You could say Bad Religion have something to prove. The veteran L.A. punk band are survivors of the West Coast's second great wave, the early '80s hardcore scene which took place at clubs like the Stardust and the Masque, those glorious days of safety pins and pogoing, when Hollywood put its own distinctive spin on the new, three-chords-and-a-cloud-of-dust music that was coming from New York and London­­bands like the Ramones, the Sex Pistols, the Damned and the Clash.

There was a heady feeling in the air back then, like rock & roll could be taken over from the dinosaur arena-rock acts which had bloated it past the point of identification. That was the atmosphere back in 1980 when teenaged midwestern transplants Greg Graffin and Jay Bentley met and became best friends while attending junior high school in the heart of L.A.'s San Fernando Valley, just 30 miles­­but worlds away­­from the scene fomenting in Hollywood.

"If I were to give that time and place any credit, it would be that the absolute staleness of it was what forced people like Greg and myself out, leading us to think, 'This isn't comfortable,' without exactly knowing why," says Bentley. "People say, 'Oh, it was just a bunch of suburban kids rebelling against nothing.' Well, that's exactly what it was. Nothing was happening."

They started reading books on existentialism by philosophers like Jean-Paul Sartre, Nietzsche, Spinoza, Kant and Lao-Tzu, cut their hair, began hanging out in Hollywood and formed a band "under the siege of persecution," according to Graffin, with fellow punk converts guitarist Brett Gurewitz and drummer Jay Ziskrout. After rejecting such potential names as "Head Cheese" and "Smegma," they settled on Bad Religion and designed their now-famous logo of a crucifix inside a red circle with a slash through it. Greg pinpoints the root of his adolescent anger from growing up on the "wrong side of Ventura Blvd," raised by a single mother in a lower-middle-class pocket in the midst of affluence.

"I was not angry at my socio-economic standing," insists the erudite Graffin, now 30 and living in Ithaca pursuing a Ph.D. in paleontology­­ironic for a 21st Century Digital Boy and punk-rock dinosaur to be studying fossils. "I was angry more at the disrespect shown. My mom always put food on the table. I'm talking about the working poor... I think their biggest frustration is not being respected as citizens of the United States."