Agents Orange! First Hands Reports From SoCal

The so-called Orange County scene encompasses a diverse variety of groups, from the buzz-saw bile of Social Distortion to the commercial punk of the Offspring to the lively up yourself vibe of Sugar Ray. So VH1 News sat down with members of all three groups to ask them about their common forbears, their sudden success, and what the SoCal culture was like when the creative spirit initially hit them. Involved in the chat were Dexter and Noodles from The Offspring, Sugar Ray's Mark McGrath and Murphy, and Social Distortion's Mike Ness. We found out you can take the boys out of Orange County, but you can’t take the Orange County out of the boys.

Mike: When I was five I felt a need to escape. Music provided that for me. It made everything all right. I grew up with your basic Beatles and Stones [records] long before I ever heard the Sex Pistols. I wasn’t on the varsity football team and had no interest in that. I wanted to play music and do cool things.

Dexter: It really wasn’t that bad to grow up in OC, but we thought it was. When you’re growing up it’s really important to find an identity. OC is a pretty conservative place, and there really is pressure to fit in and not stand out so much.

Mark: Wherever there are chicks, there’s going to be teen angst, and there are plenty of beautiful girls here in OC. Don’t think that this is some sort fantasyland. In terms of sophistication, it doesn’t rate too high. In terms of relaxing and doing what you want but having the city 30 minutes away, it’s perfect.

Mike: [What happened in] the late ‘70s was the same thing as what happened in the ‘50s. You got youth culture being fed stuff by their parents and society. Every now and then, there’s an uprising. We were not settling for mediocrity. There was a commercial for Miller’s Outpost that used to tell you, “Be a star! Shop at Miller’s Outpost.” We all thought, “F*ck this! We’re not gonna be told by anyone what to do.” You can shut up and be a puppet or get off your ass and change it. That’s what we set out to do.

Noodles: It’s a middle class suburb. There was pressure to conform: Be nice. Excel in sports. Get a B+ grade point average. Go to college, marry, have 2.69 children. It was a bunch of crap. Nobody was really like that. Once young people started realizing that this was all bullshit, they started to rebel.

Dexter: Joey Ramone said the Ramones would do a tour in like in ’77 or ’78 and in their wake bands would sprout up within the month. There’d be like two or three new bands. It was that sense of “Wow! We could do this, too! We don’t have to be as proficient as Kansas. We can make something exciting.”

Mike: There was a band called the Mechanics from Fullerton who never did anything cause they were so far ahead of their time. I think probably out of all the bands, they influenced me the most. Had I grown up anywhere else, I wouldn’t have been surrounded by that kind of musical community. There was the Mechanics, the Adolescents, Agent Orange, T.S.O.L. and my band Social Distortion. We were all looking at each other and without copying each other, thinking, “Wow, that guy plays guitar pretty good.” You were feeding off each other in a positive, competitive way.

Dexter: Like many kids I was subjected to whatever my older brother was listening to. Luckily most of it was good. KISS’ Alive got me into rock ‘n’ roll at first. One day my brother brought home a record by Rodney and the Rock. He was a DJ at KROCK and still has a specialty show on Sunday nights. He played all the stuff that no one else would even touch. This record had all kinds of great bands on it like the Adolescents, Black Flag. I went out and bought an Adolescents record. Then I got into T.S.O.L. These bands actually made me want to pick up a guitar and actually start a band.

Mike: In 1979 being a punk rocker in the streets of Orange County was dangerous. We would go to the Cuckoo’s Nest, find a place to drink in the alleys or the industrial parks and these guys’ masculinity was threatened by our mere presence. The Cuckoo’s Nest was an Orange County club. It was very easy to get in if you were under age. Right next door there was a cowboy bar and these guys would come out at two in the morning right when the punk rockers were getting out. It was like, “Hey, I don’t like you.” “Hey, I don’t like you.” It was very volatile. If you walked down the street in 1979 with a leather jacket, black shoes and colored hair, just to the liquor store, chances were you’re gonna get into an altercation. I was trying to look like Bela Lugosi. Your average family would pull their kid away when I was walking down the street. A lot of us were from broken homes, so we had a lot of rage inside. It was the difference between me and the guy who was the quarterback for the football team who shaved his head and after three beers gets all macho and wants to wrestle.

Noodles: When we grew up you got beat up for having spiky green hair. Every family on the block has at least one kid with spiky green hair or a mohawk or multiple piercings and tattoos. Skateboarding was seen as deviant behavior. I got a ticket for riding my skateboard in the street in Huntington Beach when I was a kid. Now that stuff is accepted.

