch. Yeah, that helped it go. And then the people promoting punk shows back then, these guys called Golden Voice. And so Golden Voice started putting us as, like they put us on support as a main support for a lot of the punk shows. And that really helped us a lot too. And also we got our friends, adolescents always asked for us to open for them. Jerks would take us up to San Francisco with them. It sounds like in addition to writing good music, a lot of things fell in place really fortunately. It was fortunate, but it was also like... But you're driving, you're driving along beach and you're driving to the valley and you're doing the work. Well, also there weren't that many... It was a small scene. It was like, I don't know how many punks were in the whole scene, maybe 2,000. And they were all actively searching for stuff at all times basically. And we all almost knew each other. Yeah, right. You know, it was like, you know, like if you were walking down the street and you saw another punk, that wouldn't be normal, right? It would be like, oh, do I know that guy? And if you didn't know him, you'd go up to him and then you knew him. I kind of felt that way until like 10 years ago. Maybe. I saw a fully tattooed guy, I could assume he's heard hate... Right, but it was really like that. You know what I mean? So it was very close in its scene. And if a band was pretty good, they could get shows. So you're playing a lot locally. You kind of blow through 2,000 records. Yeah. It's time to do an LP. How does that come to... How does Howe-Cut-Hell be any worse come to fruition? It's kind of the normal way. We're all going to school. Well, I was getting ready to drop out of school because I dropped out of school in 11th grade. So it might have been... It was either still in school or just took the equivalency exam. Okay. You did take the equivalency exam. I did, yeah, yeah. Congrats. Thank you. Yeah. It's kind of hanging on my wall still. Just kidding. And we said, yeah, we said, hey, let's do an album. And me and Greg started writing songs. And we started rehearsing them, teaching them to the band, going into a demo studio that doesn't exist anymore. I can't remember the name of that place. But we demoed out a couple of the songs, a few of them. And when I had made the 7-inch, I had learned how to make records. So one of the things you have to do is you have to get the tape and you have to have it mastered. And then you have to cut lacquers. And so I went to this place, which also no longer exists. It was on Santa Monica Boulevard called Gold Star Studios. Legendary place. Phil Spector worked there. They had the legendary echo chamber that Phil Spector used. The Ramones made it into the century there. But a lot of the Beach Boys recordings were done there. Legendary California studio. But Jeanette Napolitano was the receptionist at Gold Star. And she was sort of this punk rock chick with long purple hair and piercings. She was cool, right? She was older than me. I was super impressed by her. And she's like, hey, you guys are great. We actually became friends. But she goes, if you ever make an LP, you should have my boyfriend Jim engineer and produce it. And so her boyfriend was Jim Mankey, who was in Sparks, another pretty legendary band. Jim's brother, Earl Mankey, was like the main guy in Sparks. But anyway, so I took her up on that and we hired Jim to make... How long does the writing take before all this stuff? What do you have? You just come in loaded with Rolling and a Die right off the bat? No, so I've always felt grateful that I have Greg as a co-writer. Because punk records have a lot of songs. It's not like a Pink Floyd record. It might have six songs, as one of them takes up a whole side. You have to write like 15, two-minute songs. It's a lot. But I always wrote like seven or eight, and Greg always wrote seven or eight. It's easier to do. With some rare exceptions of like joint credited songs. Well we started taking joint credit around the time of process of belief. There's a couple of earlier ones too. So those couple of earlier ones really are like Suffer we sat down and wrote together. The song Suffer. But process of belief on, we just are sharing credit. We still wrote them separately. Yeah, okay. Interesting. Got you. But anyway, yeah, so we only each really had to write seven. And I don't know. Do they get refined when you get together and all that? Or are they pretty done? They're pretty done. Then you guys think so similarly. It's crazy. I know. Are there veto situations? Does anyone bring something where the others like, nah. Exceedingly rare. Sure. Yeah, I can't think of any. And there's a couple J B sides maybe. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, everyone's welcome to contribute a song. But and Jay does write songs, but I just think he, I don't know, like he has certain amount of insecurity or something. Like he, when he brought a song in, we do it. But I think maybe he's intimidated by how fast and how prolific Greg and I were. Totally. 100%. By this time for this first up, he had you upgraded from the Paul. Do you remember what you were playing at that time? Yeah. So the Paul got stolen. Like the LA punk scene used to be fucking crime-ridden. Like I mean, I used to have gear stolen just because I parked my car in Hollywood. Hollywood didn't. I call the old Hollywood, like the shitty old Hollywood. Like people think of Hollywood as Beverly Hills. People don't live here. But in the 80s, when the punk scene was happening, Hollywood was like a bad neighborhood. It was run down. It was junkies and pimps and gang bangers. You saw pimps? Huh? You saw pimps. Fuck yeah. Or they weren't. They look cool. Did they look cool? They look like Huggie Bear. Okay. Very cool. No, no. I mean, it was dereliction. You know, Hollywood was run down. Yeah. You know, it was. And so, yeah, I used to have guitar stolen out of my car. Gotcha. Like windows broken. You know, so you ended up. Grabbing it. Yeah. I learned to keep them in my trunk, but. Smart. By the time I made How Could It Be Any Worse, I don't know what guitar that was, but it wasn't the Red Rocker yet. She's coming. And it wasn't anything good. Okay. Yeah. I mean, the amp was. Please. So I had, this is partially why it sounds so weird and garagy, but I kind of like it now, but I had a, I went and got a Music Man HD 130 head. I got that out of the recycler, right? So it was like a lot of power, a Music Man head. And I thought I was buying a cabinet with it, right? So I bought a Music Man cabinet. But what I didn't realize was I didn't know anything about equipment at that time. This cabinet was a Music Man 410 open back cabinet because what it was, it had been a Music Man combo that the guy took the brain out of. Yeah. You're right. And it just had the 410s in there, right? Wow. So that was super weird. So I had this head with this combo speaker cabinet that didn't go with the head or match it. Right. And because it has an open back, there's no, no low end coming out the front at all. But then like nothing can literally ever sound like that again, which is pretty cool. Very true. True. And then, but then the other thing I did is I had a box called an orange squeezer, right? Which was, it's basically a compressor with gain. And I didn't know what compression was. But when I put that on my guitar and I cranked it, it drove the head harder and would give me more distortion. So and this wasn't a pedal. The orange squeezers were this thing, you'd stick it in the jack of your guitar and then stick the guitar cord into that. Whoa. So it's like an XLR gain booster for guitar? No, it was like a, it was like a pedal that doesn't go on the floor. Weird. It was a weird thing. Was it battery powered? Yeah, battery powered. Wow. Was it like just a small little cylinder? Yeah, it was like a little square. Weird. Just look it up. Orange squeezer. Wow. They're killer. I have one now that's built into a pedal. That's awesome. Yeah. Did it have any kind of adjustments to it or was it just set? Yeah. It was like compression and output. Okay. Wow. Right. So it's like fixed threshold and then the, or I don't know, I think it's a fixed ratio and then the compression was just lowering the threshold. Right. And then the gain was makeup gain. So I just, I just fucking squashed it and the cranked the gain. Yeah. And I've got the sound. Wow. So that's what, that was the sound. I don't know what the guitar is, but was, but it's probably something with a stock on there. So with, with how could it help be any worse? We have bands like Ignasi Front collectively calling it one of the best Harpur records ever. Who's anyone to argue with that point? Thank you guys. To that point, last year my band played a, a Fest in Europe and Madbomb played, of course, are directly related to Ignasi Front. You guys were also playing this Fest. I think it was Full Force or Brutal Assault. The one with all the, the machinery. Yeah. Yeah. There's like, like, like diggers, big, I don't know. It's a weird one in Germany. Yeah. I don't know. And Freddie said, this goes out to one of the, no, he says, this goes out to the greatest hardcore band of all time. We have royalty. This is for bad religion. Oh man. Yeah. I love Freddie. We did some Madball records at Epitaph. And I think Big Chris is part of their crew. It's interesting to me because when I listened to how could hell be any worse, it doesn't sound hardcore anymore, but we were making a hardcore record. I think when I hear that, that's hardcore. Oh, cool. That's cool. I appreciate that. But I think there's a breakdown. Yeah, but it's just, it's not as, you know, but hardcore evolved. Right. And so, so I think a lot of, a lot of fans of the genre or a lot of new kids into the scene won't think that's a hardcore record, but it was. And then hardcore evolved, but that was a hardcore album. And I think if you think that, there's no way to deny that it is. Cool. Yeah. So, you found this record that feels like kids making music, you know? It's like, or young people even. It's timeless, great songs ahead of the curve. Do you have any fond memories of putting it together? Well, yeah. So, getting back to it, so Jim Mankey was producing it. We had very, very little money to make it. And so, we had to find a cheap studio. And Jim found this place called Track Record. It was on Melrose. And he got this deal where they would give us the studio for like, I think it was like $300, but we had to go in after they closed and leave in the morning before they got there. So we were going in at midnight. And this is a very common thing. Very common. We're learning about older bands. Yeah. So, so we went in there and did that. And we did it, I think, over two or three nights, evenings. So, we must have been in there for like eight hours until the sun came up, like eight or nine in the morning. And are you tracking separately? Or are you tracking? No, we tracked all together. But I think within, you know, we would have had to have overdebbed the vocals after. But we were playing together live. And the drummer by that time, Ziskraut had already quit the band. And so, Pete was his drum roadie or tech friend, whatever. We weren't professional, but Pete could play drums sort of. And he practiced his afts off. And so, he was our drummer on that record. Was it, I think he actually played drums on half the record. Yeah, that, like, Ziskraut quit during the record. That's insane. Yeah, I think it's probably one of his biggest regrets, because I'm still in touch with him. But anyway, though. So yeah, it was really fun. We recorded, like, really, really one of our, maybe our third or fourth recording experience, because we'd recorded demos, we'd recorded the EP, we'd recorded for comps. And I always used to get super nervous recording. I remember, you know, when one of the vivid memories I can never forget is when Jim would say, okay, you know, recording, and I'd hear in my headphones, my, I was standing, you know, we were all standing like we were rehearsal. My ankles got weak. Like, my ankles started wobbling because I was so nervous that I didn't want to make a mistake on the recording, you know. You don't feel that anymore. No, I mean, you know, I mean, now I'm a recording engineer. 