How Could Hell Be Any Worse?
From mosh­pits in Cal­i­for­nia to the halls of Cor­nell Uni­ver­sity — Bad Reli­gion have changed lives. As one of the most cel­e­brated punk-rock bands of all time, they have drawn fans from all over the world, whether they sport the famed Cross­buster band logo or not. We caught up with bassist Jay Bent­ley to chat about the legacy of the band, record­ing in a non-linear fash­ion and gives an inter­est­ing take on the Lou Reed/Metallica controversy.

It looks like Sound­wave 2012 is the only thing on your tour cal­en­der at the moment! Are you excited about com­ing back to Aus­tralia?
Yeah I am! It was kind of sad when Sound­wave Rev­o­lu­tion fell apart. It was a shame, because on tour, it’s rare that you get to go to places that are lots of fun and in the sun. And y’know… there’s shrimp on the bar­bie [laughs].

Has Bad Reli­gion seen it fit to shelve many record­ings over the years?
Not an entire album but cer­tainly songs. Usu­ally, they couldn’t develop past a cer­tain stage and we’d play them and it would become obvi­ous that the song wasn’t fit­ting with the rest of the album, so we’d put it away.

Do you think it’s impor­tant to be ruth­less when edit­ing your work for pre­sen­ta­tion?
There’s two parts of that. It’s impor­tant to be able to self-edit, but as a band, it’s impor­tant to not take that process as a per­sonal attack. Some­times a song doesn’t make sense with the rest of the project. How a band relates to each other through the cre­ative process can set the tone for how they inter­act in all facets of being in a band, so it’s really important.

Over the years, mem­bers have come and gone from Bad Reli­gion, includ­ing your­self. How are the inter­per­sonal rela­tion­ships in Bad Reli­gion nowa­days?
Most bands say things like, “The band is like my girl­friend” or “We’re like broth­ers man”. I feel we’re so far beyond that, we’ve been together 31 years. This six-piece line-up of the band has been together now 11 years. We’re like fam­ily – times ten [laughs].

Do you hang out when you’re not on tour?
I only live about a mile away from Brooks [Wack­er­man, drums] – I see him the most socially. Greg [Graf­fin, vocals] moved upstate to New York, he rarely gets to see peo­ple. Brett [Gure­witz, gui­tar] lives in Hol­ly­wood and so does Greg [Het­son, gui­tar] so we see them from time to time, but most of my social con­tact mainly comes from Brooks right now. We have cof­fee and talk about kids [laughs].

How many kids do you have?
I’ve got two, aged twenty and eigh­teen My old­est son works for Hur­ley, he does mar­ket­ing and that kind of stuff. He’s com­ing down to work on some Hur­ley stuff in Aus­tralia next year. My youngest son, he’s just exactly like me when I was eigh­teen [laughs].  He’s awe­some, he’s really tal­ented. He’s still fig­ur­ing things out. Plus we have another one on the way.

How excit­ing! Will your third child be a boy or a girl?
We decided we want it to be a sur­prise. Sur­prises come far and few in life these days, so you may as well take the one’s you can get. My wife is due in April!

What was it like record­ing Bad Religion’s lat­est album, The Dis­sent Of Man?
We were doing a lot of things at once, play­ing a lot of shows. It was late hours and we were pretty strapped for time. It was really weird how things started to gel and coa­lesce into an album and vastly dif­fer­ent to past records where we had just gone into the stu­dio and fired it out almost imme­di­ately.
For me, I’m a fan of spon­tane­ity. I believe if you over-rehearse a song, you can some­times lose the orig­i­nal feel­ing, that spark. It can start to sound like you are mim­ic­k­ing your orig­i­nal inter­pre­ta­tion of the song, with­out the same sense of urgency. I wouldn’t know what Brooks was play­ing on the record until I had sat down in the stu­dio, which was nice.

Did work­ing in a non-linear fash­ion influ­ence other things within your bass play­ing?
We’ve always felt about punk rock played at high vol­ume and high tempo is, things go by so fast, that you don’t really know if that chord was a G# or an A minor – it just hap­pens to be a power chord that went fly­ing by. Brett and I were dis­cussing how to try and give our music a dif­fer­ent dynamic.
Nor­mally, bass is the thing that goes after the drums, so every­one has a bass to lay tracks down on. Now, after the vocals are done, I come back and re-do the bass – with a dif­fer­ent take on how the song works to try and tie every­thing together.

