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Courtesy of Greg Graffin

August 20, 2020

Arts & culture, ‘do what you want’: an interview with bad religion frontman and evolutionist greg graffin ph.d. ’03, by ashley ramynke | august 20, 2020.

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In a San Fernando Valley garage situated north of the decrepit glamour and clubs that composed Hollywood, hardcore punk band Bad Religion set the stage for their next 40 years together. By amalgamating their interests in science and literature with unequivocal sonic riffs and support from the Adolescents and the Circle Jerks, the band has become one of the most pivotal acts in the genre’s history. At the forefront of Bad Religion is Wisconsin born, California raised and New York transplant, Greg Graffin Ph.D. ’03. In pursuit of receiving his doctorate in zoology from Cornell University, Graffin continued with the band despite being on the opposing coast. His work with Bad Religion now spans 17 studio records, and his other pursuits include three solo records, four books and hours upon hours spent at Cornell, where the former Ph.D. student now lectures on evolution.

To commemorate the band’s extensive history, Graffin has worked with past and present members of Bad Religion, other bands from the Southern California hardcore punk scene and co-author Jim Ruland on the autobiography, Do What You Want: The Story of Bad Religion , that was released Tuesday. Prior to the book’s release, I had the pleasure of talking to him about the correlation between his musical and academic pursuits, the unwavering memory of bass player Jay Bentley, and the timeless notions of human existence encapsulated on their records.

Ashley Ramynke ’22: What is the intersection between punk rock and evolutionary biology?

Greg Graffin Ph.D. ’03: That is a really interesting question because it’s not immediately obvious that they have anything to do with one another. I think you learn that by becoming a scientist, or becoming actually any kind of academic pursuit — you want to learn to think critically. But you also have to do that in songwriting. Even though the genre that we belong to is called punk rock, we’ve always considered ourselves songwriters, [and] I’ve always considered myself a singer. In order to do that well, you have to really construct ideas in a critical fashion. It’s very similar actually to academic pursuits — putting together a good research paper, for instance, or putting together a good composition in English, or whatever language you do. They are the same skills of creativity and critical thinking. In that sense, I’ve always found a nice parallel between the two worlds.

But more recently, I’ve been thinking a little bit more about the genre of punk, and I’m very surprised at its longevity. There’s something about it that is going to stick around a long time. It seems like there’s something universal about punk music that people gravitate towards. It’s not necessarily the things you would identify with it immediately. It’s not the nihilism; it’s not the violence — that’s not what’s interesting. It’s this critical thinking about the world and challenging the norms. This countercultural strain that goes through the music has been there in popular music for a long time, even before punk really hit the scene in the late ’70s with the Sex Pistols. There was this countercultural movement, and in that sense, I think evolution is a really interesting history because it had its start as a countercultural movement also.

Charles Darwin waited 20 years to publish his discovery about the origin of species. He had come to the conclusion that species originate by natural selection, but he didn’t publish it for 20 years. That’s because it was so foreign to polite Victorian society that if he were to publish it early, he and his family could have easily been shunned by the very scientific community that he was aspiring to. So he kept it quiet, but ultimately he published evolution by natural selection, On the Origin of Species [ by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life ] in 1859. When he did, there was a firestorm, [and] there was still a backlash. In a sense, it was against all the polite social interactions of scientists at the time to suggest that humans and chimpanzees, for instance, could be closely related by a common descent.

His countercultural revolt was overturning the currently held view that they call[ed] natural theology, which today we call creationism. But creationism was the norm when he published his theory, so there was a tremendous social backlash to the Darwinian story. That’s why it’s interesting to social scientists, as well as biologists, because, in a sense, he was partaking in this countercultural strain that’s been part of human existence ever since. Most theories that have been presented overturn the currently held view, and there’s something appealing about that if you’re a punk rocker.

AR : Why do you believe punk rock, and specifically Bad Religion, has had this longevity? 

GG: That’s a really tough question. I can only answer it from personal experience, and that is, I’ve seen our music grow in popularity, and I’ve seen it maintain its interest among people over generations. We get as many new fans every year who are coming to discover Bad Religion as we do old fans who have been there for 40 years. It’s interesting; our audience now is mixed of multigenerational families who come to the shows. But what I would say is that it’s because of, from our perspective, at least, we have not compromised on the songwriting. We’ve tried to write songs and write music that has relevance to human existence.

We started in a garage, in the San Fernando Valley at 15-years-old. We knew when we started that we didn’t want to be just a pop band that was writing about the current trends. We wanted to write about things that were puzzles of human existence. In that sense, there’s a lot of overlap between human evolution and our style of punk. One of the first songs I ever wrote was about human existence, and the song’s chorus was “We’re only going to die from our own arrogance,” and that was inspired by my studies in high school of human evolution. So we were always interested in writing about topics that were timeless. And we were lucky we stumbled upon the band name Bad Religion, because religion is one of those timeless topics, and there’s a tension between religion and evolution.

AR: In writing the book, did working with past and present members of Bad Religion, other bands from the Southern California hardcore punk scene and co-author Jim Ruland change your perception of the band’s history or bring to light things you weren’t aware of? 

GG: Nothing really surprised me, except that it is interesting to see what stories meant the most to the different band members. But none of us put any rules on this, you could talk about anything you wanted. And Jim [Ruland] spent so many hours with all of us — being out with us and staying at our houses. We, as a band, are pretty united in agreeing that what we’ve achieved so far is pretty impressive, and we don’t think any petty disagreements would be good … we don’t really have any petty disagreements. That’s a unique thing for a band that’s been together for so long. But other than that, I don’t think we actually were surprised by anything.

Except, we did discover that Jay [Bentley], our bass player, has the best memory of anybody, which is funny because he spent so much of the time being drunk. But he actually remembers all these details. He remembered the exact … in the book, you’ll read about when our first drummer quit the band. I’ve never quit, I’ve been there ever since the beginning, but I’ve always had the attitude like I do in general [that] if someone wants to quit, that’s their business [and] their prerogative. I’m not going to try to twist their arm.

But Jay [Bentley] remembers every detail of why [drummer Jay Ziskrout] quit. It was something really petty, and when I first read the first draft, I couldn’t believe that’s why Jay [Ziskrout quit]. I couldn’t. I’m like “He didn’t quit because of that.” Then I read the second draft, and sure enough Jay [Ziskrout] corroborated the story. It turns out that he quit because we were meeting without him to go over publicity photos, or something really stupid. And he [was] like “Okay, you guys, fuck you. I quit.” I thought, man, that doesn’t sound like a very likely thing to happen. But sure enough, he corroborated it, and Jay [Bentley] remembered it to a tee.

I would never have put that detail in there because I wouldn’t have remembered it.

AR: What are your thoughts on the current political climate? 

GG: We’ve always tried to write music that could extend beyond the now and touch on something that was elemental about human existence. Our ability to reason is something that obviously I have dedicated my life to [and] I feel that I am privileged that I can reach a lot of people by writing music. It’s an extension of my beliefs to continue to lecture at universities; it’s a belief that you can help people use their talents and develop their ability to reason. I feel like music and entertainment is an outreach of that. It’s supposed to be something that can be fun, it can be entertaining and in the meantime, you’re learning something, and you’re exercising a part of your intellect that makes you feel good.

That’s what Bad Religion always stood for, in the process of hopefully enlightening people and hopefully getting them to think a little bit about the world they live in. So it’s very disheartening when you see a world where people are not thinking beyond themselves. They’re not thinking of building a better society, and yet, they don’t have any alternatives to offer except “Do what’s best for me.” I think that’s what provoked us to write [our 17th studio record] Age of Unreason , when in fact, it’s the irony that we should be living in an age of enlightenment. But it seems like getting the basic elements that are necessary for enlightenment has become more and more difficult. That means stuff like getting facts straight and using those facts with logic — applying logic to our inferences. Those are things that are sadly lacking. So a lot of the music on the album centers on that.

One of the standout tracks is a song called “Candidate,” which is a song about faith, again, faith over reason. The faith that we put into our presidential candidates. Obviously, if the current administration was full of promises and people were completely hoodwinked, they overlooked some of the most basic traits of what a terrible candidate could be. That’s kind of what the song is about, too; we get what we’re willing to forget. Or we get stuck with a monstrosity when we should, in fact, be moving towards enlightenment.

AR: Do you think students have the capability to enact change? 

GG: Yes, of course, I do. I believe strongly in the youth and their ability to guide us to the future. But that means that they still have to think critically and they have to be able to analyze themselves. That’s the key — asking yourself “Am I committed to this idea because it’s good for me, or is it good for other people?” I think something as simple as wearing a mask is where that really comes into focus. “Do you really think we’re trying to take our rights away from you? Or are we asking you to think about other people for a minute?” That’s the kind of stuff that I think you learn that by going through … you can learn it anywhere really. But I think the student body has to be reminded of it, just like everybody else. What you learn in college, you take with you in life. In many ways, I’m always very hopeful because I had the experience myself, and I was a different person when I finished college.

Purchase the book, Do What You Want: The Story of Bad Religion, here .

Ashley Ramynke is a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences. She can be reached at [email protected] .

Bad Religion on Punk, God and The Process Of Belief

In this 2002 interview, Brett Gurewitz and Greg Graffin discuss philosophy, belief systems and the 'definitive' Bad Religion album

It’s Sunday, and Bad Religion’s songwriting duo, guitarist Brett Gurewitz and lead vocalist Greg Graffin are in town to talk to Metal Hammer about their new album, The Process Of Belief for one day only. The day of rest. Fortunately, we manage to get out of Hammer choir practice this week.

“I think the goal was to create the definitive Bad Religion album,” says Brett. The owner of Epitaph – one of the most successful independent labels ever – may be worth a few quid, but he still looks incongruous in the fussy surroundings of a Mayfair hotel suite, despite fast approaching the age of 40.

“It was a very challenging goal because we’ve been together a long time and made a lot of records. To reunite at this time in our careers, and attempt to make the definitive Bad Religion record, is a big challenge. But that was the point.”

So, after a six-year hiatus on Atlantic Records, Bad Religion are back at their spiritual home of Epitaph Records and the Lennon and McCartney songwriting duo of punk are back together again. What drives that artistic partnership?

“It’s healthy competition,” says Greg with his characteristic impish grin. “When you grow up together, your world views evolve similarly and you tend to gravitate towards similar ideals. We’ve known each other for 22 years.”

That’s why the sleeve of Bad Religion’s first album, How Can Hell Be Any Worse? showed a dystopian downtown Los Angeles in the late-20th century. After meeting in High School, it’s the place where Brett and Greg grew up and melded their ideas: the world’s central pyre of capitalism and faith. Ideologies the band have railed against for the past 20 years.

So it’s ironic that The Process Of Belief – arguably the definitive Bad Religion album – is released mere months after world events that have reversed attitudes in America 20 years and back to that bleak period of ‘Reaganomics’.

