BRANDON CRUZ: No matter where I go in the world, or how long I’ve lived away, I always end up back here in Silver Strand, Oxnard, California. Pretty much any memories I have growing up were either on this beach or in the house my grandfather built in the ’30s, about a half mile up. It’s still there. Pretty much my whole family lives on this coastline.
The gathering spot is always at the North Jetty of Silver Strand, where the Nardcore scene started. That’s where we have paddle-outs for people who have passed away. We take their ashes, paddle them out, form a circle and hold hands while talking to each other about the person that’s passed, our connection to them, and just whatever’s on our minds.
If you’ve lived on this beach, your ashes get spread out on the water. There are so many ashes out there it’s probably formed our own little sandbar. Different people from the scene that grew up in Oxnard are all out there, all the guys from Agression have been spread out there, so you can still talk to them.
Every time I paddle out, it’s a bit of a spiritual experience for me. But this is just what I know: this is home, this is where family is, this is where a lot of important things in my life have happened. It’s where the punk rock scene took off, where I learned to surf, where I taught my kids to surf. There’s a very strong, deeply rooted sense of identity. I’m from Oxnard; this is Oxnard.
If you lived on Silver Strand, it’s because you didn’t fit in anywhere else. It was filled with Filipinos, Japanese, Blacks, Mexicans, whites, bikers, drunks, surfers… We didn’t really know that it wasn’t like that in other parts of Southern California. It’s funny to see the cholos from town come out to a funeral/paddle-out at the beach, wearing shoes and walking on the sand with all their clothes on, while we’re running around barefoot, jumping in and out of the water in trunks and wetsuits <haha>. It was the melting pot that nobody really questioned because it was just how you grew up.
There’s only one road in and out of here, one traffic light separating this little mile between the jetties, and that’s it. We wanted to get past the gates, so to speak — the traffic light — because on the other side of that light was the great outdoors, other people, other scenes. We wanted to experience that, especially starting to play music and being in the early surf and skate scene before punk rock kicked off.
Me personally, getting into punk rock, I was in LA and traveling the world with my grandparents when I was young, so I got to experience a lot of different stuff that people who are from here didn’t really get to experience. My mom knew a lot of big rock stars in Hollywood, and I got to meet people from The Who, The Beatles, The Stones – we lived across the street from Frank Zappa for a little while when my mom decided to pack out to Laurel Canyon. You know, a nine-year-old walking around with a guitar over his shoulder, barefooted, with The Mamas and Papas and all these hippie peace protest bands around. I remember Captain Beefheart came out of the desert with this bizarre stuff, hearing Trout Mask Replica for the first time going, ‘This is… I like this. I really like this stuff.’
My little brother started playing guitar in Stalag 13 when he was about 14 — we had a different outlook on music than people that lived in Oxnard full-time, because we were back and forth. We got to hear DEVO real early because they’d opened for Zappa and Beefheart in ’73 or ’74. But we didn’t know that it was going to be called punk rock, and we didn’t know that Iggy Pop was the godfather of it, we just thought he was some crazy guy from Detroit or whatever. David Bowie kind of introduced him to the world.
My mom was very politically active during the war, protesting, so we knew who the MC5 were because their political message was strong. We heard what came out of Woodstock, we heard what came out of Altamont. Most houses back then were either a Beatles house or a Stones house. My uncle was a biker, so we were definitely a Stones house, though my aunts had Beatles records stashed away — if my uncle found them he’d break them.
When punk rock started popping up and we identified who these bands were and exposed to them, it just made sense. We were all skateboarding at Oxnard Skate Park with long hair, listening to Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin, and then times changed and we started hearing DEVO, 999, Buzzcocks, early Sex Pistols. It was the natural progression. It was loud, fast, aggressive music. It fit skateboarding, it fit our surfing, and we just went with it until the park closed.
Agression was the first band on the beach that really started doing anything. There were the Rotters from Newbury Park and Inland a bit, but they weren’t here on the beach. My mom lived next door to the guys in Agression and they had a half-pipe in their backyard, so we skated there. Ron from Stalag 13 bought it from them for like 10 bucks and some beer – I think that was the trade – and so the skating moved to Ron’s house.
