Orange County’s original punks describe the origins of their sound

This excerpt is from Chapter 3 of “Tearing Down the Orange Curtain: How Punk Rock Brought Orange County to the World,” out May 20 from Da Capo Press. The book explores the trajectory of punk and ska from their humble beginnings to their peak popularity years, where their cultural impact could be felt in music around the world. Delving deep into the personal and professional lives of bands including Social Distortion, the Adolescents, the Offspring and their ska counterparts No Doubt, Sublime, Reel Big Fish, Save Ferris and more, this book offers a look into the very human stories of these musicians, many of whom struggled with acceptance, addiction and brutal teenage years in suburbia.

“You’ll have to ask the Agnews about that,” Social Distortion’s Mike Ness said about the origins of what became known as the Orange County sound.

The Agnews, Rikk, Frank, and Alfie, were the sons of a disciplinarian Irish father who worked for SoCal Gas and a Mexican mother. They grew up in La Puente before moving to Fullerton when Rikk, the oldest of the three, was in sixth grade. Richard Francis Agnew was born December 9, 1958, Francis Thomas Agnew followed in 1964, and Alfonso Agnew arrived January 24, 1969. Despite the ten-year gap between the oldest Agnew and the youngest (with a sister born in between Rikk and Frank), they were all pretty close and bonded through music.

Rikk’s musical journey started before he picked up a pencil. At the age of four, he was given his first drum kit. Instantly, he realized that he had a natural sense of rhythm. The Agnews’ maternal grandfather was a drummer and had become known in the Latin scene in California for his work with Xavier Cugat and the Latinaires, so rhythm was already in the family’s DNA.

Citing the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Beach Boys, and Motown as early influences, Rikk would bang his drums while their father strummed along with his acoustic guitar and sometimes improvised songs that Rikk would play along to. Rikk remembers coming home from school and strumming heavy, pissed-off chords on a family guitar. It began a lifelong love of playing music.

“He [Rikk] was obsessed with the Beatles, in the ’70s it was prog rock, by the mid-’70s it was Kraftwerk and electro imports from Europe. What was neat about Rikk was that he was always looking for something new, he was always fascinated by new music,” Frank said.

Naturally, Frank and Alfie were Rikk’s first co-conspirators and were also musically inclined. The Agnew boys jammed the instruments that were present around the house.

Frank started playing before he was ten, and just like Rikk, he was musically gifted.

“Immediately, Frank was so f—ing good,” Rikk said. “He could do Jimmy Page stuff when he was a fifth grader. Alfie was in second grade at that point. And the two of them would go in the garage and rehearse Led Zeppelin songs.”

“None of us was a good skateboarder,” Frank said. “So we stuck with the instruments.”

When the Ramones’ debut album came out in April 1976, Rikk was immediately hooked on the raw, aggressive sound, black leather jackets, and tough-guy swagger from the Queens-bred quartet.

“I remember I had gotten birthday money and was planning to buy a Foghat album but Rikk and his friends convinced me to buy the Ramones album, instead,” Frank said. Obliging his older brother, Frank used his cash to buy the seminal punk rock vinyl. He and his brothers huddled around the record player and dropped the needle. Frank’s reaction was . . . not very positive. “At first I was like ‘what the hell’s this?’ I was used to listening to Sabbath and the prog rock stuff, and at first I didn’t like the Ramones, the songs were fast, short, and noisy.” But for some reason the tunes got stuck in Frank’s head. Listening again and again, he eventually grew to love it, not only for the melodies and the style but because of how accessible it was. The ability to be in a band and play a few chords inspired the Agnews and many other kids growing up in the era of often complicated, overinflated virtuoso rock ’n’ roll to feel like they too could be onstage without putting in ten years of lessons.

Photo of the Vandals in the early 1980s

(Dina Douglass)

However, that jolt of youth culture and passion for music didn’t translate with their neighbors. They often complained about the noise emanating from the Agnews’ garage.