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“You would think the natural reaction would be that this was caused by religious fanaticism,” says Greg, when I ask if there’s any chance that the events of September 11 could encourage people in the US to think again about faith and religion. “Maybe we should see it as a shortcoming of our own nationalistic or theological loyalties. It teaches me that belief is hard to shake. People tend to cling to their beliefs stronger in times of crisis. Maybe it’s a position of luxury and leisure that allows people not to question anything.”

That polarisation of beliefs is already resulting in more avowed militancy from America’s flag-waving moral majority. Perhaps more distressing for us, the hysteria seems to be leeching into something as relatively insignificant as alternative music. Are the new generation of Christian bands serious, or are they a cynical marketing angle to counter the Satanism of acts like Marilyn Manson and Slipknot?

“The whole concept of Christian music is weird,” says Brett. “If it’s Christian music and rock, isn’t that some kind of form of Gospel? Gospel music is music that celebrates Christ and I’ve heard Gospel groups who rock a lot harder than Creed.”

“60 per cent of the US population believe in divine intervention and 65 per cent believe that Satan is a real person,” expands Greg. “It’s numbers like that where these bands find an audience by saying they’re Christian. It’s part of their marketing.”

Fact is though, Christian teachings still hold some importance for Bad Religion. The influence for their songs come from Biblical stories – plus legends and myths from Ancient Greece. Brett and Greg may not hold any truck with organised religion, but let’s face it, these are stories that have stood the test of time – whether you think they’re fiction or not.

“I don’t have an interest in theology. I’m not religious,” says Brett, who was brought up in a Jewish family but never practised the faith. “But I do have an interest in the great philosophical questions – not to say that I’ve ever found any answers satisfying. When writing songs – whether it’s Greek mythology, the Bible or any other classical works – sometimes it’s a fun writing tool because these stories are archetypal. And archetypal stories tend to be more evocative when you’re writing songs. I guess theology is something I’ve been interested in, but I’m not interested in it from the standpoint of attending services. Why is it that man is so fucked up and these themes continue to occur through history?”

An example of Brett’s influence is Skyscraper from 1993’s Recipe For Hate . The song is based on the Biblical Tower Of Babel story [( Genesis 10.10 ) where citizens of Babel thought they could ascend to heaven if they built tall buildings. God – supremely pissed with such a venture – invented foreign languages so the Tower’s builders couldn’t communicate with each other].

Similarly, the ultimate redemption song, Sorrow , the cripplingly cathartic highlight of The Process Of Belief , is based upon the Biblical story of Job. An upright god-fearing character, Job was the focus of a bet between God and Satan, when Old Nick bet the man upstairs that he couldn’t find a man so strong that he wouldn’t give up his faith no matter what happened to him. God showed Satan Job, so Satan set out to corrupt Job by raining down misery, famine and plague on him. In other words, Satan got Biblical on his ass. But Job never gave up his faith in God and after much hardship was justly rewarded.

Brett’s lyrics to Sorrow : ‘ Let me take you to the hurting ground/Where all good men are trampled down/Just to settle a bet that could not be won/Between a prideful father and his vengeful son’ – the vengeful son meaning Satan, being as he was created by God, but then cast out of Heaven.

“The easiest way to summarise Sorrow is that it’s very difficult to account for suffering in the world from a theological perspective,” says Brett. “My interpretation of the story of Job is that it doesn’t matter how good you are, the universe doesn’t run on the merit system. In other words, it’s impossible to justify the suffering in the world with the existence of a God. The story of Job is the archetypal sad story. It’s the saddest story ever told, it deals with the biggest question: why is there so much sorrow? Why is there so much pain the world? I wanted to tackle the subject without trivialising it.”

The sadness of the story comes through in both the melody and tone – as well as the lyrics – of the song. So much so, that alternative LA radio station KROQ picked up Sorrow as a post-September 11 anthem for America’s psychological landscape – a full three months before the album’s release.

The irony of a post-September 11 anthem written by a band called Bad Religion isn’t lost on Brett and Greg, although they want to make it clear that they were well finished on the album before September 11 and that they’re not trying to capitalise on tragedy. Brett was actually busy mixing down the finished album while he watched the events of that day unfold on the TV monitor in his Westbeach Studio. The events have no direct influence on The Process Of Belief , but you could be easily mistaken for thinking otherwise – especially with the power, impact, and message of the songs on the album.

“We knew we wanted to make a very strong statement that had a lot of personal weight and personal experience wrapped up in the songs,” says Greg. “We wanted to make a meaningful album and one that spoke to our Humanitarian slant. Because of that, it almost seems like we did write some of the songs after September 11.”

As an MSc graduate and ex-lecturer, Greg’s own beliefs go hand-in-hand with his current study of a PhD in evolution – rather than acceptance of the Bible’s Genesis book. The album title was chosen by Brett from a line of Greg’s lyrics in the track Materialist : ‘ The process of belief is an elixir when you’re weak’ . Look at the rest of the song’s lyrics closely and you’ll realise Materialist is a more of an anti-religious song than anyone like Ozzy or Judas Priest have ever written.

Fortunately for Bad Religion, America’s Christian right wing are more likely to get wound up by a demonic figure plastering themselves and their stage show in all manner of Satanic imagery than a mild-mannered academic from Cornell University and a respected record label boss.

Brett: “ Materialist refers to belief in God and the biological process that causes the belief in God. It’s a theory that humans are designed to believe. It’s in our biological make-up. Personally I’m driven to be dissatisfied with the results of my ambition and drive. We chose it for a title because it encapsulates what the band name ‘Bad Religion’ has meant all along: let’s challenge belief systems and not be satisfied with the status quo.”

Conscientious as ever, Brett and Greg are at pains to clarify the true meaning of the song. “It’s not about ‘materialism’ in the sense of shopping,” says Brett “It’s not ‘materialistic’, it’s ‘materialist’, says Greg. We’re not talking about the song Material Girl by Madonna, we’re talking about the philosophical school of ‘materialism’. It states that there isn’t spirituality that exists in the universe, it’s simply a projection of our own minds, so that all that exists in the universe are material properties. That is, atoms and molecules, and any other properties we ascribe to them.”

Still with us?

“Materialism is basically an atheistic philosophy,” says Brett, keen to clarify things again. “As opposed to deism or theism. It could be easily misconstrued though.”

But of course.

“Y’see, materialism is the foundation of a religion called Modernism,” grins Greg, warming to his theme. “And Modernism is actually something that has been suggested as the religion of worshipping capitalism, i.e. being materialistic.”

“I think this is all getting a bit dry,” says Brett. “We don’t want to come off as fuckin’ Descartes or something…”

A bit late for that, we feel. So Poindexter, why do people actually need something to believe in? “I don’t think they do – it’s a biological property of their brain,” says Greg. “Thing is, most people need an institution to provide them for it.”

It’s true; we’re all hard-wired to have something to believe in. It just seems that religion is the easy way out for most people to manage their belief systems. But what’s the alternative?

“There’s a modern school of thought called Humanism,” says Brett. “It’s a Godless belief system but basically says there’s hope for humanity without the need for some kind of divine guiding intelligence – one can still come up with a meaningful system of morals and values. The message of Bad Religion is certainly one of Secular Humanism.”

Secular Humanism has probably been most famously exemplified by controversial author Salman Rushdie and his challenges to religious orthodoxy. His 1988 book The Satanic Verses was banned by the Islamic Faith and a fatwa [Islamic death sentence] was issued upon him by the late Ayatollah Khomeini, forcing Rushdie into hiding for many years. It’s a defiant philosophy – compared to organised religions – where, simply put, people think for themselves. It dates back to ancient Greece and that period’s philosophers and mythology – again, an area where Bad Religion also draw inspiration for songs.

In terms of artistic merit, it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to draw a parallel between Rushdie’s incendiary writing and Bad Religion’s explosive songs. On the new album, Prove It sums up the philosophy’s aggressive defiance: ‘ There’s no such thing as hell/There’s no proof necessary/It’s only in your mind.’

If Secular Humanism is belief in your own destiny and success, such beliefs are apt for Bad Religion at the moment. “It’s important to note that we had to believe in ourselves to make this album,” says Brett. “We had some troubles that we had to overcome.” Brett cites personal differences between himself and bassist Jay Bentley as something he’s had to settle to make The Process Of Belief . And his substance addictions have been well documented over the years. These are the real reasons that caused Brett to leave the band in the first place after they signed to Atlantic. “I was out of my mind most of the time so I didn’t really pay much attention to what was going on,” he admits with a shrug and the look of regret.

Brett recorded one song on BR’s last contractual obligation to Atlantic: 2000’s critically acclaimed The New America . That preceded the reunion of Greg and Brett and helped heal wounds. So: punk rock. Still something to believe in? Is the fact that Bad Religion are seen as the godfathers of SoCal punk – with 1987’s Suffer revitalising the stale late-80s scene in the US – a cross to bear?

“No, it’s a feather in our caps,” says Brett. “Every time I think the scene’s peaked it gets bigger and more widespread. Especially now with the pop-punk groups – and a really vital underground. Punk rock dissent is still alive and well.”

Mainstream punk has its detractors but Brett isn’t one of them. Bad Religion may have been panned for playing with punk pop tarts Blink 182, but they did it all the same. Brett sees punk in the mainstream and underground punk as a parallel: both survive simultaneously without either taking anything away from the other. Kids who are listening to Blink this year will be buying Crass in another few years, he reckons.

“I like punk. And I like pop punk,” he avers. “You can do both well and you can do both poorly. You don’t need to be political to be punk.”

So if you don’t need to be political to be punk, what do you need to be?

“You need to be punk. That’s why it’s called punk.”

What is punk?

“Anyone who needs to ask will never know.”

Believe it.

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A regular contributor to Louder/Classic Rock and The Quietus, Burrows began his career in 1979 with a joke published in Whizzer & Chips. In the early 1990s he self-published a punk/comics zine, then later worked for Cycling Plus, Redline, MXUK, MP3, Computer Music, Metal Hammer and Classic Rock magazines. He co-wrote Anarchy In the UK: The Stories Behind the Anthems of Punk with the late, great Steven Wells and adapted gothic era literature into graphic novels. He also had a joke published in Viz. He currently works in creative solutions, lives in rural Oxfordshire and plays the drums badly.

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Science Vs. Religion: The “Punk Paradox” of Bad Religion’s Greg Graffin

Science meets religion in the form of greg graffin, the evolutionary biology professor and co-founder of the californian punk band bad religion, jade kennedy, jade kennedy's most recent stories.

