Adolescents

Adolescents, also known as The Blue Album due to its cover design, is the debut studio album by American punk rock band the Adolescents, released in April 1981 on Frontier Records. Recorded after guitarist Rikk Agnew and drummer Casey Royer joined the band, it features several songs written for their prior group, the Detours, including "Kids of the Black Hole" and "Amoeba", which became two of the Adolescents' most well-known songs. Adolescents was one of the first hardcore punk albums to be widely distributed throughout the United States, and became one of the best-selling California hardcore albums of its time. The band never toured in support of it, and broke up four months after its release. The Blue Album lineup of Agnew, Royer, guitarist Frank Agnew, bassist Steve Soto and singer Tony Brandenburg reunited several times in subsequent years, but only for brief periods. Background and recording The Adolescents formed in Fullerton, California in January 1980. The original lineup consisted of singer Tony Brandenburg (who used the stage name Tony Cadena), bassist Steve Soto, guitarists Frank Agnew and John O'Donovan, and a drummer who went by the stage name Peter Pan. They began performing locally and recorded their first demo tape that March. A second demo tape, recorded that May, included the songs "I Hate Children", "No Friends", "Who Is Who" and "Wrecking Crew". "I Hate Children" was inspired by a conversation Brandenburg overheard while riding a bus: "It was a snapshot of a man saying to his wife — with his children there crying — that he hated children, can't stand them", he said in 2011. "And this was the same message that my father had given me. When I expressed that, people didn't understand where that was coming from. I wasn't saying this was me. I'm mirroring something that I'm seeing right now. This is what is going on in my life." O'Donovan and Pan both left the band in June 1980. Frank Agnew's older brother, Rikk Agnew, joined the group, initially on drums, but soon switched to guitar and brought in drummer Casey Royer. Royer and Rikk Agnew brought with them several songs written for their previous band, the Detours, including "Amoeba", "No Way", "Creatures", "Rip It Up", and "Kids of the Black Hole". "Kids of the Black Hole" describes Social Distortion frontman Mike Ness' Fullerton apartment, a graffiti-covered drug den that was a hangout for punks and a site for parties, sex, and violence.