‘Hip Factory’ Ventures Behind Orange Curtain in Search of Cool

The words “Orange County” and “hip” have been paired so rarely, except as an oxymoron, that even those who recognize the region’s impact on music, fashion and extreme sports in recent years will be jolted to hear the county described as “possibly the hippest spot on the planet” in the VH1 news special “Orange County: American Hip Factory.”

Nevertheless, the one-hour show, premiering tonight, makes a persuasive case that the area once known outside its borders only as the birthplace of Richard Nixon and Disneyland has become a powerful influence on pop culture throughout the nation and even the world.

It begins as a chronicle of the Orange County music scene, examining the area where such multimillion-selling bands as the Offspring, No Doubt and Sugar Ray emerged in the 1990s.

Producer Lucas Troub and writer Mike Goudreau located pretty much all the right players in tracing the punk scene to its beginnings in the late 1970s through interviews and performance footage of pioneering bands including Social Distortion, TSOL, the Crowd, the Vandals and the Adolescents. (Among the other interviewees are Irvine Mayor Larry Agran, UCLA professor of urban planning Ed Soja, ESPN exec and X Games creator Ron Semiao and journalist Mike Boehm, who covered the Orange County music scene for The Times from 1988 to 1999.)

The program adroitly captures the irony of a seething underground spawned in master-planned communities that pride themselves on architectural and social conformity aimed at sustaining property values. “People plan these communities, but who could plan for the punk-rock movement?” asks Vandals founding member Joe Escalante. “We were running around going, ‘You didn’t plan for this, did you?’”

While none of those seminal bands found mass commercial success, they did inspire such future stars as Offspring singer Bryan “Dexter” Holland, No Doubt’s Gwen Stefani and Sugar Ray’s Mark McGrath to start bands of their own, bands that did hit the big time after Nirvana showed at the outset of the ‘90s that aggressive music with dark themes could sell millions.

“American Hip Factory” then expands its scope by exploring the interconnection between music, fashion and extreme sports in Orange County, noting that many of the kids who were bouncing off one another in the slam pits at punk shows every night were avid skateboarders or surfers during the day. That gave rise to the fashion world’s answer to garage bands: young entrepreneurs who started making clothes in their bedrooms and garages and creating multimillion-dollar companies, among them Volcom, Billabong USA, Quiksilver and Hurley.

“I don’t know if marketers would say that Orange County is the coolest place in America right now,” says John Fine of Advertising Age magazine, “but whether they say it or not, it’s the area they are most desperately trying to associate their products with.”

The evolution of the punk counterculture into a commercial force, naturally, rankles some of its forefathers.

“The sad part,” says TSOL singer Jack Grisham, one of the most colorful provocateurs the scene has produced, “is that they took a look and turned it into a uniform; they took a song and turned it into a Pepsi commercial, and they took a movement and turned it into an advertising campaign. And for that, yes, I’m bitter.”

“Orange County: American Hip Factory” is consistently entertaining and illuminating. Scrupulously balanced it’s not--there are no interviews with any of the government officials or civic leaders who battled O.C.’s early punks.

Also, in exploring the crushing effects of social Disneyfication on young people, the show unintentionally Disneyfies the result by ignoring the high cost of nonconformity paid by the many punk musicians and fans who landed in prison, died of drug overdoses or drank themselves to death in pursuit of anarchy in O.C.

But this is VH1, not “Nightline,” and, all in all, the show does an admirable job of dispelling stereotypes and pointing up contradictions, concluding that when it comes to explaining Orange County, “It’s still not an easy place to figure out.”

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“Orange County: American Hip Factory” premieres tonight at 10 on VH1 and repeats April 12 at 2 p.m.