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Chapter 4 - Life Alone Is Such A Curse

For a band with a reputation as intellectuals, in the early days of Bad Religion its members harbored a cavalier attitude toward formal education. Greg did not distinguish himself in school after moving to California and Brett was more focused on his music than his studies. While Brett was trying to get projects for Bad Religion and Epitaph Records going, he would occasionally borrow money from his father. According to Richard, he loaned his son “$1,500 or $1,700” to make Bad Religion’s first EP.

Perhaps more important than how much money Brett borrowed to finance Bad Religion’s first release was when he borrowed it. At the end of 1980, Brett was essentially done with El Camino Real. “I wasn’t doing well in school and I was sort of floundering. I took the GED in eleventh grade and never finished high school.”

That Brett’s father would lend money to his son so he could make a punk record after dropping out of school reveals one of two things: either he shared Brett’s vision or he believed in the value of learning lessons the hard way.

“He wasn’t a bad kid,” Richard said. “I knew he was really working it. I could see he was passionate about it.” Brett was more sanguine about his father’s support.

“My dad is an entrepreneur,” Brett said. “His dad was an entrepreneur. My mom’s dad was an entrepreneur. It just sort of runs in my family. I think my dad was like, Really? You want to try and do something entrepreneurial?”

Nevertheless, funding Bad Religion’s debut proved to be a smart business move, despite the band’s offensive name and controversial logo. The EP also came with a mysterious message. Etched on one side were the words, “We’re not Bad Religion . . . ” and the flip side declared, “UR!” (i.e., “you are”). Unlike names such as “the Ramones,” “the Sex Pistols” or “the Weirdos,” “Bad Religion” wasn’t a declaration of identity, but an observation about the world. Those looking to Bad Religion for answers would find their own reflections in the mirror the band held up to society. “Our name,” Brett explained, “no less than our songwriting, was always meant to provoke and make people think.”

But if any organized system of thought could be a bad religion, the band itself was extremely disorganized. Case in point, when the EP came out in early 1981, no one in the band knew what to do with it. Jay Ziskrout sent out copies to punk zines and college radio stations, but that was the extent of their marketing efforts. They didn’t run any ads or plan any special events. Brett took a more do-it- yourself approach to getting the record into fans’ hands. “I would take a box of records,” Brett recalled, “and bring them to Middle Earth Records in Downey, Moby Disc Records in Van Nuys, Zed’s Records in Long Beach, and Poobah Records in Pasadena. I’d talk to the buyer and leave fifteen copies in their store. Then I would call around and say, ‘Hey, do you need any more?’ and lo and behold, they were burning through them and wanted more. So I would drive out there again. That was the extent of the business. It was pretty small-time, but that’s how we did it.”

Despite the modest sales generated this way, the connections Brett made would pay big dividends down the road. Slowly but surely, the EP made its way into the world. They went through their initial run of five hundred copies in a fairly short period of time. They used re-pressing the record as an opportunity to correct a problem with the recording that caused the record to skip, expanding to 1,500 copies.

That spring and summer the band only played about a half dozen shows, but they were memorable. On March 3, they performed with the Cheifs and China White at the Vex, a legendary venue in East L.A. that was an offshoot of Self Help Graphics. Photos taken by Gary Leonard show Jay Bentley and Jay Ziskrout with very short hair, and Brett appears to be growing out of a Mohawk.

   
_{Photos by Gary Leonard}

They played the Vex again on April 30 with T.S.O.L. and a third time on May 29 with the Adolescents, Social Distortion, and Saccharine Trust. This show represented something of a milestone: it marked the first time Bad Religion played two consecutive nights, and the previous night’s gig was the band’s first in front of a local crowd at Valley West in Tarzana.

In May, they piled into Brett’s Volkswagen Vanagon with all of their gear and drove up to San Francisco for a Sunday night show at the Mabuhay Gardens, booked by the notorious “Pope of Punk,” Dirk Dirksen. During the trip, Ziskrout came down with the flu and all he could do was lie in the back of the van and try not to get sick on the equipment. Pete Finestone, a San Fernando Valley punk who was a fan of the band and unofficial roadie, had to set up Ziskrout’s equipment and break it down after the show, but the show did go on.

In the beginning of the summer, the punk rock community suffered a blow when the legendary Starwood closed its doors for good on June 13, 1981. The Starwood, located on Santa Monica Boulevard at Crescent Heights, was an important venue for L.A. punk bands and out-of-town acts like Blondie, the Damned, Devo, and the Jam. The Germs famously played their final show there on December 3, 1980, and Darby Crash overdosed four days later.

