Pop Music : The Honest Power of Bad Religion at Palladium

Out of the hundreds of hard-core punk bands that gigged around Los Angeles in the early ‘80s, Bad Religion was among the last you might have picked for long-term success.

T Its live shows were erratic, its personnel unstable, its second album was an unholy prog-rock-style mess. Some people assumed that any kid wearing a Bad Religion T-shirt was just too unhip to like Flipper or Black Flag.

But in 1991, Bad Religion is by all accounts the most popular hard-core punk band in the world. They’re still an underground phenomenon by Bon Jovi standards in this country, but their last three albums are considered punk-rock classics; they regularly sell out large halls in Europe, and a full-blown punk riot broke out at an aborted Bad Religion concert last month at the North Hollywood Theatre.

And at their headlining Palladium concert Friday--the biggest L.A. punk-rock show since the heyday of Black Flag--the band ranked up there with the best.

The quintet started off with a sarcastic cover of “Give Peace a Chance,” retitled “Give Punk a Chance,” then launched into “The World Won’t Stop.” Sample lyric: Now mister, here you are / An element in a sea of enthalpic organic compounds.

Singer Greg Graffin is working toward a Ph.D. (at Cornell University) in evolutionary biology, and though his lyrics sometimes reflect this--the theme of half the Bad Religion songs seems to be man’s struggle against biological inevitability--his vocal melodies have the organic simplicity of folk songs. If Darwin played to the slam pits, it might have turned out something like this.

But Bad Religion is still a punk band in the classic Los Angeles mold. Whether decade-old classic things or brand-new stuff, every Bad Religion song starts with the old click, click, click-click-click-click tapped out with drumsticks; bouncy guitarist Greg Hetson, who also plays with the Circle Jerks, defines hard-core guitar the way Eric Clapton used to define the sound of ‘60s blues.

While Bad Religion may lack the intensity and individuality of, say, Black Flag and the Dead Kennedys--in the last decade, the genre has become, well, generic--the group carries on the honesty and power that has always characterized the best punk-rock.