What kind of basses and amps do you use on stage?
I’m using an Epi­phone Jack Casady Sig­na­ture Bass, it’s like a Les Paul copy. Since 1994, I’ve been play­ing a 1984 Schechter Tele, like Pete Townsend used to play, except it’s a bass. I’ve never seen another one like it and it weighs like 16 pounds. I didn’t have a back up for it, so our gui­tar tech at the time built me one. I played it to death but after all these years, 16 pounds of mahogany can be tough on your back.
My on-stage amps, I use a Ampeg SVT with one of those new Her­itage heads. We were on tour with Rise Against and their bass player had two of these Ampeg Her­itage heads and I thought they were awe­some. I rang my guy at Ampeg and said, “I will give back every piece of Ampeg I have, just for one head” (laughs).As far as the stu­dio goes, every­thing I’ve done since 1988’s Suf­fer was done with a 1978 P-Bass and a Hi Watt 8x12.

Left of field, there’s been a lot of heat about the col­lab­o­ra­tion between Lou Reed and Metal­lica. What are your thoughts on bands col­lab­o­rat­ing with acts that are left-field of their musi­cal style?
I’ve heard about it, but I haven’t heard any of the mate­r­ial. I don’t under­stand why some­body who is a fan of a band work­ing with some­one they look up to would be upset.  It’s sim­i­lar to when we worked with Ric Ocasek [The Cars] on The Gray Race. I mean, it’s fuck­ing Ric Ocasek from The Cars! If he had sat down with us and said, “I want to co-write all these songs with you”, of course we would have said yes. I think it’s great when bands step out and work with other artists they are fans of. Recently, we recorded a song for Chimes of Free­dom: Songs Of Bob Dylan Hon­our­ing 50 Years of AMNESTY Inter­na­tional. Some­one put out a press release for it, list­ing the artists with the songs they were doing. But they mustn’t have known what song we were doing, so it read “Bad Reli­gion, Lucinda Williams” and then it said the song she was doing, ‘Tryin’ To Get to Heaven’. Because there was a comma between Bad Reli­gion and Lucinda Williams, peo­ple auto­mat­i­cally assumed that we were work­ing with her. You could see it going through all of the lit­tle punk rock cir­cles, fans flam­ing all over the inter­net, “What the fuck are Bad Reli­gion think­ing, work­ing with Lucinda Williams?”. Some­times peo­ple hear about some­thing and they don’t want it to hap­pen, they don’t even know why. Their first reac­tion is “Fuck that”. It’s weird.

Are there any records that you love and have puz­zled you over the years?
I’m puz­zled by 1996’s The Gray Race. There were dra­mas sur­round­ing the band at the time, leav­ing Epi­taph, Brett was out of the band and peo­ple are really going to scru­ti­nise this record, but we were pre­pared for that. But every­thing in my mind about the record was per­fect. To this day, I believe it’s one of the great­est Bad Reli­gion records, but when it came out to lit­tle to no fan­fare, I turned to Greg and said, “No mat­ter what any­one else thinks, it’s a sleeper and it’s a great record.” Greg wrote some phe­nom­e­nally per­sonal lyrics on that record and to this day, I don’t know whether or not it got the recog­ni­tion I thought it deserved.

Don’t for­get Bad Religion’s ven­ture into prog-rock, 1983’s Into The Unknown, mauled by fans and ignored by the band. Has the band’s opin­ion of the record changed over time?
Umm…no [laughs]. Brett’s opin­ion has prob­a­bly changed from the record – from the moment it was released until now [laughs]. I’m sure he was think­ing, “This… is… awe­some!” dur­ing the mak­ing of it. Greg’s opin­ion has never changed because he stands behind the idea that, they were 17 year old kids, doing what they wanted to do.

I was lis­ten­ing to it before our chat and I thought ‘The Dichotomy’ was a really cool track. Of course, one of my best friends, who is a fanat­i­cal Bad Reli­gion fan, hates Into The Unknown.
Bad Religion’s cat­a­logue with­out that album, con­cep­tu­ally, is really some­thing spe­cial. I know in my mind, when we get together and play, it’s some­thing really spe­cial. But going into a genre of prog-rock, lorded over by a band like Emer­son, Lake And Palmer – it’s like tak­ing a ten­ta­tive stab at some­thing you’re a fan of. I’m a big fan of walk­ing on the moon but they’re not going to let me just take off in the spaceship!

By Matt Petherbridge

Bad Reli­gion will be appear­ing along­side Sys­tem Of A Down, Slip­knot, Mastodon and many, many more at Sound­wave 2012, tak­ing place on the fol­low­ing dates:

Feb­ru­ary 25 – RNA Show­grounds, Bris­bane QLD
Feb­ru­ary 26 – Olympic Park, Syd­ney NSW
March 2 – Mel­bourne Show­grounds, Mel­bourne VIC
March 3 – Bonython Park, Ade­laide SA
March 5 – Clare­mont Show­grounds, Perth