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Los Angeles Times
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
OC's original punks describe the birth of the world-famous ‘Orange County sound'
This excerpt is from Chapter 3 of 'Tearing Down the Orange Curtain: How Punk Rock Brought Orange County to the World,' out May 20 from Da Capo Press. The book explores the trajectory of punk and ska from their humble beginnings to their peak popularity years, where their cultural impact could be felt in music around the world. Delving deep into the personal and professional lives of bands including Social Distortion, the Adolescents, the Offspring and their ska counterparts No Doubt, Sublime, Reel Big Fish, Save Ferris and more, this book offers a look into the very human stories of these musicians, many of whom struggled with acceptance, addiction and brutal teenage years in suburbia. 'You'll have to ask the Agnews about that,' Social Distortion's Mike Ness said about the origins of what became known as the Orange County sound. The Agnews, Rikk, Frank, and Alfie, were the sons of a disciplinarian Irish father who worked for SoCal Gas and a Mexican mother. They grew up in La Puente before moving to Fullerton when Rikk, the oldest of the three, was in sixth grade. Richard Francis Agnew was born December 9, 1958, Francis Thomas Agnew followed in 1964, and Alfonso Agnew arrived January 24, 1969. Despite the ten-year gap between the oldest Agnew and the youngest (with a sister born in between Rikk and Frank), they were all pretty close and bonded through music. Rikk's musical journey started before he picked up a pencil. At the age of four, he was given his first drum kit. Instantly, he realized that he had a natural sense of rhythm. The Agnews' maternal grandfather was a drummer and had become known in the Latin scene in California for his work with Xavier Cugat and the Latinaires, so rhythm was already in the family's DNA. Citing the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Beach Boys, and Motown as early influences, Rikk would bang his drums while their father strummed along with his acoustic guitar and sometimes improvised songs that Rikk would play along to. Rikk remembers coming home from school and strumming heavy, pissed-off chords on a family guitar. It began a lifelong love of playing music. 'He [Rikk] was obsessed with the Beatles, in the '70s it was prog rock, by the mid-'70s it was Kraftwerk and electro imports from Europe. What was neat about Rikk was that he was always looking for something new, he was always fascinated by new music,' Frank said. Naturally, Frank and Alfie were Rikk's first co-conspirators and were also musically inclined. The Agnew boys jammed the instruments that were present around the house. Frank started playing before he was ten, and just like Rikk, he was musically gifted. 'Immediately, Frank was so f—ing good,' Rikk said. 'He could do Jimmy Page stuff when he was a fifth grader. Alfie was in second grade at that point. And the two of them would go in the garage and rehearse Led Zeppelin songs.' 'None of us was a good skateboarder,' Frank said. 'So we stuck with the instruments.' When the Ramones' debut album came out in April 1976, Rikk was immediately hooked on the raw, aggressive sound, black leather jackets, and tough-guy swagger from the Queens-bred quartet. 'I remember I had gotten birthday money and was planning to buy a Foghat album but Rikk and his friends convinced me to buy the Ramones album, instead,' Frank said. Obliging his older brother, Frank used his cash to buy the seminal punk rock vinyl. He and his brothers huddled around the record player and dropped the needle. Frank's reaction was . . . not very positive. 'At first I was like 'what the hell's this?' I was used to listening to Sabbath and the prog rock stuff, and at first I didn't like the Ramones, the songs were fast, short, and noisy.' But for some reason the tunes got stuck in Frank's head. Listening again and again, he eventually grew to love it, not only for the melodies and the style but because of how accessible it was. The ability to be in a band and play a few chords inspired the Agnews and many other kids growing up in the era of often complicated, overinflated virtuoso rock 'n' roll to feel like they too could be onstage without putting in ten years of lessons. However, that jolt of youth culture and passion for music didn't translate with their neighbors. They often complained about the noise emanating from the Agnews' garage. 