Mark: I remember back in the 80’s there was place called the Red Barn up on McArthur and it was like a little skate thing. Zach from Rage Against the Machine used to skate there. We listened to Afrika Bambaataa and would skate. That got torn down. Now you look down and it’s a bunch of mini malls and Baja Freshes. Which I love, but there’s not much character to it.

Mike: There was a public alarm about kids supposedly slashing swastikas in their arms and vandalizing things, and I remember an organization called Parents of Punkers on these talk shows. This was fueling us. If you want to start a band, just turn on your TV. On one channel you’ve got Phil Collins, who makes you want to kick in your television. On the other channel you’ve got this Parents of Punkers stuff. They thought it was satanic, and they were really trying to save these kids. Some of those kids were messed up. I was in jails and psychiatric wards, but I admired these kids who dressed in black and listened to punk rock but during the daytime went to UC Irvine; they had their lives together. For me it was a real lifestyle that almost killed me, and killed some of my friends.

Mark: I bought “My Sharona” in ’79 and for some reason I was in my bum-huggers with my tennis racket in front of the mirror. Everybody hated me at school because I was the new guy. My high school was like Fast Times at Richmond High. There was New Wavers, rockabillies, punks. The common thread that held everyone together was K-Rock. They are giving you Elvis Costello, Siouxsie & the Banshees, Stray Cats, Duran Duran and everything else. Then metal happened in the late ‘80’s. When we started this band, we wanted to be like Faster Pussycat - I can honestly say that now. But we also had our own influences that we threw in. We were playing like Selector, the Clash, Loverboy, Run-D.M.C. It was a reflection of our record collection.

Noodles: Rodney Bingheimer was the only radio exposure for a younger kid who didn’t have a car to get up to L.A. or all those cool record stores like Long Beach. Somebody growing up in Des Moines, Iowa didn’t have access to any of those records. Most people in the country didn’t. Only the bigger cities, had radio stations with any kind of alternative show. Rodney was huge back then.

Dexter: His show was the first time I heard of bands like Bad Religion or Suicidal Tendencies, a lot of stuff that was really seminal. I don’t know if I would have heard of them if it hadn’t been for him. He was the kind of guy, where bands would go down to the radio station and knock on the back door and he could literally take that record and put it on the air. We even tested that out when we did our very first record. We pressed a thousand seven inch [discs]. That’s all we could afford, two songs. We went down there and knocked on the door and some security guy answered. But we said, “Hey, can you this record to Rodney?” He took it back there and we thought, “Well, we’ll keep our fingers crossed, but certainly wouldn’t count on it.” Literally within an hour and half, he’s like: “Hey, I just got this new record ...” and he put it on. F*cking played our record right there that night. It was the most amazing thing ever.”

Dexter: If I could think of anything that really influenced us I’d probably say Jello Biafra from the Dead Kennedys. I used to write him letters just as a fan. Dead Kennedys always had these crazy posters with these weird headlines a la Jay Leno nowadays. I used to cut out crazy headlines that I would see in the newspaper and send them to him and say, “Hey, maybe you can put this in your next record.” He would always take the time to write back. I thought that was a pretty amazing thing that he would make an effort to write back to me.

Mark: In the 80’s, the perception of Orange County in general was it’s very conservative. There definitely is that element here. But reggae was very popular along the coast here in Newport Beach and Laguna Beach. Some great bands would come here - Gregory Isaacs would play the Coach House for Christ’s sake! There were great bands like Common Sense, who are still playing today came out of here…premier reggae bands. Then in the late 70’s and early 80’s there was a punk club called the Cuckoo’s Nest. It’s where Henry Rollins debuted with Black Flag. You had Fear playing there, the Circle Jerks ... The violence in punk rock started in Huntington beach! Up in L.A. it was artsy punk. Down here the violence just came into it.

So you have the reggae coming in off the coast, inland you had bands like Social Distortion and TSOL starting, so it was starting to perpetuate a real punk rock scene here as well. Then you still had the stoners in the back parking lot listening to Led Zeppelin and stuff. So there are all these cultures clashing at once. Then in ’82-’83 you started hearing this breakdance thing happening, hip-hop was coming along. I remember I saw the Malcolm McLaren video “Buffalo Girls” and I thought, “What the hell is that? I wanna be a part of that!” So I had a Black Flag shirt on, I’m trying to moonwalk and do windmills with a Black Flag shirt on, trying to get the radio up in L.A. because Ice-T was DJ-ing that night. That’s why you have such a decentralized music scene down in Orange County. There isn’t one particular style here. You have No Doubt, Social Distortion, Offspring, Lit, us ... everybody’s just feeding off this energy off the beach, off L.A.