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Greg Graffin is a man of science. With a master’s degree in geology and a Ph.D. in biology, Graffin has taught subjects like evolutionary biology at University of California Los Angeles and Cornell University, where he wrote a dissertation entitled “ Evolution, Monism, Atheism, and the Naturalist Worldview. ”

Like many academics, Graffin has authored multiple books, including  Evolution and Religion , Anarchy Evolution: Faith, Science and Bad Religion in a World Without God , and Population Wars: A New Perspective on Competition and Coexistence .

Unlike other academics, however, Greg Graffin is also the front man for one of the world’s longest-serving punk rock bands , Bad Religion.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, punk was an emerging subculture on the streets of Los Angeles. Graffin, in his early teens at the time, recalls some of the transition from child to teenager in his recent memoir, Punk Paradox .

“I wasn’t the best cultural anthropologist at the time, because I was only 15 when we started the band,” he laughs. “Bad Religion formed my first I guess ‘excursion’ into being part of a subculture… But I was still basically a kid, not qualified to comment on the implications of the subculture.”

Describing the Los Angeles punk scene as chaotic, Graffin says Bad Religion’s arrival on the scene in 1980 was nothing new, with punk bands already performing in clubs around Hollywood.

“We didn’t really ‘arrive’ on the scene,” Graffin corrects himself. “We rehearsed in my mom’s garage – that was our ‘scene’ – and we tried to go out into Hollywood to go to concerts or go to clubs, and half of them we didn’t get in, so we just hung out outside.

“We didn’t really ‘arrive’ on the scene… We rehearsed in my mom’s garage – that was our ‘scene’.”

“But on the streets of Hollywood it was everything you’ve read about. Everything you’ve heard: a lot of violence, and lot of crime, a lot of sleaze… and a lot of drugs and alcohol.”

Graffin and co-writer Brett Gurewitz and himself listened to a lot of progressive rock and classic rock in the 1970s, but when punk music emerged, there were bands they wanted to emulate the look and stage presence of when creating their own band.

“Brett was a really big fan of The Ramones, and I loved all the LA bands like The Gears and Black Flag and the Circle Jerks,” Graffin says. “And likewise, we were just part of a scene with a lot of contemporary bands, like Agent Orange and The Adolescents, so we were forming a culture of our own and borrowing from each other – liberally.”

Although Bad Religion was so named because the then-teens thought it would cause distress to adults, there is a deeper meaning behind the band’s name, which Graffin says they were lucky to grasp early on.

“Most teenagers don’t really know much about – or care much about – the future, and we didn’t necessarily care about the future, but we chose a name that you could talk about until you were old and grey, like I am,” Graffin laughs. “Religion is something that never goes away, it’s a conversation that you can literally carry to your grave. And the importance of religion in one’s life is a constant meander between significance and irrelevance, and I think we were very fortunate to touch on the as a theme because it has formed a thematic background for all of our song writing, too.”

Bad Religion’s memoir, Do What You Want , was written by friend of the band Jim Ruland, which was released in time for the band’s 40th anniversary – right at the beginning of the COVID pandemic.

“People who enjoy knowing every little detail of the band’s history are really going to like Jim’s book, because every detail of the band is in that book,” Graffin says. “From the time we started ‘til the last concert we played up until 2020 – Jim even came on tour with the band in 2019, when he was writing it.”

Referring to the book as “the Bad Religion chronology” Graffin explains his approach to writing his own memoir was more novelistic than encyclopaedic, where he treats himself as the protagonist of the story.

“I wanted there to be a story thread that could be mapped onto the chronology that Jim provided,” he says. “So, I say Jim’s book is like the skeleton, and my book is like the connective tissue and the muscles. They go hand in hand, but if you’re literary in your interests then I think Punk Paradox is a nice complement to Do What You Want .”

Do What You Want chronicles Bad Religion’s first show, which is referred to on the band’s Wikipedia page as their first “unofficial” show with Social Distortion, who is co-headlining the band’s upcoming Australian and New Zealand shows.

“It was official, in a sense, even though it wasn’t at a legitimate club – it was at some warehouse in Orange County,” Graffin says. “But yeah, that was our first show ever, so it’s pretty cool being friends with these guys for so long… we’ve sort of both gone off on our own trajectory, and it’s nice now to be coming back together.”

Graffin says the double billing is particularly special because, despite both bands being actively touring for most of the last 43 years, they have rarely billed together.

“I don’t think there’s ever been a co-headlining tour with Social D and Bad Religion, so that is why this is a remarkable occurrence – and we’re kicking it off in Australia.”

“I don’t think there’s ever been a co-headlining tour with Social D and Bad Religion, so that is why this is a remarkable occurrence – and we’re kicking it off in Australia,” Graffin says. “For whatever reason we spent a lot of time touring in Europe over those decades, and they spent a lot of time touring in the States, and by the time we toured the States, which was usually in the fall, they would have already played all the venues over the summer. We played the same size venues, so we did more hopscotching, and we didn’t play together.”

Bad Religion had planned to do a retrospective show in 2020 to celebrate the band’s four-decade career, but plans were foiled by COVID-19 and the worldwide travel restrictions.

“So, this will be, essentially, the show that we were planning to do,” Graffin says. “Which is going to be a good look back at our history.”

Graffin says he divorces himself from the process of choosing songs to perform out of Bad Religion’s back catalogue of around 300 tracks, but bass player Jay Bentley takes great strides to catalogue each performance.

“He has a database of the last time we were in Sydney or something, and he’ll say, ‘Oh yeah, so this is the show we did then,’ and pays attention to that stuff and changes it up so that it doesn’t become redundant,” Graffin says. “With the number of songs that we have, it’s easy to make things sound fresh again – there are songs we have never played, so we can break something out and say hey, that’s the first time we ever played it.”

Having written so much material, Graffin says it is difficult to write new songs that are different but also great tracks.

“I speak on behalf of my co-writer Brett that we both have always felt the pressure to put out something great,” he says. “And sometimes we miss – as my friend Brian Baker, our guitar player, says: they can’t all be winners. But we try every single song, we think, is going to be great – and we wouldn’t record it or release it if we didn’t think that.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_I77GEybVs

The band’s most recent album, Age of Unreason , was their 17th studio release, and was eerily prophetic in some ways, thematically, to the pandemonium of the global epidemic that soon followed. It was also very political, in many ways.

“We always have insisted that we don’t write concept albums; it wasn’t an overarching concept album,” Graffin says. “There were songs on it that pointed to the absurdity of the democratic process that we’ve seen… I won’t say ‘ruined’, I’ll just say, ‘temporarily impaired’, so songs like “Candidate” are kind of a tongue in cheek parody of who we’re voting for these days.”

Then there are tracks like “Chaos From Within”, which suggests that maybe the chaos in the world today is really because of a flaw in human reasoning.

“Maybe it comes from up here,” Graffin says, indicating his head, “As much as our actions in the streets. So, it was very appropriate for what was going on – not only in the COVID epidemic, but in the crazy years leading up to it. And in many ways, it’s still very relevant today.”

Bad Religion with Social Distortion Australian/New Zealand Tour

Full ticket information available at badreligion.com

Wednesday, February 15th The Trusts Arena, Auckland, NZ

Friday, February 17th Riverstage, Brisbane, QLD

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Sunday, February 19th Margaret Court Arena, Melbourne, VIC

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Punk Rock Professor Talks Anarchy And Evolution

At the same time Greg Graffin was starting the legendary punk rock band Bad Religion, he was becoming fascinated by evolutionary biology. Both would become lifelong pursuits. He talks about the connection in his new book, Anarchy Evolution: Faith, Science, and Bad Religion in a World Without God.

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Music interviews, the amygdaloids mix neuroscience and rock 'n' roll.

Copyright © 2010 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

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Bad Religion's Greg Graffin on cramming 40 years of punk-rock chaos into one book

Do What You Want: The Story of Bad Religion, explores the band's founding and rise to fame.

After 17 albums, 350-plus songs, multiple lineup changes, and all the punk-rock chaos you can imagine, Bad Religion is finally getting the book treatment their legendary career deserves. The forthcoming autobiography Do What You Want: The Story of Bad Religion, co-authored by writer Jim Ruland, explores the band's early days, from starting out as teenagers in a San Fernando Valley garage (appropriately nicknamed “The Hell Hole”) to battling for radio play to having run-ins with the police.

"I think the moment when my passion for punk rock and the challenge of writing a biography clicked was when I realized very few people know the whole story of Bad Religion," Ruland tells EW. "There are so many moments when I thought, 'How on earth did this band stay together?”

With insights from lead singer Greg Graffin, guitarist Brett Gurewitz, bassist Jay Bentley, and an all-star cast of punk rock legends, Do What You Want sheds light on the 40-year career of a band who worked their way into history by doing things their own way.

Graffin, who has been spending most of his quarantine time teaching classes remotely at Cornell University, took some time to briefly about the new book, Bad Religion's continued influence, and keeping in touch with an evolving audience.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: How did you guys decide that now was the time for a Bad Religion biography?

Greg Graffin: We got to give due credit to Jim Ruland, the author of the book. Even though we are listed as the authors, Jim really did the work. [He] had a herculean task. He had to put 40 years of history into a readable and enjoyable narrative. I think he did a fantastic job. But the original nugget of an idea came from the fact that there've been a lot of punk histories written and punk documentaries [released]. They all sort of had the following narrative: Punk got started with the Sex Pistols, then it moved to New York. In New York, the punk scene got big. Then by 1982 punk died. Then in 1992, Nirvana was born. OK, there's like this 10-year history between '82 and '92, where very little was written about. Those were the years that Bad Religion was extremely industrious. Our formative years started in 1980... Squarely in the middle of that period, Suffer was recorded [and] has proven to be extremely influential to a lot of those bands that were part of the sort of explosion of punk that happened in the '90s. That story was interesting to tell.

As one of the main figures of this story, what kind of emotions and memories went through your head when revisiting it?

Well, the most important thing of course is to not give up. I think anything that is worthy of a long history and worthy of a story that should be read is because the people in it felt passionate about what they were doing. I think the drive was there from the beginning. We wanted to open people's minds and make them aware of the world that they were living in. It was, I think, an honorable journey that we started on — and we're still on it today. [It's] absolutely stunning and shocking to me that there's still people who want to hear our story and hear our music. That's never far from my mind. But the other thing is that none of it could have been achieved without the people and without our fans and also without the mutual support that we give one another.

Bad Religion's music was always able to tap into younger audiences. H ow do you continue to do that after 40 years?

I see a lot of the younger kids in the audience and that's deeply meaningful. It's not as meaningful as how often I get told by people and fans "Because of you, I went to college." I have professors now who come up to me and say, "I went into academics because of this album." Or something like that. That's very meaningful to me. I've always approached being a lead singer like being a professor. There's a lot of professors who want to be more like rock stars, which is kind of bizarre to me because I always wanted to be a professor. The thing is, you never think like, "Oh, I'm not going to take that class because that professor is so old. He can't relate to me."

