Busy Bawdies : This Has Been One Active Year for Punk’s Scoffing, Rudely Satiric Vandals

If Santa needs to find out who’s naughty and nice on the Orange County rock scene, any punk-loving elf can tell him that the Vandals belong on his Christmas blacklist.

For 15 years, this rudely satiric band has foisted naughtiness and silliness on the world, with a special penchant for chronicling and snickering at trends and events in the world of punk rock.

But if Santa looks benevolently on boys who stay busy, the Vandals may rate more than a chunk of coal in their stocking.

This has been the most active and productive year in the band’s long existence. Since the summer, the Vandals have issued two CDs of new, original material, have toured steadily in the United States and Europe, and have composed and performed the score for an independent film called “Glory Daze.” Two members, Joe Escalante and Warren Fitzgerald, have become punk entrepreneurs, starting their own label, Kung Fu Records.

One of those new CDs is “Christmas With the Vandals,” which finds the band bringing joy to the world in its own scoffing, sophomoric and sometimes bawdy fashion. The Vandals plan to draw heavily from it when they wind up a special holiday season tour with their biggest-ever headlining show in Orange County on Dec. 15 at UC Irvine’s Crawford Hall.

Escalante, 33, is one of the world’s few blond-dyed, spike-haired, punk-rocking attorneys. The bass player (who started as a drummer) is the only member remaining from the band that recorded the Vandals’ debut release in 1982.

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Fitzgerald, 28, is an especially busy and rather elfin guitarist and record producer who, since joining the Vandals in 1988, simultaneously has conducted an independent career that includes moonlighting as an adjunct member of Oingo Boingo. He also embarked on a major-label rock experience in 1991, with the now-defunct Xtra Large.

Singer Dave Quackenbush has fronted the band since the mid-80s. The drum chair is shared by whichever of three talented players is available for a given tour or session: Josh Freese, Brooks Wackerman or Chris Lagerborg, in order of seniority.

Sitting over beers last week in a dark bar near Kung Fu’s unmarked office, Escalante and Fitzgerald made it clear that, mocking and obstreperous as the Vandals’ music might be, the keys to their recent career upswing have been such old-fashioned virtues as commitment, hard work and, yes, niceness.

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The Vandals’ industrious streak began in 1995, when they landed a deal with Nitro Records, the independent label run by Dexter Holland, the singer with the Offspring. Fitzgerald, deciding that punk rock was his artistic home, began devoting most of his time to the Vandals instead of other projects. Aided by some opening slots on tour with the mega-selling Offspring, the Vandals were able to sell about 40,000 copies, according to Escalante, of their 1995 album “Live Fast Diarrhea”--a substantial success in the indie-rock world.

As the follow-up, “The Quickening,” emerged last summer, Escalante decided to get off the executive track at CBS Television, where he was director of business affairs, handling contracts, licensing documents and the like, so he could devote himself fully to the Vandals’ punk track.

“There was a lot of stuff I wanted to do in television, but business affairs wasn’t it,” said Escalante, who claims that “nobody watches more television than I do.”

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He’d had the job “four years. It was a great job to have as a lawyer and a miracle to get right out of law school, but there’s a high burnout, and the band was doing well enough to support itself. It was time to make a choice: Be a real band or a band that only tours during my vacations.”

Escalante still handles some legal work for other bands, but he mainly is committed to playing with the Vandals and overseeing Kung Fu’s operations (so far the label has issued an album by Assorted Jellybeans, a ska-punk band from Riverside, along with a “Glory Daze” soundtrack compilation featuring NOFX and others, and the Vandals’ Christmas album).

The industriousness involved in churning out three albums of their own original material in less than two years has helped the Vandals connect with a new, teenage audience, according to Escalante and Fitzgerald. Old-guard fans in their mid-20s to 30s now are far outnumbered at shows by youngsters in their middle teens, they said.

“With these kids, it’s all about new music,” Escalante said. “They don’t care about our old songs.”