Greg and Jay hitched rides to the Starwood from Pete. “I had a car,” Pete explained. “Every Tuesday and Wednesday when there were shows at the Starwood, I would drive across the Valley, pick up Greg—sometimes Jay, but mostly Greg—and we would drive to shows. That led to me being their roadie.”

The closing of the Starwood was a big deal because the parking lot was as much a scene as the club itself. It was a place where punks hung out before the show, and then afterward they headed over to Oki-Dog, which was nearby and open late, long after the clubs had all closed down. Typically, punk shows were held on weeknights, and when the Starwood shut its doors that summer, it left a huge void in the scene.

On the Fourth of July, Bad Religion played its first show at a Hollywood club: the legendary Whisky a Go Go with the Alley Cats and the Dickies. The band had expanded the set list to include a number of new songs, including “Fuck Armageddon . . . This Is Hell,” “We’re Only Gonna Die,” “Part III,” “Latch Key Kids,” and “New Leaf.” The show was particularly memorable for Greg.

“We were playing ‘Only Gonna Die’ and I’ll never forget it because my mom came to that show and brought her friends,” Greg said. “Someone came up onstage to do a stage dive and ran into me and I cut my lip on the microphone. I was so mad that I took the mic stand and I clocked the guy in the front row with the base of the stand. It landed right on his skull! After the set, our roadie said, ‘Greg, that was the wrong guy! You fucking hit the wrong guy!’ I felt so terrible. And even if it was the right guy I would have felt bad. I said, ‘Please go get that guy. I want to talk to him and apologize.’ The roadie found him and the guy was like, ‘It’s cool man. Tell Greg no problem!’ He was having such a good time he assumed it was par for the course to get hit by the mic stand. He didn’t even care!”

One of the reasons they played so few shows was that Greg returned to Wisconsin for the summer. While Greg was away the band started to get letters from places like Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Munich, and Rome. Brett didn’t think much of it at the time. “I’d go to the P.O. box and get all this fan mail. I thought, European kids must write a lot more than American kids.”

Some of the letters would include reviews of their EP from newspapers and zines that had been published in Europe. They couldn’t read the clips, and they assumed their listeners overseas didn’t understand the lyrics, but the logo was a different story. Brett’s father recalled a music magazine from Italy put the crossbuster on its front cover.

“Even more than the name,” Brett said, “the logo helped get us known. We were just trying to be punk, but that logo was like a shot heard around the world. It spread like wildfire in L.A. because you could spray-paint it. But when the EP made it to Italy, Germany, and Spain, our logo caught their attention.”

It’s probably no coincidence that the letters came from fans living in places where Catholicism’s influence was particularly strong. While lyrics are open to interpretation, an effective logo communicates its message on a psychological level. The crossbuster’s meaning is universal; its message unequivocal. If Bad Religion hadn’t invented it, someone else probably would have.

“It’s not just that it was extreme,” Brett said of the logo. “I think it has a profundity that hits people in a deeply psychological way. They see it and they remember it. It’s not just simple and graphic. It’s like a wake-up call.”

That fall Greg started his senior year of high school. Ziskrout had already graduated but Brett and Jay were no longer attending classes at El Camino Real. Jay was asked to leave and, like Brett, opted to take the GED. While formal education wasn’t a priority for most members of the band, they remained curious about the world and its complex mysteries. “I always tell people I dropped out of school and got all my education in Bad Religion,” Jay said. “I learned a lot from these guys. The discussions that we would have—about everything from geology to astrophysics—were phenomenal for a sixteen-year-old. I learned way more from this band than I ever would have learned sitting in a classroom.”

The band had written enough material for a full-length record and many of the songs were battle tested. Plus, they were making money from the sales of their EP and occasionally from live shows. Brett estimated that he had enough to pay for the recording and then he’d figure out how to finance the pressing. Around this time he got a call from Bob Say, who was one of the buyers for the Moby Disc record store in Woodland Hills. Bob explained that he had moved on to Jem Records, an indie distributor and importer in the Valley. He invited Brett to come down to his office for a meeting, which Brett recalled went like this:

BOB: Your EP sold well at Moby Disc. Are you doing an LP?

BRETT: Yeah.

BOB: Okay, then I’ll take three thousand.

BRETT: Three thousand?

BOB: Yeah, I’ll take three thousand.

BRETT: Where am I gonna get the money to make three thousand?

BOB: Well, if you let Jem be the exclusive distributor, I will advance you the money so you can press it.

BRETT: All right. How much would that be?

BOB: We’ll pay you five dollars a record.

BRETT: You’ll give me fifteen thousand dollars?

BOB: Yeah.

