The first chapter of the new book Tearing Down the Orange Curtain: How Punk Rock Brought Orange County to the World, like its unfurling title, leaves you a bit breathless. It starts with the history of the Cuckoo’s Nest, a ramshackle Costa Mesa club that became a haven for O.C. punk bands like T.S.O.L, the Vandals, the Adolescents, Agent Orange, and Social Distortion to moor and display their loud, raucous music among the sea of pleasantries of Orange County, California, in the Seventies and Eighties. Quickly, however, through lucid details and retellings from T.S.O.L. singer Jack Grisham and the Nest’s owner Jerry Roach, things get sweaty, wild, and loud — setting the frenetic tone for the rest of the book.
While the heart of Tearing Down the Orange Curtain, by authors Nate Jackson and Daniel Kohn, aims to be a chronological examination of the emergence of O.C. punk and ska before it reverberated around the world and deliciously warped music’s soundscape, the book is also a tale of rebellion, addiction, and raw grit. It pummels forward and backward, through chapters focusing on bands like Social Distortion, Sublime, and No Doubt, capturing how those artists, and more, had to fight, often literally, to get their now-indelible songs into existence. Blood was physically spilled for songs like “Story of My Life,” “Doin’ Time,” and “Spiderwebs.”
In the firsthand recollections of Social D’s Mike Ness, we see the Fullerton, California, tough guy discover his artistry in a babysitter’s bedroom fitted with a radio and religious art, what he calls “a shrine to eroticism and rock and roll.” From there, Ness carves a path into punk-rock history with his bandmates Casey Royer, Dennis Danell, and Rikk Agnew — themselves following the groundwork laid by Fullerton punk pioneers, the Mechanics.
Mosh pits, the uncertainty of the future, and the lull of drugs all collide in the pages that follow, teeing up the unlikely success of bands like the Offspring, who sweated it out on the punk circuit well before their 1994 album Smash — and its ubiquitous “Come Out and Play” — hurtled the band into the mainstream. The book chronicles the early years of the group, while also probing the DIY beginnings of future concert-promoter behemoths Goldenvoice and the Warped Tour festival, where backstage exploits and bus antics became the stuff of punk-rock lore.
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The DNA of Orange County punk is also recognized in the ska, surf-rock, and reggae sounds of Sublime, whose humble house-party origins belied the enduring success the group would experience, despite the heroin-overdose death of singer Bradley Nowell in 1996 — “Santeria” and “Wrong Way” remain in heavy rotation today on rock radio. The same is true of the songs of No Doubt, an Anaheim band that leaned into poppy angst while coming of age in the shadow of the Happiest Place on Earth, Disneyland. Following the suicide of original singer John Spence, a devastating romantic breakup, and the departure of co-founder and songwriter Eric Stefani, No Doubt went on to release a monumental album, 1995’s Tragic Kingdom, and catapult its new singer, Gwen Stefani, into superstardom.
As Tearing Down the Orange Curtain races through the chaotic, violent, roaring corridors of Orange County punk rock, Jackson and Kohn also take pains to dig into the region’s past. This is their invitation to the world to discover the music that also shaped them, as both journalists and music fans. The book, like the music it celebrates, goes by fast. The same can be said of the era too.