Murphy: The funny thing about Orange County was there were all these bands and styles, but there weren’t really too many places to play. Bands would mostly start their scene by just playing parties and for their friends. You’d go to a party and you’d see Shattered Faith in the backyard playing.

Mark: We couldn’t get a gig to save our lives. We couldn’t play but we were friends with the guys who started the Quicksilver clothing line. They were having a party and needed a band, so we came down. I would bring a hockey stick on stage and that amused them more than our musical ability.

Murphy: He’d whack my knees and I’d be like bam! And that was music back then.

Mark: People got creative and started their own little production companies. They’d take over the Red Onion for the night and go, “Yeah, we’re just gonna have a mellow night.” Then three punk bands would come in and ruin the place. There were a lot of naïve restaurants that you could rent out for a while.

Murphy: Bands like Social Distortion set the tone for great rock to come from Orange County. I saw them at UCI and watched them from the side of the pit like a scared little child going, “Oh my god this is bitchin’!”

Dexter: When you have a true scene, it concentrates around a certain area where there are lots of bands. They usually have a place they can mix ideas and develop as bands. You see that in the Bay Area scene with Gilman Street. That was happening in DC around the time of Minor Threat. You see that in a lot of places like London when punk was starting. In Orange County there really wasn’t a place like that.

Noodles: I remember the year before Smash (1994) came out, we opened up for NOFX in Europe. We spent six weeks over there and saw NOFX actually making a living primarily in Europe. They would also tour the US and Canada, but they made their living off Europe. Bad Religion were huge. They were rock gods in Europe.

Dexter: When we were signed to Epitaph, we put out Ignition (1993) and it shipped, I think, 10,000 copies. We were ecstatic. We would get letters from places like Italy and that was the most mind-blowing thing, that someone in Italy had our record.

Noodles: No way did we expect to ever sell a butt load of records. When we were making Smash, we were a punk band signed to a punk label. We were judging against other bands that were signed to the same label, bands like NOFX and Pennywise. When Smash took off, it was almost frightening. That doesn’t happen to bands like us, four guys who are just music fans and like to drink beer at the bass player’s mom’s house.

Mike: It’s very surprising when you see a new band doing stuff that you and your friends have been doing for 10 or 20 years suddenly “make it.” After Nirvana broke, the whole music scene changed completely. All of a sudden 20 years later, the masses decided that punk rock was okay after all.

Dexter: We were on tour once in Australia with Hole. Courtney Love said, “Don’t you feel guilty that you’ve done well and all these bands haven’t done well?” We decided that we wanted to start this program called Adopt an Old Punk. Some poor guy who made this great record in 1977 who no one knows. We’re gonna Kato Kaelin him and put him in the backyard or something. I knew there were a lot of great bands out there that no one wanted to sign.

Mark: You have to include Sublime in the Orange County era. They fostered the whole surf/skate style you see down here with 40 Oz. to Freedom (1992). They were like a trade show band. Everybody wanted to be like Sublime. They were really respected, and broke huge. So there were a lot of bands that paved the way.

Murphy: Sugar Ray got lucky with the timing. We got blessed, but then people in Southern California dictate the way the rest of the world sees things. And I know that’s going to piss off everyone in New York, but there was that vibe down here. Certainly with the surf/skate/snowboarding culture. Orange County was the Metropolis of that.

Noodles: When all those bands were coming from Seattle, we realized Orange County was going to go through a similar kind of thing. But it’s just in the media’s eyes. You had a lot of bands that sounded like they were from California coming from all over. We play with bands from Sweden that sound like what was stereotypically the California punk sound.

Mike: Korn represents their circle, Sugar Ray represents their circle, but it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re the same as what we are. I imagine there are Sugar Ray fans who like Social D and vice versa. But I’m in Social D, so I don’t know.

Mark: It was never like us and No Doubt ever hung out. I had to go to Montreal on the Warped Tour to meet Offspring, for Christ’s sake!

Mike: I love Orange County but it’s a love-hate thing. I love to go down to the beach and go surfing but every now and again, I’m reminded about where I live. Go one mile south and you’re in gangland. Go four miles south and you’re in Irvine. I need stuff to be discontented with. That’s how I write songs. There’s still plenty of it left in Orange County, believe me.

From VH1 - March 12th, 2002