TEARING DOWN THE ORANGE CURTAIN

Inside the diverse and enduring Orange County punk scene, launchpad for No Doubt, the Offspring, and more.

In the 1980s, Orange County punk bands had a reputation for being more conservative and down-market than their California brethren. Los Angeles had the hugely influential Black Flag; OC had slighter, jokier acts like T.S.O.L. (whose signature track was about necrophilia) and the Adolescents. San Francisco’s Dead Kennedys were provocateurs, while OC’s Social Distortion was more rooted in rockabilly and outlaw country. But Jackson and Kohn’s chronicle of the scene from the late ’70s to the present finds that OC acts were determined to shed their reputation as a lesser sibling. It helped that the scene had a healthy concert infrastructure, from go-to Costa Mesa club the Cuckoo’s Nest to Huntington Beach–based booking agency Goldenvoice. And a certain distance from the industry power centers were liberating, incubating talents like the ska-infused No Doubt and the punk-meets-reggae act Sublime. The scene persisted almost in spite of itself—Social Distortion frontman Mike Ness struggled with heroin addiction, and Sublime singer Bradley Nowell died of an overdose in 1996. The authors interviewed scores of musicians, club owners, and scenesters, so the book is rich with road stories and quirky anecdotes regarding bands’ out-of-nowhere success. (The Offspring’s label owner recalls a “Rubik’s Cube of pallets” of the band’s albums filling its warehouse to bursting.) But the book misses broader context—beyond mentions of the musicians’ relative comfort level playing a Young Republicans party, there’s little about how OC’s social and physical location influenced the music. And the prose rarely rises above press-release-speak, which suggests that deeper, more nuanced stories remain to be told.

A complicated scene shown in sometimes lackluster portraits.