walking upstream…
NOFX
sourcesGuitar World — "NOFX's Fat Mike" (Suffer teaching vocal harmony; RKL as the band's chased-but-unmatched musicianship) · Stereogum — NOFX's final show setlist and recap (Bad Religion's Brett Gurewitz and Jay Bentley joining for "We're Only Gonna Die") · Cleveland Scene — "Melody Makers · Songfacts — "Fat Mike of NOFX" (Bad Religion's Brett Gurewitz named favorite lyricist; Suffer's lyrics)
In 1983, bassist Mike Burkett showed up to a Los Angeles practice full of strangers who had only called him because they had heard he played bass. "I didn't know anyone in the band," he later said of that first session, adding that he and guitarist Eric Melvin "wouldn't practice, but just skateboard." Out of that unserious start came NOFX: breakneck tempos, gang-vocal hooks, and lyrics that swing between crude jokes and hard left politics. Fat Mike also built the label Fat Wreck Chords to sell the same fast, melodic template he and NOFX had spent years chasing from other bands' records. By the time NOFX played its farewell show in 2024, the sound it had gone hunting for at that first practice had outlived most of the bands it borrowed from.
the sound in question
1994
LinoleumNOFX
walk the tributaries ↓
Bad Religion1990s · Hardcore punk / Melodic punk
Fat Mike has named Bad Religion his favorite band since NOFX's earliest interviews, and traces a specific technical debt to one record. "Bad Religion's Suffer changed everything; that's where I learned harmony," he told Guitar World in 2022. "I also learned not to do three-part harmonies... but two-part is great, because you can hear it." Before Suffer, NOFX was a straight-ahead hardcore band; after it, Fat Mike started stacking his and Eric Melvin's voices into the two-part hooks that carried the band for the next three decades.
listen: upstream & heresource: Flipside — 1997 Fat Mike interview (RKL, Bad Religion, and D.I. named as the band's founding sonic templates) ↗
1982
We're Only Gonna DieBad Religion
2024
We're Only Gonna DieNOFX
listen forAt NOFX's final show in October 2024, Bad Religion's Brett Gurewitz and Jay Bentley walked onstage to help NOFX perform Bad Religion's own "We're Only Gonna Die" — the model band lending its harmony live to the students who had spent a career borrowing it. Listen for how easily NOFX's gang-vocal chorus locks into Bad Religion's melody, the same close two-part harmony that turned hardcore into something a crowd could sing along to.
RKL1980s · Hardcore punk / Skate punk
Before Bad Religion, before any melody, there was RKL — Rich Kids on LSD, a hardcore band from Santa Barbara that formed a year ahead of NOFX. "When we first started, we wanted to sound like RKL," Fat Mike told Flipside in 1997. It went past tempo: NOFX's drummer bought the same four-piece Ludwig kit RKL's drummer played, and Fat Mike copied bassist Joe Raposo's headless bass with a cheaper knockoff, chasing a level of musicianship the band still admits it never actually caught.
listen: upstream & here
1987
Blocked OutRKL
1989
S&M AirlinesNOFX
listen forPlay RKL's 1987 "Blocked Out" against NOFX's early, breathless "S&M Airlines" and the debt shows up in the speed control: both bands run through start-stop time changes at hardcore tempo without losing the groove. "No one can ever touch the musicianship of RKL: the drumming, the bass playing... they were our heroes and we tried to be like them," Fat Mike said in 2022 — NOFX never matched it, but the effort is audible in how hard the rhythm section works just to keep up.
D.I.1980s · Hardcore punk / Punk rock
The debt to D.I. — an Orange County band formed by ex-Adolescents drummer Casey Royer — is narrower but just as directly stated. Asked how NOFX arrived at its guitar sound, Fat Mike didn't reach for a whole style, just one technique: "And D.I., too. We got the octave chords from D.I." It is the smallest of NOFX's three founding debts and the only one resting on a single interview, but it names something concrete: a specific chord shape written into nearly every song the band plays.
listen: upstream & here
1983
Richard Hung HimselfD.I.
1988
Vegetarian Mumbo JumboNOFX
listen forD.I.'s best-known song, 1983's "Richard Hung Himself," rides on the stripped-down octave chords — root and octave, no fifth — that Fat Mike credits as NOFX's borrowed technique; NOFX's "Vegetarian Mumbo Jumbo," from the same Southern California scene five years later, leans on the identical shape. No interview ever named this exact song pair — it's an ear-test of a technique Fat Mike did name, not a confirmed borrowing — but the guitar trick itself is unmistakably the one he described.