The Band that Went Up a Punk Hill, and Came Down a Prog Mountain (and then Went Back Up the Punk Hill)

If you were to listen to the commercially available records of veteran Los Angeles punksters Bad Religion chronologically, an output now spanning thirty years, it would seem like a relatively smooth and logical progression. First album, the optimistically monikered “How Could Hell be Any Worse?” is full of youthful punkiness, but somewhat short on consistency (although album opener “We’re Only Gonna Die from Our Own Arrogance” is a bona fide Socal hardcore classic).  There then follows perhaps the holy trinity of BR albums, “Suffer”, “No Control” and “Against the Grain”, whereby the band increased both the velocity, the hooks and the harmonies and in the process created a new skate punk template that spawned a thousand-and-one inferior copycats who would improve on the record sales (although not the product) throughout the following decade.

As BR entered their second decade, things were slowed down and the songs became less punk and more alternative rock.  This period saw a move to a major label, which gained them more airplay and promotion, and with that their biggest hit, “20th Century Digital Boy”, but lost them their founder guitarist and songwriter “Mr” Brett Gurewitz, and also some of their more ardent hardcore-punk fans. After this, I kind of lost interest due to the law of diminishing returns, as the band became (somewhat justifiably) comfortable in their role as the elder statesmen of punk, continuing to trade on past glories as their releases became stodgier. Every now and then they release an album which people rate as “a return to form”, but although they may be valiant attempts to recapture past magic, they always seem to badly pale in comparison to earlier efforts.

In fact, I see the career of Bad Religion as almost a punk mirror image of The Rolling Stones. Exhilirating in their first decade, reaching a high point as they entered the second, before the quality started to drop off, leaving them to tread water in their third.  However, this isn’t the whole story, because early in the 1980s there is a strange and surprising anomaly that goes by the name of “Into the Unknown”.

“Into the Unknown” is Bad Religion’s second album, released in 1983. Yet you won’t find it in your local record store. You might come across it on eBay, but if it’s on LP you may well have to pay up to three figures, and if it’s on CD it’s a bootleg. So why, when the rest of the band’s back catalogue is kept constantly available, has this album remained out of print almost since the day it was released? Well, as I’ve already said, it’s an anomaly. It doesn’t fit into that smooth and logical Bad Religion narrative I was talking about.

Simply put, “Into the Unknown” isn’t punk. It’s prog. That’s right, like your dad listened to. The music form that punk was supposed to do away with.

The album cover is a giveaway. It has “Bad Religion” and the album title in a futuristic font, over a spacey painting. It looks more Journey than anarchy. More Boston the band than Boston hardcore. And the album is more power rock than power chord.

When it came out, it dropped like a stone. The band’s rhythm section of Jay Bentley and Pete Finestone were so aghast at the BR’s new direction that they decided to quit the band rather than enter the recording studio. The one time the band attempted to perform songs from the album live, at legendary San Francisco punk venue The Mahubay Gardens, only twelve people attended, such was the reaction to it in the punk community. Gurewitz claims that all 10,000 albums released ended up being returned to the band (before being surreptitiously resold by his then girlfriend), never to be repressed. The band returned to punk rock for the knowingly entitled EP “Back to the Known” but soon split afterwards. When the line-up of singer Greg Graffin, Gurewitz, Bentley and Finestone, augmented by ex-Circle Jerk Greg Hetson, reformed in 1986 the whitewashing of “Into the Unknown” continued, so much so that when, in 1991, they released a compilation album of their work from 1980-85 none of the album’s eight songs were included.

So why, just a year after recording one of the seminal Socal punk debuts, did the band decide to change tack so radically? Recently Gurewitz has attempted to explain away the album:

“This record was a creative departure that was really a terrible misstep on our part, really nothing more than showing our youthful naivety and inexperience … Greg and I had fairly diverse musical roots and we were both into prog before we got into punk … I used to listen to a lot of Emerson Lake and Palmer, a lot of Genesis with (Peter) Gabriel, a lot of Yes. Anyway what I know now is none of this stuff has any bearing whatsoever on the creative direction of Bad Religion … Being a teenager in a successful band we just figured that “How Could Hell be Any Worse?” was a fluke, and that the band wouldn’t have a longevity and that basically anything that we did we could, you know, have this free form creative output and not much thought was put into it to be honest … There was sort of a bit of escalation. Greg would play me a song and I would write a song like that. I’d play him a song and before we knew it we had an album that sounded more like Pink Floyd and Jethro Tull.”

So a “terrible misstep” that had no “bearing whatsoever on the creative direction of Bad Religion.”  So “Into the Unknown” deserves to be consigned to the dustbin of punk rock history, right? Er, maybe not. When you take the album out of context it isn’t a bad album at all.  Although it is understandable how this album must have horrified the band’s hardcore (in both senses) fans upon release, listening to it today, the songwriting breaks through the obviously dated keyboards (which I personally like).  Despite Gurewitz’s claim that it sounds more like Pink Floyd and Jethro Tull than Bad Religion, I don’t believe this is accurate. Yes, it is prog-rock, or more correctly prog-punk, but it’s still obviously Bad Religion. Many of the songs, if rerecorded, could fit in with mid-nineties Bad Religion and hold their own very comfortably.

The lyrical themes are perhaps more introspective than the political diatribes of their other work, but that suits the music and in some way comes as a welcome relief; often the wordiness of  Bad Religion lyrics can feel a little bit like being lectured at by a college professor, which, as Graffin has a PhD in zoology, is somewhat the case.

So, in the cold light of day, maybe the album is ripe for reevaluation? Well, partially to my surprise, when I researched on the internet before writing this post, I discovered that the album had already undergone something of a reappraisement.  In his review for Allmusic, John Dougan gave the album four-and-a-half out of five, calling it “a terrific record that was perhaps more daring than anyone realized at the time of its release. An extremely influential and interesting record, one that any fan of hard rock should enjoy.”  Aesop Dekker, drummer with metal bands Agalloch and Ludicra, curator of the Cosmic Hearse blog and a man who clearly knows his 80s hardcore onions, calls it “their single greatest recording.”  Elsewhere across the internet, the album gets a consistently high write-up.

Even the band’s previously frosty opinion of the album may be thawing.  ”Into the Unknown” has finally been repressed, albeit as part of their complete discography vinyl boxset, whilst they have started to drop one of the album’s tracks, “Billy Gnosis”, into recent setlists.  Maybe they will finally give the album a proper rerelease. I hope so, as it deserves to take its place on the record store racks alongside the other BR albums, their weird yet endearing brother.  Until that happens though, if you want a copy, you’ll either have to fork out the bucks on eBay, or illegally download it.  I couldn’t possibly condone that, but if you feel you have to, perhaps you’ll find it at the aforementioned  Cosmic Hearse blog. But if the Record Industry Association of America comes knocking, you didn’t hear it from me, capiche?

A comparative sampling of the first three Bad Religion albums. First “The Voice of God is Government” (“How Could Hell be Any Worse?”, 1982):

That tricky prog-rock second album. “It’s Only Over When…” (“Into the Unknown”, 1983):

And finally, the return to the script. “Give You Nothing” (Suffer, 1988):

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