'The lady who lived next door would get all pissed off and come over and threaten to call the cops,' Rikk said. 'She said 'Stop making that noise' and we kept saying 'It's not noise, it's music!'' The brothers' intricate blend of influences combined with their natural ability would shape the sound of their bands in the years to come. 'People were calling him [Rikk] the Brian Wilson of punk,' future bandmate Steve Soto told OC Weekly. 'And he was.' 'I could hear an 'Orange County sound' starting to identify itself amid the SoCal punk scene,' early Social Distortion drummer Derek O'Brien said. 'Elements of surf guitar and drums, certainly with Agent Orange but others like the Adolescents, D.I., Channel 3, and the Crowd also. Then you had rough but still actually melodic lead vocals as opposed to just yelling, two-part guitar, two-part melodies where one or both would play the melodies with octaves and the backup vocal harmonies soaring with or around the lead vocal.' Punk roared out of London and New York in 1976 before making its way out west not too long after. First in Los Angeles, by the time the sound trickled past the Orange Curtain, which was the not-so-flattering nickname Angelenos gave to the county directly to the south, it gained its own flavor. Impressionable young punkers, who came from broken homes that fit outside of the idealistic nature of the Reagan presidency, were influenced by British bands like the Sex Pistols and the Damned. It could be heard in the voices of the emerging singers. 'Your punk band sings in an English accent,' the Vandals bassist Joe Escalante said. 'That's what we do. You might be able to make your own style, but you start there.' In bands like Huntington Beach's T.S.O.L., Fullerton's Adolescents, and Social Distortion, traces of those British bands can be heard. Escalante points to T.S.O.L.'s 'World War III' as the prime example. 'That's our leader in Orange County, Jack Grisham, telling us how to do what we need to do,' Escalante continued on a podcast. 'We're not going to argue with that.' Looking back at his first time singing, Escalante remembers the Vandals singer Dave Quackenbush telling him that he sounded like a 'Republican who sounded like they just got out of a John Birch Society meeting.' From there, he went with an English accent himself before incorporating some of his own natural style. When all of this adds up, it becomes clear that the brand of punk that broke through in the 1990s could be traced back to its origins in Orange County. Many of the early bands' sound had a preciseness to it and a simultaneous lack of pretension. 'I believe that the California punk sound came from Orange County,' NOFX front man Fat Mike said. Born Mike Burkett, the singer was first introduced to punk by his camp counselor, who just so happened to be the Vandals' Joe Escalante. Even in a major city like Seattle, where Guns N' Roses bassist Duff McKagan grew up a thousand miles away, the sound of Southern California punk was echoing into the consciousness of punk social circles. 'We were aware of what they were doing—and why,' McKagan said. 'Even though in Seattle where we didn't have suburbs, we envisioned these punks from sprawling suburbs whose parents were Reagan conservatives and these kids were rebelling against it. We got it. Could we fully identify with it? Not really. But we knew what they were about.' Fullerton had the fortune of being the home of Fender. Leo Fender's factory often discarded guitars that they deemed unusable. For the locals who couldn't afford one of his instruments, dumpster diving to obtain a guitar was frequent and critical. These discarded guitars found a new home, often in the hands of young punks. It was the literal embodiment of 'one person's trash is another's treasure.' In addition to being the home of Fender, Fullerton was also the place where many families moved in search of the ideal, pleasantville life depicted as the American dream. The area was gentrified by tract homes where nuclear families would settle. By the 1970s, that dream vanished for many disaffected youths, and a new scene emerged that many in the community would instantly hate. Jackson is a deputy editor for entertainment at The Times.