You guys did the box set for your 30th anniversary, you are doing the book for your 40th. Anything planned for a 50th yet? Or are you just going to play that card when you get there?

We always joked about this, but if we reach 50, I do want to do something that we've been talking about since our 20th anniversary: a Bad Religion roast. We would basically have to rent out the Hollywood Palladium because [and] give tickets to everybody who was important to the band. We'd talk about them and show a big presentation and bring them up on stage. When you've been around that long, you've been in partnership with a lot of people. I just think that would be so much fun and we've always joked about it, but that would be my goal.

Anything else coming up for you or the band?

We've been working on some music, just as we're socially distant from each other; each of us has home recording studios. I always write music acoustically. There's a lot of that coming out. In terms of big releases, the main thing is the book and then hopefully getting out there and honoring all the tickets we sold in 2020.

Do What You Want: The Story of Bad Religion is out Aug. 18.

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40 years of bad religion: vocalist greg graffin on science deniers, garage days and band’s inner strife.

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Greg Graffin of Bad Religion performs at The Forum on December 8, 2018 in Inglewood, California ... [+] (Photo by Emma McIntyre/Getty Images for KROQ/Entercom)

At the onset of the 1980s, a group of teenagers from El Camino Real High School in Woodland Hills, California, came together to start the punk band Bad Religion. For about a year and half, the group would gather every day after school and rehearse in vocalist Greg Graffin’s garage, which they nicknamed the “Hell Hole.”

Located in a back alley, the two-car garage was tucked within an endless stream of garages — much like the suburban landscape of the San Fernando Valley. The wooden structure had no insulation and a black tile roof that baked the building underneath.

“It literally got to 130 degrees in there on a daily basis,” 55-year-old Greg Graffin says. “It was miserable.”

Inside the garage were stacks of unpacked boxes — Graffin and his mother had recently moved from a large house in Wisconsin to a small house in the Valley — and the shelving was filled with linens and other junk. There was also a late 70s Oldsmobile, which dominated much of the real estate. In the space that remained, the young musicians set up a drum kit and some amplifiers.

“It was just this hellacious place to practice,” he says laughing. “And it’s because my mom was the only one of the parents that allowed it, mostly because she was always supportive of me being a musician, even though this was early experimental days. The music did not sound like any music she could imagine we were gonna be playing.”

Punk rock crowd in the front row at a Bad Religion gig in San Diego, California, 1994. (Photo by ... [+] Martyn Goodacre/Getty Images)

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The neighbors couldn’t believe what they were hearing, either. The improvising punks needed soundproofing, but found it from an unconventional source. Unfortunately, the band had a friend whose sister was in a coma. Every few weeks, when the hospital switched out the patient’s foam mattress for a fresh one, Bad Religion added a new piece of lining to their wall.

“It was really kind of morbid,” Graffin says. “But the truth is, those medical grade foams are great for insulation. Now, that also made it all the hotter inside, so it didn’t improve any of the airflow. That’s why we ended up painting ‘Welcome to the Hell Hole’ on the mattresses.”

Those sweaty garage sessions were the foundation for an over 40 year career in punk music, as founding members Graffin, guitarist/songwriter Brett Gurewitz, and bassist Jay Bentley, secured Bad Religion’s status as trailblazers of modern punk music.

Over the years, Gurewitz would take the label he launched to jumpstart Bad Religion — Epitaph Records — and turn it into one of the largest independent record labels in music. Graffin would go on to pursue a career in academia as an evolutionary biologist, receiving his Ph.D. from Cornell University. Despite their independent endeavors, they always found home in Bad Religion.

In 2020, the guys are still releasing new music. Their discography touts 17 full-length albums. And the band’s iconic Crossbuster logo is known around the world.

In a new book, Do What You Want: The Story of Bad Religion, out now, the band’s history is detailed by various members and co-author Jim Ruland. Below, singer Greg Graffin discusses the current climate of anti-science in America, the band’s inner turmoil and the legacy of Bad Religion.

Musicians Jay Bentley, Greg Graffin, Brett Gurewitz and Brian Baker of Bad Religion perform at The ... [+] Forum on December 08, 2018 in Inglewood, California. (Photo by Scott Dudelson/WireImage)

As a man of science, how frustrating has this year been? Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, have you been going crazy with the anti-science, conspiracy theory people and anti-maskers?

One thing is for sure, if you look at the Bad Religion catalog, my co-writer Brett Gurewitz and myself have been writing songs about anti-science people for 30 years plus. We’ve kind of been writing the primer for a world that we wish we didn’t have to live in right now [laughs], but it seems to have come true. There seems to be a current in today’s world that thinks that blind faith is going to get us through this thing.

We just released a song called “Faith Alone 2020” and it’s based on a song from our catalog called “Faith Alone” (1990), so we did a new version of it. The words and ideas for that song are more relevant today than ever.

This idea that we don’t have to listen to science and we don’t have to pay any attention to fact, that everything is some kind of a political strategy or conspiracy theory… this is very disconcerting. It’s very difficult to live in a world like that. 

But I must say, a pandemic, it brings it to the forefront, because you can live in a world of faith and you can ignore science for a long time until you can’t ignore it anymore when you’re confronted with something like this.

I feel the worst for the people who are suffering. It has nothing to do with politics or religion, if you’ve got an infection that you can’t fight, then you deserve better than this. You deserve to be taken care of. The richest country in the world should have a better system of taking care of you than we do.

Is it angering to see people willfully ignoring science? “I see these facts, I see the sources and I refuse to believe it.” Many of those same people get sick from the virus. Then how do you feel? It’s a complicated time in humanity…

That’s ultimately where your ethics have to kick in. Even if they’re on the wrong side of the political or belief spectrum, you still have to extend your humanity to them and help them out. It doesn’t give me any sense of joy to say, “I told you so.” 

Now, there are people who are like that: the people who believe in science and then flaunt their arrogance and say, “I told you so.” That’s just as disheartening to me as people who are science deniers. It’s a sad reflection of humankind.

Bad Religion performing live at a USC frat party. Band members are left to right: Brett Gurewitz, ... [+] Greg Graffin, Jay Ziskrout and Jay Bentley. (Photo by Gary Leonard/Corbis via Getty Images)

The book spends a fair amount of time discussing violence in the California punk community during the 80s, but you guys tried to stay away from it. You experienced some bullying though, didn’t you?

The punk scene had its violent aspects, but most of the bands that I knew wanted to distance themselves from the violence. Punk, for us at least, it was a fun place to hang out and be with like-minded people — but like-minded did not extend to gang fights, it just wasn’t cool.

The only violence that we saw, people had a strong hatred for punk rock. The people who were into music like from the 70s, “long-haired music” as we would call it, they hated punk! For some reason, they saw it as a threat. Random beatings took place, “Beat up the punk rocker!” That was very common at schools.

In Hollywood, we could hang out and have safety in numbers, but when we were by ourselves in our little suburban communities, people would harass us on the streets. People in their pickup trucks would drive by and shout, “Punk sucks, you f***ing f**s!”

Jay [Bentley], our bass player, once got beat up at school by the bully, who picked him up and threw him upside down in a trash can [laughs].

One time I got beat up at school from some jock on the football team, he wanted to pick a fight in the hallway. There in front of everybody, he just started wailing on me. Nobody came to my assistance and he just walked down the hall with his cadre of supporters and acted as though he’d just thrown the winning touchdown.

That kind of violence was completely inexplicable. I didn’t understand it. What are these people so angry about?

Bad Religion’s second album, a prog-rock record called Into the Unknown, is discussed in great detail as the band’s grand faux pas. It was characterized as a total disaster, Brett Gurewitz even said he burned boxes of the records in his driveway. After all these years, doesn’t that make people even more curious about the album?

Bad Religion's 1983 prog-rock album, 'Into The Unknown' was hated by punk fans.

Anything that pisses people off so much, there must be something good about it. I’m that way about everything. I don’t understand, at this juncture, why it should be seen as taboo. 

It was simply a teenage experimentation — and it’s a terrible idea [laughs]. If anybody is thinking of becoming a popular band, it’s a good study for how not to be popular. We gave people exactly what they didn’t want to hear. We gave them zero consistency with our previous release which was actually very popular.

It really was self-defeating as a professional piece of work, but I really believed in my heart of hearts that punk was about not being able to read a book by its cover, not prejudging something and expecting it to fit a stereotype, I thought it was one of the most punk things we could do to put out something that was completely unexpected.

The album isn’t on Spotify, but if you look at the version uploaded to YouTube, ironically, many of the comments are overwhelmingly positive.

My son and my daughter, my older ones, are really much more open-minded and they don’t judge things in categories the way that people did back then. When that album came out, everyone was fixed in their categorization of music. If something was punk, it had to conform to a certain formula. Thankfully, with all the mashups and all the content on the internet, those barriers have been broken down. The drawback is it’s harder to make any consensus about, “What does genre even mean anymore?” It’s good and bad. 

But I do think people are more open-minded today, so I’m not surprised by the comments because the album itself does sound pretty cool. It’s just, if you have too much history and knowledge about it, you realize how bizarre the influences were and what a total “f*** you” it was to the punkers at the time. That’s when you realize that this thing is just out of left field and it didn’t really care about the audience that was gonna listen to it.

Bad Religion during KROQ Almost Acoustic Christmas, 1994 in Los Angeles, CA, United States. (Photo ... [+] by Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic, Inc)

Around 1994, Bad Religion signed a four-album contract with Atlantic Records — you recorded the first album, Stranger Than Fiction , then shortly after Brett Gurewitz quit the band and you were going through a divorce. How did you keep your composure during this period?

Part of me didn’t want to admit the reality. As I get older, I realize people respond to adversity in different ways. My way of responding to adversity is by not acknowledging, I kind of live in denial. 

So, Brett left the band, I entered a phase of denial that he mattered to the band, even though I was not outwardly hostile to Brett. To this day, I never said a mean word to him for leaving the band. That’s another insight into how I cope with adversity, I don’t say, “F*** you, you’re a piece of s***, get the f*** out of my life.”

Bad Religion singer Greg Graffin, portrait, San Diego, California, United States, 1994. (Photo by ... [+] Martyn Goodacre/Getty Images)

If people don’t want to be with me, I just move on. That’s my way of dealing with it. I never burned any bridges with Brett and it’s a good thing I didn’t because he eventually wanted to come back and we all wanted him back.

I just put my nose to the grindstone and worked harder. I had to write a whole album. Brian Baker [Minor Threat guitarist who joined shortly after] helped me with a little bit of the writing, but The Gray Race came out in the absence of Brett.

I also was running a household with two little kids in the absence of my first wife. Again, there was no hostility, there was simply doubling my efforts to create a divorce situation that was tolerable for the kids. I was driving back and forth from New York City to Ithaca and then bringing the kids out on tour with a full-time nanny and a personal assistant. Things got really busy. I took a leave of absence in the middle of my Ph.D. work. I’m glad that I made that compromise, that would’ve killed me.