Bad Religion was officially in business. However, Jem was only willing to put up the money to make the record as long as there was a record to make. With the money they’d made from the sale of the EP, Brett calculated they could afford to go to a professional studio. “My parents have always been super supportive. I can’t promise that I didn’t go back to my dad and ask for a little more money. If I did it wouldn’t have been much.”

Next, Brett reached out to Jim Mankey, who secured a place for them to make the album in Hollywood near Paramount film studios called Track Record. They were able to get a discount rate by booking the late shift from 10 p.m. to 8 a.m. It was an eye-opening experience for Brett—in more ways than one.

“When I refer to Hollywood, it’s not the Hollywood we know today, and it’s not the Hollywood of the glory days of the Sunset Strip in the sixties. I think people who aren’t from L.A. conflate Hollywood and Beverly Hills. So when they think of Hollywood they think of palm trees and mansions. In the late seventies and early eighties, Hollywood was a seedy, crime-ridden area. It was very rough. There were a lot of hookers and junkies and crime. Strip bars, liquor stores, and dilapidated venues. Basically, it was a playground for punk rockers. But if you left a guitar in your car, it was broken into. The glass was smashed and the guitar was stolen. I had two or three guitars stolen that way.”

With Mankey at the helm, they went to work, recording and mixing as they went. They recorded half of the record, including “Voice of God Is Government,” “We’re Only Gonna Die,” and “Fuck Armageddon . . . This Is Hell,” which Greg played on the studio piano. “I didn’t know we were actually recording,” Greg said, “but I’m glad [Mankey] had already put a mic on the piano. I listened through the headphones and it was the first time I heard myself play piano. It was surprising and very motivating. We were so inexperienced back then that it didn’t occur to us to try piano on the album. But I was a big fan of Sham 69 and they’d put out an album around that time called The Adventures of Hersham Boys that had piano on it. So that was enough motivation for me to go ahead and play punk piano on our own album.”

The recording session took longer than expected and they ran out of money. Jay recalled telling Mankey, “We gotta play some more shows, make some more money, and then we’ll be back.” They booked a number of gigs that winter so that they could finish the record. But then a bizarre series of events unfolded.

They’d hired Edward Colver to do a photo shoot in Hollywood and around Los Angeles. Colver was the man behind the camera for numerous photos that appeared on the covers and sleeves for many Southern California punk bands, including Black Flag, Circle Jerks, China White, Suicidal Tendencies, and T.S.O.L. If you were an L.A. punk band with a record in the eighties, chances were Colver shot the cover. Colver took Bad Religion to the Hollywood Cross, a thirty-foot-high Christian cross that overlooks the Hollywood Bowl and the Hollywood Freeway, for the photo shoot.

  
_{Photos by Edward Colver}

During the break in the recording, Colver’s proofs arrived at Brett’s house. Jay and Greg happened to be there when the package was delivered. They looked at the proofs and picked out the ones they liked. They were very happy with the shoot. In fact, they would eventually use the shot of downtown L.A. for the cover of their debut full-length album, How Could Hell Be Any Worse?

When Jay got home, he got a call from Ziskrout.

ZISKROUT: I heard you looked at pictures without me.

JAY: Yeah, so what?

ZISKROUT: Fuck you guys, I quit!

Apparently, Ziskrout was under the impression that he had been deliberately excluded from the meeting. Jay was baffled. “He quit because we looked at pictures without him. I’m not joking. He called me and quit because we looked at pictures without him.”

It’s not a moment Ziskrout is particularly proud of. “For some reason the guys got together to look at pictures and for whatever reason I wasn’t there. I got really pissed off and I quit. It was really very silly. Instead of just mentioning that I was unhappy I stormed off in a huff. It was very childish. It’s actually one of the things in my life that I regret. I regret it for a couple of reasons. That’s not the way to move on from something and certainly not the way to respond to something that you’re unhappy about. And also I wish I could have played with Bad Religion for longer, if not still to this day.”

Bad Religion was now without a drummer. This put the band in a serious bind. Not only were they in the middle of recording an album, they’d booked a number of shows in the hopes of earning enough money to finish the record. They were in dire need of a drummer.

Greg recruited their friend from the Valley, Pete Finestone, who was one of Bad Religion’s roadies and Ziskrout’s drum tech—though those titles were a bit overstated. “There was an age-old thing that punk rockers did,” Jay explained. “If you showed up at the club and carried a guitar case or a cable inside, you’d get in for free.” That’s what constituted a “roadie” in the L.A. punk scene circa 1981. To Jay, Pete was more than a guy who could be counted on to carry a case into the club—he was a friend. Asking him to play in Bad Religion was a no-brainer.

