The first time Fat Mike ever encountered punk rock
For punks of a certain generation and tethered to the States’ sunny West Coast, Fat Mike and his NOFX band scored an essential slice of the 1990s underground.
They’re not universally beloved. Orbiting the explosion of Californian punk with the likes of The Offspring and Green Day, some of the original pioneers scoffed at the seemingly toothless chart-conquering such groups enjoyed during punk’s commercial embrace. NOFX just about remained anchored to the punk underground, however, avoiding major label signing while still enjoying their Heavy Petting Zoo or Punk in Drublic, featuring heavily among suburban teens’ bedrooms across the alternative MTV nation.
While going on to influence Blink-182 and Sum 41 for better or worse, NOFX’s formation stretches back as far as 1983, when Fat Mike was still a teen, and the original wave of hardcore was sweeping across the Sunshine State. Truth is, their eccentric frontman had only been exposed to punk a few short years earlier, stumbling upon the movement almost by accident but yielding a life-altering transformation at just 14 years old.
Growing up on the wrong side of Los Angeles’ Beverly Hills in the working-class flats near Wilshire Boulevard, the young Fat Mike curiously absorbed little music in the house, reportedly only first hearing The Beatles in college. A formative spark was felt while in fifth grade, catching the transgressive The Rocky Horror Picture Show lace and corset comedy, quite possibly sowing the seeds for Fat Mike’s open penchant for crossdressing and BDSM sexual shenanigans later in life.
Yet, punk was to make its most foundational impact. At summer camp in Susanville’s Mountain Meadow Ranch in 1981, the weekly dance of disco and pop slyly slipped in two strange numbers in its playlist, the Sex Pistols’ ‘Who Killed Bambi?’ and ‘Beat on the Brat’ by the Ramones. It turned out that that night’s DJ was none other than The Vandals drummer Joe Escalante, a good several years before helping pioneer the Orange County punk sound.
He was hooked. Back home after camp, the young Fat Mike shot to Westwood’s Rhino Records store to nab the Ramones’ first album on cassette. “To be honest, I really only liked three or four of the songs on it,” he revealed in 2016’s NOFX: The Hepatitis Bathtub and Other Stories. “But this ‘punk’ thing was intriguing.”
By this point, ‘Beat on the Brat’ was five years old, and the Ramones were six whole albums in. Punk had been around a while and had already permutated into its myriad post-punk and new wave offshoots when Fat Mike was playing his coveted cassette tape. Still, it was one thing to listen to punk on headphones, something else altogether to witness a show. Upon the recommendation of a friend, a ruse to go to the movies with a friend to keep his mother happy was, in fact, a surreptitious plan to head to Hollywood for his first punk gig.
Wide-eyed and wet behind the ears, Fat Mike and his pal caught Killing Joke’s August 1981 show at the famed Whisky a Go-Go, an infinitely more commanding and shamanistic conjuring of metal heft and industrial smog than what he’d been used to on his little Ramones tape. “Killing Joke was like nothing I’d ever heard before – pounding and relentless and loud as fuck,” he recalled. “Everyone on the dance floor was slamming into each other. I didn’t know what to make of it at the time; slam dancing had not yet been splattered all over the media, at least not any media I was paying attention.”
He wasn’t dressed the part, sporting shorts and a pink Izod polo shirt amid a sea of skinheads and older bruisers, but when the same pal invited Fat Mike along to an X show the next week, a safety pin through his shirt’s Lacoste alligator logo began a slow and inescapable trajectory into the punk subculture that would last his entire life. In only two years, NOFX was forged and helped pull punk to unseen heights of commercial success.
