They Can’t Throw Us All Out

Christine Terrisse interviews Nate Jackson and Daniel Kohn about their new book “Tearing Down the Orange Curtain: How Punk Rock Brought Orange County to the World.”

By Christine TerrisseJuly 19, 2025

• Music

• History

I MET NATE JACKSON in 2014 when I began writing about music for the OC Weekly. At the time, Nate was the music editor for the award-winning publication, which was known for its coverage of local politics and of often-overlooked corners of music, art, and culture in the state’s third-largest county.

Daniel Kohn was also a freelance writer at the publication, where he started covering many of the artists and groups mentioned in his and Nate’s debut book, Tearing Down the Orange Curtain: How Punk Rock Brought Orange County to the World. It’s an unlikely story in which disaffected kids watching the fireworks of Disneyland from their suburban backyards would take their angst and anger to the stage and, later, the world.

In my conversation with the authors (Daniel had to leave for a previous engagement midway through), we explored their approach to working together, the emergent days of the punk scene, key differences between Orange County punk and other punk movements, and more.

¤

CHRISTINE TERRISSE: When you began this project, were either of you surprised that no one before had documented, at least in a comprehensive way, this part of punk rock history?

DANIEL KOHN: We knew it was our calling and duty to do this, because many of the guys in the scene, whether it be for health or age reasons, were getting up there, so it just felt like, with our experience and knowledge of the scene, knowing the big players, that it was going to happen, that it had to happen.

How did the idea of working on it together come about?

NATE JACKSON: When we were writing the proposal, Dan and I worked together in West L.A. or Santa Monica—where the fuck were we?

DK: Santa Monica.

NJ: And it was a job that we both were looking to leave at some point, sooner rather than later. But we were also thinking about, you know, “What’s something we can do as a project?” To kind of give ourselves something to focus on. I was at OC Weekly seven, almost eight years. Dan had been writing music for me for a long time and was doing a great job. But he also had his main gig, and I knew that I was going to leave OC Weekly, so I reached out to him. And so that’s how I wound up working with him as an editor.

Music movements and scenes are, by nature, fluid. Did you at all struggle defining the boundaries of time and place that make this particular iteration of punk unique?

DK: No, it was kind of an organic place where we started, which was the Nest. Going back to the Mechanics and other artists that the world has no idea who they are, but to Mike Ness [of Social Distortion] and Rikk Agnew [of the Adolescents], they couldn’t have been bigger stars, especially in those beginning years sitting and watching them perform in the garage or not in the garage. Nate, where did they perform?

NJ: Sherpa Studio, [near] where the Continental Room in Fullerton is. It was just like a warehouse where they would get together and get drunk and play songs and hang out. So you know, that was where a lot of the sound started that we talked about with the Mechanics’ guitarist Tim Racca, creating this whole “octave sound” that was more melodic and catchy than anything coming out of London and New York. In the beginning, it was sped-up pop songs; it felt different from what was going on in the punk scene in other places.

And then you add in other elements of Southern California music, whether it’s the Beach Boys or surf guitar, Dick Dale. You add all of that together, along with the attitude of the West Coast, and it formed this new sound that hadn’t been done anywhere.

It’s such an interesting mix. I think you guys did a good job of defining how those early bands were influenced by the punk scenes from London and New York initially, but then it was filtered through this strange sense of place. Nate, you were born in Orange County, right?

NJ: Technically, I was born in Whittier. My dad was one of the first professors at Cal State Fullerton. Between Fullerton, Placentia, and Yorba Linda was where I grew up.

And, Daniel, I understand you are a New Yorker. When did OC punk first come up on your radar?

DK: The first time I ever even heard of the area was when I saw the video for “Story of My Life,” and Mike Ness was the first person I had ever seen with multiple tattoos on him. [I was based in] this North Shore of Long Island suburb, and no one looked like that or had that swagger like he had in that video. And then a few years later, when I came back from summer camp, all my friends, when I returned, it was like “What is this? You’re like skateboarding now? Like, that’s what we’re doing?” And it was like, “Yeah, we like this band called the Offspring. They released this album.” And they went on and on: “Epitaph, this indie label, it’s so cool!” And they played the shit out of that CD. Those two bands were my entryway into it, and then I got really into Sublime in high school, and No Doubt maybe a bit later on.

Hearing the Offspring that summer was like the soundtrack to our lives. And wherever we went on our bikes, someone would have a boombox and play their album Smash. Looking back, it was such an innocent time.

How you described the beginnings of the emergent Orange County punk scene in this book, starting in the late seventies and the eighties, it’s kind of remarkable that it even made it out to the mainstream with the kind of mayhem and violence that abounded. Did you think about bands like the Mechanics that never made it big, tracing the thread from them to the ones that everyone knows?

DK: Totally. And that’s the beauty of this. That was one of the big things when we sequenced and wrote this thing, to ensure that people saw the straight line of how you go from the Adolescents and T.S.O.L. to Something Corporate. There’s connective tissue with the geography and the region, because being from suburban New York City, the one thing that always stuck out to me was the message. These were not the problems and issues that everyone sings about in their lyrics. I can tell, through the rage and the music, that these are suburban problems, and these are suburban kids. And that’s what was so relatable.

