In Issue #1:

    * Summer 1994: First Issue!

    * News From The Front

    * On The Road

    * Individuals: Randon Notes from the Members

    * Greg Hetson

    * Brett

    * Jay B

    * Bobby

    * Greg Graffin

    * Graffin's Research (1994)

    * Contact BR

    * Letters

 

 

 

    Summer 1994

 

    THE FIRST ISSUE! This is the first of hopefully many issues of Bad Times that will come your way. It is the first of hopefully many issues of Bad Times that will come your way. It is intended to provide BR fans with some insight into what’s happening with Jay, Greg, Brett, Greg H., and Bobby from time to time as well as give advanced notice of tour cities, offer special merchandise at reduced rates, perhaps even special ticket advances and passes to shows.

 

    There is no doubt about it, Bad Religion is getting more popular. Each year more people pick up BR albums, people who weren’t even aware of the band’s prior history. This can be a drag to many of the original fans who have followed the band for so long. They may feel like BR has a greater commitment to the new legions than to the old.

 

    Bad Religion wants to re-assure those older fans that they are still vitally important. This newsletter is one way of doing that. This letter is only sent to those fans who have written to us. We have been keeping track of mail addresses for over nine years now and we tried to answer all of it. Our newsletter will be our way of communicating with fans (in addition to the huge amount of discussing we do with fans while on the road, backstage, or wherever they catch us). It is also a new medium to share views and news with all of you, and hopefully receive your views on various topics.

 

    Included in each issue will be columns from one or many members of the band on current band activity. Also, there will be numerous columns on issues that we feel are relevant to our fans (hopefully, some of the fanzine writers can use this information too). Hopefully also it will contain a section of reader’s comments and letters, and our responses.

 

    In short, we want to show that we are committed to relevant discourse with our fans and that this newsletter can be a useful way to achieve it. We hope you all agree.

 

    NEW FROM THE FRONT

 

    Bad Religion has finished recording and mixing their latest batch of songs. They will be compiled in our new album called ‘Stranger Than Fiction” and will be in the stores around September 04, 1994. It contains 15 songs and is our best piece of work to this date (at least thats what all of us band members think). Some who have heard it say it reminds them of ‘Against the Grain” or “No Control”. We tried to make a punk record, and I think we succeeded in typical BR fashion. We hope you will agree.

 

    ON THE ROAD, Touring News!

 

    Currently, the band is in a rather idle period because the new album won’t be out until September. It is the first summer since 1988 that the band members will be home for the summer. However, that idle period is getting shorter each day. Here is a short list of events planned for the summer:

 

    July 29, Los Angeles: BR will play at the Epitaph Punk Festival at the Hollywood Palladium. This will be their only show in California this summer. Tickets are only $6.00! But it’s already sold out.

 

    August 20, Cologne, Germany, the Bizarre Festival: BR will play their only summer show in Europe this year.

 

    Here is a quick rundown of our upcoming tour plans. Some dates have already been booked, other ones are just planned but not confirmed:

 

        * Sept. 22, Barcelona, Spain

        * 23, Madrid

        * 24, Bilbao

        * 26, Milan, Italy

        * 27, Stuttgart, Germany

        * 28, Zurich, Switzerland

        * 29, Munich, Germany Oct.

        * 01, Vienna, Austria

        * 02, Erlangen, Germany

        * 03, Leipzig

        * 04, Berlin

        * 06, Copenhagen, Denmark

        * 07, Lund, Sweden

        * 08, Gothenburg

        * 09, Stockholm

        * 11, Hamburg, Germany

        * 12, Hamburg

        * 13, Hamburg

        * 14, Bielefeld

        * 15, Bremen

        * 16, Amsterdam, Nederlands

        * 18, Hannover, Germany

        * 19, Coesfeld

        * 20, Paris, France

        * 21, London, England

        * 23, Glasgow, Scotland Nov.

        * 11, begin USA tour, probably in the Northeast cities we will hit include: Boston, NY, Montreal, Cleveland, Washington, DC, Toronto, Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Denver, Salt Lake City, Seattle, Vancouver, Portland, California cities.

 

    We will also be on tour in early 1995 in the southern tier of the USA. And then head back to Europe.

 

    If you don’t see your city on here don’t fret. It is very possible that in the second leg of the USA tour we will hit your home town. We have decided to stop at more “secondary”, smaller towns, this year than ever before.

