In 1899, the southern part of Los Angeles County seceded into a new entity, Orange County, which would develop into a bastion of conservatism through the twentieth century. Both the Old and the New Rights found a home in the suburbanized, racially exclusive, white-Midwesterner-settled county.
Richard M. Nixon was born and raised there. It’s where Mendez v. Westminster, the state’s historical school desegregation case, was fought in the late 1940s. In 1979, the regional airport was named after actor John Wayne, an action that has since become controversial. In the 1980 and 1984 presidential elections, county residents delivered the state’s highest percentages of votes for Ronald Reagan.
Historian Amanda Marie Martinez locates Orange County at the “forefront of a wave of conservatism” that culminated in the presidency of Reagan, a former actor turned politician. The conservative backlash was echoed in the county (and the country) by the great popularity of country music, “by then a symbol of whiteness,” and the “‘urban cowboy’ craze,” Martinez writes.
So, Orange County in the late 1970s and early 1980s seems a peculiarly unlikely place to have a hardcore punk rock scene. But it was precisely because of the county’s “dominating character” of conservative, middle-aged, white suburbanites in clean cowboy hats that local white youth rebelled by turning to punk music. As the biggest stronghold of cowboy culture outside of Texas, Orange County was, in the words of one local punk band member quoted by Martinez, just “so redneck.” “Safe and sterile” beach towns, as another punk put it, like Hermosa Beach, Huntington Beach, and Long Beach, became spawning grounds for rebellious noise.
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The county’s leading punk venue, the Cuckoo’s Nest, was situated right across a parking lot from a major country music venue, Zubie’s, in the city of Costa Mesa. The twain did not meet well.
“Two uniquely suburban and Southern California sounds collided,” writes Martinez about the resulting violent clashes, “at a significant point of transition in American policies and culture—at heart, it revealed a conflict over the merits of suburban life.”
Punk originated in New York and the UK in the mid-1970s with the Ramones, Sex Pistols, and the Clash. It arrived in Los Angeles around 1977, sparking bands like X and the Germs as the music, both local and otherwise, spread out to the ‘burbs via KROQ. (Penelope Spheeris’s 1981 Decline of Western Civilization, available on various streaming services, is a vivid documentary of the regional scene.) When the Hollywood-centered punk scene “fizzled” out in 1979, Orange County bands “like Black Flag, the Adolescents, and Social Distortion coalesced with a harsh sound and fashion, accompanied by the rise of slam dancing at local shows.”
Unlike explicitly working-class British punk, OC punk “lacked a cohesive political agenda,” Martinez notes, but it sure had enemies: “Ronald Reagan, local cops, ‘rednecks,’ jocks, and suburban cowboys.”
As she writes, the punk musicians of Orange County
intended to shock local orderliness with loud and angry sounds, nontraditional hair colors, and intentionally distressed clothing. Not only did such fashion choices reject local politics of respectability, but they also defied conservative, heteronormative gender expectations.
Social Distortion, formed in 1978 in Fullerton, articulated something of a manifesto: “I just wanna give you the creeps.” They were successful.
“Being punk came with serious risks to personal safety,” writes Martinez. The violence began “with attacks on punks, though violence also existed among punks themselves.” After police “inexplicably beat and arrested several punks at a show in Los Angeles” on St. Patrick’s Day, 1979, there was a regional punk scare as fears of violence by punks (not the instigating police) spread. Huntington Beach police started labeling punk bands as “gangs.”
The Cuckoo’s Nest/Zubie’s parking lot in Costa Mesa became ground zero for clashes between punks and cowboys. The city council responded by shutting the Nest down, although the state Supreme Court overturned that ordinance. Costa Mesa finally succeed in closing the Nest at the end of 1981 because the club didn’t have, and couldn’t get, a dance permit.
“In Costa Mesa, joint efforts by country music fans, local police, and city leaders to quash the punk rock scene foreshadowed a broader cultural clash within popular music,” writes Martinez, noting the subsequent rise of music censorship organizations like Parents Music Resource Center, formed in 1985. The resulting reactionary war on culture turned out to be much bigger than antagonism against punk.
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Ironically, the end of the Cuckoo’s Nest saw the beginning of the mainstream success for OC punk, with the rise of a local label and recognition outside Southern California. Social Distortion becoming the first OC band to sign with a major label. (Speaking of irony, here’s their cover of a Johnny Cash classic.)
What some have called the “Orange Curtain” between Orange and Los Angeles Counties isn’t what it used to be. All seven of the Congressional seats in Orange County went Democratic for the first time during the midterm elections of 2018. Ronald Reagan, buried in Ventura County, might be spinning in his grave—if not moshing in the pit.
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