Pop Music : Punk Goes Folk With Bad Religion at Palladium

Punk’s not dead, OK, at least not as long as L.A.’s Bad Religion is around to revive it every once in a while. Saturday at the Hollywood Palladium, in the first of two sold-out shows, the band played to a room so steamy that shellacked Mohawk haircuts were wilting in the heat.

Singer Greg Graffin is an amiable frontman, sometimes looking more like Tom Hatten introducing a Popeye cartoon than like a punk singer driving a packed house bonkers. (It’s not hard to imagine him as a teaching assistant at an Ivy League school, which in fact he is, at Cornell.) Graffin’s folkish vocal melodies are cool, real sing-along stuff, and it’s always fun to see how he fits all his sesquipidalian lyrics into a bar of cannonball-speed 4/4.

On the choruses, Bad Religion manages to sound like an old Weavers record with louder guitars--it may be the only punk-rock band in the history of the medium that consistently sings in tune. Where rock ‘n’ roll theoretician Thurston Moore has long postulated that hard-core punk was in fact folk music, 5,000 bands in 5,000 towns all singing about their principals, their parents and the local cops, Bad Religion is the living incarnation of that theory.

And where after a while it becomes pretty clear that Bad Religion is just doing punk-rock by the numbers--1234-1234, to be exact--the band is universal enough in its appeal to strike a resonant chord in anybody who’s ever dived off a stage, or even wanted to.