 

    INDIVIDUALS Random Notes About the Members

 

    Greg H.

 

    For those of you who don’t know, Greg H. doesn’t only play for BR. He is also a founding member of one of the legendary hardcore bands from Southern California. Of course, I’m talking about the Circle Jerks. This summer, while he’s not too busy with Bad Religion, he will be playing some shows and planning a small tour with his other band. If you have never seen the CJ’s try to. If you have never heard of them, you will wonder how you ever overlooked them.

 

    Brett.

 

    As usual, Brett has been busy with Epitaph. Since BR signed with Atlantic, Epitaph has been more busy than ever. They are having phenomenal success with bands such as NOFX, OFFSPRING, PENNYWISE, RANCID, and PENNYWISE. Also, the BR catalog titles have been selling like crazy. Currently, he is busy producing former Epitaph band Clawhammer who is now on Interscope. Brett is spending his free time building a 525 horsepower hot rod (that’s without Nitrous!). It’s his ‘67 Chevy Camaro body with a Chevy big block 502 engine containing twin port fuel injection. Fans can probably find him later in the year racing amateur drags in So. Cal. Finally, he is also busy writing for the next BR album.

 

    Jay B.

 

    After years of insistence, Jay is finally leaving the Southern California area. He recently sold his home in Hollywood and is moving with his family up to the Pacific Northwest. He will be moving to an island off the coast of Vancouver, British Columbia. That’s right, he will soon be a Cannuck (and probably a Cannucks fan). So all of you in Canada, we hope you will accept our band member as one of your own, and maybe this will be our excuse to play in Vancouver more often!

 

    Bobby S.

 

    Bobby is spending his summer travelling to his favorite city NYC, and visiting his favorite singer in Ithaca (Greg G). Also, he has been busy researching famous historic Los Angeles addresses. One of his long-term goals is to operate an historical tour of Los Angeles for those interested in film, radio, and TV. He already is our resident expert on Los Angeles locales of yore. His encyclopedic knowledge is increasing every day. If you ever want to know anything about LA history, he will be glad to supply you with some sort of an entertaining answer.

 

    Greg G. For the first time in a long time I have been able to do some research instead of touring with BR. This summer I have been spending many hours looking into a 2 meter long tube that carries an electron beam. Since our album won’t be out until September, I am using this time to make make some progress on my Ph.D. I am nearing the completion but still have a bit of work to do in the lab. You will find me at the electron microscope facility at Cornell looking at living and fossil bone tissue. I also spent some time producing an independent band called Bottom 12 from los Angeles. I hope they will become more recognized as one of the unique bands from LA. In my spare time I’ve been trying to write new songs for the next BR album. I have two of them already.

 

    Now, for those who are interested in some aspects of my research, here is a short essay that I wrote. Don’t worry, I won’t be offended if you feel no inkling of interest in the subject, many others share your indifference, and I don’t take offense.

 

    Have you ever wondered why some animal’s bones contain living cells and others have none? Oh you don’t? Well you’re not alone. This topic I have chosen to study for my Ph.D. research is one that has received very little attention from the scientific establishment. That’s part of what makes it an exciting topic to study, it’s relatively easy to make a scientific advance because so little is known about it. The other aspect that makes it rewarding is that the results of my study (titled “The Development and the Evolution of Acellular Bone”) have implications for that will impact many fields of science, including evolutionary biology, medicine, physiology, and developmental biology.

 

    Relatively obscure topics can be indicative of relevant work not yet undertaken by any scientist. But this is not always the case. For instance, someone might be interested in searching for the connection between extra-terrestrials and winning-streaks in Las Vegas. This is a valid topic (whatever piques someone’s interest should be explored) that could be explored scientifically, and whoever took up the study would certainly be the world’s expert on ET’s role in gambler’s ruin, but it isn’t exactly relevant. Neither Ets nor winning streaks in Vegas are taken very seriously in our world.

 

    But certain obscure scientific topics have broad significance and remain unstudied merely because no one was interested in the past or because new information only recently came to light that illuminated the topic. For instance, extinction was never really taken too seriously by biologists. It was known that animals appeared as fossils that were no longer with us, but the details of their disappearance were never studied. But in the early 1980's, a paper was published that suggested the dinosaurs may have died out because of a huge meteorite impact. This was based on new evidence in the geologic record that showed a trace element, possibly derived from meteoritic impact, distributed in the sediments just above the last vestiges of dinosaur bones. With this new evidence came a wave of interest in causes of extinction. The dinosaurs weren’t the only animals to go extinct 65 million years ago. Animals of many different varieties died out with them. And why they all died is being studied at more universities today than ever before. This is an example of a topic that grew from relative obscurity to highly relevant in less than 15 years.

