Tearing Down the Orange Curtain: How Punk Rock Brought Orange County to the World

Music journalists Jackson and Kohn debut with a vivid genealogy of Orange County, Calif., punk music. Tracing the genre’s origins to Costa Mesa’s Cuckoo’s Nest club in the 1970s, where bands sought to “blow away the weak, square and boring rock and pop of the ’70s” with a sound and style that broke all the rules, the authors capture its evolution from “escape from... middle-class life” for bored suburban youth through violent subculture to an established part of mainstream music. Along the way, the authors follow such bands as Sublime, T.S.O.L., and the Adolescents as they traded members, drew diehard fans, toured, and frequently dissolved thanks to drug abuse or infighting. Jackson and Kohn also document adjacent scenes (such as 1970s skate culture, which—like punk music—“relied on aggression, tension release, blood, sweat and devotion” and turned kids into cop targets) and highlight the tensions that arose when bands that hit it big were accused of selling out. Fluidly drawing from historical records and personal interviews, the authors employ colorful detail to bring alive the punk world in all its fist-swinging, house-destroying glory—while hinting at pitfalls that contributed to its eventual demise (including, ironically, acceptance by mainstream musical culture that threw the genre into something of an identity crisis). The result is a spirited portrait of an influential subculture. (May)