Brett was always the president of the label, but back in 1980, Epitaph was just a logo and a PO box. They used to store the records in Brett’s mom’s garage. Greg and Brett would sit in Brett’s dining room and come up with Epitaph logos. Greg still keeps a sketch pad at home with the ideas he drew back then. Greg says, “Brett was a better artist than I was, but I had good ideas. I drew the original tombstone, but it didn’t say E. It was a gravestone with a record in the middle, and I made it 3-D with a split down it. Brett thought of making slits in it to make an E, which was even better, and that stuck.” They came up with the name Epitaph while joking about the King Crimson song “Confusion Will Be My Epitaph.” Greg says, “Epitaph, what a great idea! Because epitaph is in a sense a record of a lifetime; these grooves in the vinyl will be our epitaph.” When “How Could Hell…” sold around 12,000 copies, the Epitaph “office” expanded from Greg’s living room to Brett’s home. They personally stuffed all the albums by hand and sometimes wrote little notes or autographed copies to make it more fun. After “Into the Unknown,” Brett had to disband the label because it went bankrupt, so he focused on his job at Chameleon Records. In 1987, when Brett revived Epitaph, Jay started working for Epitaph too. They would sign bands and immediately license them to Chameleon. L7’s release was Epitaph’s debut unlicensed release, but it was the second record, “Suffer,” that was the first one distributed by Epitaph itself. In 1988, Brett decided to give Epitaph a real try and take a systematic approach to creating an independent record company. He made a plan for himself, figuring out costs, projected income, growth rate, and how many releases he wanted to do per year. He learned how to do all of this by asking people, buying books, and checking out books from the library. In 1989, they released “No Control” and sold 60,000 albums. Jay says, “At the time, you had two heavies, Alternative Tentacles and SST, but then there was Dischord
This content was originally written by the badass contributors of thebrpage.net, the best superfan resource and website that exists for any band, let alone the best band in the whole entire world. I’ve been lurking on that site for over 20 years and if you’re into Bad Religion as much as I am, I’m sure you’re familiar. If you are not, go there right now and never come back to this site again. You should, and I totally understand.
Leave a Reply