Today’s Vandals get annoyed if they see older, bigger fans throwing their weight around in mosh pits and crunching the littler kids. The better-behaved the older, more nostalgia-minded fans are, Escalante said, the more likely they’ll hear such early- and mid-80s nuggets as “The Legend of Pat Brown,” the funk-punk “Lady Killer” and the country-punk spoof “Urban Struggle.”

(Brown, incidentally, was an actual punk fan from Long Beach, lionized by the Vandals for an infamous confrontation in 1981 with Costa Mesa police [“Pat Brown tried to run the cops down,” goes the refrain. “Pat Brown run ‘em into the ground.”]. Brown died in July from injuries sustained in a mountain-biking accident.

“It was real sad,” said Escalante. “I’ve never had anyone that close to me die, so it was really bad.”)

Niceness became part of the Vandals’ equation for success in 1994 after Escalante looked in the L.A. Weekly and saw an advertisement for the Offspring’s “Smash” album. The ad cited the Vandals as one of the Offspring’s influences.

“We sent them a thank-you letter,” along with a package of Vandals T-shirts and CDs, Escalante recalled. “We saw our T-shirt in an Offspring video soon after that [Holland wore it during parts of the ‘Self Esteem’ video]. We sold 20,000 of that shirt that year, and about 1,000 in our whole prior existence.” Soon enough, the Vandals were recording for Holland’s Nitro label. “We were nice to them,” Escalante said, “and they remembered.”

You might even say that some of that niceness has intruded on the Vandals’ artistry. One current song, “Canine Euthanasia,” is a rather tender account of Fitzgerald’s decision to put a sick, aged Labrador retriever named Sidney out of his misery.

“For me, it was emotional. I wrote it right before my dog died. Whatever you are, punker or whoever, it’s always a drag, so I wrote a song about him.”

Otherwise, it’s Vandalism as usual. “The Quickening” includes “Moving Up,” a spoof about a kid deluding himself that his dead-end McJob has a future (Fitzgerald, once a Taco Bell employee, says he drew partly on firsthand experience); a sardonic slacker anthem called “Failure Is the Best Revenge,” and a poke at incompetent teachers called “How (Did This Loser Get This Job?).”

“Aging Orange” is a cruel but very clever cut at Agent Orange, the seminal O.C. punk band whose leader, Mike Palm, ruffled some feathers in punk circles when he claimed that the Offspring owed him money for allegedly copying one of his guitar solos for their hit “Come Out and Play” (see accompanying story).

“Christmas With the Vandals” includes such typically warped Fitzgerald fantasies as “Christmas Time for My Penis” and “My First Christmas as a Woman.”

The Vandals see it as their gift to young punk fans who don’t relate to the more tinselly trappings of the holiday.

“They’re at the stage of their life where they hate their family [and] disillusioned by the commercialization [of Christmas]. This is a soundtrack for that,” Escalante said.

He recalled his own teens, when his Christmas gifts would include outfits more suitable for a heavy metal, Guns N’ Roses-type dude than for a committed punk. “You’d get so depressed that the family knows nothing about you, that it’s missed the whole point of your lifestyle. All it does is remind you that they don’t understand you, and you go deeper into a funk.

“Then again, I probably didn’t give them much to go on [in figuring him out]. You wouldn’t be punk, otherwise.”

Continuing to understand the teen point of view as they themselves advance toward the latter stages of youth hasn’t been a problem, the Vandals say.

Teenagers “are the people we spend most of our time with, so it’s not so hard,” said Escalante, the only married Vandal. “We’re so surrounded by teenagers, it’s not even funny.”

He sees Kung Fu and entrepreneurship as a way to stay in touch with punk when he reaches an age when he no longer will be believable playing the music to teenagers.

“That’s the good thing about being a punk label. You pass the torch on to the kiddies” and put their records out.

Fitzgerald doesn’t see an age limit looming, though.

“It’s hard to put a number to that. But as long as we do records that are relevant and good and kids like them, that’s a pretty good angle to work.”

* The Vandals, Blink-182, Save Ferris and Diesel Boy play Dec. 15 at 7 p.m. at Crawford Hall, near the corner of Bridge and Mesa roads on the UC Irvine campus. $11. (714) 740-2000.