“Pete was always around and was a good friend to all of us,” Jay said. “It never occurred to anyone to do anything different. There’s Pete. He’s got a drum kit in his car and he knows the songs. He’s standing right there.”

Pete may have known the songs, but he didn’t know how to play them. Also, he didn’t own a complete set of drums and had never taken any lessons, but he knew how to set up a drum kit and break it down. It would be comparable to hiring the sound guy to sing because he knew how to set up the microphone. But to Pete’s credit he was ready, willing, and able to learn, which were the three requirements that mattered most.

Pete was from the San Fernando Valley and both of his parents worked at California State University, Northridge. In fact, Pete’s parents knew Greg’s parents from academic circles long before their sons got acquainted.

Pete had a slight speech impediment and felt ostracized from other kids. He would get into fights and had to change schools. “I was a kid who was very uncomfortable in his skin. I didn’t have a lot of friends. I had a brother who was a jock. I was a very lonely kid. Very self-aware of my loneliness and being different.”

A friend who’d been to London tried to get Pete interested in punk rock by playing the Sex Pistols for him, but he didn’t like it. “‘This shit sounds terrible! What is this garbage?’ I thought it was really silly.”

Pete had his punk rock awakening in the summer of 1978. He had tickets to go see Jethro Tull during the Bursting Out tour at the Long Beach Arena, but his friend urged him to go see the Clash, who were playing at Santa Monica Civic.

“I went back and forth,” Pete said. “Finally, I decided to go see the Clash. I think it was their first or second time through the United States, and that changed everything. What is this? This is talking right to me! ”

Punk rock introduced Pete to a new community of outsiders. He didn’t go to El Camino Real, but he knew Arnel Celestial, Bad Religion’s first fan. Arnel introduced Pete to Greg in Hollywood on the day the band recorded its demo at Studio 9, and Pete had been part of Bad Religion’s circle of friends ever since.

None of this changed the fact that Pete didn’t know how to play. Greg, however, was steadfast in his support. “You’re our friend,” Pete recalled Greg telling him, “it will work out fine.”

Pete talked his mother into buying a drum kit. “We didn’t have much money. She had some saved up and we went to Pro Drum and I bought this little drum set. I took it home and I tried to learn all their songs by playing along with the cassette, but I didn’t really know what I was doing. I didn’t really know how to play. I was flying blind, trying to learn the drum parts without knowing how to play.”

The next few weeks were a roller coaster of emotions for Pete. He was excited to be a part of the band he loved, but the pressure was intense. The low point was his first practice in the Hell Hole. “I set up my drums and started to play. I’ve never been so nervous in my fucking life. Everyone was looking around. I think Brett and Jay were probably thinking, This isn’t working out. But Greg told me it sounded great and to keep practicing. We had a show coming up at Godzilla’s with Fear and China White in a month or so, and somehow they were patient with my playing. Again, I didn’t know how to fucking play!”

Not only was the show scheduled, it was for the grand opening of Godzilla’s, a club operated by Mark, Adam, and Shawn Stern of Youth Brigade on the east end of the San Fernando Valley. Godzilla’s was big, which meant that everyone Pete had ever known could come and watch his debut with Bad Religion.

“I’d never played a show in my life,” Pete said, “and I’m playing a show with Fear in front of a thousand kids. Everyone seemed to have a great time. I was on cloud nine. Girls were talking to me for the first time. I’d never had girls talk to me. Even in the punk rock scene you still had a pecking order and I was accepted for playing in this band that people liked.”

There was no time for Pete to rest on his laurels as he went out of the frying pan of a live performance and into the fire of the recording studio.

When Bad Religion returned to Track Record with their new drummer in early 1982, they had already recorded and mixed eight of the fourteen songs that would appear on their first full-length album, which they’d decided to call How Could Hell Be Any Worse? The album title is a lyric from the song “Fuck Armageddon. . . This Is Hell,” which Greg composed on his mother’s piano.

The song begins with a bass line that’s so muted and subdued, you barely know it’s there. Against this backdrop a single guitar—solemn and somber-sounding—pierces the air like the horns that herald the end of days. The tempo ratchets up, the drums kick in, and we’re back on the familiar footing of a Bad Religion song. The contrast between the slow introduction and the headlong thrust of the lyrics lends “Fuck Armageddon” an epic quality.

There’s people out there that say I’m no good

Because I don’t believe in things that I should

In the end the good will go to heaven up above

The bad will perish in the depths of hell

How could hell be any worse, when life alone is such a curse?

Fuck Armageddon . . . this is hell!

