Bad Religion

BAD RELIGION

Formed: 1980, Los Angeles, California

Members: Jay Bentley, bass; Brett Gurewitz, guitar; Brian Baker, guitar; Pete Finestone, drums; Greg Graffin, vocals; Greg Hetson, guitar; Brooks Wackerman, drums.

Genre: Rock

Best-selling album since 1990: Stranger Than Fiction

Hit songs since 1990: "Stranger Than Fiction," "Infected," "Sorrow"

Forming at the tail end of punk's first explosion, Bad Religion spent years honing its sound and flying under mass-audience radar—until the early 1990s, when the alternative-rock juggernaut finally struck middle America.

Bad Religion has always maintained punk's ethic of simplicity, speed, and protest, but the group's principal songwriters, Gurewitz and Graffin, create hummable melodies and dramatic harmonies. Their aggressive but catchy sound has influenced recent alt-rockers such as Cake and System of a Down.

Gurewitz founded Epitaph Records to release the band's material, starting with 1982 debut album How Could Hell Be Any Worse? The album featured the raw "F---Armageddon, This Is Hell," with the sixteen-year-old Graffin singing raspy, Sex Pistols-influenced vocals. Little did he know that Epitaph was a name that would figure prominently into alt-rock's 1990s ascendance. In their first few years the group underwent frequent lineup changes and finally took a hiatus during the mid-1980s but returned triumphantly in 1987 with the catchy but angry-as-ever album Suffer. Though punk music was far from most music fans' minds during that era, Bad Religion was sowing the seeds of its latter-day commercial renaissance by sticking it out through punk's wilderness years.

Bad Religion kicked off the 1990s with Against the Grain, whose sarcastic "21st Century Digital Boy," penned by Gurewitz, skewered middle-class apathy. Graffin's voice had matured into a passionate but lucid shout, and he enunciated his lyrics with a precision uncharacteristic of punk. The members also tweaked the punk rule-book by incorporating some spirited vocal harmonies. During the early 1990s Graffin also did graduate work in paleontology at Cornell University in New York.

With Stranger than Fiction (1994), Bad Religion confronted the punk rocker's dilemma: The group was finally big enough for a major label, but would such a move represent a sellout? The CD was the group's first on Atlantic Records, but Gurewitz was uncomfortable losing business control. Meanwhile, his label's young prospect Offspring was breaking out of nowhere to define punk's next generation. Gurewitz decided to leave the band and was replaced by Brian Baker. With his departure the band lost not only its guitarist but also the songwriter of half its material. But no one could deny Atlantic's distribution muscle—Stranger than Fiction was the group's first album to make the Billboard charts, peaking at number 87. The album contained a new version of Gurewitz's "21st Century Digital Boy" and also featured the title track, a pessimistic song proclaiming that "life is the crummiest book I ever read, there isn't a hook, just a lot of cheap shots, pictures to shock and characters an amateur would never dream up." Graffin picked up the slack for the rest of the decade, taking over nearly all the songwriting chores for the subsequent The Gray Race (1996), No Substance (1998), and Todd Rundgren-produced New America (2000).

The group figuratively hit a "reset" button in 2002 with the return of Gurewitz. Back on Epitaph Records, Bad Religion finally enjoyed both commercial success and full control. The Process of Belief made number forty-nine on the Billboard 200, and the idealistic, harmony-filled "Sorrow" peaked at number thirty-five on Billboard 's Modern Rock Tracks.

Bad Religion has always been a group with plenty on its mind, but its longevity comes from its ability to express itself concisely and melodically.

SELECTIVE DISCOGRAPHY:

Suffer (Epitaph, 1988); Against the Grain (Epitaph, 1990); Generator (Epitaph, 1992); Recipe for Hate (Epitaph, 1993); Stranger than Fiction (Atlantic, 1994); The Gray Race (Atlantic, 1996); The Process of Belief (Epitaph, 2002).

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