Mike Ness wrote the foreword to this book. And you kind of ended it with him as well. I feel like Social Distortion acted as a through line. Was that a conscious decision, or did it naturally work out that way?

DK: It’s funny because when you start, if this were a challenge ladder, T.S.O.L. was the big band at the time, and then it was the Adolescents with The Blue Album. Social D was kind of languishing in third place for a long time. And then, due to Jack leaving T.S.O.L., with the Adolescents essentially imploding, it left a hole for Social Distortion to kind of take it and run. And then, when, [their album] Prison Bound happened, it was the moment when Social Distortion changed what punk music could be. It could be this sound that embraced roots rock and elements of R & B and had long songs, and not everything had to be so fast, so furious; it was more contemplative. And then a lot of other artists took their lead from that. They were the first band to break through to the mainstream, and they kind of paved the way. And although Sublime, the Offspring, and No Doubt had a larger success, they couldn’t have done it without Social D.

[At this point in the conversation, Daniel Kohn had to leave.]

How did you work as a team? Were there separate eras or artists you each handled?

NJ: We knew there was a lot to tackle. Even with that two-decade span (1978–2000), every year was very full of stuff. It was fast, and it was harsh, and that kind of mimicked the scene in a way in terms of the movement of it. We knew from that standpoint that we had to break it down and outline some of the key things we knew we wanted to cover. We kind of did break it up into geography too. So covering Fullerton as a piece, Huntington Beach as a piece, early on. Certain things we had to break up into cities, certain things into periods, and certain things in terms of style, where you are talking about classic punk, hardcore, or ska.

You both covered the scene as journalists before you started writing this. Was there anything that surprised you in the course of working on this project that you didn’t know beforehand, or a story that shocked you?

NJ: Probably one of the most shocking ones is where we talked about Mike Ness OD’ing in the bathroom at that party at Mike “Cheez Boy” Brown’s house. And he essentially was dead for a matter of seconds, and paramedics came to shoot him up in the chest like in Pulp Fiction and then him popping up, and the first thing he did was ask for his leather jacket. We got that story corroborated by five different people.

You expect that from the rock and roll lifestyle, but a lot of these guys are still around.

NJ: Well, I mean, most of them. And that’s the thing. Considering how hard these guys lived in the eighties and part of the nineties and stuff like that. I guess you could say, as someone who grew up in Orange County, that bands like these were always there, always playing, but it turns out they weren’t. A lot of them had flamed out or people quit or died, whatever the case may be, and things hit a pause pretty drastically toward the end of the eighties.

Another thing that struck me when reading about the early days was the violence, where it seems they were beating each other to a pulp, and it wasn’t just the audience members. Somehow, that translated more into moshing or whatever, but the kind of “violence for the sake of violence” early on was surprising.

NJ: Slam dancing and stuff started in Orange County. That was a definite departure from the scene in London or New York. Before that, it had been a little like a pogoing thing. You just basically jump up and down in one place, you’re not there to cause harm so much as just jump up and down and, you know, release energy. But with the slam dancing thing on the West Coast, that started at the Cuckoo’s Nest [in Costa Mesa] with the Crowd, which was a band out of Huntington Beach. You’d have a bunch of kids getting riled up and having a football game in the middle of a dance floor—people flopping around on the floor. And Jerry Roach, who was the owner, kicking them out and telling them, “You can’t do this shit.” This started with a few people, and then they must have gone back to school and said, “If we all do it, they can’t throw us all out.”

One distinction you made clear was that with the London punk scene, a lot of the music was politically charged, and the New York scene had an artsy element, which wasn’t the case with the suburban angst of the Orange County youth. But at some point, it did become political because the city councils and school boards and police began to get involved, right?

NJ: Yeah. I mean, the cops in the cities looked at punk as public enemy number one. It was something that took hold in the media too, and became this big threat to honest, hard-working taxpayers. It was like a whole epidemic that was viewed as a menace, essentially. Most of the authoritarian arm of Orange County was “Hey, we want to squash this thing.” That’s where you see someone like Jerry Roach going from someone who didn’t care about punk and was almost anti-punk in a way, but when he got taken to court, first by the city and then up to the California Supreme Court, he became an ally. Punks showed up in court to support him.

I think here it’s important to note that the violence we are talking about in the early days was not, by and large, directed toward the outside community.

NJ: The community was terrorizing them.

There was an incident we talked about where this group of long-haired guys called the Cropdusters would go around beating up kids who dressed like punks. T.S.O.L.’s front man Jack Grisham took pleasure in beating those guys up or not running from them as they would expect. At the end of the day, the biggest threat was the police because they’re the ones who can arrest you. There was a point where they started rounding people up in these paddy wagons.

That’s wild.

NJ: In my concertgoing days in Orange County, it was never like that. I can only imagine the amount of hysteria that had to go into society saying we need to do this.