But ultimately, it kicked me into high gear and I never acknowledged that floor dropping out. We got through it and things started to get easier by the time The New America was recorded. We’d started talking with Brett because he decided that he was at a place where he could get back in the band now.

It appears that you and the other members of Bad Religion shared many experiences but also lived very different lives. You worked on academics throughout the country, whereas Brett and Jay were building Epitaph Records — Brett as the owner and Jay working in the warehouse and driving a forklift. At one point they even went to counseling together.

Is it a weird miracle that you were never a part of this drama? Do you think there was resentment that while they were loading boxes you were doing your doctoral studies?

Let’s not candy coat it. When you’re the singer of the band, there are a lot of perks and privileges. I won’t say that it also doesn’t come with a lot of burden, it does. But when you’re the face of the band, delivering the message of the band, it doesn’t matter what you do, the perception is that you’re the most important. Forget the fact the biggest hit songs of our band were written by Brett. Everyone thinks I wrote them because I sing 'em! 

Internally, every band has to deal with that, from The Rolling Stones to the smallest punk band you could imagine. “Hey, I did all the work, why does the f***ing singer get all the credit?” 

You see that all the time, not just Van Halen, which is a great example, you wonder why certain guys can’t be in the same band together, Creedence Clearwater Revival, what’s going on there? It’s the unraveling of so many bands because the members have these internal strifes that they just can’t get over. 

Jay Bentley and Greg Graffin of Bad Religion during 2004 Vans Warped Tour 10th Anniversary Reunion ... [+] Show - Boston. (Photo by Marc Andrew Deley/FilmMagic)

How did Bad Religion survive all these years? There may have been resentments, there may have been deep-seeded seething hatred that I missed out on all that drama that was going on in L.A. while I was out here getting my Ph.D. at Cornell. 

But the truth is, it was the Band-Aid (pun intended) that got us through the most difficult periods. The internal strife dissipated because we weren’t having nightly arguments. We would have official band business and I would show up and then I’d be back away from those guys and the day-to-day stuff, doing what I do best: taking care of myself, writing music and exploring my academics. All those things aided not only in the material benefits of Bad Religion — that was some of the stuff that actually became songwriting material  — but it, more importantly, gave me something else to focus on other than the drama.

While those guys were going through all that, they were also struggling personally with many demons. I think, today if you asked them, they don’t harbor any resentment because we all got through that and we still think highly of one another. We’ve never been reduced to arguing about past resentments.

Various members of the band have had severe substance abuse issues, but you were never a drinker or into drugs. Did you ever get involved? Or did you let everyone deal with their own addictions? All the storylines involving crazy drugs stories never really reference you, it’s almost as if you just existed in your own ecosystem...

That’s a very good observation — and it’s probably testimony to my own immaturity — even though for all intents and purposes the band is my own — I always looked at it as a free collective of bunch of individuals who are free to destroy it as they see fit. 

I was never a ringleader where I would say, “We’re playing in front of 20,000 people in South America tomorrow and you guys are drinking a bottle of Jack Daniels the night before. How’s that gonna affect us?” I was never that person.

If we were gonna be embarrassed, we were gonna be embarrassed collectively, but I wasn’t gonna be the source of that embarrassment if it came from drugs and alcohol. 

If those guys could not perform — I guess there’s another aspect here... I know those guys. They’re gonna feel far more affected by it than anything I could say to them. 

Brett Gurewitz and Jay Bentley of Bad Religion perform at Coachella, 2015, CA. The musicians have ... [+] both overcome battles with substance abuse. (Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images)

Reprimanding them was not going to help. I always firmly believed, and it’s how I am as a father, that you lead by example. You don’t lead by preaching.

I learned with my kids that in the long run that’s the best policy, but sometimes in the short run it’s not because it looks like you’re too lenient or too tolerant. 

But, I feel like in those years specifically, there was nothing I was gonna tell those guys that was gonna get them to sober up. Even if they were struggling with their own demons, they knew how important those shows were and I think it’s testimony to our collective camaraderie that we never did do any preaching or self-righteous lecturing about those personal issues.

While Brett was out of the band, he was arrested and forced by court order to enter rehab. The moment he’s taken into custody is described like a scene from a movie: he’s walking around in a robe with pockets full of heroin and cocaine when a riot squad shows up to knock on his door and arrest him. At this time, where would you have been? In a classroom?

At that time I was teaching at Cornell. When that was going down, I probably had my hands inside of a specimen teaching students about comparative anatomy. I remember later that night, I don’t know if I got the phone call right away, but I do remember we’d keep in touch by telephone. I couldn’t reach Brett and that was kinda weird. I remember vividly because Jay ended up spilling the beans. But yeah, it does seem like a scene out of a movie.

Greg Graffin and Brett Gurewitz of Bad Religion perform at The Forum on December 8, 2018 in ... [+] Inglewood, California. (Photo by Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic)

At this point are you scared for your friend? Are you thinking, “Wow, I hope this guy doesn’t kill himself doing heroin after all he’d worked so hard to accomplish…”

You care deeply when you hear things like this affecting someone so close to you. But by the same token, you really can’t let it affect you too much because it’s not good for the person who’s in rehab to have the added pressure of people trying to get in touch with him. So, luckily, I was focused on my academics and my home life, and Bad Religion was getting ready to get back on tour, too. Our touring activity at that time was at an all-time high even though Brett wasn’t on tour with us.

Billy Joe of Green Day performing at Shoreline Amphitheater, 1994. While the band once opened for ... [+] Bad Religion, they experienced a whirlwind of success in the 1990s. (Photo by Tim Mosenfelder/Getty Images)

The book discusses how Green Day and other bands that had opened for you and were influenced by you were blowing up and far surpassing the commercial success of Bad Religion. Looking back at the 90s, was that a frustrating reality?

We had a belief that punk music was far more popular than people gave it credit for. The Offspring and Green Day were able to reach that popularity level that I always knew existed. So, in some ways it was very satisfying because my hunches were correct. 

But Bad Religion never was a band that was jealous or marked our own success based on the success of others. We always had an internal satisfaction that was, I think, very mature, for how immature we were in many areas.

The guys never had sour grapes and I didn’t either because we always were really satisfied with our work. If we went out on tour and the material that we had put out that year was crappy, then maybe we’d call it quits or we’d then be showing our rage and frustration and jealousy at the success of others, but the truth is we really believed we had the best material and we just wanted to make it better on the next record.

That constant growth, the constant refinement of our craft is what got us through those years without even looking at the success of others with jealousy, but looking at it with admiration and actually motivation in saying, “Man, if those guys can do that, let’s do that too and let’s put out a better record.” The long history of our songwriting catalogue speaks the loudest. We’re just committed to the craft. And we’ve been very fortunate that other people have recognized that.

Follow me on Twitter at  @DerekUTG .

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Bad Religion’s Greg Graffin returns with a folk-minded record

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Greg Graffin, purveyor of optimistic folk-rock songs?

The generations of punks who were reared on Bad Religion, where Graffin is the melodically venomous lead singer, might be forgiven for doing a spit-take at “Millport,” Graffin’s new album.

Southern California punk music, after all, was born in part as a reaction to the tepid soft rock of Crosby, Stills & Nash and the canyon-rock peers who were floating near the top of the album charts during the early 1970s.

Has Graffin ,who cofounded Bad Religion with Epitaph Records owner Brett Gurewitz, lost his mind?

“Just because it’s a great privilege and I greatly appreciate all the people who love Bad Religion, that doesn’t mean I’m going to pander,” says Graffin. “It doesn’t mean that I’m going to be commercially motivated to capitalize on that.”

A 10-song project created to explore different kinds of tensions, it features Social Distortion members — drummer David Hidalgo Jr., bassist Brent Harding and Jonny “2 Bags” Wickersham (electric and acoustic guitars) — and was produced by Gurewitz.

With a title that’s a far cry from early Bad Religion albums as “How Can Hell Be Any Worse?” and “Suffer,” “Millport” is named for a town near where Graffin now lives in upstate New York. Its notably pastoral cover suggests the humbleness within.

“I wanted every song to be happy,” says Graffin, relaying the first of a few rules he made to himself while writing “Millport.” “I wanted every song to not include the word ‘me.’ I wanted every song to be very evocative — reminders of icons of history and heritage.”

It’s not all roses, though. In “Time of Need,” Graffin wrestles with the existential reality that no matter his heritage or level of success, doom awaits. “In the end there’s no refrain/ There’s just a bag of sour lemons and a name,” he sings with a touch of rasp, to piano backing. “Now, all your hard work and all you’ve made known/ Will be carved on a twelve-inch stone.”

As the song progresses, textures of old gospel music float to the surface. Instead of an “amen” refrain, however, Graffin and a small choir steer away from religion by instead singing, “Hey man.”

Sometimes I like to slam dance and sometimes I like to square dance. I mean, you know, I’m a rounded human being.”

— Greg Graffin of Bad Religion

Graffin stresses that he followed his instincts not as a way of sticking his head in the sand or for sentimental purposes “but, rather, as reminders of things that are still deeply relevant.”

He pauses to add: “I guess, you know, part of that is my own struggle with getting older and remaining relevant.”

This isn’t Graffin’s first so-called departure.

In addition to his two other solo albums, both of which also sidestepped Bad Religion-style aggression, the artist, 52, became known as a kind of punk rock scientist after he earned a zoology PhD from Cornell University on the back of his dissertation, “Evolution, Monism, Atheism and the Naturalist World-View: Perspectives from Evolutionary Biology.”

In 2010, he turned that experience into his first book, “Anarchy Evolution: Faith, Science, and Bad Religion in a World Without God.”

In comparison to a godless world, “Millport” seems like a breeze. With songs such as “Backroads of My Mind,” “Sawmill,” Norman Blake’s “Lincoln’s Funeral Train” and “Echo on the Hill,” it’s the result of what Graffin describes as “an intellectual quest” to meld “different cultures and different aspects of our enlightened society to try and provoke dialogue and try to bring together different communities.”

The artist cites as inspiration singer-songwriters including Gordon Lightfoot, Linda Ronstadt, Steven Stills and Elton John, as well as Neil Young’s band Crazy Horse.

Further, Graffin notes that “Millport” is the product of a kind of bequest: “This kind of music is a part of me,” he says. “And it’s a kind of music that was handed down to me from numerous generations in my family.”

Still, Graffin’s been around the music business long enough to understand its fickleness.

“Let’s face it, it’s not for everybody,” Graffin concludes.

“If you want to slam dance, I wouldn’t buy this record. That’s just the way it goes — although sometimes I like to slam dance and sometimes I like to square dance. I mean, I’m a rounded human being.”