These lyrics introduce a Bad Religion trademark: irony, especially when it comes to religious themes. Greg, who wrote the song, most certainly didn’t believe “the good will go to heaven up above.” But the lyric goes along with the accepted truth of this received knowledge for the purpose of puncturing it with sarcastic wit.

Since the narrator isn’t part of the crowd that will “go to heaven up above” he will be left behind with the damned. But with countries constantly at war with another and corporations poisoning the earth, life on earth is no picnic. Forget about the afterlife, the song argues, we’re already in hell.

The irony and sarcasm are a roundabout way of getting at an interesting philosophical question: in a world without moral restraints, what’s the use of being good? The last line of the chorus, which is also the song title, answers the clarion call of the solitary guitar at the opening: forget about the afterlife, look at the hell we’ve made of this world. Here, at last, the singer is deadly serious, urging us to get our heads out of the clouds and into reality. For all its talk of the end, the song isn’t nihilistic. “Fuck the world” is nihilistic. “Fuck Armageddon” is a wake-up call.

Jay was still playing his hand-painted Jazzmaster bass during the first recording session with Ziskrout but it was stolen after a show. “I don’t remember what the venue was, but I remember seeing the guitar and then it was gone. That I remember like it was yesterday.” It was a blessing in disguise because that prompted him to purchase a Rickenbacker—again with help from his parents.

“We were in the middle of making a record. It was obvious to my parents that I wasn’t fucking around now. I was going to do this whether they liked it or not. That was when I got them to agree to buy me a real bass.” (Many years later, Jack Grisham of T.S.O.L. would tell Jay that he had stolen his bass and thrown it off the roof of the venue.) Brett also bought a new guitar and they went back into the studio with new gear and a new drummer.

They had six more songs to record, including “Part III,” which was one of two songs on the record that Jay wrote. (The other was “Voice of God Is Government.”) “Part III” is about War World III, but since they already had a song called “World War III” they settled on a synonym that stresses how these cataclysmic conflicts are part of an ongoing saga. Jay wanted a second guitarist to play against Brett to complement the theme of warfare. Jay invited Greg Hetson of the Circle Jerks to play on the album. This marked Hetson’s unofficial beginning as a contributor to the band, a relationship that would continue for over thirty years.

Pete had never recorded in a studio before and felt the band should try to find someone else to play the last remaining songs for the album, but once again Greg was adamant in his support. For better or worse, the job fell to Pete. “If you look back at that record,” Pete said, “you can really hear Ziskrout’s parts versus the songs I played. Ziskrout played ‘Fuck Armageddon . . . This Is Hell,’ which is probably the most popular song on the record. I played ‘Oligarchy.’ There’s a distinctive difference between Jay’s jazz- influenced style of punk rock and my playing, which is atrocious.”

In addition to having two different drummers, the album reflects the band’s unorthodox approach in other ways. “We’re Only Gonna Die,” “Damned to Be Free,” and “Fuck Armageddon. . . This Is Hell” all feature piano, which was unusual for a punk band. “We’re Only Gonna Die” also has some acoustic guitar. Interestingly, Greg wrote four of the first five songs on the album, while Brett wrote four of the final six, yet the album is cohesive in terms of the band’s vision and sound.

How Could Hell Be Any Worse? is full of images of death and destruction. Despite the record’s apocalyptic feel, the mayhem stems from mankind, not from a divine agency. The album opens with “We’re Only Gonna Die,” which is listed on the liner notes as “We’re Only Gonna Die from Our Own Arrogance,” a parable of modern man done in by primitive urges. The keyword is “arrogance.” Humankind has the knowledge and the power to avoid catastrophe, but our monstrous hubris and warlike urges lead us down the path of destruction again and again. Incidentally, this song was later recorded by the legendary Orange County band Sublime.

Both “Faith in God” and “Pity” drip with scorn for the ignorant masses, with the former offering advice not to “be feeble like all of them.” Meanwhile, “Damned to Be Free” revisits the themes laid out in “Fuck Armageddon . . . This Is Hell” in which the singer rejects religion’s dogmatic oppression. When it comes to choosing eternal damnation or freedom, the only choice is freedom. But “Damned to Be Free” isn’t a song about living for today; rather, it emphasizes the responsibility that comes with freedom.

The band wrapped up recording How Could Hell Be Any Worse? in a single weekend. The artwork was ready to go. With a distribution deal in place, they were able to get the records pressed and shipped. At the time, the number one song in the U.S. was “Centerfold” by the J. Geils Band. On Golden Pond occupied the top spot at the box office, and Ronald Reagan was in the second year of his first term as president of the United States. Bad Religion had just released its first full-length record. Would anyone care?