Around ’81 there was a party and somebody had a copy of DOA’s Hardcore ’81. It came out around the same time as Nazi Punks F*ck Off by Dead Kennedys, so there were two early instances of the word ‘hardcore’ being used. It was uttered at one of the parties: “Well if they’re hardcore, we’re Nardcore!“
Oxnard had always been made fun of — it’s a horrible name – it sounds weird, and it is weird. Some farmer brothers that raised sugar beets around here went full throttle and said, ‘Okay, well, we’re the Nardcore guys,’ and started writing it on the walls of the Whiskey and the Starwood and Godzilla’s. People saw Bob and Mark and Henry from Agression and their friend KC rolling with us, they were big dudes that did security for B.Y.O. and Godzilla’s and a few other places, so no one really got f*cked with too much.
Punk rock was violent, and if people wanted to get violent with the smaller guys from Oxnard, then they’d have to deal with the bigger guys from Oxnard, and they didn’t really want to. Still, incidents happened because it was just a violent thing. Someone gets their nose smacked in the pit, and even if it wasn’t you or you weren’t going after anybody in particular… Things just happened between sets and after the shows. Not everybody was sober, that’s for sure.
We kind of just went out of our way to bring our music and presence down there, because we wanted to not just be nobody. You took pride in your area, and we had a music scene that people recognized. Mystic started putting it out and calling it Nardcore.
But every band had a different sound. I remember an early article about Dr. Know saying that we sounded like Discharge or sped-up Black Sabbath, and that Agression sounded like they were blues-oriented, which was very true because Henry was a great blues guitar player. Ill Repute were kind of our Beach Boys, and there was really no ’70s music that you could have attributed Stalag 13 to, or False Confession, which I would say were probably the most talented of our bunch. Harry went on to drum with The Cramps, which was huge, and we all took a lot of pride in that — like, a guy made it from Oxnard to play with The Cramps, touring all over the world with them. Israel, the singer, became a big hairdresser around here, so he had other talent besides singing. John Morris joined Stalag 13 after False Confession, and Scotty Morris started Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, which went on to play the Super Bowl. So if you take one band from Oxnard and say, ‘Okay, who did what?’ False Confession probably did the most damage — just between the Super Bowl and The Cramps, and that was only two guys. But probably the most famous band from here is Agression, and maybe us, because I bring a little notoriety to it from my stint with Dead Kennedys.
But honestly, I think it’s mainly because of me and Kyle fighting about sh*t all the time, more than anything. Some people like his version of the band, some people like mine, and some people don’t care. It’s not a competition. I think Kyle’s a great writer; he had a good voice, he wrote amazing songs. Unfortunately, we just don’t see eye-to-eye and we probably won’t play together again. I wish we would. I did the first 14 songs that we recorded, that I sang and he played guitar on, because I was the first singer that did anything with the band. We had three other singers: Ron Berg from Stalag 13 sang for a bit, a guy named Joey Piña, and Rick Heller, who became our drummer later. But it was all like over the course of a year, year and a half, and then they got me.
We recorded and played a gig around here up in Santa Barbara, we threw house parties in Oxnard. We did a bunch of gigs in LA until we quit in ’83, so I really wasn’t even in the band that long. But nobody knew that the scene was going to last this long. I mean, it’s 2026 and we’re still going, still playing music. Stalag just got back from the East Coast, and we’ve both gone to Europe a few times; pretty interesting that this music has lasted this long.
I was living in LA in the early ’90s and I was pretty strung out on drugs and alcohol, it was pretty f*cked up. I had just ruined my knee snowboarding and had surgery, and my ex-wife was pregnant with my kid. We were in the birthing class — the Lamaze thing — and she knew a guy that was there with his wife (they were having a kid too), who was a producer at South Park, or Comedy Central. He saw my knee all torn up and he’s like, ‘What happened?’ I told him the story and he said, ‘Yeah, so they’re probably going to come and tell you that you need to be a baker or something horrible!’ A few sessions later we got to know each other better and he told me, ‘Why don’t you learn to edit and I’ll give you a job?’
