Reissues Look at the Early Daze of Social Distortion : Pop: ‘Mainliner,’ ‘Monster’ and others demonstrate that although needles and brawling figured large, so did creativity.

A gaping hole in the documentation of Orange County rock history has just been filled with the long-delayed re-release of Social Distortion’s earliest recordings.

“Mainliner” gathers tracks from 1981 that first appeared as singles or cuts on compilations; “Mommy’s Little Monster” is SD’s album debut, from 1983. Beyond their historical value as chronicles of the formative years of Orange County’s longest-running and most consistently excellent alternative-rock band, these long out-of-print, hard-to-find recordings are full of blazing rock that doesn’t sound the least bit dated.

Leader Mike Ness’ early songs are mainly about the joys, struggles and perils of being an embattled young punker. But Ness’ splendid ear for memorable melodies and catchy guitar riffs makes these recordings much more than fodder for moshing; hardly any of these songs rides a 1-2-slam-bang hard-core beat. Older fans of rock that’s both intelligently conceived and unreservedly aggressive will find a lot to like here, while younger punk fans may not rate their Rancid and Face to Face CDs quite so highly after they’ve been turned on to “Mommy’s Little Monster.”

“Mainliner” and “MLM” are part of a Social Distortion reissue blitz that, along with a reissue of the first two Vandals records on a single CD, marks the debut of Time Bomb Recordings, a new alternative rock label based in Laguna Beach and headed by Jim Guerinot, a former A&M; Records senior vice president who also is Social Distortion’s longtime manager.

Another great find in Time Bomb’s crop of reissues is the first official (i.e., not bootlegged) home video release of “Another State of Mind,” a documentary from 1982 that focuses on Social Distortion and the L.A. band Youth Brigade as they tour the continent’s deep-underground punk circuit in a ramshackle school bus.

Also included in the reissue series is SD’s less rare “Prison Bound” album, which was available on Restless Records from 1988 to 1993. The SD archive isn’t quite complete: Guerinot says he tried unsuccessfully to acquire the rights to two additional tracks, “Lewd Boy” and “Telling Them,” that originally appeared on a punk compilation, “Hell Comes to Your House.” A later version of “Telling Them” eventually surfaced on “Mommy’s Little Monster.” On “Mainliner” and “MLM,” Social Distortion’s lineup featured Ness and rhythm guitarist Dennis Danell, the band’s mainstays since 1979, plus a splendid bass and drums team, Brent Liles and Derek O’Brien. “1945,” the leadoff track of “Mainliner,” finds Ness leading the charge: He hollers the song’s first word ( atom , as in atom bomb ) before the rest of the band leaps in to do its explosive best on a song chronicling the nuclear devastation of Hiroshima.

Such social-political-historical pondering is highly unusual for SD, then or now. Quickly, with “Playpen,” Ness turns to the theme that would carry him through the early singles and the “Mommy’s Little Monster” album--the proclamation of punk rock as a dynamic and legitimate way for young people to find excitement and carve a spot of their own in the world, no matter what horrified adults might think.

“Playpen” tells the tale of Ness and his buddies’ ouster from his teen-age crash pad in Fullerton, a den of illicit experimentation and musical ferment that was dubbed the Black Hole (the apartment and its goings-on also were the subject of the Adolescents’ gem “Kids of the Black Hole”). It’s the first of many early SD songs about punks putting up a fight against a punk-hating world.

This isn’t just rah-rah, us-against-them soapbox stuff, though. Avid as he was in proclaiming the punk rock cause, the teen-age Ness had enough insight and honesty to see that the excitement he found in the punk life also could lead to a crackup.

As early as 1981’s “Justice for All” (later redone on “Prison Bound,” sans the snidely ironic title, as “It’s the Law”), we see him acknowledging the harsh consequences of fun that turns violent. And in “Hour of Darkness,” from “MLM,” the young punk who had opened the album gleefully snarling the refrain “I just wanna give you the creeps” at a punk-resisting world tells what it is like to have given himself the creeps with a scary drug overdose.