16 LP's later. Well, no, I mean, 16, I've probably made 300 as a recording engineer and producer. So now I know if you make a mistake, you just go over it. It's just you're recording. It's not live, you know. But with, with, like, tape at the time, how big of a pain in the ass would punching something in be? It wouldn't have been, I don't think. But I was just a dumb kid and it was just, it was so important to me that, like, sitting there, I'm recording my record, you know, and my ankles got weak, you know. Well, that's cool. Another thing I remember is, like, you know, the studio just had some stuff laying around, right? So, like, there was a timpani sitting there. And so that's how we ended up having, I don't know if you've ever even heard it, but we have a timpani in that song, In the Night. In the Night. You know, Pete's like, hey, there's a timpani. Should we, yeah, let's use it. Cool. Is that like the, like, acoustic guitar that comes in in the bridge of we're only going to die? Is that just something that'll play? We always meant to do that. And there was a piano there. And there was, I think, you know, because there was a piano there, we've got to have piano on, fuck Armageddon, this is hell, and on Only Gonna Die, which sounds really good. Superb. Yeah. Those were happy accidents. Wow. Do you get asked to repress or re-release Into the Unknown? All the time. Tell me of the story. What happened with the records in the warehouse? Bad Religion was pretty popular when we put out Into the Unknown. And so we actually, I think I made 10,000 and we got orders for all 10,000. Wow. Right? Now, the record is such an abortion, a musical abortion, that, you know, Jay ended up quitting during the middle of making the record. And I now fully agree that he was right to do that. It should not have made that record. And I know I'm going to get people to tell me that they disagree and they really like it. And maybe you'll even say that, I hope not, but anyway, whatever. But I think the people who say that to me are just trying to be, they're just trolling me. Contrary. Yeah. But we shipped 10,000, they all came back. Like, no way. I mean, I think we got, you know, I don't know how it worked, but I think we got 10,500 returns just kidding. Like, you know, it sold like nothing. Wow. Yeah. So it was a great failure or disaster. Are these orders to stores? To distributors. To distributors. Yeah, but then I figured out that I could sell to distributors and then we're driving to stores. And, I mean, it is a completely different band, sonically. Yeah. Yeah. And it was like, I don't know, you know, it was just, Greg and I had both been fans of Prague before we went punk. Around the same time we was listening to Glam, I was listening to Prague. Those were like the left of center forms of music, which I always gravitated to. And we had that in common. Like, we both liked Yes and ELP and King Crimson. So anyway, I don't know what we were thinking, but in 83, the LA Hardcore kids were growing their hair long and getting keyboards, right? Yeah, totally. TSOL, who we loved and looked up to, had a keyboard. But they were going more like post-punk with it, right? Doing like what the British bands were doing. And so I brought a keyboard to rehearsal. Roland Juno 6, Monophonic. Wow. Wow. Yeah, you couldn't play a chord on it. And Greg was like, cool. Now we're doing this. This is awesome. And he started writing songs. He wrote a full-on Prague song. Yeah. Right? And I was like, oh, I'll do that too. It was just it. But you weren't alone though, because if you go back to like most Hardcore or punk bands, most Hardcore bands especially, the second LP is something else. Yeah. Yeah. There's an LP itis that like everybody's got to get through. Yeah. It's like, you dumb kid, you have to learn your lesson. I'm glad I learned it early. That's what I chalk that up to. Success is not about never making mistakes. It's about never making a catastrophic mistake. We only learn from failure. Yeah. As long as you don't make any catastrophic mistake, your mistakes just make you better, because you just learn from all of them. So that was a really good lesson that we learned early. And you would leave the band in 1983 to go to rehab? Yeah. So it would be convenient for me to blame drugs on that record. I'll blame that record on drugs. Yeah, sure. But yeah, but I would, through all of this that we've talked about thus far, I was a recreational drug enthusiast. Enthusiast? Yeah. Big fan. Big fan of that. I think I've accomplished. Okay, all right, congrats. That's Nanny in my field. You got the GED and you're in the theater. I was great at writing punk songs and getting high. Is there, and this can be a discography-wide, it's maybe a crazy question, is there a song that you can attribute to drug use that you hear and you go, that was fucking awesome? I'm glad I did those drugs that day. No, no, no, no, no. I got it all. I mean, drugs don't help me be created. Excellent. That was a true question. Yeah. You passed. Unbelievable. Yeah, no, I mean, in fact, I think I wrote all my best songs when I was cleanest over. You hear that? You hear that shit? Kids? Straight edge. No, I'm not straight edge, but I'm cleanest over. And no shade on straight edge either. But you do not need mood altering chemicals to be creative. In fact, I think it inhibits creativity and I think it inhibits productivity. For those who are straight edge and never tried mind expanding chemicals, I would say you're missing out on something. I do think that, I do think all the acid and psychedelics I experimented with really opened my mind and made me a better person. I will not say that for narcotics or alcohol or anything like that. I understand. Well, as far as the mind. Well, another discussion. Yeah, yeah, yeah. My head's big enough. I don't need to expand my mind. All right, we'll talk later. Pardon this interruption. We got to tell you about some very important things before we continue this landmark episode with the co-founder of one of the greatest bands to ever exist. Speaking of guitars, which this man, Brett, plays, we know a little thing or two about guitars as well. Bad religion, good guitars. Well said. This episode is brought to you by Dunnable Guitars, which are, in my opinion, and many others, the guitars for heavy music. Listen, you guys heard of a band called Sangua Sugar Bog because that's what they play and they sound great. You heard of a little band called God's Hate because Anthony uses one and Taylor uses one. Alec uses one. They sound fantastic. They have a variety of different tones and the 25 and a half scale allows for better tuning stability and lower tuning. 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This might be the craziest deal we've ever offered considering what it costs to build a custom guitar. 15% off a guitar is insane. This is insane. Please go now. We're so lucky to ever do anything with them ever. My favorite guitars on earth. They're going to be yours. This episode is also brought to you by the great timeless coffee, the first ever vegan roastry and bakery in America founded with the sole purpose of being the punk and hardcore hang out the spot in the Bay area. They ship beans nationwide. You can set up a schedule. You can send them as gifts. You can set up your grind size, your frequency, how often you want your beans. If you want beans at all, if you want some preground stuff, it's unbelievable. They got baked goods. The cookies don't even worry about it. They're unbelievable and they ship within 24 hours of being baked. How is that possible? It's everything is possible at times. And if you live in the Bay, get a custom cake made. They're insane. I've had them. They look beautiful. These bakers are taking over the world now. And also, lest we forget, this is an operation owned and operated by punk, hardcore adjacent people. So head over to timeless coffee. Use code hard lore. Get 15% off your order and get caffeinated. The timeless way. Back to the episode. So between 83 and 87, what's epitaph up to? Does the label grow incrementally in this time? No. So, yeah. So where are we left off? I went to rehab. Greg is really diving into studies at UCLA. He's a serious student, always had been. Greg never messed with drugs. He was around them, but he never did. Never did any. Do people give him shit for that in the time? No. No. Everyone respected it in the scene. And he'd be around it. And he was interested in it from a scientific standpoint. That tracks. Yeah. Yeah. But so I went to, I dropped out of school, took the equivalency. I went to junior college. I went to art school. I went to vocational school to learn recording. I was just trying to find my path. And I really loved recording. I discovered I really loved sound recording. And I started doing a lot of that. And I started recording studio with my friend John Gurdler and then with the G-I-R-D-L-E-R. And so I was doing a lot of recording. Greg was doing a lot of going to school. Smart stuff. Yeah. And, you know, Greg called me up. We hadn't done anything for a few years. And so I guess it was around, you say between 83 and 87? Yeah. Yeah. So I got clean and sober April 14th, 1987. And that was the first time I got clean. And so I'd just gotten clean and I get a phone call from Greg. He's like, hey man, the band's been playing the whole time. Hetson kind of took my place as the full-time guitar player. A lot of people think bad religion always had two guitar players. But it wasn't. It was just, I was a guitar player. Greg did a solo on the first LP. But he wasn't, you know, when we'd play live it was just one guitar. And then when we sort of broke up after Into the Unknown, Greg kept the band going, Greg Graffin, with Greg Hetson on guitar. And they would just do sporadic shows on and off. And it wasn't really... Would they play mostly, how could it help me any worse though? Yeah. Into the Unknown only got a couple songs, got played at a couple shows. They got the message. Oh yeah. So Greg goes, hey, we have a show at Gilman Street and Hetson can't do it. Will you do it? I'm like, I don't know. And he's like, oh come on, it's fun. You won't believe how big the crowds are. The kids go off. It's super fun. It's way bigger than it ever was. And I'm like, really? He's like, yeah. And I'm like, well, all right. I've just gotten clean and sober. I was in my studio. So I'm like, OK, let's do it. So we played a show at Gilman. It was super fun. Right? And that's still the best room for hardcore music on Earth, to this day. Yeah, it's great. It's a great club. And so that happened. And then we sort of dipped our toe back in by doing the Back to the Known EP. So I was saying, Back to the Known was sort of our wink of saying, OK, just kidding. Can we have a do-over? Yeah. How was that recieved? It was recieved fine. OK. And it was an OK record. I don't know why we re-recorded the song from the EP. But we're still figuring things out. But then what started happening was that my studio was doing well. Like I was recording tons of bands, art bands, noise bands, punk bands, country bands. Anyone who was sort of underground in the LA scene, reusing my studio. And it was really cheap. It was $15 an hour. It was called West Beach Recorders. $15 an hour, you got me and the studio. Wow. And I was doing the recording. That's McDonald's rates then. I know. I could hardly live off what I was making, but it was like I was probably working 80 to 100 hours a week. Just recording, recording, recording. We loved it. I loved it. And I was getting really good at it by doing so much of it. And I started to get a reputation. You want to get a good sound for cheap, go here. If you had $150, you could get in my studio for 10 hours. So for $300. It's fucking crazy. If you knew your music, I could make you a record in two days. I could make a record for $300. I was doing that for bands. And do you think, was it like, hey, the guy from Bad Religion? No, it wasn't that so much yet because we hadn't done Suffer yet. But I was cutting my teeth. So I was making all these good sounding recordings for other people. So when Greg in 87-ish said, hey, let's make another album, I was like, fuck you, let's do it. I can make it sound good. You know? Because punk records didn't really sound good except Ramones and The Clash and the Pistols. Most punk records had sounded bad prior to that time. 87 is kind of when they start to sound like, age of choral 86 sounds really good. And then like anything, all the Don Fury stuff, late 80s. Suffer sounds unbelievable. Suffer sounds good. It sounds fun. And I had spent 10,000 hours learning how to record other people's bands just because I loved doing it. And so I'm like, fuck you, let's do that. So then the band agreed to do it. And so now we were two guitar players because we wanted to keep Hetson in. And even though circle jerks were still going, so with two guitars, we sounded really good. And Hetson was a way better guitar player than me. And the jump, come on. He's a jump and beam. He's got a good jump. And he invented it, right? Both Gregs had hair at that time. He still had hair. Where did the harmony come from? Bad Religion is a band that has a signature type style of harmony. Yeah, yeah. It came from the adolescents. A good answer. That's where it came from. But where did those come from? It came from the Beach Boys. Wow. I mean, California. We all grew up on the Beatles and the Beach Boys, grown up in California. And adolescents were my favorite band in the scene. And I tried to do that style of stuff on How Could Hell Be Any Worse, like a couple of the songs like White Trash, Second Generation, and also American Dream. We did a little bit of harmonies and background vocals. But it was an Oz. Yeah. Yeah, we did a little on How Could Hell Be Any Worse. And I was trying to be like the adolescents. You really dialed in. You dialed in. Yeah, so when we did suffer, I knew I wanted to do that. And so we did suffer and recorded it in seven days. Greg and I wrote it over the course of, I would say, two months where we were going to rehearsal. We'd just bring two songs in each time, teach it to the band, go home. Two weeks later, have rehearsal, two new songs, go home. Now when you bring in a song, is it lyrics, melodies, done every day? Yeah. Wow. Yeah, so I have to teach it. I write down the chords on a piece of paper. And then I would write down Greg's lyrics for him. And to show him the melody, I would sing it. Although I had my studio by then. Yeah. I'm away without him. But I didn't have, usually not. Usually I'd just bring the chords and give him the song. Then I would sing it. And he'd be like, OK, then he'd do it 20 times better. Get the idea. But yeah, they're finished songs. You can play them on acoustic guitar. So suffer comes out and is this big restart button for the band. It's like this, you've cemented. For the band, but also for the scene. For the scene and the label. Yeah. The label, right. Right. 