Pursuing freedoms

Returning to Costa Mesa’s Westside to record their first album in a few years gave the members of vintage Orange County punk band TSOL a nostalgic feeling.

It was like coming full circle for the band that frequented the now-defunct Cuckoo’s Nest nightclub on the Westside 30 years ago before rising to national fame and notoriety both for their trend-blazing music and their wild lifestyle rife with the substance-abuse problems and in-fighting that plague many bands.

“Doing it here was completely different. It kind of felt like when we first started recording — friends dropping in, close to the beach, in a warehouse,” said the band’s lead singer Jack Grisham, who still lives in Huntington Beach, while the rest of the members have moved to the four corners of the country.

Decades ago, while the band’s popularity was growing exponentially, another movement was on the rise in Costa Mesa: the surf industry. Luminaries of companies such as Billabong and Quiksilver that would later see an explosion in their businesses both in California and overseas filled the neighborhood.

It was at this time that Bob Hurley — who later founded Hurley International — met Grisham. Both were young surfers in Huntington Beach, which was then a small town where everyone who was part of the surf culture knew everyone else.

Hurley went to the Cuckoo’s Nest to see the band play.

“It was the only place around here where we could play. A lot of places wouldn’t let guys like us play there,” Grisham said.

The two men reunited for a weeklong recording session at the end of December to produce TSOL’s (short for True Sounds of Liberty) latest release, “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Free Downloads,” at the recording studio that Hurley International set up in one of its warehouses.

The company recorded the album free of charge for the band, and it was released to the public free to download off Hurley International’s website, Hurley.com. It’s a strategy similar to that employed most famously by British band Radiohead in 2007 with one difference — any money fans choose to pay goes 100% toward a list of charities, not the band.