Bad Religion Keeps the Faith but Shows Mature Themes in New Album ‘Recipe for Hate’

There’s still anger in these tracks, sung with all the appropriate horror and sarcasm by Bad Religion singer Greg Graffin. The band’s new album, after all, is lovingly titled “Recipe for Hate.”

Yet there is something more here than the title and the rock act’s local punk roots might suggest. More than a dozen years after launching itself out of a Woodland Hills garage, Bad Religion has aggressively moved far beyond the simple adolescent rebelliousness of its early years.

It’s a direction the band pursued as far back as 1984, when the album “Into the Unknown” first demonstrated some broader musical aspirations. Released this week on the band’s own Epitaph Records label, “Recipe for Hate” chooses mature sociopolitical themes and complex hard-rock arrangements over the old smash and burn roar, circa 1980.

“It’s so much easier to have a cause, to have a purpose when you’re young,” Graffin says. “When you’re 15 years old you’re fairly ignorant, so you have causes that are somewhat shortsighted. As you mature, I think, you become more broad. It’s hard to remain devoted to any one cause because part of what sophistication is all about is learning there are more sides to the story.”

That isn’t to say the quintet is courting overtly mainstream sounds or ideas on the new record, which offers some background vocals from Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder and Concrete Blonde’s Johnette Napolitano. The title song was inspired by the mix of hoopla and controversy surrounding last year’s 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ trip across the Atlantic. For Graffin, that celebrated event of 1492 merely marked the beginning of brutal conquest, slavery and murder across the continent.

“All these things got rolling through my head, and I thought: What’s a good way to make people hate you? One way is to portray history incorrectly because it does a great disservice to the aboriginal people.”

The singer has spent most of the last decade in school, first at UCLA, and now at Cornell University, where he is working toward a doctorate in zoology. This biological training has played a growing role in his songwriting, he says.

“A lot of things we talk about affect mankind as a species,” he says, talking by phone from his house in rural Upstate New York. “And you don’t really think about what a species is until you study biology.”

Otherwise, his dual roles in academia and rock ‘n’ roll rarely mix, he says. Graffin doesn’t wear his Bad Religion T-shirts to class, and his duties as a Cornell teaching assistant have him working at a much lower volume. But, he adds, “The feedback I get from my students is sort of analogous to feedback I get from fans at shows from playing live.

“No matter how you cut it up it’s sort of the same thing: You’re sharing ideas with people and getting feedback. You do that at the university, and you do that on stage.”

The new album is Bad Religion’s first since fellow hard-core act Nirvana unexpectedly broke some pop-radio barriers, riding its “Nevermind” album to the top of the pop-album sales charts.

“It was an incredible surprise,” Graffin says. “Obviously the climate is better for our kind of music right now. We don’t have to be apologetic about its style, because it’s really pop music all of a sudden.”

Bad Religion had begun as a way to kill some time for a group of teen-agers from Woodland Hills and Canoga Park, all of them El Camino High School students or recent dropouts. With guitarist-songwriter Brett Gurewitz, bassist Jay Bentley and original drummer Jay Ziskrout, the young band gravitated toward the new punk movement.

“We were bored, and we were outcasts,” Bentley says. “To me it was just an expression, something to do that other people weren’t doing. I don’t know why, but that seemed to be a pretty comfortable place.”

The band’s first show was opening for Social Distortion, itself only playing its second or third concert.

Even in those rebellious days, Graffin was motivated to stay in school for his science classes, he says. But his spiked haircut, and the skull painted on the back of his leather jacket, were causing problems.

“I would get really serious threats, not only from other students, but from faculty,” Graffin says. “They took it as an incredible offense.”

The group’s first record, simply called “Bad Religion,” was a six-song seven-inch disc released in 1981.

The band had pressed 2,000 copies of the record, which quickly sold out. That motivated the group to record its album-length work, “How Could Hell Be Any Worse?” with uncredited production by future Concrete Blonde guitarist Jim Mankey.

The band parted for some years in the mid-’80s, but reunited in 1988, adding former Circle Jerks guitarist Greg Hetson.

“Every day I’m surprised,” says Bentley, who also acts as production coordinator for the Hollywood-based Epitaph label. “Every day I wake up and go, ‘I can’t believe I’m doing this.’ I would have never guessed that this would still be going on. For us, the monumental day was when we got out of the garage and went to play the shows. So after that everything was just icing.”