I told the Workers’ Comp people that I wanted to learn how to edit, and it was cheaper than what they would have sent me to for other stuff, so I ended up working on a comedy show with a very early Comedy Central crew. Then they got South Park, and that guy moved over to South Park and took me with him. I got sober during that time, so South Park was my first sober job around ’96 or early ’97.
I got a Dr. Know song in there because they needed a song for a mosh pit, which I hated — ‘Don’t call it a mosh pit, that’s lame.’ But they’re from Colorado, they didn’t know people called it a ‘slampit’ — I’ve never liked the word ‘mosh.’ But Kenny dies in a mosh pit, and they needed a track, so I gave them a little Dr. Know song and we got on that. It was cool; they paid a couple bucks for that, and nobody made a lot of money off of it, but Kyle wrote the music, I wrote the words, so we split it.
I quit after three seasons of being assistant editor thinking, ‘Oh, all these guys are funny, but it’s going to burn out quick.’ It didn’t; they’re still going, and I just watched the latest episode and it’s still funny, it’s still good. But I was newly sober, so I didn’t really know what I was doing and I wanted to be around a pretty sober environment because I’d been around a bunch of fuck-ups for a long time, and those guys partied back then. From what I hear, they’re a lot mellower now, but I haven’t seen them in a long time.
Getting sober led to helping people get sober themselves, I’ve been doing that for a long time. I moved to Europe after I got divorced, and I worked over there helping people get into different rehabs. I lived in Denmark, and then I would work in Germany, or Italy, or France, or just wherever. I went to Dubai, I went to United Arab Emirates, I went to Thailand, I went to Bali – wherever there were rehabs or people that needed help, I went.
I got in with a bunch of doctors and eventually got connected in Malibu with a bunch of fancy-ass rehabs that, for better or worse, had the idea of helping people, but the American recovery industry is based on making a lot of money… I think it’s pretty greedy. People dying and getting sent the wrong level of care? I mean, I’m not a doctor and never went to school for this stuff, but I went through it on the other side. I don’t want to say I know better, but it’s hard for a doctor who hasn’t had the disease of alcoholism or drug addiction to know exactly what you’re going through.
Day in day out, I still work in recovery today. I’ve been to a lot of rehabs and I’ve seen how a lot of them operate; some work well and some of them don’t work at all, I try and steer people to the right ones. Well, I don’t try, I do.
As a guy who’s 64, a lot of people look at me and say, ‘Why are you even going to shows anymore, playing music and hanging out with these kids?’ It’s because I still think I’m vital to the scene. I still have ideas and opinions that kids ask me for, I’ve sat and talked with younger bands and said, ‘Yeah, you guys can just go here, call this guy and ask him for a gig,’ you know, ‘Don’t be afraid to do it, don’t be afraid to go for it.’ Because what’s the worst that can happen? The guy says no, then you go and do it yourself, right? Just like printing t-shirts or making stickers. Or, how do you get your band noticed? It’s by f*cking geting out there, being loud, being seen. If you just stand in the background, nobody’s going to know who you are. So get out there.
These days, I’m not a real in-the-pit audience guy — age has given me the privilege of knowing who’s putting the shows on so I can just get on stage and not get shit knocked out of me. But I don’t see sexism here, I don’t see racism. I just see a bunch of people really involved in what they’re doing with their heart in it, giving it 100%, putting on shows, putting out zines, going on tours, and welcoming bands from outside the area here, showing them a good time and putting out the welcome mat. That’s what it’s all about.
Don’t let this thing die, because it popped up here in ’80, ’81, well before a lot of these kids were born. I go to shows now and I see these kids and I’m like, I know your dad. Sh*t, I know your grandpa! And now my nephews are in bands. I’m like 30, 40 years older than some of these kids, but it doesn’t matter. Music, punk rock, does not have an age limit. Which I’m pretty stoked about, because I’ll probably keep doing this until they spread my ashes at the jetty in Silver Strand. There’s no reason to quit.
-Brandon Cruz for Dead Relatives.