The title of the book, with its reference to an “orange curtain,” makes a lot of sense, because you get the idea that there was a divide from what was going on in L.A. right next door. What were some of the key differences between the two scenes?

NJ: All you have to do is read most of the books that are out there on L.A. punk to see how Orange County punk was viewed. When it’s mentioned at all, it’s usually in a disparaging way. “It ruined our scene”—that type of thing. It was just a difference in attitude.

There was more violence, I think, a need to maybe take things to a further extent to prove themselves. And most of the L.A. thing was art students, or people like that. And these kids were not that. They were from the area, maybe had decent, middle-class lives, or whatever. Maybe they were into sports or surfing and stuff, and so they were more athletic. That, in a sense, made them more different from the inner-city punks. I think the whole thing, not having a cultural-political ideology, guided what they were about. It was more like, “Hey, we just want to have some fun.” But I think the L.A. scene was ignoring a lot of the artistry that came from the bands themselves.

Goldenvoice, which is a titan in the industry today, had its origin in the Orange County punk scene. In the book, you make the connection between the years from about 1978 through the early nineties to the mainstream export of culture, style, and business in the later years, like with Vans and the Warped Tour. Could you speak to that?

NJ: Goldenvoice was a grassroots organization that was funded by grass. You had a guy, Gary Tovar, who was moved by the spirit of punk and wanted to throw shows, but he had a whole other life. He had his marijuana smuggling business. Those things stayed separate until the early nineties, but one was funding the other. Partly because he was so early on it, there was no money in punk.

People would try to throw shows and they would lose their asses financially and then quit. So the only real way to have done it was to have a steady flow of expendable income that you could put toward showcasing it properly, having decent shows at big-enough venues, and paying bands that were in the upper scale and stacking those bills. If he hadn’t been able to have that kind of illicit funding, it might not have become what it is today.

You write that radio played a role in the success and export of Orange County punk, with the support of SoCal radio station KROQ and a couple of influential DJs. Do you think it would have gained a wide audience anyway?

NJ: No, it wouldn’t have. It would have been a thing that was a local phenomenon, staying native to the area, with maybe a few bands that were able to tour, as you saw with the chapter we did on Another State of Mind. I mean, how punk was able to tour in 1980 was just poverty on wheels. There was no way for them to sustain that.

It was a male-dominated scene, but some women pop up as influential figures in your book, like Linda Jemison, who fought to keep the Anaheim venue Doll Hut running. How did you see women operating within the scene during this time?

NJ: You had someone like Lisa Fancher with Frontier Records, who started her label that allowed bands like T.S.O.L. and the Adolescents to put out their first records. And then you had people like Linda who came around a little later, and what struck me about her was how she put in the time to make the scene not about her, [which led to] some successful venues.

So, although very few women were in bands, they always took part either as audience members or in key behind-the-scenes roles?

NJ: You start to see that shift as things get more ska-oriented and with the pop-punk thing, as far as having a larger female presence at shows and stuff too. I think it had to go through this period of change for it to be more appealing to women, or where they felt safe enough to go to shows. Because that was a reality too. It’s like some of these shows were, especially during the hardcore era, not a super friendly place to go.

One thing I think also got overlooked was the diversity of the scene. Orange County is a lot more culturally diverse than outsiders might think.

NJ: Even with the Agnews, they were half Mexican. That’s where they got a lot of their musical culture from, their mom’s side; their grandfather was a Latin drummer. And, you know, you had different areas like Westminster and Garden Grove that have the largest population of Vietnamese outside of Vietnam. While it was largely a white community, I think the scene was a lot more ethnically diverse than people give it credit for.

Finally, what do you see in today’s music landscape that speaks to the lasting impact of the period covered in this book?

NJ: I think that there are all kinds of ways for us to see the connection, if we look hard enough and if you’re open-minded enough to think, “Hey, there’s a reason why this music still exists.” People still feel this way. There are a lot of examples; people can look at them for what they are and appreciate them, and not see them as derivative or a delusion about what existed there. This is just what it’s always been. It’s like kids taking our form and making it their own and doing that time and time again throughout history, and that’s what we’re going to continue to see as things keep going.

¤

Nate Jackson was born in Orange County and came up in the local punk scene, playing in bands and rumbling through the mosh pit in warehouses, DIY venues, and clubs across SoCal. He is currently the deputy editor of entertainment at the L.A. Times. He was previously the music editor for OC Weekly and also worked as a staff writer for the L.A. Times. His work has also been featured in The Village Voice, LA Weekly, Vice, Noisey, DOPE Magazine, and others. He currently lives in Long Beach with his wife.

Daniel Kohn was born in New York City and grew up in Long Island but has long been mesmerized by Orange County punk rock. He lived in Southern California for nearly two decades, covering many of the artists featured in this book. Kohn’s work has been featured in SPIN, OC Weekly, Rolling Stone, Billboard, Vice, Noisey, SF Weekly, MLB, LA Weekly, and The Village Voice. He currently lives in Nashville with his wife and son.