Ness’ drift into heroin addiction would stunt SD’s career growth and halt the flow of new recordings for about five years after the release of “MLM”; sobered up and revamped, the band found a new lease on creative life starting in 1988 with “Prison Bound,” an album that would have been a perfect comeback if not for a couple of lesser tracks, “I Want What I Want” and “Lawless.”

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The title song of “Prison Bound” remains SD’s finest moment, a song that is majestic in execution and heartbreaking in its anguished but utterly unsentimental look at a life--no, at millions of wasted American lives--that can’t break free from a past that tugs like a whirlpool. SD graduated to Epic Records in 1990 and is aiming for its third release for the label, tentatively scheduled for October.

With such solid influences as the Clash and the Rolling Stones (the reissued albums include covers of the Stones’ “Under My Thumb” and “Backstreet Girl”), Ness knew how to write a song from the start; even on “Mainliner,” there are no tracks that sound juvenile or poorly conceived.

On the second half of “Mainliner,” we hear the band begin to team with its late mentor/producer, Chaz Ramirez. Such refinements as backing vocals and trickier introductions, rhythms and instrumental breaks result. The refinement doesn’t pay off immediately on the Ramirez-produced re-recording of “1945,” which suffers from hokey atom-bomb sound effects and lacks the raw clout of the original rendition. But the eventual result of the collaboration is the epic grandeur of “Moral Threat,” the last track on “Mommy’s Little Monster.”

With Ramirez’s keyboards and a Chinese gong filling out the sound, SD goes on a prolonged instrumental excursion in the middle of the song. The band gathers momentum, a fabric-tearing, needle-toned lead guitar hurtles, and Ness’ core theme, that punk as a musical movement is unstoppable, comes to life in raw sound.

The two reissued albums have all-original artwork, which is excellent in both cases. “Mainliner” comes with striking shots of the eminently photogenic early SD by Ed Colver, an excellent pictorial chronicler of the Southern California punk scene of the early 1980s.

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“Another State of Mind” is the perfect film companion to SD’s early recordings. It is not a concert movie, although there are some dynamic sequences in which SD, Youth Brigade and the influential Washington, D.C., hard-core band Minor Threat hold forth amid much moshing and stage-diving.

The film captures punk in its days as a truly alternative culture. We meet some poignant, outcast punk kids as the touring Californians make their way in a wheezing bus prone to breakdowns, and we get war stories, philosophizing and theorizing from some articulate and engaging voices.

Social Distortion doesn’t engage in much of the theorizing. Ness and the other members are caught up in being a band; any broader significance must start with the creation of songs. In the course of the tour, SD literally falls apart: Ness’ band mates, fed up with minuscule pay, scant rations, a smelly bus that won’t run and a front man who responds to adversity by staying drunk most of the time, bail out and go home before the tour is finished.

“I thought there was more strength in the band. I thought we were like one group: stick together till the end,” Ness laments after Liles, O’Brien and Danell have left. But his grit comes through as he contemplates starting SD over again with new band mates, if need be: “And I will keep the same name. And I will keep the same songs” (the lineup did regroup, and it lasted another year until Liles and O’Brien quit for good).

The tour winds up a losing campaign; the Ness who had started out a charming figure demonstrating the properly messy application of black mascara ends up lamely defending himself from Liles’ complaints that he is always drunk: “I can get as drunk as I want and still play. . . . I know these songs like my mother.”

But over the closing credits we hear the trek’s vindication: a recording of “Another State of Mind,” the song about on-the-road disorientation that we had seen Ness composing and teaching the band during several earlier sequences of the film. Ness’ ability to create fresh music redeems the experience; it would later redeem much more. Crackups and booze, needles, brawling and petty theft may figure large in the early Social Distortion story, but creativity, amply evident on these reissues, was the engine that got the band rolling and that ultimately pulled it through.

* Available from Time Bomb Recordings, 219 Broadway, Suite 519, Laguna Beach, CA. 92651.