For tips, records, snapshots and stories on Los Angeles music culture, follow Randall Roberts on Twitter and Instagram: @liledit . Email: [email protected] .

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Former staff writer Randall Roberts covered Los Angeles music culture for the Los Angeles Times. He had served various roles since arriving at The Times in 2010, including music editor and pop music critic. As a staff writer, he explored the layered history of L.A. music, from Rosecrans and Sunset to Ventura Boulevard and beyond. His 2020 project on the early Southern California phonograph industry helped identify the first-ever commercial recording made in Los Angeles.

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Bad Religion’s Greg Graffin talks about influencing a generation of punks

• Jay Cridlin Times staff

Here’s a line Greg Graffin sings at every Bad Religion show: “I don’t need to be a global citizen, because I’m blessed by nationality."

Timely, right? Truly inspired by our divisive, isolationist times — just like Bad Religion’s furious, anti-unenlightenment new album Age of Unreason , yes?

Actually, no. That line is from their song American Jesus , which came out way back in 1993.

“Bad Religion has never been reactive,” Graffin said by phone recently. "You can go back and listen to a Bad Religion song 10 years ago, 20 years ago, that will have some relevance today.

“That means two things. That means you’re writing about universals, things that are going to persist through time, and hopefully people will be talking about them in the future. But it also means that we are forward-thinking instead of living in the past. Those are two good things that all songwriters should strive for.”

Spoken like an expert, which Graffin definitely is, even in fields that go way beyond punk.

On the music side, Bad Religion is happy to be touring one year shy of their 40th anniversary, with a show Wednesday at Jannus Live in St. Petersburg. The Los Angeles veterans have influenced a generation of politically inclined groups, not only through brainy, melodic songs like American Jesus and 21st Century (Digital Boy) , but through co-founding guitarist Brett Gurewitz’s seminal punk label Epitaph.

Outside Bad Religion, Graffin is one of rock’s great academic minds. He has a doctorate in zoology from Cornell and has lectured on evolution and paleontology there and at UCLA. Like fellow punk Ph.D.s Dexter Holland of the Offspring and Milo Aukerman of the Descendents, Graffin has put his curious mind to work both inside and outside the studio, inspiring countless fans to do the same.

“A lot of people who’ve been in academics their whole life, who’ve sponsored graduate students and have themselves trained professors, one way they measure their career is by how many academics they’ve created,” said Graffin, 54. "For a really exceptionally good teacher, he might have a handful, maybe 10, maybe 15 people who’ve moved on to become professors.

“It’s unbelievable how many people are on my list who have written to me. It’s probably, I don’t know, 500, maybe even 1,000 people who have gotten in touch with me, shaken my hand on the street, and said how much our work in Bad Religion has helped them to see the world in a better way. And because of that, they went to college, or they went into academics, or they went into being a schoolteacher. To me, that’s the most satisfying thing about being a multigenerational act."

Graffin has long been a musical omnivore, with tastes ranging from prog rock to Kraftwerk to pop bands like the Backstreet Boys. (“ I Want It That Way , that’s an incredible song. That, to me, is, Why didn’t I think of that ?”) He even likes some country music — he picked up the banjo as a teenager and still plays it on his solo albums.

“What I hear coming out of Nashville is incredibly good production,” he said. “There’s not a lot that I would consider innovative. What I see is people in cowboy hats who want to be in a rock 'n' roll band, and they’re somehow calling that country. I don’t really get it. But I’ve heard some of the more legitimate stuff that’s focused on songwriting, and that’s what I always have liked.”

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That’s obvious in Bad Religion’s philosophical, often wordy lyrics. Age of Unreason , for example, tackles the head-in-the-sand hysteria of America’s “extraordinarily unreasonable” political climate, which he likens to the blind idolatry of religion — long a favorite Bad Religion subject.

“There’s a lot of great things about religion, but if you think about what the most flawed, potentially damaging aspect of religion is, it’s that it’s unreasonable," he said. "It doesn’t use verification. It doesn’t use the traditions of the enlightenment to advance its cause.”

Graffin said he and Gurewitz, Bad Religion’s other songwriter, occasionally talk politics, “railing against the things that piss you off in the world,” but no more than any other friends might.

“Friends are supposed to reminisce and have fun and do things,” he said. “There should be some sort of discourse and daily enjoyment of each other that has nothing to do with what the latest tweet of the president was.”

Graffin himself doesn’t spend much time on Twitter, “a place where people exercise their anger and hatred — or worse yet, their boring lives.” When it comes to molding fans’ opinions, he’d prefer to let his music do the talking — and for those fans to make up their minds for themselves.

That said, over the last few years, he has enjoyed watching more Bad Religion fans bring their kids out to shows. Just like all his former students who went on to become academics, he’s thrilled a few punk parents are trying to turn a new generation on to his music.

“I always stop the show and call out the little kids in the front row that are 9 and 10 years old, little kids sitting on their dads’ shoulders,” he said. “That’s really touching. I always try to make a comment about that at shows, or try and shake their hands on the front row.”

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With Emily Davis and the Murder Police. $29.50 and up. 7 p.m. Wednesday. Jannus Live, 200 First Ave. N, St. Petersburg. (727) 565-0550. jannuslive.com .

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Music + concerts | high school football: live updates from friday night’s games, things to do, music + concerts, music + concerts | bad religion’s greg graffin talks about the band’s 40 years of punk rock, the singer also reveals a family secret about the group, which started in woodland hills in 1980..

The San Fernando Valley-based punk rock band had plans to commemorate its 40th anniversary, but the coronavirus global pandemic forced the cancellation of its 2020 global jaunt.

As well, this year marks anniversaries for three of Bad Religion’s biggest albums: Its 1990 album “Against the Grain” turns 30, 2000’s “The New America” turns 20 and 2010’s “The Dissent of Man” celebrates its 10th anniversary.

“We’ve always done something important in the years that end in zero,” vocalist Greg Graffin said during a phone interview in February. As well as music from those albums, the band had planned to perform songs off its most recent collection, 2019’s “The Age of Unreason,” along with fan favorites such as “Infected,” “No Control,” “American Jesus,” and “Los Angeles is Burning.”

San Fernando Valley punk rock band Bad Religion (pictured performing at Pacific Amphitheater in Costa Mesa in 2014) is celebrating its 40th anniversary in 2020. (Photo by Michael Goulding, Orange County Register/SCNG)

Punk rock band Bad Religion (from left: Mike Dimkich, Jamie Miller, Jay Bentley, Greg Graffin, Brett Gurewitz and Brian Baker) celebrates its 40th anniversary in 2020. It also celebrates the 10th, 20th and 30th anniversaries of some of is biggest albums this year. (Photo by Alice Baxley)

San Fernando Valley punk rock band Bad Religion (pictured performing at Surf City Blitz at Huntington State Beach in 2018) celebrates its 40th anniversary in 2020. (Photo by Kelly A. Swift, Contributing Photographer)

Punk rock band Bad Religion (from left: Jay Bentley, Mike Dimkich, Jamie Miller, Greg Graffin, Brett Gurewitz and Brian Baker) celebrates its 40th anniversary in 2020. It also celebrates the 10th, 20th and 30th anniversaries of some of is biggest albums this year. (Photo by Alice Baxley)

San Fernando Valley punk rock band Bad Religion (pictured performing at the Punk ‘N Brew Craft Beer & Music Festival in Huntington Beach in 2017) celebrates its 40th anniversary in 2020. (Photo by Kelly A. Swift, Contributing Photographer)

Punk rock band Bad Religion (from left: Mike Dimkich, Jamie Miller, Greg Graffin, Brett Gurewitz, Jay Bentley and Brian Baker) celebrates its 40th anniversary in 2020. It also celebrates the 10th, 20th and 30th anniversaries of some of is biggest albums this year. (Photo by Alice Baxley)

“We really do look at [Bad Religion] as a lifetime together, and a lifetime as individuals who are committed to each other,” he said. “We’re committed to raising awareness and enlightening people through our music. We don’t want to get too hung up on the fact that it’s a 40th anniversary, though that is a huge milestone that we are very proud of. But we look at it as another opportunity to share music with people who may not have had a chance to see us and we believe we can play and sing as well now, if not better, than we did before. So it’s not just a nostalgic thing.”

Though playing live isn’t an option right now, a history of the band, “Do What You Want: The Story of Bad Religion” by author Jim Ruland , will be published on Aug. 18.

It’s a story that begins at El Camino Real High School in Woodland Hills in 1979 and moves on to the first time Graffin, guitarist Brett Gurewitz, bassist Jay Bentley and former drummer Jay Ziskrout got together to play at “The Hell Hole” (the nickname for Graffin’s mother Marcella’s garage in Canoga Park) in 1980.

“Jim [Ruland] did such a fantastic job fitting in thousands of hours of interviews into story form, because you have to remember when you’re as old as we are, it’s not just that memories fade,” said. “But people have different recollections of events.

“[Ruland] did a great job of streamlining those events and getting the actual facts. One of the funniest quotes in there is from an unexpected source: Peter [Finestone], our old drummer,” said Graffin. “Peter saying something like ‘Whenever Brett and Greg were in a room, there wasn’t much oxygen left for anything else.’ Reading that now, I’m like, I didn’t know I had that effect on Peter, but I love that honesty included in the book.”

Graffin said he’s the only member of Bad Religion, out of nearly a dozen others through the years, that at some point didn’t quit or walk out. Even as he embarked on archaeological digs, moved to the east coast to obtain his PhD in Zoology from Cornell University and simultaneously teach at UCLA , Graffin stayed the course with the band.

“I hope that’s an indication of my tenacity,” he said with a laugh. “I hope these [guys] I’m working with finally realize how tolerant I am. Every one of them has had enough but me. I never did throw a tanty, now did I?”

Having four decades of memories chronicled in one book has given the band a chance to pause and look back at some of its accomplishments.

Graffin recalled the first time legendary KROQ DJ Rodney Bingenheimer played Bad Religion’s song “Politics” off its 1981 self-titled debut EP.

“It’s the hometown thrill and when I first heard myself on the radio, it was otherworldly,” he said. “You can’t believe it’s actually happening and then you start to hear it over and over through the decades and you hear your songs in strange places like the mall or someone is blasting it in their car on PCH.”

Though Bad Religion is a roaring punk rock band, Gurewitz and Graffin share some of their influences and inspirations behind certain songs: Neil Young’s “Cowgirl in the Sand” inspired the band’s song “Suffer,” and Elvis Costello’s “Watching the Detectives” was on Gurewitz’s mind as he worked out “Anesthesia.” Gurewitz admits he initially rejected the band’s ’90s hit “21st Century (Digital Boy)” because he thought it sounded too much like the Alice Cooper song “Poison.”

While Graffin said his vocal style was influenced by a variety of punk rock singers, as well as Costello, Young and Todd Rundgren, he was teased for admitting that Jethro Tull had made an impact on him.

