1997
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Brian Baker is an American punk rock musician and founding member of Minor Threat. He also plays guitar in Bad Religion and has been in several other bands, such as Dag Nasty, Samhain, and Fake Names.
Mar 3, 2023 · Anyone minded to listen to Baker’s solos on songs such as Drunk Sincerity, Kyoto Now! and Live Again, to name just three, will hear a level of musicality that was lacking in this great band’s earlier years. On the first day of spring, however, Brian Baker is on the stump to discuss his occasional group Fake Names.
#BadReligion, Dag Nasty and Fake Names guitarist #BrianBaker, also known for his stint in #MinorThreat, plays riffs from his favorite bands and his own group...
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- The Ruts – The Crack
- The Damned – Machine Gun Etiquette
- AC/DC – Powerage
- ZZ Top – Tres Hombres
- Van Halen – Van Halen
- Motörhead – Ace of Spades
- The Beatles – Revolver
- Discharge – Realities of War Ep
- Black Flag – Nervous Breakdown Ep
- U2 – Boy
"I wasn't made aware of it until maybe 1980 when I went punk. I heard it in context with a lot of those first bands that I was attracted to – like The Damned and US bands like Black Flag and Circle Jerks. But there was something about The Ruts which was just so precise. The performances were so strong. "At the time, I didn't really know that [guita...
“Because it’s the first Damned album I ever owned. It’s so wildly different to the first and second records. Captain Sensible is such a different guitar player to Brian James or even the second record with both Lu Edmonds and Brian James. "It's so much more theatrical. The songs were so incredibly developed and there's so much guitar on it. No offe...
"It’s their best album. This was my rock guitar solo primer. I started playing guitar when I was eight in 1973 but I didn’t really start to get serious until about 1978 and that’s when Powerage appeared. So that was my first AC/DC exposure, then I became a fan of everything else by them subsequently. "It's just the right record. It’s the right Bon ...
"This is how crazy this is: I didn’t really know who ZZ Top were. I got a Stevie Ray Vaughan record in 1983 – Texas Flood– and through that I went back and discovered ZZ Top. And through ZZ Top that’s how I found Elmore James. And Son House. And Albert King. It was this huge lifeline from Stevie Ray Vaughan. It’s like an Offspring kid who then disc...
"You have to understand the impact of Van Halen. It wasn’t about it being metal or hair metal, it sounded like nothing else. It was a miracle. And it was scary. "I wasn’t a fan of the entire Van Halen oeuvre – I just liked that record. Really shocking, dry, guitar one side, bass one side. It was just a revolutionary stripped-down sound, and the gui...
"This was my first Motörhead experience. It's everything. It's sped up rock ’n’ roll by people on speed. The sound is monstrous, the distorted bass, Lemmy's vocal… everything that makes Motörhead so important to all of the conversations we have about rock music. "They looked badass. They were punk but they didn't have short hair. It was just this c...
"My first exposure to music came from my parents. I also went to a Montessori school when I was very young and there was a lot of music in that programme. I’m not really a student of that teaching idea but my parents were kind of hippies and this was the 70s in the USA, man! "Revolver was when I started to get more serious about guitar. The first r...
"It’s not an album? But it is! Realities of Warcounts because it’s the first Discharge that I ever heard. In the States we didn’t get the same kind of Discharge – we got compilations. “For me, it was the cover – the jacket. But the sonics… it was low-fi chaos. It was about to fall apart at any time. It was so much rawer and more destructive than Bl...
"With a lot of these records, it would have been Henry Rollins giving them to Michael Hampton (guitarist in The Faith, and a bandmate of Rollins in State of Alert) who was my childhood best friend. So that’s how I discovered them, through Michael, from Rollins. That’s how the whole tiny DC timeline worked together. "It’s my favourite Black Flag rec...
"I didn’t get into it until 1983 – because it was guitar pedals. I’d never been interested in music with that electronic addition, the reverbs and the delay. It was so spatial: U2 sounded enormous. I didn’t understand production at that point. I didn’t know why things sounded the way they did. U2 just sounded like this enormous thing made by four g...
Jan 24, 2022 · “This whole journey is based on right place, right time, and luck, for the most part,” says Bad Religion guitarist Brian Baker about playing music for a living. “I didn’t realize I was a professional musician until I’d been one for 20 years.”
May 5, 2020 · Brian Baker, guitarist of Bad Religion and Minor Threat, formed Fake Names with friends Michael Hampton and Dennis Lyxzén. The band's debut album is a retro-rock record with strident lyrics and a sense of rebellion.
For Brian Baker, Fake Names was born out of the simple desire to hang out with his friends. Brian Baker of Bad Religion performs onstage during day 2 of the 2015 Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival (Weekend 1) at the Empire Polo Club on 11 April 2015 in Indio, California.