 

    As for my topic, it is still in the obscure stage. Only about five people worldwide study it; in the sense I am one of the world’s young experts. It is, however immediately relevant to those who are interested in the evolution of tissues (this is a larger number of people in the world, probably in the hundreds). It is also significant to those who study bone disease (there are literally tens-of thousands of osteopathologists in the world). And finally it is pertinent to the general educated public because we are all interested in the biology of our bone tissue (I can’t calculate the number in this category, but there is a chance that it is slightly higher than the number of osteopathologists).

 

    My study involves comparing bone tissue from the earliest known vertabrates (animals with backbones) with that of living vertebrates. The animals I have chosen to compare are interesting. When I received my master;s degree in geology at UCLA, I discovered two new fossil localities that contained the earliest appearance of bone on the planet, about 460 million years old. The bone fragments belong to a fossil group of fishes that are now long extinct. When viewed under the microscope this tissue can be seen to be totally lacking in spaces for cells. This is puzzling because as any medical textbook will tell you bone cannot exist wihtout spaces for cells (it is hard dense material unlike mot tissues, but still very much a living tissue). It is plausible to siggest that something happened to the fossils during the 460 million years of preservation that erased the cell spaces from the tissue and that we are not seeing the true tissue anymore. However, there is a group of living fishes that also show this peculiar trait. In fact many of the fishes at the local aquarium shop have bone that totally lacks spaces for cells, just like the earliest bone on the planet.

 

    No one can say how similar the fossil fish bone is to the living-fish bone. Futhermore, it has never been shown whether this so-called “acellular bone tissue” functions like typical “cellular” bone of humans. Also it is not known whether bone was originally acellular or cellular during the dawn of the vertebrates. In evolution it is far more common for species to lose anatomical traits that to gain them. This would imply that cellular bone was primitive and accelular bone is derived from it. If this is true we have to conclude that our bone tissue is actually more primitive than that of many fishes! This would mean that a whole new realm of medical science would evolve. Osteopathologists would study fishes because their advanced bone tissue may be the source for cures to common bone ailments. The reason that so little is known about this fascinating vertebrate tissue is simple, no one has studied it in the past. With such a wealth of potential ramifications from such a fundamental comparative study, this fact is surprising.

    Other contacts:

    If you want to contact any of the band members individually, it will now be posible to do so. BR is connected to the internet! You can write us at:

    ggraffin@badreligion.com

    jayb@badreligion.com

    gregh@badreligion.com

    bobbys@badreligion.com

    brianb@badreligion.com

 

    Also, keep in mind you can reach Greg G. at PO Box 4416, Ithaca NY 14852. Last but not least you can reach us indirectly through out management: Bad Religion, 11601 Wilshire Blvd, Suite 2040 LA, CA 90025

 

    LETTERS:

    We have received a lot of mail lately, and here are a few of the more interesting excerpts:

    J. Harris from South Carolina: You darn anti-christ you guys. How could you hate and sing in defiance of jesus our Lord and God. You Freakin Jerks make me so mad that you could even think of harming our youth with your satanic music!...Listen to us we know the answer...If you wouldn’t mind, please send us some stuff.

    Either this is a clever attempt at getting free stuff, or this person is seriously deluded. In either case, I don’t think he ever listened to BR music.

 

 

    G. Stugzdinis II, from “Mao and the Chinese Revolution”: ...I was never a fighter but now I’ll fight the system, the system screwed me so fuck the system, you labelled me socially disturbed segregated me you bastards you can’t believe what you have done to me...”strength within”.

    What can be said but...archetypically punk!

 

    J. Joelsson, Farjestaden, Sweden: I am a boy from Sweden and I think you play good, but my parents are against you...

    Parents have been against us since we were kids....It helps us keep our edge

    M. Ishimaru, Laguna Nigel, CA ...I live in the land of competition and would love to set people straight on your lyrics, there’s a lot of idiots around here....

    We share a common goal!

 

KEEP WRITING WE NEED THE ENTERTAINMENT!