Punk rock in California

Many bands also formed in the San Francisco Bay, including The Nuns, Crime, Avengers, Negative Trend, The Mutants, The Sleepers, The Offs and Dead Kennedys.

Hardcore bands and fans tended to be younger than the art punks of the older LA scene and came mainly from the suburban parts of the Los Angeles area, especially the South Bay and Orange County.

Notable hardcore bands active in that period included the Circle Jerks, Black Flag, the Adolescents, Minutemen, Descendents, T.S.O.L., China White, Agent Orange, the Vandals, Love Canal, Wasted Youth, Social Distortion, D.I., White Mice, Channel 3 (band), Dr. Know, the Mentors and NOFX in Southern California, and the Dead Kennedys, Flipper, MDC, and Verbal Abuse in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Cities like Sacramento, Lake Tahoe and neighboring Reno, Nevada followed San Francisco and Los Angeles, creating their own underground hardcore scenes.

Local promoter Stuart Katz brought punk rock to Sacramento in the early 1980s starting off with shows in auditoriums at McKinley Park.

Katz eventually opened Club Minimal in South Sacramento, booking early hardcore acts such as Black Flag, Circle Jerks, Flipper, Crucifix as well as local bands.

The police department shut down the club, but Katz led a 60s style peaceful protest inside the lobby of City Hall, joined by more than a hundred punk rockers.

[4] Early bands of the nardcore scene include Agression, Dr. Know, False Confession, Ill Repute, Habeas Corpus, Stalag 13, RKL and Scared Straight.

Some unity came from the coverage by a local publication called 60 Miles North, which began in 1983 initially as a xeroxed flyer for an Alley Cats concert in nearby Camarillo.

In 1985, Bad Religion reemerged from a hiatus and returned to Punk Rock with their 2nd EP, Back to the Known, featuring a sound that would later be continued and expanded on with albums like Suffer and No Control.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, San Diego was home to a burgeoning post-hardcore scene centered on bands like Pitchfork, Rocket From the Crypt, the Renegades and Unwritten Law.

Their album, simply titled Social Distortion became a minor hit with four singles "Let It Be Me", "Ball and Chain", "Story of My Life" and a cover of Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire" all charting on the Modern Rock Tracks top 25.

In 1993, following the success of Social Distortion, Bad Religion were signed to Atlantic Records and reissued then-current album Recipe for Hate for the label that same year.

Unlike Social Distortion however, Recipe for Hate initially received mixed reviews from music critics but brought the band a little success, peaking at #14 on Billboard's Heatseekers chart.

Formed in 1992, skate punk trio Blink-182 after having spent the next two years recording in DIY fashion two splits and three demos, including the commercially available Buddha before signing to independent label Cargo in 1994.

After opening for bigger bands in the scene like Pennywise and NOFX, Fletcher Dragge, who strongly believed in the trio, convinced Warped Tour founder Kevin Lyman to bring them on the next line up.

The band grew tired of Cargo's lack of distribution and faith in the trio, ultimately signing with MCA and entered the studio after completing tour obligations to record their second LP Dude Ranch, released in June 1997 to moderate success.

Soon thereafter, Green Day and the Offspring were joined by Bad Religion, NOFX, and Rancid, whose respective albums Stranger Than Fiction, Punk in Drublic, and ...And Out Come the Wolves, were all certified Gold or Platinum (with the first being released on Atlantic and last two on Epitaph).

In June 1999, Blink-182 released their seminal album Enema of the State, now with a new drummer in Travis Barker, catapulting the trio into mainstream success and spearheading a second wave of pop punk, whose influence had an extensive impact in the genre.

As of 2019, there are a handful of bands that play punk rock music that hail from Oxnard and surrounding areas: Bare Minimum, Bootleg Brigade, Global Warning, Civil Conflict, Crazy D & the Nutz, Dead Heat, Malice Thoughts, Marron, Mullholand, Omega Point, Sordo, Violation of Probation and 3-Day Holocaust.

There has also been a revival of Nardcore as of late 2018 thanks to promoters such as Midnight Society Productions, Bangerz Only, Sleep Away, David Stalsworth (drummer of the above band, Civil Conflict), Ventura Pyrate Punx, Skip Nasty, and Casa Anarkia.

Mark Vallen, a painter and graphic artist, was associated with the early LA punk scene; his work was featured on a number of fanzine and album covers.

Winston Smith, a San Francisco collage artist, was associated with Dead Kennedys and also did a piece of artwork named "God Told Me to Skin You Alive" for Green Day's fourth album Insomniac.

According to historian Gaye Theresa Johnson the emergence of ethnic punk rock bands in Los Angeles was a result of double marginalization of individuals within the African-American and Latino communities during the late 1970s.

Bag says one of the things that inspired her to join the punk rock scene was being rejected by the leaders of her high school's Brown Berets club.

[24] Chicano and Chicana artists like Bag and Los Crudos challenged the idea that Punk Rock was an exclusively white genre by incorporating Spanish lyrics into their music.

[26] San Francisco and Los Angeles were major centers for both gay and punk subcultures, and there has long been crossover between them, with bands such as MDC featuring openly-gay frontpersons.