In the new book Tearing Down the Orange Curtain: How Punk Rock Brought Orange County to the World, authors Nate Jackson and Daniel Kohn get in the pit with influential bands like Social Distortion, the Offspring, Sublime, the Adolescents, and No Doubt to trace the history of Southern California punk and ska.
Released May 20th, it’s a rabid read, with wild anecdotes about parking lot fistfights, harrowing overdoses, and lots of stage diving. The book, an oral history told by the artists who were there, also ripples with the vibes of SoCal, thanks especially to lifers like the Agnew Brothers (the Adolescents), Dexter Holland and Noodles (the Offspring), and Mike Ness, the founder and frontman of the enduring Social Distortion.
In the foreword to Tearing Down the Orange Curtain, exclusively excerpted here, Ness takes readers back to the streets of Fullerton, California, ground zero for Social D, and marvels at how instead of landing in jail, he became a bona fide rock star — with a key to his hometown.
Let us not ask what the city can do for us but what we can do for the city. That was not my mentality back then on the streets of Fullerton. Forty years ago, they might have wanted to lock me up and throw away the key. But things change. And now I got a key, a key to the city I grew up in.
I have nothing but fond memories of growing up in Fullerton. My parents moved us here in 1963 to a little house on Malvern Avenue, the east side. We rented the back house from an older woman who was also our babysitter. I was five years old and spent a lot of time alone at the babysitter’s house. Her bedroom had a radio and religious art on the wall. The angels were naked, so it was a shrine to eroticism and rock and roll. I already knew that music is what I wanted to do. Music did something for me.
By sixth or seventh grade I’d started to embrace counterculture. We grew up across the street from the park that had Little League and Pop Warner football, but my parents weren’t very encouraging about sports. Instead of playing ball there, after seeing Easy Rider, I built a chopper bike, cruised the park, and sat on it while I watched the games. I knew that was cool. So it didn’t matter that I wasn’t playing ball.
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My two uncles were part of the counterculture. One was gay and the other wasn’t. The one who wasn’t was super tough, and the gay uncle was so cool, and they were both very influential role models. The gay one had friends in Hollywood and we’d go to Palm Springs, and my other uncle would have friends over to his house who had lowriders, while the women sported beehives and cat-eye glasses and wore garter belts and fishnet stockings.
For a young kid, it was a crazy world.
When I got into punk, I finally found my voice and my place in the world. Soon I realized I was going to have to fight—physically fight—to keep it. The reaction to punk wasn’t friendly. But I wasn’t going back.
In spite of these things, overall my life was not that good. Music provided me with something to keep my mind focused in pursuit of a dream, and Fullerton itself enabled that. When I became a punk, it was dangerous to roam the streets of Orange County looking the way we did. Ninety-nine percent of society saw it as a provocation. My personality dictates that telling me I can’t do something is about the worst thing you could do because not only am I going to succeed at it, I’m going to enjoy proving you wrong. Then I’ll say, “How do you like me now?”
I wasn’t going to back down and I wasn’t going to change. We were just jamming in my friend’s mom’s living room, and we had no idea where it was going to go. We were in the moment, trying to put pieces of a puzzle together, and not seeing the big picture at all. But on a local level, we saw other people doing it, and if they could do it, we knew we could too.
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Fortunately, at the time, we had a manager who was tied in with Goldenvoice, and he made sure that whenever a big band came to Los Angeles, Social Distortion was the opening act. We went from playing in front of fifty people in Fullerton to playing in front of five hundred in LA. It helped immensely.
Decades later on April 3, 2024, getting the key to the city I grew up in—on my sixty-second birthday no less!—was an emotional moment. It felt good to have someone acknowledge our accomplishments. When we started the band, official recognition wasn’t something we were after. We didn’t know that our music would have a positive impact. You hoped that it might, but you don’t know.
Dennis Danell, our guitarist, was my partner in crime back in the day. He wasn’t committing crimes with me, but he was, figuratively, my partner in crime. We would drive to Hollywood on a Tuesday night, see some bands play, and go to school the next day and tell everyone about it.
This stuff doesn’t happen. It’s not supposed to happen. But like I said, things change.
What a ride it’s been.
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For lack of a better metaphor, it’s almost like you’re a pinball. You get shot out, and then it’s all the bumps, specials, bonus points, and penalties. It’s a funny analogy that you’re the ball, but you’re not the one in control. And, ultimately, you’re only as good as the player.
Excerpted from the book Tearing Down the Orange Curtain: How Punk Rock Brought Orange County to the World by Nate Jackson and Daniel Kohn. Copyright © 2025 by Nate Jackson and Daniel Kohn. Reprinted with Permission of Da Capo Press, an imprint of Grand Central Publishing, a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