100%. Yeah. So that year, that was the year that Op IV was the record. Energy and suffer came out. And maybe they came out pretty close. There's came out, I think, the following year, but like six months later. But yeah, everyone, suffer was beloved. Flipside, which was sort of like the Bible of the LA scene, called it best album of the year. And Maximum Rock and Roll, which is the Bible of the East Bay scene, called it album of the year also. Wow. And it was the album that year. And it was, if you went into a parking lot of a punk rock show, you heard it coming out of every window and people are hanging out in the car before going in. And yeah, everything started blowing up from there. Do what you want as the punk ethos statement in 1988 is all anybody was looking for. Yeah. Yeah. I wrote that song and it took me 10 minutes. I wrote it while I was recording some other band in the other room. And then we would take a break and I wrote it. Now when that happens, are you just like, there's the melody. And there it is in my mind. I got to get this. Yeah. I write the riff. I write the music and then I can start going. And then I come up with the words and sing the words on top. And it was like, you know. Jesus Christ. And the other thing that that thing did was that everyone wanted to get that sound because they heard that it was done at West Beach. And so all these bands started going like, oh, fuck that. That's better than suffer so good. Have you heard it? Let's go record at West Beach. So the bands would come in because they wanted to sound like that. You could get me for $15 an hour. Maybe by then it was $20 an hour. It's got to go up. Yeah. But I mean, it was super cheap. And so I didn't, it wasn't like doing A&R for Epitaph. Bands were coming to me because they wanted to. I see. So are they recording with you and then you hear L7 or the Vandals make something cool and you're like, this is good. I'll put it out. Yeah. Kind of like no effects. I didn't, had never heard of them, but they booked time in my studio and went in and recorded liberal animation. Right. And I was like, hey, let's put this on Epitaph. They're like, no. I'm like, okay. And then, which is crazy because he's like suffer as the reason I like music. Right. But then after that, like not shortly thereafter, he's like, hey, just kidding. Let's do, let's be on Epitaph. So then we did S&M Airline and then, you know, so the rest is. And you know, and then Tim Armstrong called me up because they dropped off IV but he had suffered. He was like, I wanted to sound like that. So he called me up when IV broke up and said, hey, Brad, Tim, can I, you know, I've got a new band with Matt. We want to be on Epitaph. I'm like, yep, let's do it. Whenever you're ready. Okay. Like I'm in the Salvation Army right now, but getting sober. But like, as soon as I get out of here, like, you know, do you need to hear music or anything? Nope. Wow. Like you're my favorite punk songwriter. Whatever you and Matt do, it's on Epitaph. Wow. So, you know, it's like, sort of that record was the catalyst and it sort of accelerated everything that was happening because the punk scene was sort of dormant at that time. It was a little dead in the late 80s. And it sort of exploded again with that moment. And then a year later, you do it again. Yeah, but it was so fun and so easy. I knew that so fast. I only had to write seven songs, you know, and I'd spent a long time not writing anything and I'm really creative. Greg's creative and prolific. We can write punk songs, you know. Sure. Wow. So... No control one year later. Yeah. And the sort of the mission statement for that one is, let's do suffer again, but make it even faster. And it really is. Yeah. Because you know what? But here's the thing. We had learned our lesson, right? We made how could hell be any worse. Yeah. And everyone liked it. And then we fucked up by changing it. Changing up. So we're like, let's fucking not do that again. Sure. Everyone loves suffer. Let's make suffer, but even faster. Yeah. It really is. So, you know, we learned our lesson and we went back in and we tried to make something that was catchy again, but even harder and faster. With bigger melodies, more harmonies. Yeah. Yeah. Insent. Yeah, more energy. Is there a conversation about what should open between Big Bang and Change of Ideas? Is that why they're one and two? So, I think back then I was sequencing the records and then later it became more of a collaboration. But I look at sequencing, especially for punk records where the songs are so short, is almost a form of songwriting. Absolutely. So, it's sort of like, I just would throw them together in different ways and say, I listened to the end of a song, the beginning of a song, what sounds good going into that, what sounds good coming out of that, and just shuffling around until I thought it sounded good, and then play it for the guys and say, do you like this? It's chapters of a book if it's out of order. But I can give you, I can tell you what starting with Change of Ideas was all about. Tell me. Okay, so the intro to Change of Ideas, did that, have you noticed that any other punk song starting in that exact way? No, no, the exact way. Oh, so not bad, right? Tell me. What we do is secret by the germs. Oh, wow. Okay. Right. That was our tribute. We loved the germs, the most influential hardcore record, the proto-hardcore record that started all. So, that's us, that's our nod to the germs. Beautiful. Yeah. We were just talking about it. Makes a lot of sense. Are you seeing all this stuff happening at the time, the busyness in the studio, the reception of both of these records, being contacted by bands, putting more stuff out on the label? Are you seeing this as a, oh, like we're doing something, something's happening here, or is it all happening so fast that you're just kind of doing the next thing every day? Look, when No Control came out, it was probably 18 months or 20 months cleanest over. For me, in my life right then, it was all about chop wood and carry water. I was like, okay, I've been a fuck up for my whole life. I'm just trying to fucking, I'm trying to fucking get my shit together here. So, I was working hard. I was being diligent. I was meditating every day. I've always been into meditation. I was just keeping my nose clean, keeping my head down and doing the work and doing everything with integrity. For real. And I didn't really see it for what it was. I couldn't zoom out and know what was exactly. I couldn't know what was happening. But I knew that my life was better. Things were going well. No Control is still at the top of bad religions, popular releases on Spotify. Still top three in the essential albums on Apple Music. How does this impact resonate with you almost 40 years later? And did you feel at the time you'd made something special, especially with it being so soon after suffer? Yeah, I knew No Control was a good record. But that feeling of like, holy shit, what did we just do? We had that on suffer. Really? Yeah. When me and Jay, I remember me and Jay were driving home from Tijuana. We had played a gig at a legendary club down there called Iguanas. And some insane punk shows happened. And we were driving home, pretty long drive, and we were listening to suffer on cassette. And we listened to it all the way through. We went side one, flipped, side two. We both looked at each other because we had just finished it. It wasn't even out yet. And it was just like, fuck, is that us? Yeah, is that really, did we really do that? It just seemed otherworldly and it seemed really good and it didn't seem real. It seemed kind of unreal. And then I think No Control felt like a big achievement. But because sort of, I think suffer had set the standard, it felt good. It was a proof. Suffer was a proof of concept and No Control was a proof that it was sustainable. Sustainable. Like fuck, we can do this. We can do this till the wheels come off. And the wheels have yet to come off. That's maybe the most insane thing. I think bad religion is maybe the band in history that has done the most with the least, if that makes sense. Yeah, it's crazy. You really never, you've evolved. You haven't changed. And that's the secret. I just, I can't believe that the great Ramones are, almost all of them passed away. This just doesn't seem fair. So many great bands are no longer with us and yeah, bad religion is still just raging. Raging. And still writing great music. Yeah, all I can say, I don't know what to attribute, it's just luck and all I can have for that is gratitude. I love it. Is there a song you can recall from any album that Greg brought in that gave you the feeling, like your own personal feeling of songwriting goosebumps satisfaction as if you had written it? Yeah, no control. The title track? Yeah, yeah. I mean, I just, I think the friendly competition between Greg and I or the brotherly competition is what has helped us get better as writers. Because he will write a song and I'll just think, God, I wish I could write a song that gave me goosebumps like that. You know? In the old days there was a song that did it, which the one off How Could It Be Any Worse that he wrote that I always felt as I couldn't believe how good it was, was pity. But, you know, it's like so fucking profound just the way it feels, you know? And especially for the time. Yeah, yeah, for the time, yeah. Yeah, but he kept up in the ante. But same thing happens to him because sometimes he'll send me a song, you know, it'll be like, that's a good Greg song, you know? And I'll be, and then I'll be working on my song, and he'll wait till he hears this, you know, and then I'll send him my songs and he'll be like, oh, okay, I'm raising the bar and then he sends me his next song and like, oh. Is there, can you recall one that you sent him that really just knocked his socks off? I think when we were doing Process of Belief and we started writing and I sent him Super Sonic, I think he was like, oh, okay, it's on. Yeah, it really was. It really was. Let's see. Let's go here. As soon as I think, this is interesting on that topic, as soon as I'm listening to Bad Religion and I think I can guess which one you wrote it, is when I'm finally wrong. Like is there, is there certain things you do where you're like, Greg's gonna like that? That's some shit he would do. Uh-huh. And vice versa? No. Uh-uh. Well, I mean, I do think about him when I'm writing and I think about him that he's gonna be singing it. And so, I am careful to not put words in his mouth that he'd be uncomfortable with. And so sometimes- Thank you. Not realistically. But when I'm writing, I'm writing about my own truths and that's really important to me. So it doesn't have to be something that I don't have to try and decipher what his truth is. I'm fine with him conveying a truth that is mine. As long as I don't think it's to be too uncomfortable with him. So like for example, there are times where I'll write something where I'll be like, I hope he doesn't mind this. Like in Digital Boy, you know- Cynagogue. My daddy's a lazy middle class intellectual. My mommy's on Valium, so ineffectual. Now that's not specifically true about my parents, but I was getting to deeper underlying truths about, you know, teenage alienation and the household and so forth. But his parents aren't anything like that at all. You know, his parents are academics. I think you're talking about the Digital Boy. You're not talking. It's, you know, well, but I'm always trying to get to a truth. So with that one, I wanted to know, who's talking to mine saying that? Because, you know, I love his mom, Marcella. I always loved his dad and I don't want them to get mad at me for making Greg say that. So I never even thought about that. I'm sure they understand hyperbole. So the no control title track is the one that's not. So does he come in with no control? All the backers. Geez, that's a good job, Greg. You guys are good. The band's pretty good. You would eventually be in the Tony Hawk's Preskater 2 soundtrack. Yeah. How did that move the needle at all? Yeah. The song you. Yeah. I can tell you that was absolutely without a doubt the first time I heard Bad Religion as a young guy. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. That was a great sink placement for us because they introduced a lot of people to us. 100%. To punk overall, which is great. Yeah. True. Yeah. Yeah. I just, it was one of these, it was like, it's just. It must have been a tough one. It was, but yeah. But it was just sort of like, I didn't think I was writing a great song. I just thought I was just venting. So why was that song chosen? Was there a particular? Mr. Hawk was into it? Yeah, I don't know why. I don't remember that, but TH. By the way, me and Tony Hawk have the same birthday. That's why it was chosen. Wow. It's just a weird trivia, but he was born on May 12th also. May 12th. And we're still in touch after all these years because he's continued to support punk music by continuing to put punk songs in every later iteration. 25th of a lifetime. He's the real one. Yeah. Every once in a while, every time he's got a new one coming out, he's like, hey Brett, what's like the cool new punk song? Oh, that's awesome. Put in a good word for us. We'd have to help him out with that. There's a break in I Want Something More. Yeah. I Want Something. And it sounds like you cut the tape and then like splice it back together. How did you get that to sound that way and what is that? Yeah. Well, I used to do a lot of tape editing, so I might have just done that. I Want Something. But also, yeah. No, I think the way, yeah, I don't think I would have used an edit for that, although I could have done that by putting in a piece of leader, but I had a Soundcraft 2400 console, which if anyone can find one of those, they're fucking killer for rock music and they're not expensive or anything. Full Moon Fever by Tom Petty was made on the same shitty console. They just sound great for drums and guitars. But it had this mute matrix where every channel had an A mute and a B mute and then on the master console, on the master control panel, you had a master A or B. So you could set up, put everything on a mute, like mute A. And then go, bink. So is that you doing that in real time? I'm sure that's what I'm doing. We had no automation or no computer, so we just used to... That's awesome. It sounds like the hardest stop. And then go, come on. For anybody, we actually might have younger people watching you don't realize when we're talking about cutting tape, it's literal tape, cutting with a razor blade, pasting or was it a tape? It was a tape, a piece of... It wasn't audio tape, but you tape it with editing tape on the back to connect the spices. And you can... A lot of older recordings, you can hear it. It's in there. It's in there. You can't hear all the ones I did, man. There's an OFX song that has probably 30 edits in it. 30 tape edits? Because Smelly, who's got the best right foot in punk rock, is a great drummer. But back then, he was only good at fast. And it's one song that was mid tempo, and he had a lot of drum fills in it. And he'd always speed up. He'd always rush the fill. Let's go fast. I literally had them record it like 12 times, and then I got their best take, and then I just took the drum fills that were in the right tempo and cut them from other takes into that take for every single drum fill. And now that's what everybody's shit. I was really good at tape editing. There's a pretty blatant one on Wherever I May Roam on the Black Elbe. That's always pointed out. The Bob Rock or whoever, I forget the name of the engineer on that one, but they kind of fucked it up. It's pretty loud. One year later, once again, against the grain. You do it again, you do it as fast as hell. How? What do you mean? How did you do that so fast? You don't mean the tempo. No, no, no. Literally. Greg and I are prolific. We can write. It's not hard for us to write. Neither one of us have ever had writer's block. Thank you for asking me that. Yeah, I mean, we like to write. I feel that the fact that I can do it helps me in my role as a label president. Because I sign bands and they're demoing songs. I'll say, hey, how's the writing going? Oh, well, I have 20 songs with music, but I haven't come up with lyrics yet. That's bullshit, dude. It's not a song if it doesn't have lyrics. Write a song. Demo it. Come on. Yeah. You know, that's just fear. That's just resistance. Writes some music and not put words on it. You're not songwriting. Your song is the whole thing. I mean, the local melodies and lyrics are 80 percent of it. And what you want to say. Yeah. Right? It's not just sound. Do you believe that to be a ubiquitous truth for every band? That's how? Yeah. That's my rule of thumb. I'll say to the band. I don't, you know, because when you write your piece of music, you've got to put your, you know, write your melody. Some people write the melody in the words first. I can't do that. It's hard. But either way, whatever you're starting with, you immediately have to do the other piece, right? Because when you have your music and then you put your melody and ideas on top, right? Then you have something that you can think about, right? And then you'll say, okay, it's not great yet. Why? Okay, let me tweak the music. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Oh, that took in this direction. Now I can tweak the words. And then you go back and forth between the two and that's how your song comes into focus. And I'll do a lot of bands try to fight you on, because obviously as the label guy is a great songwriter, you're going to have an inclination on what a good single will be. Yeah. And a lot of times they just like, no. And then you go, hey, American Jesus, pretty good, trust me. I do not pull that card. I never pull any card. But I don't get in fights over the singles, but a lot of bands, a lot of times it's obvious what the single is. And then if there are too many choices that are the single, that means you don't have a single. And usually if there's two or three that you can't figure out between those three, then I'll let them pick. I'm not, you know, like there's no right answer. I have a really good method of picking a single and that is just, I get goosebumps. The CBGBs. Yeah. Like it just makes my skin, makes my, you know, makes the hairs on my arm raise when I hear the single. It is fascinating sometimes to look back at bad religion records and see what was first and second single. Where like sometimes the breakout hit is the third single. Because it's process of belief where it's just sorrow and you know anything else. It's fascinating. Against the grain, no radio play, no TV play, 100,000 records sold. So my memory of against the grain is, you know, that year the biggest punk bands in the world were Bad Religion and Fugazi. And we were both selling around 100,000 records and we were both could sell out the palladium and you know had different styles. But we were, you know. Of course there was no radio because punk had not been played on the radio yet. Ever. So other than Ricky in the morning or whatever it was called Rodney. Rodney on the Rock in midnight. Yeah, right, right. Specialty radio. Yeah. So they call that specialty show. But that's not, you know, radio play. And for the audience, you know, it's a different world. There's no streaming, you know, there's no internet. There's no smartphones. There's no way to discover music other than hearing it on the radio or hearing them play it at the record store or hear it at your friend's house. But this is just 100,000 people going to the store and picking it up. Yeah. Yeah. Good job. Thank you. 21st century digital boy. It was one of the greatest punk hits of all time. How did that feel to just finish and present to Greg? It felt, it was, I felt insecure about it because it wasn't fast. And we'd sort of set that as one of the rules. Like we only play fast songs. And I wanted to do one that wasn't fast. And I brought it to rehearsal. Our sound guy at the time, it's Carrot, or his other nickname was Rudy, he goes, you can't do that. You can't play that song. That's not punk. Wow. He literally told me that in front of the guys. And so I mean, I think him saying that to me made me defend it. I said, fuck that. You know, I say it's punk, so it's punk. That makes it extra punk. Yeah. Yeah, rules. Yeah, fuck that, we're doing it. But I was insecure about it. Interesting. That's fascinating. Because you step out of the context, you would never think that. Well, because bands are always, and I was no different, bands are always insecure about the one that sounds different. But the thing is, why is a single called a single? It sounds different. It sounds different. It doesn't sound like the other ones. It stands out. And that would set the tone of, Bad Religion has like one or two, maybe three mid tempo songs per record. You're playing them every show because they're very popular. And it's because you don't overdo it, maybe that it works so well to this day. What is touring for Bad Religion like by 1990? So it was massive in LA, massive in New York, massive in Chicago. Kind of like medium sized shows in between those places. I'd say pretty big in all the West Coast, but huge in Germany. Bad Religion had blown up in Germany even sooner. We blew up in Germany on the self record. And we were like, we could play like palladium sized places everywhere in Germany. Like this huge phenomenon there. Well, yeah, what would you attribute that to? I don't know. Yeah, I mean, they just loved it. Yeah. Had other punk bands in your world been going to Europe at that time? I know Black Flag did famously. Yeah, no. Black Flag bands were and American Punk was getting popular there. But I mean, it became the second home to all of New York hardcore for 15 years. Yeah, American hardcore got popular in Germany. But Bad Religion were the biggest band to the point where we were playing like rock star level places all over Germany. Yeah, tour buses, big rigs with our equipment in the kitchen. Like bringing around a ping pong table and setting up in the arena. True punk luxury. And then the states, it still was taking a minute to pull the picture. Well, I mean, it was huge in the big cities. Springfield, Missouri. Yeah, Springfield, Missouri played for probably 500 or something. I'd kill for that. That's crazy. Right around the corner is Generator. Yeah. This is a bizarre experimental. Are we going to do every record? We'll be here until tomorrow. Yeah, we'll speed through some of them. But yeah, I want to talk about it. The title track, are you back on drugs here? No. No. Crazy song. And the song Generator? Generator, yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. You're not back on drugs. No, no. All right. Good for you, man. Yeah. I've never made any record on drugs. Is this one? Well, I mean, except how could I be even worse? Okay. Is Generator when you finally stop recording things live or is this still somewhat recorded? No, it recorded live, but I just moved West Beach into a new studio. So that's why it sounds different. The first record I made at the Hollywood Boulevard location for West Beach, I was learning the room and we had a new board. I had a Trident Series ADB instead of my Soundcraft. So it does sound a little weird and I don't love the sound of that recording. Although I made, later I made records in that room that I loved. Like I made the Let's Go record. Yeah. Although I tracked it at Fantasy, but I mixed it at West Beach. What comes to mind when I just say the word Generator? Positive experience, negative experience? Yeah, positive, yeah. Yeah. Two songs from this session were on a split seven inch with Noam Chomsky. Yeah. How? Well, what happened there? Well, it was the Gulf War. It was the first Gulf War. And we were anti-war. And we were also friendly with the guys over at Maximum Rock and Roll, Timmy O'Han and the Gilman Street crew. The whole East Bay crew were very anti-war. Punks in general back then were, none of them had been excited by the MAGA idea yet. But are they? Yeah. Now they can't believe it. They're thrilled with it. Are they big like philosophy and linguist heads? Well, but Noam Chomsky is probably the most notable American political dissenter. And so I think the idea came from Maximum Rock and Roll, who they have their own label and they put out records. So they hit me up and they're like, hey, we're doing out of spoken word seven inch with Noam Chomsky. You want to be on it. And I mentioned before that Greg and I are both into science and philosophy. And so I was aware of his writings. And I thought that would be an honor to do that. So I wrote the song, Heaven is Falling, as a war protest, specifically to be on that split seven. That's awesome. Yeah. Any more words about Generator before we move on? Generator of the record. The first record with Bobby Sharon drums. And so it gave it a different quality in that sense. He's a great drummer. Many people say that he's their favorite bad religion drummer. Bobby's a great drummer. So that record's a great showcase of his stuff. And it let us do different things because of his vibe as a drummer. And he's like a great swing when he drums. And yeah, I think we were just stretching a little bit. Oh, that record we had Eddie Vedder. Yeah, from Pearl Jam. Well, he's on recipe as well, right? Oh. On Watch It Die. Oh, wait. He's not on Generator at all. So I'm mixing it. We'll get there in a minute. Same studio. I'm back there at West Beach. But OK, yeah. 1993. Recipe for Hate. Yeah. Unbelievable. The success of American Jesus. Did that individually as a single change things for the band much? No. That song became a popular song in the punk scene and one of our popular songs live. But it wasn't a huge song in any sense. It wasn't ever played on the radio. It wasn't a radio hit. There was no streaming. Streaming didn't exist. So you couldn't tell how many people were playing that song compared to other ones. So all we knew is that was a song that went off live. Yeah, it went off live. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there was definite awareness that it was a popular song. And Greg and I, I think we knew we came up with a good one. Yeah. That was a joint record. And that's my favorite video, too, for that song. Great. But yeah. I think that's my favorite bad religion video. And my buddy, Gore Verbinski, who's a great movie director and producer. Pirate's the Caribbean. Yeah. He shot that video. Unbelievable. So. My favorite record changes a lot. So a recipe, recipe and generator kind of always in the top five. So cool. No, I love those two, too. You guys are doing great. 1993 not only marks a big change and a big year for bad religion, but Epitaph is on the verge of massive game changing success. Yeah. Walk me through 1993 and what the label's experiencing at this time and what you're experiencing. Yeah. So the label's really growing. I think we have three or four bands that are selling like in the range of 100,000 records with every record. And that was, you know, no effects, bad religion. The offspring on their first record ignition were selling around 50,000, 60,000 records. We also had Rancid. We also had Pennywise. So it was almost like, you know, the stuff we were signing was always working. It was, yeah. Everyone was liking everything. And all the bands were doing well. And the label got into the point where I couldn't just run it out of the back of my studio. I used to have run Epitaph out of my West Beach Recorder's office. And then I kept our records in a storage space under the freeway, under the 101 there where Gower goes under the 101. Wow. So I used to drive there in my Volvo station wagon and get records out. Oh, wow. And if you put them on the truck, it would have to pull into the studio parking lot. So we'd have outgrown that by 93. Is this when you get the Silver Lake office? No, no, it's before that. I got this little like garage warehouse space on Santa Monica Boulevard. And that was the office and the warehouse. And I was going between there and the studio. And we had a few employees. It was very small. But it was a good time. But still the cell phone had not been invented. So when I went on tour, it was literally like, Jeff Abard and my first employee would be like, all right, you're in charge. Good luck. See you later. Sorry. I'm gone. I'd be playing guitar with that. But other, if you're not on tour, you're still just super hands on at this time? Yeah, yeah. I'm still super hands on now. That's good. Where does struck a nerve sit amongst your Greg song favoritism lexicon? I love that song. It's a banger. Yeah, yeah. Was that the first? And Jeanette sings on that one with him. And my God. It's that. Okay. So that's who that is. That's Jeanette Napolitano from Concrete Blonde. Yeah, I didn't finish this story for earlier. But so Jeanette, who introduced us to Jim Anki, produced our first record. She went on to be Jeanette Napolitano from Concrete Blonde. So our connection to her goes all the way back before, goes back to the first seven. Wow. That's awesome. And then she finally lays down this harmony on struck a nerve. Yeah. By then she was a rock star because they had that hit Joey with Concrete Blonde by then. And was this your first, you played this song on Conan. Was this the first TV appearance for bad religion? I don't know. I can't remember. I got you. I bet you it is. If you're saying so. Okay. Eddie Vedder on Watch It Die. Yeah. How does this happen? Eddie Vedder, a super cool dude, was a bad religion fan. And he used to go see us. We played at Iguanas in Tijuana because that's where the San Diego kids would go. He'd drive up to LA and see shows at Fender's Ballroom or whatever. So he was a punk kid before he went grunge. And then we reconnected when bad religion got popular and Pearl Jam were popular and we asked him. And he's such a down to earth dude. He drove up to West Beach Recorders and his fucking beat down rusty Mazda pickup truck and pulled into the parking lot and came in and sang on Watch It Die. Doing his thing, doing his full thing. Yeah, the full. And is like 10 out by 93? Yeah, yeah. It was out. So they're just... Yeah, he was a big rock star. He just pulled up in his Mazda pickup and sang a song for us. So how does the bad religion on Atlantic conversation start? And is there part of it... In your mind, are you like, why is somebody else going to do this? To use that like paying another engineer to record your record at this point? No. Are you against the idea of Atlantic's hiding bad religion? Yes and no. Definitely mixed emotions. The way it happened was this fanzine writer, kid from the scene, Mike Gitter, he's been around forever, he's still around doing A&R. Friend of the show. Huh? Friend of the show. Yeah, you know Mike. Yeah. So we had known him from being a writer and a fanzine guy but he had transitioned to being an A&R guy at Atlantic and he hit me up. He said, hey Brett, what do you guys think about being on Atlantic? And so I'm like, I don't know, let me talk to the guys about it. And you know, I mean, by this time I'm like wearing so many hats. I've got West Beach recorders, I've got Epitaph records, I'm in bad religion but I'm also the guitar player and the songwriter and the recording engineer and mixing engineer and producer doesn't take credit for production. I'm just doing too much shit anyway. I think in my heart of hearts what I was hoping is if I asked the band what they wanted to do they'd say like, no way, we're never leaving Epitaph, right? But at the same time I also was kind of feeling like, well, but if we do do that it's fine. Less work for you? Yeah, it's less work for me and also maybe we can be as big as Nirvana if we're on Atlantic. I don't know if there's a ceiling to what an indie can do. Right. It might be fun to see if something like Digital Boy can do. You've never done it. Yeah, I mean I want to be a big band. People say that's selling out, I don't think it is. I think that, I think punk music is for everyone and I'd like them to hear it. I'm not an elitist on that. But anyway, so I was sort of mixed in feelings but then I told the band about it and they said, yeah, fuck yeah, let's go for it. I said, yeah, fuck yeah, let's go for it. I didn't ever let the band know that I had any reservations because I felt it was a conflict of interest and that would not have been the honorable thing to do. You know what I mean? Because I didn't know if being on Epitaph was holding them back. You know what I mean? I really couldn't know. So if they had said to me, no fucking way, major suck, we'll stay on Epitaph forever, I would have been like, okay, cool. Cool, yeah, let's see. But if they were kind of like, same as me, like, let's see, it could be cool trying that, then I wanted to do it. And so, anyway. And that he did. So they would, did they fully buy a recipe from Epitaph? No. So the deal was, because I had already put recipe freight out or I was just about to. I had maybe already taken the orders or something. And it's listed as a re-release, an Atlantic re-release. Well, but I released it. So there was a first pressing had already come out worldwide. And then we did a deal where I, Epitaph would keep it for, I should remember this because it's still in place, but no, no, no, I have it for the world again. But I think Epitaph kept it for one territory and Atlantic released it in the other. So either Epitaph had North America and they had Europe, or Epitaph had Europe and we had North America. I can't remember. So it was a split. Atlantic put it out somewhere and I kept it for half the world. And then the next record after that would be on Atlantic. So Stranger Than Fiction is the first proper, fully Atlantic release. Yeah. You know what? I think Atlantic had it for Europe. I had it for North America. Okay. Yeah. Okay. And then Stranger Than Fiction was recorded on Atlantic's dime and came out on Atlantic everywhere. And I had heard that Andy Wallace got the job by doing an unsolicited test mix of American Jesus. No, it was not. I'll tell the story. It was solicited. Okay. So Atlantic hits us up and they're like, all right, hey, you know, are you thinking about producers for your next record? And I had produced every bad religion record. To be perfectly honest, I was like stoked to be able to pick a rad producer because as a producer myself, working in my own studio, one thing I always knew is that I was never exposed to other producers. I could never learn any of their tricks or learn anything from them. Once in a while, when another producer, outside producer would come to West Beach and I was like, I would just be the engineer or just be there to assist or whatever. I'd learned so much. You know, I'd learn all kinds of things like side chain compression and all kinds of like killer stuff. Right? And I would just level up so much by working with other producers. I was sort of really excited about the idea. Andy Wallace had just mixed Nirvana, Nevermine, and he had also just mixed Rage Against the Machines album. Sepultura Rise, Rain and Blood, Jeff Buckley Grace. Yeah, yeah. One of the greats. Yeah. But more of a mixer than a producer. Sure. But mixing was something I was a big fan of. And I don't think recording is that hard. I don't think we need a producer to tell us like how to make the chorus. Or to make the mic. Yeah. So I suggested Andy Wallace. But the idea was, hey, let's get him the multi-tracks from American Jesus and see how he would mix it to see if we like it. If we like it, it's hard to produce us. So yeah. And that would finally be released on the Christmas songs. Yeah, yeah. We had it laying around. That was an idea. Sounds great. It's not that much different. No, it's not. Yeah. Stranger Than Fiction would be the first bad religion record to chart on the Billboard 200. I don't pay attention to it. I don't even remember that. That's cool. My all-time favorite bad religion song changes often. But the one that I go to the most is Better Off Dead. Really? Oh yeah. Can you tell me about writing Better Off Dead? Another breakup song. Yeah, I mean, yeah. You can tell. I agree. You know, that was a really dark time for me because I was no longer clean as sober. I'd fallen off the wagon. So you know, I got clean, as I said, April 14, 1987. I stayed clean about seven and a half years. And after the giant success of the offspring and the label as a whole just exploding, you know, oh wait a minute. That's coming up. Yeah, hold on a second. Was I clean as sober for it? Yeah, but I said I... Because you leave the band. Right, but the offspring are blowing up. Yeah, it's about to happen. