Social Distortion ready to punk the Big Easy
Punk rock hurts.
Just ask scar-riddled legend Iggy Pop.
Better yet, ask Social Distortion front man Mike Ness when his band of rockers comes to the Big Easy Concert House on Monday.
Social Distortion has power-
chorded its way through the music world for the past 25 years, since Ness was a 17-year-old punk growing up in now-notorious Orange County, Calif.
Those years treated Ness and his rotating lineup with a type of roughness, to which only a punk rocker can relate.
Now the band has matured, released a new album and is staging a comeback, including selling out shows in Seattle and Portland. Here’s a brief look at what Ness and Co. are coming back to, according to socialdistortion.com:
1979: Mike Ness brings together Casey Royer and Rikk and Frank Agnew to form SD. Police break up the group’s first gig; Ness is thrown in jail for spitting in a “plainclothes-
man’s face.”
1980: Royer and the Agnews ditch the group after Ness asks friend Dennis Danell to play bass; he later moves on to play guitar.
1981-82: 18-year-old Ness goes “into a rage,” slicing his left hand at his one-bedroom hangout, “the Black Hole,” where he and his friends experiment with drugs. Ness also loses a chunk of his ear after a rival punk bites it off during a brawl.
1983: Ness beats up a bouncer before a show in San Diego. After the set, a “posse of bouncers” attacks Ness, beats him up and calls the police. At a New Year’s Eve show that year, bassist Brent Liles and drummer Derek O’Brien leave the band in the middle of the set.
1984: John Maurer picks up the bass and Christopher Reece takes over on drums. A video for the single “Another State of Mind” begins rotation on MTV.
1985: Ness enters a drug recovery program “after a series of hospitalizations and brief jailings.”
1990: The group’s first major label album, “Social Distortion,” is released on Epic.
1996: SD releases “White Light, White Heat, White Trash,” featuring the alt-rock radio hit “I Was Wrong.”
1999: Ness goes solo with “Cheating at Solitaire.”
2000: Guitarist Danell dies of natural causes at 38.
August 2004: Bassist Maurer leaves the band to spend more time with his family.
September 2004: “Sex, Love and Rock ‘n’ Roll,” Social Distortion’s first release since 1996, hits the shelves.