Social Distortion

Mainliner: Wreckage From the Past (1981)
Mommy’s Little Monster (1982)
Prison Bound (1988)
Time Bomb Recordings, Laguna Beach, CA

In Rolling Stone’s 1977 end-of-the-year issue, the editors of the esteemed rock magazine gave the Steve Miller Band album of the year honors and stated blithely, “Rock-n-roll will surely last; punk probably won’t.” The obvious temptation is to ask, So where the hell is Steve Miller today? Or the bands he influenced? But popular tastes are fickle and difficult to account for, so I’ll resist and instead point out the editors’ failure to understand that as long as there is one, there will surely be the other.
If you assign 1954 as the year in which rock was born—Little Richard and Chuck Berry released their first records in that year; Elvis, I think, was still toting his momma’s groceries in Tupelo, Miss.—and 1975, the year of the Sex Pistols’ first rehersals, as the birthdate of punk, then as of next year we will have lived as long with punk as without it. Apparently it took as many years as it takes for an American to reach legal adulthood for rock to lose (in some minds) the rebellious attitude that made it appealing to the young and scary to the grown-ups.
By 1980, in that strange, aided-by-air-travel kind of way peculiar to trends, punk made its way to Los Angeles while skipping over most of the territory in between. Nowhere on Earth was as ripe for the transformation of youth music than the suburbs connected by freeways in the City of Quartz.
L.A. fosters alienation by isolating classes, races and age groups and by idolizing wealth, status and the trappings of outward appearances. So punk’s ascendancy here made perfect sense: if you wanted to talk about disaffected youth, the transparency of fashion or working-class nightmares, there’s no better place than L.A., the city that put the “bore” in “bourgeois.”
Black Flag, DOA, True Sounds of Liberty, Stormtroopers of Death, Jody Foster’s Army, Fear, The Misfits, The Germs, The Blasters, The Descendants…Lost Angeles may have produced as many recording punk groups as London and New York combined. But one of these groups rose above the others by emphasizing its inherent Americanness and recognizing and ignoring the stylistic dead-ends of punk: playing as fast as you can, displaying no vulnerability, etc. There’s a reason Social Distortion is still playing today, and it’s because they emphasized their songs over their stance. Yes, this is ironic for a punk band.
The group’s first recording was a single, “1945”/”Playpen”, made in 1981, when Mike Ness and his troops were still in high school. This single is collected with a few other tracks and a re-recording of the first single on Mainliner. The original “1945” is actually better than the second version: Even though Derik’s drumming was better than Carrot’s, the vocals are more tangible and the guitars are not melded into the bass. The rest of the songs feature themes that would reappear in Ness’ songs over the course of the coming years: unsupervised children turning to drugs, the tyranny of the police, the frightening notion that kids with dyed hair and torn clothes represented the future (he couldn’t have known how right time would prove him to be).
It’s on Mommy’s Little Monster that Social Distortion really grows up (they’re all of nineteen at this point). Ness has learned how to write a bridge by now, enabling his songs to pass the two-minute mark. That the entire album was recorded on Christmas Eve tells you something about their ideas of traditional notions of family, and the title track states it plain: it’s basically “19th Nervous Breakdown” from the child’s perspective.
Prison Bound shows more growth and development by the group. Ness paints a Western motif across the album in textures, rhythms, and tones, most notably in the scratchy, flamenco-styled acoustic guitar beneath his crying electric on “No Pain No Gain.” In the second solo he leaps to a lower register with the confidence and abandon of a cliff diver, rounding out the feel from anxious to angry, with stuttered notes as if his emotion is too raw to be filtered by the instrument and this is his last chance to exorcise himself. Suddenly the song ends.
“On My Nerves” goes from a slow, stacatto beginning, drummer Christopher Reece’s precise rolls initiating the next chord progression, then launches into a fast and aggressive second section. “I Want What I Want” mocks a self-important egotistical materialist with derision, but the interesting, almost funny, part is Ness’ choice of images of wealth—along with a house and a yard, a ‘55 Cadillac and a Harley. “Justice For All,” from Mainliner, reappears with a new title, “It’s The Law,” on Prison Bound. The guitar riffs in between verses add a fluency to the tune which the original lacked.
The most familiar Social Distortion songs, “Bad Luck” and “Ball and Chain” (released on Epic in 1991) were supposed to be stylistic changes for the band, but a reappraisal of Prison Bound demonstrates this is not so. Social Distortion’s development into a quintessentially Americanband is traceable on these records. And more than that, the three albums prove that this pop-punk thing represented most obviously by Green Day is nothing new: Mike Ness could throw a hook under some heavy distortion too. Big deal. Now, when even the kid in the latest Bon Jovi video carries a skateboard and dyes his hair, it’s time to give them their due respect.