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I... One year later, yeah, it's about... I was off the wagon by then. Okay. But I think that anyway. So being off the wagon and this gnarly breakup and everything going on in your life. Yeah, I'm having like... The problems with like my first marriage and grappling with success and the band were not getting along. We're all like super sick of each other by now. We've been a band a long time. Yeah. You know. So yeah, it was a rough time and it was a dark time. I was writing dark songs. And are you unhappy with the record because of that? No, I like the record. It's awesome. Yeah, I mean, I write better songs when something's... When I'm really, really upset about something. Yeah. Who wants to hear a punk about a really happy, fun guy? No, no, when something really bad happens, I write a better song. Yeah, sure. Yeah, sure. 1994, huge year for bad religion, but you leave the band. Yeah. Tell me about this decision. There's a little record called Smash by the offspring right around the corner. By the time I leave the band, the Smash has come out. Yeah. So what had happened was Epitaph records was completely blowing up. Like I think we just sold 5 million records, most of them offspring Smash, but... First gold and platinum record for the label. Yeah, gold and platinum record. But all my groups are massive. Bad religion is huge. My own record is about to blow up and be my first personal gold record. No effects are huge. Pennywise is huge. I've been working my ass off for about eight years straight and now... And suddenly, and just working class, nose of the grindstone, blood, sweat and tears, and now just overnight, suddenly... It feels like overnight, but suddenly I wake up and I'm fucking rich. Right? But I'm really the same person. It was a very disorienting time. So that's where I was at personally. And the band weren't getting along. But also Epitaph was requiring just everything I had to figure it out. No one ever told me how to make a company. You just wanted to make 2007 inches. And you just kept going and going and going. That year Epitaph probably did $60 million worth of business. In 1994. And I was offered... That's a billion dollars now. I was offered... Major labels were circling me trying to buy the company. I was offered $50 million for half the company. Holy shit. And I turned it down. Who offered you that? Mark Cuban? Kevin O'Leary? I'll tell you off camera. Barbara Corcoran. And I said no to that. I kept the company, stayed in pennant. I was also going through a divorce. I just... I don't know. I didn't think I could keep all the... I had all these plates spinning. And I didn't think I could keep them all going and be in a band at the same time. Sure. Which is fair. How are you going to go tour when you have now this huge company? And I've also got kids at this time. And I've got some employees. I'm 32 years old. I think I've written maybe my best record that I've ever written. I think it's going to be my biggest record. My band is bigger than it's ever been. My company is bigger than it's ever been. I'm 32, so I'm not a kid anymore. Sort of the moral calculus for me is let's go out when I'm on top. Let's stop trying to be a punk rock star now and fucking grow up and be a man. This is a good moment to... I'll start doing that. It's four other people depending on you versus every band on the roster, every employee. All the employees, their family. But also with a healthy dash of resentment, which I'm not proud of, which is, oh, so you didn't want to be on Epitaph? Well look at Epitaph now. You know what I mean? I'm not proud of that. It wasn't being my best self. But on some level it was sort of like, okay, the band signed to Atlantic. I did my very best and I wrote the best record I could write for you, for us. And that's sort of my... The Epitaph. That's my goodbye note to Bad Religion and it's a good one. It's positive. It's the best work I could do. 100%. I didn't phone in a shitty album. So I gave Atlantic the best album I could make. And you re-recorded Digital Boy on there, which they asked me to do. They asked you to do. Because they thought it could be a radio hit. Atlantic. Yeah, that's what they said. We think this could be a... We think the singles are infected. Obviously. But we think you should... Yeah, and the title track. But we think you should re-record Digital Boy because we think that could have been a hit if it was on Atlantic. Were they right? I mean, it was a minor hit. It was a small hit. That was a good video. Yeah. The TV... I didn't like it. It had a bad video. Oh, oh. Oh, that one. This is the Digital Boy video. It's a great video. I like that video. It's fun. But it wasn't supposed to be blue. It is blue. So that was supposed to all look like the static. So it was supposed to be a blue screen thing and they just left the blue. It didn't work. The static thing didn't work so it just ended up with blue. Blue man group. Pissed, I'm sure. Yeah. One year later after this, Rancid Outcome the Wolves. Yeah. Are you part of the development of this record? Do you just hear this Finnish master and think, fuck yeah, let's go? Yeah, I was a big part of that. Okay. Yeah. The way that happened is Jerry Finn, good friend of mine. Legend. R.P. Yeah, and died way too young. Yeah. He was a producer and he bit off more than he could chew. He took on too much. And so he was tracking them at Fantasy in the East Bay. But he had to stop date where he had to move on to another record. I forgot which other record he was doing next. And so he didn't get, he got everything finished except the vocals. And then the band were going to New York to Electric Ladyland to do the vocals. So the band called me up and I finished the record with them. So we actually did everything. So you engineered all vocals. Engineered and produced and arranged all the backgrounds, sang on most of, you know, a lot of those backgrounds. You can hear me. You can hear. Boring, man. That's the bad religion coming out. No, but yeah, me and Laura are saying a lot of the high harmonies together. He's the king. He introduced us. So thank you, Lars, for ultimately making this happen. Yeah, but you know, so I went in there and recorded with them. All the B3, all the percussion, all the backgrounds, all the lead vocals, vocal comps, everything. Wow. And do you hear the singles in the moment as Time Bomb, Ruby Soho, Roots? Definitely. But there's not, I mean, that's one of the best records ever made. Ever made. Yeah, that's an example of, you know, that's like the Fleetwood Mac rumors of punk. 100%. Yeah, there's not a better punk record. You re-released Poison Idea, Feel the Darkness in 1996. Hell yeah. Is this something you sought out individually or did you acquire the American leather label or something? No, no, I saw that. I mean, I wanted to sign Poison Idea, really. I couldn't. Do you still own Feel the Darkness? I don't remember, but I mean, that song will always be on the punk ramma, you know. Was the Plastic Bomb on the punk ramma? No, what's the song? It's like a... Just It. Badge? Living Life Just It. Oh, Just It Get Away? Yeah, Just Get Away, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, My Life, Johnnie DeGasley. Slayer hippie? Slayer hippie, fuck yeah. I'll never forget, like, he was in town. I put him up in a hotel nearby because I was having him produce one of my other bands. And he was so drunk, he slept through the big Northridge earthquake. No way! Holy shit. He fell out of bed, but he didn't think it was because of the earthquake. Oh, shit. Damn, that's awesome. Now, he was a lush man. Meanwhile, in Bad Religion World, they have replaced you with Brian Baker. Yes. Are you part of that decision? Are you aware of it? I think so. I mean, I was happy with it. He's a legend. That's his best case scenario. Yeah, yeah. If you're going to be replaced by someone, you know, a guy from Minor Threat. He's the guy, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So that was great. I was really happy with that. And in the moment, do you know if he was contributing to Gray Race, New America or... I think he was, yeah. I think in the beginning, you know, that he and Greg and the guys worked closely. Okay. Yeah. Why wouldn't you? And how in contact with them are you throughout the day? No, I wasn't. Yeah, I mean, it took a... I said some nasty things about them. They said some nasty things about me when I quit. So we were sort of like being brats about it for a few years. And... Brat carowinds. Yeah, exactly. That's when my wife calls me, Brett the Brat. But around their third record for Atlantic, Greg, you know, Greg and I had been like talking on the phone and he's like, hey, you know, we want to contribute a song. And I'm like, oh, I don't know if I can anymore, but I've tried and written anything in a long time. And so I gave him a song, which I don't think is a great song, but that they did and put it on one of their records. And then... So... But yeah, no, we weren't in touch. When they were making those records, I hadn't even listened to them. Have you now? The songs I know from those records are the ones I played with them a lot, of course. Yeah, yeah, yeah. A walk, punk rock song. Come join us. Come join us. Yes, banger. Banger. So how hands-on are you... I know that you said you're still hands-on with Epitaph, but you have to delegate at some point. But by like 99, 2000, how much has it changed since 94 when you left that religion? 2000 was a tough time at Epitaph. So, we really blew up. We had a lot of employees and we had a lot of infrastructure and, you know, like any company, we had a radio department, accounting department, royalty department, like the real deal. That's a lot. And we had a... We're selling a lot of records. And by then, I had more than one label because I bought Burning Heart Records. Right. Had Hellcat doing the stuff. Hellcat is happening. It was sort of launched as a Scott Punk label for me and Tim's partnership. And then we had Anti, which I started a label called Anti, basically, you know, to build that around Tom Leitz for things that we do that are interesting but not punk per se. So there's a lot happening there and it's complicated and it's doing pretty well. But then, you know, that's around the time the music industry started having trouble because... Napster. It's been a long time. And then Pirates Bay and the Torrents and the music industry starts to crater and record stores start to close. And then Steve Jobs invents the iPhone. Right. What year did the iPhone come in? That was 7. 7. Okay. So there's no iPhone yet. Is there an App Store yet? There's Napsters out. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So... The iPod. So stuff's starting to go sideways in the music business. And Epitaph isn't, you know, I'm making it work, but it's not... You're not prepared for digital. We're not growing like a motherfucker anymore. Sure. Like we're like... I'm grinding it. You know, it's a grind and it's everything I can do to fucking get everybody, you know, get everyone paid, get them their Christmas bonus, be a good boss. You know, that's where it's at, right? You know, it's sort of, you know, we're looking for that next big record to keep it going. So let me ask you, you kind of have your feet in two different camps as a record label owner, someone who needs records to be bought and sold and distributed and everything. And then as a punk rock, someone from the punk rock scene, originally, who probably at the time, I mean, bad religion was discovered, as you said, from the taping of a radio show that was kind of, you know, get more demowersy in a way. I'm just curious, I mean, we are both in agreement that streaming, especially the model that it is today, sucks. Raw, evil, pure, the purest evil. Oh God, strong disagree. You love it. Love. Fascinating. You think the value of music is ten dollars a month? That's my argument, is that the... Fuck yeah. Okay. Yeah. Historically, the recorded music business has been a disaster for recording artists, for musicians. I don't care how far you go back, right? You could go back to the roots of rock and roll with Little Richard, right? These people didn't make any money, right? You had record companies paying an artist, if they were lucky, ten percent of the retail list price. Half the time, they wouldn't even get that. They give Chuck Berry a Cadillac and say, you know... Good job, kid. Good job, kid, right? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. It wasn't much better in the 60s. It wasn't much better in the 70s. You had these artists, you had record companies ripping off artists and independent businesses who wanted to do better by artists, they didn't have a chance because the major labels were gatekeepers. They would keep you out of stores, right? Stores only bought from a couple distributors who only bought from the major record companies, right? If you're an indie label, I mean, look at what I had to do in the 80s. I had to drive my car around and put records into stores and come back a week later. They weren't even buying it from me. I was giving it to them on consignment. They would pay me if it sold, right? Just a disaster, literally for everybody, okay? Except the major labels, right? Who were a monopoly. It's how it always was, right? It didn't get any better with iTunes. I mean, suddenly you have a tech company that has a proprietary piece of hardware and then you again have gatekeepers, right? They want to put DRM on the MP3 so you can't share it, right? Okay. Next thing you know, the torrents come, Pirates Bay, mp3.com. Suddenly if you're a college student and you have a hard drive in your dorm room, you can download the entirety of the history of recorded music onto your dorm room's hard drive and have everything for free. Okay, everybody gets paid zero for that. So then the value of music is zero, right? But it's not much higher than zero now. No, it's much more. So this is an example of what I call good people having bad ideas, right? We're in a divided society today. We've got our MAGA friends on the right. Many of them I think are good people with bad ideas, right? I think some of them are bad people with bad ideas. Don't get me wrong, okay? But good people can have bad ideas. There are, anyway. I think the bad ideas are a result of poor information and I think the most important thing is that people are open-minded to change their view in the presence of new information. I'm here to give you that new information. Spotify and all the other streaming services for the most part give 70% of their revenue to rights holders, okay? The rights holder could be a kid in a band who put the song up via DistroKid or it could be a label. Very often if it's the label, sometimes if it's an aferious indie label or major label, they're not going to pass through enough to the artist. So it's a bad deal for the artist, right? But what Spotify is doing and what the other, you know, Deezer or all the other ones, they're passing through 70% of their revenue. Now you might say, hey, a million streams only pays $4,000. That's approximately correct, right? It's not a per stream rate, but that's about what comes in. So a million streams is $4,000. A thousand streams is $4. You could say that's too low. Why is the music valued so low? Well, here's the difference. In the old days, a kid would buy, how could he be any worse, right? He'd buy it on his record, he'd buy it once. He'd never buy it again. And he'll play it thousands of times over his lifetime. It's just how it works. But the band only ever gets the $3 wholesale price that that thing sold for, right? That's even if they were the band, right? Okay. Today, thanks to streaming, there are more musicians making a middle class income than ever in the history of music. What I'm talking about is $50,000 a year, $100,000 a year. There are kids making that kind of money. It's not that much, right? If you're getting, let's say you're doing a million streams a week, right? Okay. There are plenty of kids doing that from their recorded music that made their music on a laptop in their bedroom. Most of them, of course. Right? There's tens of thousands of them doing that today, right? Okay. A million streams a week is $50 million streams a year. That kid is making $200,000 a year living at home going to high school. That's crazy. That never existed in the history of the world. And it will keep going. Bad Religion have 17 albums. Bad Religion are streaming. Your kids, your people in the audience, you're going to be able to do the math now. Bad Religion stream over 4 million streams a week. We're not the biggest band in the world. They're a working class band. They have a lot of fans. They sell out a stadium in Brazil and in some places, LA, they can do palladiums. They're a working class band. They work their asses off and they put out 17, 18 albums over the years. But today, they're streaming 4 million streams a week. Okay. Under the old model with records, what record store carries 17 albums from any band? The record stores would be carrying... If they do, they return them. They'd be carrying suffer and no control, maybe process of belief. They'd have three records by Bad Religion. That's it. And those other records would never get bought again because the record company couldn't press it if the stores won't stock it. That is a fast... That's the most fascinating argument we've had pro streaming. It's structurally the best thing that's ever happened. So I view the Spotify boycott as Spotify having a terrible PR problem. And I feel like it's part of my job to just help just provide the information, new information to people. I think it doesn't help that they're doing anything with AI, missile defense systems and all that stuff. Okay. I'll speak to that too. Nice promo. Okay. So Spotify isn't doing that. Founder Daniel Eck. I don't know him. But their founder Daniel Eck got rich of making Spotify. And he invested in an AI defense company. Okay. So I'm a pacifist. I'm anti-war. I don't agree with that. However, okay. The company is a German company. Germany is a constitutional democracy with marriage equality, trans rights, more liberal immigration policies than the US has. Right? And they're over there next to Putin who's invading Ukraine. Is it the end of the world that they might be able to defend themselves against authoritarianism? I don't think there's a reason to boycott Spotify. I really, like if he was supporting Putin, you know, I'd say, well, that's, you know, or if he would, you know, I'm not saying there's not an ideological line and won't cross. But it's an investment for him. I think, right? Isn't that, isn't that what's maybe? It's an investment, but it's not Spotify. He's the founder of Spotify. It's a personal, it's a private investment. Is he still part of Spotify? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, he's on the, yeah. But that's where some people have these. Okay. But those same people have a double standard because they're not, they don't care about YouTube. Sure. Where more music is streamed than Spotify. Yeah. They don't care about Meta. They're on Instagram all day long. They don't care about big tech, right? Spotify is a music company. Right. You know, so yeah, so, I mean, you show me the board of any company and tell me there's not a guy on there who's investment decisions you wouldn't boycott. That is the thing, is there, you cannot ethically consume anything. Anything. Everybody's got their toes inside of you. Yeah, I don't buy that. I mean, but anyway, so. Fascinating. Yeah. You know, I, I'm staunchly on the left of the political spectrum, but I disagree with my friends on the left. That Spotify is bad. I feel exact opposite. As a label owner, you would know. Yeah, you don't really have a ground to stand on. But I'm open-minded too. Yeah, I just don't have all the information, but it's, it's, you said there are more middle class musicians than ever making a living just from their music, but there's probably more, there's a, there's more musicians than ever because it's never been easier. There's probably more musicians. There's more musicians that you can discover than ever. But here's for sure. Here's the problem. Like I hear these guys go, you know, like so often the complaint against Spotify is musicians deserve a right to earn a living. It's like, no, they don't. You earn the right to earn a living. Good musicians do. Yeah. You have to make good music do. That is true. Musicians who can play. There's so much crap out there. You can't say like just because you can make sound, you deserve to make a living. Because you wouldn't have had any distribution before this. More of the people with talent have a chance of doing that because of Spotify. You have the chance of getting signed to a major label as in the old days. Point, uh, one. Yeah, yeah. So, huh. All right. Well, it's time. Get the call to return to Bad Religion. Who's who makes the idea for Greg? Yeah. Walk me through it. Well, I don't know if he said come back to Bad Religion. I think what happened was he asked me to contribute a song to one of their Atlantic records and that rekindled our friendship and our communication. And then after they fulfilled their contract with Atlantic, I think they gave them three records. That's what they owed them. They were done with it. And Greg was like, you know, he was talking to me one day. He's like, you know, we're not going to, you know, it's not family over there. That doesn't feel good. You know, you know, uh, I don't think they know what they're doing, blah, blah, blah. So then I said to him, well, you guys should do your next record on Epitaph. And you know, it'll be, it'll be like the old days. I'll write half the songs. You write half the songs. We'll do, you know, we'll do it together. I'll produce. Not only will we make a great record, but there'll be a story because it'll be like a homecoming and everyone will be interested in it. So it'll be a moment where everybody's interested in us again, you know, because it's the human intersight of it. It's not just another bad religion record. And Brian will stay. So, yeah, and Brian will stay, of course. He'll have like the best punk guitarist that ever existed and, you know, the best punk singer and the chemistry of me and you writing. It'll all be there and we'll have a moment where it'll be of interest to people. And if we can make the right record, it'll be a big moment. And you really did make the right record. Thank you. I'm really proud of that. Co-produced by you and Greg formally for the first time. Maybe. Sure. Recorded at Sound City. Oh, yeah. Yeah. 818. Yeah. And West Beach. Yeah. And the best places in history. Also the introduction of Brooks Wackerman. Oh, my gosh. Shred. Listen, we can talk about Brooks right now. Oh, my God. Brooks, Brooks fucked you in a way because bad religion was a very kind of reasonable band to fill in for or find a new drummer for. Brooks is insane. Brooks, now it's a big task to be like the next guy. I agree. I mean, I feel like getting Brooks at that moment was one of the ingredients of what made that record so magical because it is adrenalized. And having him in the band allowed me to write in another way. Faster than ever. Track one. Faster and more technical. And the thing is, we've been in the punk genre for so long. I'd seen the genre evolve and I realized, of course, because I run a label, that the genre had become more technical. And so having that young energy and his just, he's a prodigy. He's insane. So having that technicality as our engine allowed us to make a modern punk album. I mean, it was competitive. And it was more than competitive. It was competitive on the execution. But because me and Greg were mature as writers, I think on the writing it was even superior to many of our peers. And it was competitive technically. And so that was sort of a really great chemistry. Is it a great catharsis? Oh yeah, hell yeah. It's just such a fun record to make. And you mixed it other than epiphany? Yeah, I mixed it. Why did Jerry Finn mix epiphany? So we had two songs that we thought were singles. Sorrow and Epiphany. And by then, of course, punk was a staple on the radio. However, epithaph is in indie. And indies have a harder time getting songs on the radio. And still, but at that point? At that time, yeah, sure, yeah. And so, and I was buddies with Jerry. Jerry had mixed Green Day Dookie and Blink Wendt 82. He was the hit mixer. And so, yeah, so I just thought, you know, hire him to mix the singles. So he mixed sorrow and epiphany. But sorrow didn't sound the way I was hearing it. As the writer of sorrow had something in my head. And so he gave his both. I thought epiphany sounded perfect. I thought sorrow didn't sound that rad. So it sounded fine. So I thought I'd take a shot at sorrow. I was able to beat what he did. And that was the one. Wow. And then you mixed the whole record. Yeah, well, he's always going to mix the record. Which is awesome, you know? Coming back, doing a record in the valley symbolically. Putting it out back on epithaph again symbolically. Writing these incredible songs, producing it together symbolically. Are you fully back in the band and for the touring cycle? I was briefly. I sort of committed to just do that because I was, first of all, having a lot of fun. But also I wanted to just really go all in and give as much as I could. Since the band had put their trust in me to come back to the label, I wanted to do as much as I could for the record to have it be successful. And a big part of the story was a reunion. Like the band's reunion with epithaph, but also Greg's reunion with me as a songwriting team. And everywhere we went, that's what people wanted to talk about. So if I was on the tour, then I would be there to do that and we'd maximize the press and the attention we get. So that was part of it. Sorrow just as a songwriter. Is that a crowning achievement to you? Yeah, I think it's my best song. It's insane. Yeah. Great video. Simple lyrics. I think sometimes I get too grandiose in my words. And so I thought it was powerful, but concise. Why the explosion on the left side of the ear in the chorus? So that is... Are the right side? Yeah. So one of my favorite songs growing up is The Boxer by Simon and Garfunkel. And on that song, they have this sound. It goes... They actually hit a snare drum at the bottom of an elevator shaft to get it. That's awesome. It's in the song, you know. Lie, lie, lie. Yeah, yeah. Lie, lie, lie, lie, lie, lie, lie, lie, lie, lie, lie. Which is just... That's Flat Earth Society, which is really funny. Yeah, yeah. Well, that's... Yeah, so... Yeah, and Simon and Garfunkel are one of our