“Everyone poked fun at me for that,” he said.

In 40 years, Bad Religion — which currently consists of Graffin, Gurewitz, Bentley, former Minor Threat guitarist Brian Baker, guitarist Mike Dimkich and drummer Jamie Miller, the newest member who joined in 2016 — has released 17 albums and done countless tours around the world. It was the first band signed to Gurewitz’s now robust L.A.-based indie label, Epitaph Records, and they’ve gone on to influence a new generation of punks in bands like Rise Against , AFI, Authority Zero and many, many more.

Vocalist Greg Barnett of the punk rock band The Menzingers said Bad Religion was one of the reasons he wanted to start a group.

“They had such a huge impact on my life as a musician,” he said during a phone interview. “I got a hold of ‘Suffer’ in like 1999 or 2000 and it stopped me in my tracks. I was into Green Day, Blink-182 and Nirvana at the time, but when I heard that album it was all a minute or two-minute songs and it was fast, angry, smart. I connected with that and how intelligent the songs were. All of that stuck with me and it had a huge influence on the type of band we wanted to be. We wanted to be a band that mattered, that could sing about politics and actually feel like you’re doing something that mattered.”

Though Graffin said he doesn’t know if he can picture himself and the guys rockin’ out on stage when they’re as old as The Rolling Stones, he’s not ruling it out.

Things have come full circle from when they started, he noted. Forty years ago when Graffin took over his mother’s garage, he said her only real issue was when one of the guys would drink milk straight from the carton. But she put up with that and the band practices and the punk kids coming over to listen, and what was her reward?

“She got a song on the first album called ‘Latch Key Kids,’” Graffin laughed. “No parent is going to be super proud of that.”

“Looking back, we never could have done this without our families,” he said. “We never would have admitted that back in the day – that our parents did anything other than make us angry. The truth is, when you look back on it, that support and enthusiasm was important – and to this day my dad still won’t miss a Bad Religion show.

“It’s something that is both very humbling and a bit telling. Had my mom not donated the rehearsal space and had Brett’s dad not given us that $3,000 loan or whatever it was, there’d be no recording legacy for Bad Religion. That stuff is important to say now and make sure everyone understands that there are a lot of factors that go into making a successful band.”

Now that Graffin himself is in his 50s with children of his own, he’s getting a taste of his own medicine. His son formed a band and took over the basement for rehearsals. He also inherited a punk rock attitude from his father, as when Graffin recalls his son using a two-word expression that begins with the letter “f” and ends with the word “you” (and is the title of a song off the band’s “True North” album) during an argument.

“When those two words come out of your kids mouth,” he said with a laugh. “It just warms the heart.”

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Bad Religion Bio

Acclaimed Los Angeles punk rock band Bad Religion's new album entitled Age of Unreason is out now on Epitaph Records. Since the group’s formative years they have steadfastly advocated for humanism, reason, and individualism. Now, when these values are in decline and nationalism and bigotry are on the rise, Bad Religion’s message has never been more essential. Age of Unreason delivers a powerful and inspired response - a political and deeply personal treatise on all they believe in.  

“The band has always stood for enlightenment values,” co-songwriter and guitarist Brett Gurewitz explains. “Today, these values of truth, freedom, equality, tolerance, and science, are in real danger. This record is our response.”

The songs on Age of Unreason are both furious and meticulously crafted. There are references to contemporary events; racist rallies, Trump’s election, the erosion of the middle class, Colin Kaepernick’s protest, alternative facts, conspiracy theories, and there are homages to the literary and philosophical works that have long inspired the band.

The track “Chaos From Within” uses the band’s iconic fast, powerful and melodic sound to examine the current border wall controversy with the lyrics, “Threat is urgent, existential / with patience wearing thin / but the danger's elemental / it’s chaos from within.” As co-songwriter and lead singer Greg Graffin says, “Throughout history, walls have been used to keep the barbarians out, But it seems to me that the truly barbaric aspect of a civilization is the chaos that comes from within.”

Age of Unreason is Bad Religion’s 17th studio album and was co-produced by Carlos de la Garza. It is a timely work of immense power and one of their very best. Society’s step backwards has propelled the legendary band decidedly forward. There is an elevated craft in the way the song “Candidate" vividly evokes the current president, “I am your candidate / I am bloody lips and makeup /I'm your caliphate, opioids and mutilation / a celebrity and my name is competition.” Another track, entitled “The Approach,” addresses the possible demise of democracy with the lyrics, “There’s a moral and intellectual vacuum / and you're right to be lookin' askance / philosophically moribund, revolution hasn't a chance.”

This record is both a dire warning and testament to resilience. The overall message being - seek truth about the world and oneself.  As Graffin, who holds a PhD in the history of science, says, “When I saw all these headlines about how terrible our world had become, I started doing a lot of reading. I read about the French revolution, the American Revolution, the Civil War, and I started to recognize that this is a pattern of history and something we should never venture into. There are ample warnings against it. Every school child should know this but it’s hard to get people to read about these things. Maybe this album can help. Because right now, with social media, we are just playing a version of kill the guy with the ball.”

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Bad Religion Address ‘Perilous Times’ on New Album ‘Age of Unreason’

By Patrick Doyle

Patrick Doyle

Los Angeles punk pioneers Bad Religion have been playing for nearly 40 years, but they haven’t lost their urgency: the band just announced they will release their 17th album Age of Unreason on May 3rd on Epitaph Records – an album that the band says directly addresses the “perilous times” the country finds itself in: “The band has always stood for enlightenment values,” co-songwriter and guitarist Brett Gurewitz said in a statement. “Today, these values of truth, freedom, equality, tolerance, and science are in real danger. This record is our response.”

The first single from the album, “Chaos From Within,” is a one-and-a-half minute indictment of the current American climate, singer Greg Graffin  describing terror, racism, hypocrisy and fear: “Threat is urgent, existential!” he howls.

The band says the album references current events: racist rallies, Trump’s election, Colin Kaepernick and conspiracy theories. Graffin, who has a PHD in the history of science, said, “Throughout history, walls have been used to keep the barbarians out, but it seems to me the truly barbaric aspect of a civilization is the chaos that comes from within.”

“When I saw all these headlines about how terrible our world had become,” Graffin continued, “I started doing a lot of reading. I read about the French revolution, the American Revolution, the Civil War, and I started to recognize that this is a pattern of history and something we should never venture into. There are ample warnings against it. Every school child should know this but it’s hard to get people to read about these things. Maybe this album can help. Because right now, with social media, we are just playing a version of kill the guy with the ball.”

Age of Unreason Track List

• Chaos from Within
• Do the Paranoid Style
• The Approach
• Lose Your Head
• End of History
• Age of Unreason
• Faces of Grief
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• What Tomorrow Brings
• The Profane Rights of Man (bonus)

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Bad Religion

Age of unreason (2019).

It’s been six years since Bad Religion’s 2013 album, True North, and about six years since their 2013 novelty Christmas EP, Christmas Songs, making this the longest gap between two Bad Religion albums ever, the previous longest gap being between the recalled Into the Unknown and Suffer five years later, but even then the band released the Back to the Known EP about halfway between those two LPs. Aside from that, Bad Religion has averaged a new album every two to three years since around 1988. To put that into perspective, that means that Greg Graffin didn’t take this long of a break from putting out music while working on his Master’s Degree, his PhD, or even his PhD dissertation, nor did he take this long of a break when teaching at UCLA or at Cornell. As someone who made it halfway through her PhD program before getting kicked out, trust me when I say that recording albums while working on a PhD would be a logistical nightmare. Admittedly, Graffin released a solo album in 2017, but it being his third solo album, it’s also true that he didn’t take as much time off from Bad Religion for either of his two previous solo albums. So, all in all, while a six-year gap between albums may be standard for some bands, it’s shockingly out of the norm for Bad Religion.

So what did those six years of waiting give us in the new Bad Religion album? For the first Bad Religion album of the Trump Era, Trump’s name is not mentioned once, but the album sure as hell is about him, as evidenced by Trump buzz phrases being dropped into the lyrics like “alternative facts,” “kids in cages,” and “the art of the deal.” Songs like “Chaos from Within” and “Do the Paranoid Syle” may not be direct shots at Trump, but they certainly address the mob mentality that created the cult of Trump supporters. It’s not easy after nearly 40 years as a band and 17 albums to produce a song that belongs amongst the band’s greatest hits, but “Do the Paranoid Style” is definitely one of those songs, being a clever take on the format of old dance songs with a punk backbone, attacking not just Trump supporters but conspiracy theorists in a wider sense, as well. “My Sanity” is still a political song, but takes a very personal approach to politics, reflecting on how it affects one person (presumably Graffin) personally.

When I talked to some other Punknews staffers about how I wasn’t sure how I felt about the album yet, one person responded “I haven’t heard it but I'm sure you could just say ‘it sounds just like everything from the past 15 years. 6/10.’” But that’s hardly the case. The changes to the band’s sound are subtle, but they’re all over the album. While there’s plenty of classic Bad Religion style on this album, with plenty of the normal fare of Graffin showing off his singing skills while the lyrics are peppered with highly intellectual words that the average punk fan isn’t necessarily going to understand, there’s plenty of great stylistic innovations on this album. Probably the most obvious is “Big Black Dog” that lays a dance beat under punk chords, and, surprisingly, it works. “Downfall” has some vague surf elements mixed with some good old-fashioned pop-punk. “Candidate” starts out with a beautiful folk opening, perhaps a hold over from Graffin’s solo country album, and keeps that slow, steady style throughout as the band harmonizes throughout the song.

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• Date Tue, October 15, 2024
• Venue The Showbox
• Time 8:00 PM Doors 7:00 PM
• Ticket Prices* $49.95 Day of Show $55.00-$55.00
• Ages All Ages to Enter, 21 & Over to Drink

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Bad Religion Cancel Fall 2024 North American Tour

The veteran punk band cites an "unforeseen family circumstance" as the reason for the cancellation

Bad Religion have announced the cancelation of their Fall 2024 North American tour.

The punk vets cited an “unforeseen family circumstance” as the reason for the canceled dates, which was scheduled to kick off September 17th in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, and run through an October 19th show in Sacramento, California.

The band shared the following in a statement on Instagram and gave a nod to Los Angeles punk band Niis, who appeared to be the tour’s support act:

“We apologize for any disappointment and disruption this may cause. For ticket refunds, please visit the point of purchase. A sincere apology to @niis.losangeles for your willingness and support. Go check them out, they are fantastic!”

The trek would have been Bad Religion’s second stateside trek of 2024 following their tour earlier this year with Social Distortion. It was set up to be the band’s most active year since 2021, when they belatedly celebrated their 40th anniversary with a tour (postponed from 2020 due to COVID) and the release of their autobiography, DO WHAT YOU WANT: The Story of Bad Religion .