Los Angeles Times
09-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
New documentary shows how a trio of brothers were instrumental in shaping SoCal punk
The first time that guitarist Frank Agnew went to a punk show he was about 13, and even though he was underage he was able to get into the Whisky a Go Go to see the Bags, Black Randy and the Metrosquad, and the Weirdos. It was 1978 and he went with his older brother Rikk. 'When the Weirdos came on, holy s— that changed my life forever because it was so good,' Frank said. 'Ever since I saw the Weirdos at the Whisky, I'm sitting there thinking, 'I want to be that good, I want to be that tight,' and so that was my goal.' Frank and his brothers Rikk and Alfonso 'Alfie' Agnew spent the next decade forming and playing for some of the most significant bands in the punk canon, including Adolescents, the Detours, Social Distortion, Christian Death, TSOL and D.I., among others — and now their journey as punk rock musicians is finally being told in the new documentary 'Agnew: The Story of a California Family,' which is screening for the first time on April 12 at the Fox Theatre in Fullerton. Recently, their life's work in music was put on display as part of the new exhibit 'Punk OC — From the Streets of Suburbia' at the Fullerton Museum Center that debuted last week. On a recent afternoon, the Agnew brothers gathered at the museum to pose for photos and relive the memories through artifacts of their punk rock youth. 'I constantly am asked questions about my family and about Rikk, D.I., Adolescents, all that stuff, it's amazing to me how many people not only know but care,' said Alfie, who is also a mathematical physicist teaching at Cal State Fullerton. 'This is just as much about the Orange County scene and the people that supported it, not only back in the late '70s and '80s, but also up to now, so I think this is kind of a celebration for all of us.' The documentary by filmmaker Gabriel Zavala Jr. was filmed roughly between 2018 to 2024 and looks back at the brothers' early history and their storied musicianship while also capturing the brothers as they play various shows and navigate the circumstances of their personal lives. Zavala told The Times that he was inspired to create the documentary after watching the Agnews play an explosive show together at the Observatory in Santa Ana. 'It was such a rush because at that time people were once again re-invigorated by punk rock and Rikk and Frank's version of the Adolescents and it was such an electric night,' Zavala said. 'I just told them, 'What if we made a documentary about your family?'' Rikk, Frank and Alfie all agreed to make the documentary with Zavala, who promptly began filming and interviewing various musicians associated with the Agnews including Gvllow, Gitane Demone of Christian Death and Casey Royer of Adolescents and D.I. Zavala, a feature filmmaker who directed and wrote the 2015 indie film 'Rude Boy: The Movie,' also interviewed the brothers' parents before they died while filming the documentary. 'I think they would be proud of it, they were always very proud and supportive of their kids, I think my parents were reasonably unique in supporting such an activity — being punk rock and being musicians instead of going for being doctors and lawyers, although eventually I became a professor,' Alfie said. As children of Irish and Mexican parents with immigrant roots, the brothers say they grew up surrounded by an eclectic variety of music, listening to everything from Irish folk to mariachi, and while their parents weren't musicians themselves, the brothers agree they likely inherited their musical gene from their maternal grandfather, Alfonso Fernandez. According to the brothers, Fernandez was a professional drummer who emigrated from Guadalajara and played throughout Mexico and the U.S. Southwest in a Latin jazz band called the Latinaires. 'When I learned about my grandfather, which was particularly personal for me because I was named after him — in fact my first instrument was drums — I very much had that connection and was always very proud of that,' said Alfie, who also plays guitar. Frank and Alfie didn't know their grandfather — Fernandez died in 1965 — but like Alfie, Frank also credits his grandfather's legacy as being influential in his own journey as a musician. 'My mom obviously would say, 'Your grandpa Alfonso was a drummer, and he was the best drummer,'' Frank said. 'And he had a reputation all through Mexico as being like one of the best drummers and so by her telling us that and showing pictures of him at his drum kit, it was really inspiring, it's like, 'Oh s—, grandpa was in a band, we can too.'' The brothers were at the height of playing shows while filming the documentary, but in 2020 several hardships took place that set the project back and also pushed the crew to finally finish it. First, the COVID-19 pandemic grounded all operations, especially when stay-at-home orders were implemented in 2020. 'COVID hit during the middle of this, God, so we were like in this limbo where we couldn't film for a month and then we had to proceed with the people that were willing to get together and work under the restrictions,' Zavala said. This period is also when Rikk, Frank and Alfie's parents died from old age — first their father Richard Francis Agnew, and then just six months later, their mother Lia Paula Fernandez. Zavala's father, Gabriel B. Zavala, a renowned mariachi performer and teacher, died in early 2021 from COVID-19 complications. 'It was profound and it was sad, but I know that he would have wanted me to fight and to finish the documentary, so that's what we did,' Zavala said. 'We buckled down and, in a way, it was also a healing process to not have to really think about it and I just focused on the goal of finishing this regardless of what it was gonna take to finish it emotionally, financially and with a skeleton crew.' Through the hardships, Zavala was able to successfully finish the documentary more than six years in the making, and the brothers say they are grateful and still humbly surprised that anyone thinks they are interesting enough to feature in a full-length film. 'I often hear from people how much the stuff we did influenced them and how it was like a positive thing in their life, and if that's the only takeaway, I think that's cool,' Frank said. 'Some things we did made people happy, made them move their feet, or influenced them in a way where it's like, 'Wow, I'm not the only one who feels that way,' and I just think that's fantastic and a good thing, and hopefully the documentary will display some of that.'