“The lady who lived next door would get all pissed off and come over and threaten to call the cops,” Rikk said. “She said ‘Stop making that noise’ and we kept saying ‘It’s not noise, it’s music!’”

The brothers’ intricate blend of influences combined with their natural ability would shape the sound of their bands in the years to come. “People were calling him [Rikk] the Brian Wilson of punk,” future bandmate Steve Soto told OC Weekly. “And he was.”

“I could hear an ‘Orange County sound’ starting to identify itself amid the SoCal punk scene,” early Social Distortion drummer Derek O’Brien said. “Elements of surf guitar and drums, certainly with Agent Orange but others like the Adolescents, D.I., Channel 3, and the Crowd also. Then you had rough but still actually melodic lead vocals as opposed to just yelling, two-part guitar, two-part melodies where one or both would play the melodies with octaves and the backup vocal harmonies soaring with or around the lead vocal.”

Punk roared out of London and New York in 1976 before making its way out west not too long after. First in Los Angeles, by the time the sound trickled past the Orange Curtain, which was the not-so-flattering nickname Angelenos gave to the county directly to the south, it gained its own flavor.

Photo of Joey Escalante from the Vandals

(Dina Douglass)

Impressionable young punkers, who came from broken homes that fit outside of the idealistic nature of the Reagan presidency, were influenced by British bands like the Sex Pistols and the Damned. It could be heard in the voices of the emerging singers.

“Your punk band sings in an English accent,” the Vandals bassist Joe Escalante said. “That’s what we do. You might be able to make your own style, but you start there.”

In bands like Huntington Beach’s T.S.O.L., Fullerton’s Adolescents, and Social Distortion, traces of those British bands can be heard. Escalante points to T.S.O.L.’s “World War III” as the prime example.

Jack Grisham, singer of T.S.O.L., at the Ukrainian Cultural Center, October 15, 1982

(Dina Douglass)

“That’s our leader in Orange County, Jack Grisham, telling us how to do what we need to do,” Escalante continued on a podcast. “We’re not going to argue with that.”

Looking back at his first time singing, Escalante remembers the Vandals singer Dave Quackenbush telling him that he sounded like a “Republican who sounded like they just got out of a John Birch Society meeting.” From there, he went with an English accent himself before incorporating some of his own natural style.

When all of this adds up, it becomes clear that the brand of punk that broke through in the 1990s could be traced back to its origins in Orange County. Many of the early bands’ sound had a preciseness to it and a simultaneous lack of pretension.

“I believe that the California punk sound came from Orange County,” NOFX front man Fat Mike said. Born Mike Burkett, the singer was first introduced to punk by his camp counselor, who just so happened to be the Vandals’ Joe Escalante.

Even in a major city like Seattle, where Guns N’ Roses bassist Duff McKagan grew up a thousand miles away, the sound of Southern California punk was echoing into the consciousness of punk social circles. “We were aware of what they were doing—and why,” McKagan said. “Even though in Seattle where we didn’t have suburbs, we envisioned these punks from sprawling suburbs whose parents were Reagan conservatives and these kids were rebelling against it. We got it. Could we fully identify with it? Not really. But we knew what they were about.”

Scene from OC punk show at the Cuckoo’s Nest, Steve Soto of the Adolescents in the crowd

(Edward Colver)

Fullerton had the fortune of being the home of Fender. Leo Fender’s factory often discarded guitars that they deemed unusable. For the locals who couldn’t afford one of his instruments, dumpster diving to obtain a guitar was frequent and critical. These discarded guitars found a new home, often in the hands of young punks.

It was the literal embodiment of “one person’s trash is another’s treasure.”

In addition to being the home of Fender, Fullerton was also the place where many families moved in search of the ideal, pleasantville life depicted as the American dream. The area was gentrified by tract homes where nuclear families would settle. By the 1970s, that dream vanished for many disaffected youths, and a new scene emerged that many in the community would instantly hate.

Jackson is a deputy editor for entertainment at The Times.