Kamala Harris Once Took Her Cousin to a Bad Religion Concert

Below you can see the tour poster with the affected dates for Bad Religion’s canceled Fall 2024 North American tour.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Bad Religion (@badreligionband)

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Legendary punk band cancels upcoming tour due to ‘an unforeseen family circumstance’

• Published: Aug. 29, 2024, 7:00 p.m.

Punk rock band Bad Religion canceled its upcoming tour after citing unforeseen family circumstances on Wednesday. (Aristide Economopoulos | NJ Advance Media) Aristide Economopoulos | NJ Advance Media

• Christopher Burch | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com

Punk rock band Bad Religion has canceled its upcoming North American tour after due to ‘an unforeseen family circumstances.’

The seminal Los Angeles band announced the news via social media on Wednesday.

“Due to an unforeseen family circumstance, we are canceling our upcoming fall tour,” the post read. “We apologize for any disappointment and disruption this may cause. We appreciate your understanding. For ticket refunds, please visit the point of purchase.”

Additional details on the situation have not been provided yet.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Bad Religion (@badreligionband)

The tour was set to commence in Pennsylvania on Sept. 17 and conclude Oct. 19 in Sacramento. While the tour was not coming to New Jersey, it was set to include a stop on Long Island. The band extended an apology to the tour’s planned opening act, Niis, urging fans, “go check them out, they are fantastic.”

Bad Religion formed in 1980 in California. Singer Greg Graffin has been the only constant member. The band is known for songs like “Infected,” “American Jesus,” “21st Century (Digital Boy)” and more. The band has has released 17 studio albums, including its most recent “Age of Unreason” in 2019.

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Why is Bad Religion canceling upcoming 2024 tour dates? Refunds and all you need to know as band issues apology statement

Bad Religion was set to tour across North America from September 17, 2024, to October 19, 2024, in venues across the mainland United States and Canada. The tour, however, has now been canceled due to what the band has said to be 'unforeseen family circumstances':

"Due to an unforseen family circumstance, we are canceling our fall tour upcoming fall tour. We apologize for any disappointment and disruption this may cause. For ticket refunds, please visit the point of purchase. A sincere apology to @niis.losangeles for your willingness and support. Go check them out, they are fantastic."

As mentioned above in the statement, ticket refunds will be processed at the point of purchase. Authorized vendors such as Ticketmaster often automatically process ticket refunds within 30 days of cancelation. For tickets purchased through resale ticket sites such as StubHub and Vivid Seats, ticket holders have to contact the reseller for refund information.

More on canceled Bad Religion tour

The canceled Bad Religion tour through North America would have been the band's second tour of 2024, with the band having previously toured across North America with Social Distortion from April 6, 2024, to May 20, 2024.

The North American tour with Social Distortion was followed by a Europe tour with special guests Death Lens from June 20, 2024, to July 20, 2024. The Europe tour saw the band tour across the continental European countries of Germany, Poland, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Belgium, Czech Republic, and many more.

More on Bad Religion's recent career

Bad Religion released their latest studio album, Age of Unreason , on May 3, 2019. Their seventeenth studio album was released via Epitaph Records and became successful in the European charts upon release. The album charted at the 8th position on the German album chart and at the 12th spot on the Finnish album chart.

The band celebrated their 40th anniversary in 2021 with a tour, after postponing it from 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The lead member of the band, Greg Griffin, gave an exclusive interview with The Cornell Daily Sun that was published on August 20, 2020, in response to the question of what drove the longevity of the band:

"That’s a really tough question. I can only answer it from personal experience, and that is, I’ve seen our music grow in popularity, and I’ve seen it maintain its interest among people over generations. We get as many new fans every year who are coming to discover Bad Religion as we do old fans who have been there for 40 years."

The singer continued:

"It’s interesting; our audience now is mixed of multigenerational families who come to the shows. But what I would say is that it’s because of, from our perspective, at least, we have not compromised on the songwriting. We’ve tried to write songs and write music that has relevance to human existence."

The singer then elaborated on how the band always wanted to write and make music about timeless topics such as human evolution and how that correlates to the growth of their kind of punk music, even when they were 15-year-olds playing in a garage in San Fernando. He then concluded by pointing out that they were lucky to stumble upon the name of Bad Religion:

"..So we were always interested in writing about topics that were timeless. And we were lucky we stumbled upon the band name Bad Religion, because religion is one of those timeless topics, and there’s a tension between religion and evolution."

The band released their autobiography, DO WHAT YOU WANT: The Story of Bad Religion, on August 18, 2020. The book was written by Jim Ruland and published by Hachette Book Group.

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Bad Religion Cancel Fall 2024 Tour Due To 'Unforeseen Family Circumstance'

Bad Religion have canceled their Fall 2024 North American Tour due to "unforeseen family circumstances."

The punk rock band announced the cancellation in a statement posted on Instagram .

"We apologize for any disappointment and disruption this may cause. For ticket refunds, please visit the point of purchase. A sincere apology to @niis.losangeles for your willingness and support. Go check them out, they are fantastic," Bad Religion said in reference to the tour's support act, Los Angeles punk band Niis .

The band did not disclose what the unforeseen family circumstance was.

Greg Graffin and company were scheduled to start their month-long tour in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, on September 17, and wrap up the trek in Sacramento, California, on October 19.

It would have been Bad Religion's second tour of the year after one with Social Distortion , covering European, Mexican, and U.S. cities.

For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com

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Bad Religion cancels fall tour, including Seattle show

MONTERREY, MEXICO - MARCH 29: Bad Religion band performs as part of the 2024 Tecate PalNorte Festival at Parque Fundidora on March 29, 2024 in Monterrey, Mexico. (Photo by Medios y Media/Getty Images)

SEATTLE - Punk rockers Bad Religion announce they are canceling their fall tour.

Band members took to Instagram to post the announcement , citing an unforeseen family circumstance for their decision to cancel the 22 dates.

Bad Religion announces tour cancellation 2024

A Seattle stop was part of the tour, Bad Religion was set to appear at The Showbox on October 15. 

Ticketholders can receive refunds at point of purchase, according to the band's post. 

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Bad Religion Announces 2024 Tour Cancellation: Apology, Full Refunds & More to Know

Iconic punk rock band Bad Religion has cancelled their recent tour amid an "unforeseen" family emergency. The band apologizes to fans for the cancellation of the show.

Punk rock band Bad Religion has recently announced the cancellation of their tour. The band was scheduled to perform across North America on September 17, which was set to conclude on October 19th. However, the band canceled the tour due to a family emergency. 

Taking to their official Instagram handle, the band shared their unfortunate announcement. "Due to an unforeseen family circumstance, we are canceling our fall tour,” the image of the post reads. “We apologize for any disappointment and disruption this may cause,” the band added.

Bad Religion has also announced that ticket refunds will be credited to every fan. “For ticket refunds, please visit the point of purchase.”

The refund for the tickets will be credited within 30 days of cancellation if booked through authorized vendors, including Ticketmaster. Fans were advised to process their refund at the point of purchase.

Fans who have used resell ticket sites including StubHub and Vivid Seats to buy the Bad Religion tour should contact the reseller for a refund.

Fans were excited about the tour of the band. Bad Religion released their seventh and latest album, Age of Unreason, in 2019 via Epitaph Records. The album was a huge hit and topped the European charts. Remarkably, the album stood at the 8th spot on the German chart and 12th on the Finish album chart. 

The iconic band celebrated their 40th anniversary during their 2021 tour. Speaking of the golden moment and about sustaining for long among fans, band’s lead, Greg Griffin, had an exclusive chat with Cornell Daily Sun. "That’s a really tough question,” Griffin said in 2020 when the interviewer asked how the band has survived this long. 

“I can only answer it from personal experience, and that is, I’ve seen our music grow in popularity,” the musician added. He further stated that he has seen it “maintain its interest among people over generations.” They “get as many new fans every year” coming to “discover Bad Religion as we do old fans who have been there for 40 years."

For Griffin, it’s really interesting, their audience is now a mix of “multigenerational families who come to the shows.” The musician also has a fair explanation for that, as he candidly shared that it’s because, “from our perspective, at least, we have not compromised on the songwriting.” They have tried to “write songs and write music that has relevance to human existence."

Timelessness was the key, at least, according to Griffin, as they were “always interested in writing about topics that were timeless.” Further, he feels lucky that they “stumbled upon the band name Bad Religion,” because religion, by default, is one of “those timeless topics, and there’s a tension between religion and evolution."

As for the recently canceled tour, it was set to begin in Las Vegas and move all the way to Canada, ending in October. As many as seventeen venues have sold out the tickets. The band had booked a stunning 30 venues to perform.

It was unfortunate but the cancelation of the tour left fans uncertain about the next tour from the band. The band has also refrained from giving detailed information about the “unforeseen family” emergency. Fans can only hope that the Bad Religion will continue their tour very soon. The current members of the punk rock band are Graffin, Brett Gurewitz, Jay Bentley, Brian Baker, Mike Dimkich, and Jamie Miller.

ALSO READ:   Why Did Queens Of The Stone Age Cancel All 2024 Shows? Find Out Amid Josh Homme's Health Scare

Lachit Roy is an experienced writer focused on entertainment news and feature stories. With a postgraduate degree in Mass

Lachit Roy is an experienced writer focused on entertainment news and feature stories. With a postgraduate degree in Mass Communication and Journalism from Tezpur University, he combines his deep knowledge in the field with a passion for creating engaging content. A devoted movie enthusiast, Lachit enjoys sharing the latest entertainment trends with global fans. He has been a 'The Big Bang Theory' and 'Family Guy' fanatic but when not writing, he indulges in his love for films and series, occasionally tending to his garden. 

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Legendary punk rock band cancels tour due to ‘unforeseen family circumstance’

• Published: Aug. 30, 2024, 5:15 a.m.

American punk rock band Bad Religion performs at the Heaven & Hell Metal Fest, in Toluca, Mexico, Saturday, Dec. 3, 2022. (AP Photo/Alejandro Godinez) AP

• Brian Linder | [email protected]

Fans of Bad Religion are going to have to wait a while to see them on stage.

That’s because the band announced on social media this week that it is cancelling its 2024 tour.

“Due to an unforeseen family circumstance, we are cancelling our upcoming fall tour,” a post on the band’s Instagram page read. “We apologize for any disappointment and disruption this may cause. We appreciate your understanding.”

The band directed fans to “visit the point of purchase,” for refunds.

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The band’s tour was slated to begin on Sept. 17 n Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, according to Billboard.com.

Bad Religion is considered one of the most successful punk rock bands of all-time. The band was founded in 1980. Co-founder Greg Graffin has been the only consistent member across that 40-plus year run.

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The band has released 17 studio albums with the last — “Age of Unreason” — coming in 2019.

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