influences on our vocal harmonies that we do in the band. There you go. I see. And the sorrow had the feeling of that. And I just thought, oh man, it'd be cool to do that. So I... Well, me... Yeah, it's me. It's just sort of echoing influences. A little night, a little sprinkle of something. That's awesome. What a track. Thank you. Masterpiece, someone say. So you're back, you've re-signed the band, you've co-written their most successful record since you left the band. I'm looking at his note and it just says Masterpiece. And now there's only one option. You gotta do it again. Empire Strikes First. Yeah. Another smash hit. Thank you. Yeah, I mean, well... And so, you know, we were writing a record anyway, but then the U.S. made a... Oh, right. That thing. That's so the defense is about the Patriot Act, right? On Process of Belief? Yeah. So there's a little bit of 9-11 on Process of Belief, but then Empire is like... So Process of Belief, interestingly, I'll just tell this anecdote I've told you before, but I was mixing sorrow at a studio called Larabee East and Greg calls me up and goes, turn on CNN. I turn it on and the Twin Towers are falling. I was mixing sorrow watching the Twin Towers fall. The day 9-11 was happening. And I was mixing sorrow. But when you listen to it, it kind of sounds like I wrote it in response to 9-11, but not. But it was just... It's an eerie coincidence. It's an eerie confluence. And so then Empire Strikes First is when we went into Iraq, even though they had nothing to do with 9-11. And then this whole record is just... It's an anti-war record. Let them meet war. Yeah. Good... Sage Francis was on Epitaph at the time. Yeah. Yeah, he did a verse. I moved to California in 2004. And when I tell you LA's Burning was inescapable, let me tell you, it was everywhere. So reading... When I was reading about the record, it said they had a minor radio hit for an LA's Burning. And that blew my mind because living here, you couldn't go in your way. I was in the rocks without you. It was a big hit here, but it was not a big hit nationally. Which is surprising because people hate LA. You think they'd be excited about it, Burning. It's a catchy song. It's a great song. I think part of it is that indie labels don't have the big national promotional reach of majors. Which is... We look at like Time Bomb. We do now, but we didn't then. This is the highest billboard chart ever for the band so far at number 40. Yay. In 2004, that meant something. I'm learning all this good stuff. It's good stuff. Are you still doing the Battle of the Sun tour since 2004? No, I'd stopped by that. I only did one tour cycle with Process and I went back to my day job. Just straight up. Yeah, well, and then for a while I started... I would like, if they would be in LA, I would join them on stage. But it became more and more difficult to do that because they won't play the same set list on a tour. And they have just too many songs for me to practice. How many songs are in a bad religion set these days? A lot. Like a headliner set. 33 to 35? Yeah, a lot. Wow. But they have like 180 songs. And they just... The band members need to be able to just play any of them on any given night. So I can't do that. When do you make the decision to stop playing live altogether? When they stop being willing to send me the set list in advance. I can only do this if you'll send me the set list. That's it. Because I can go sit in my home office and practice a set list every day for 30 days. And then I'll have my chops to play about in the church. Yeah, I'm not going to go up there if I'm not prepared. And they're like, no, we don't know what the set's going to be. I'm like... And I never wanted to just join them for the encore. Yeah, yeah, that's kind of... We want to be there for the set. I get it. The barrel isn't ever known then. Does cool album playthroughs undersells at the Troubadour and stuff like that. Any of those coming up? Oh, none that I know of. But I'm not sure they would tell me. You wouldn't play... They wouldn't have you play even just that? They might. I know. You let me know. I think they started... Well, I don't know. But I think they're starting to play reliable set lists again. He's available. Yeah. He's available. Okay, so new maps of hell. Following up two later smash hits, not easy. But I think this record is really cool, really unique, kind of metallic. Yeah, metal. Underrated. Why is it... How is it so metal? What was the thing? Well, we brought in Joe Berezi, Evil Joe. Yeah. And he's a metal producer. Okay. And did he put those harmonized leads on New Dark Ages and stuff? No. No, that was all me. The tramverse. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think a big part of it in the writing is that I knew I had Brian that I could as a tool. And I can't play like that. I'm like a punk guitar player. But Brian can do anything and Brooks can do anything. What can I do? So between the two of them, I'd be like, okay, here's how I'd like you to play this. And I'd show them, I can't really do it well enough, but they can do it. Sounds like a lie, I know. So yeah, just try to inject some more aggression intensity through it. Because punk and hardcore, by this time, I've always got my A&R label guy head. Of course. And by this time, I'm putting out metalcore. Yeah. And I know that punk has split into three new subgenres since the last time we did a punk album. And a lot of it's more metal, it's more metal. And then hardcore is pivoted metal. So not going overboard with that, but introducing some of that. And I liked metal as a kid too. But those guitar monies, I call them. As a kid, I grew up liking this metal band called UFO. And to me, New Dark Ages, I was doing like a, it sounds nothing like UFO. But the chord progression and melodies were like sort of teenage, everything comes to somewhere. Yeah, it's coming from like a UFO place. I see. Yeah, so we'll go quick through Descent, True North and Age of Unreason real quick. Anything come to mind for those three records that make you special or stand out? Which ones? Descent, True North and Age of Unreason. Yeah. My favorite song on Descent is The Devil and Stitches. Great song. That's my ode to Bruce Frank's scene. I never really tried to write a song with that kind of a vibe. And I feel like it's really got that, especially Love the Outro. It's got like a good, it's really uplifting. I wrote that song for my wife, Gina, my true love. She's my angel devil reveler. That's her. And then True North, I just think is one of Graffins. It's so fucking good. Yeah, to me, it's one of our return to form records. I love the record. Title track is unbelievable. Yeah, and the song True North is one of Greg's greatest songs. And it's one of the ones that when he writes, when he brought it to me, I was like, oh fuck, it was like, I don't think I can beat this. You know, just a really great song. What's funny is that reminds me of the No Control title track. So it gives you that same feeling when he's harmonizing the name of the album. Yeah, yeah. And it's a great, it's a truly great Graffins song and the centerpiece of that record. The one I love on that record, which people don't really, people don't really call it out that much, but it's Robin Hood in reverse. That one, I love that song. I'm really proud of that one. There you go. Age of Unreason is at this moment the last value. Yeah, Age of Unreason is my response to Trumpism or Trumpistan, where we're now living. And it's really just about enlightenment values. It's not really a record against Trump himself, but about, you know, what liberalism and the open society and the scientific worldview means to me. And what I think is great about the American experiment that has been lost since Trumpism. And it's, I don't think it's always successful. There's few songs on there that I really love and I'm proud of it. I don't think that many bands on their 17th album make one that's that consistent. So it's solid. I think our next one's going to be better. Tell me about the next one. Can you tell me about the next one? I'm writing it right now. Good job. We're writing it right now. Can't wait to hear it. Yeah, I've got a couple of them that I really like. Oh, you just psyched out of your mind about? Yeah. Me too. We're going to wrap this up. Where did that come from? There's psyched out of my mind. Yes. It's a, what is that? Oh, Elf. Oh, yeah. It is Elf. My favorite movie. Is it? Is it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm psyched out of my mind. All right. The writer who comes in, Peter DeLondon. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's got a few great things I'm psyched out of my mind about. He's an evil elf. He's an evil elf. He's called me Elf one more time, my friend. One more time. Is that really your favorite movie? We watch, our family tradition is to watch that every Christmas Eve. We all get together. Yeah. Unbelievable. It's such a great movie. It's the modern. It is the modern girl. I would say Daddy's Home 2 is the last modern girl, but you know. He loved it. A lot of people aren't there yet. Which one is? Daddy's Home 2. Okay, so I got a new one for you. I don't know if you've even seen it. Tell me. Christmas Chronicles. Yeah, it's the Kurt Russell Sanwell. Oh, I love it. I'm not into it. I love it. You know, that's all. He's in prison. That's all him. When he does the Christmas song. Yeah. My wife loves it. She cannot believe it. I eat it up. That's all him. The hair and the beard. He grew that. I love it. It's not a wig. It looks like hateful eight. We'll do a Christmas podcast about how much we love Christmas songs together. We do that. We've done it. We've done it. You want to do it again. That's all Christmas songs, so we've got a whole pod we could do it all night. Yeah, no 100 percent. Do you prefer the Home Alone version of White Christmas or the OG? That would be V2. That's the superior version. The Drifters. Yeah, that's the one. After this pod, I'm going to share the Girl With Christmas Playlist. Playlist, please. It's public on Spotify. It's called Christmas With The G's. It's in the description, boy. It's shot out of a canon. You have to pick one, your favorite Christmas song. Oh. What would it be? Man, it's so hard. Maybe Blue Christmas for Elvis. That's probably number two, my, the Christmas song, Nacking Cole. Yeah. Well, I also like, I'll be clicking my guys around. I'm a silent item. Silent? I like the weird religious shit. Shtelig and Acht. The fucking, on your knees once that hits. I'm love it. Dude, there's a carry under word version of that. The Celine down one too. It's just, that's the one. Damn. I like, I like Nacking Cole. Yeah, I love Nacking Cole. Brett, could you tell me your top four hardcore records of all time? Yes. But they're not all records. It's okay. That's fine. Releases. So germs GI, because it was the, it was the one that started it. The nervous breakdown EP, Black Flag with Keith Morris, because that EP invented hardcore. Love it. Adolescent's blue album, because it came just before Minor Threat's first two seven inches. Oh, I did. And it demonstrated that hardcore could be melodic. Yeah. And that, bad religion wouldn't exist without that. I'm gonna name it more than four. Then the, Minor Threat, Minor Threat. Yeah. Not, not a, that's the blueprint. Not out of step, but Minor Threat, Minor Threat. Because that set the rule book. That was like, that showed how fast and how tight hardcore can be and what it should be. But I can't ignore two records that are for me what kept hardcore from dying, because opened up the potential of where it can go. And that is converged Jando and the shape of Punk to come. Those two records were the records that showed that hardcore doesn't have to play by any particular rules and can keep going forever. Yeah. Unbelievable. Couldn't have said it better ourselves. I won't. We do a thing where we make brackets of bands per era. Tournaments. Tournaments, if you will. And we put converging the 2000s bracket because they really kind of, even though they started before, they made it. That was their defining era. And a lot of people were confused about how far our converge went. Because we're trying to tell them. They're in a league of their own. League of their own. Yeah. Brett, what a great time we've just had. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for sharing. So many things I've been wondering. My Bad Religion group chat, The Flat Earth Society is all listening. We're all just, we can't believe what we just heard. So thanks for being here. I didn't know you had that. Oh yeah. Oh man, okay, we'll have to drop in there. And come on in. We would love to have you. We'll do an AMA in The Flat Earth Society group chat. Brett, thank you so much for joining us today. My pleasure. Can't thank you enough. Let's do it again someday. Maybe around Christmas. You got it. Thanks everybody. Right on. This episode is brought to you by Mad Vintage.