Uniform Choice - History

History

Uniform Choice was started by guitarist Myke Bates, bassist Hanson Meyer and drummer Eric Hanna during the Spring of 1982. Bates had been playing with a couple of bands previously in Palm Springs. His band, Funeral Information, had played early punk shows with Sin 34 and Black Flag (band) and his other band, Target 13, had written the song "Rodney On The ROQ" for KROQ-FM DJ Rodney Bingenheimer, which appeared on the compilation album Rodney On The ROQ, Vol 2 under the independent record label Posh Boy Records.

Bates left his skateboard shop, Bates Skates, behind in Palm Springs and moved to Newport Beach. He looked to start a new band in Orange County and found Meyer and Hanna who were playing with a local punk band called Moral Sin.

They together created Uniform Choice and as a power trio started playing a number of songs already written by Bates. Meyer and Bates wrote a number of songs together over the course of the next two years including "War is Here" and "Don't Take the Car You'll Kill Yourself". After the punk club Cuckoo's Nest (nightclub) closed down, there were limited clubs for the band to play in the Orange County area. Not too long after the closure of the Cuckoo's Nest, owner Jerry Roach was able to reopen the club as "The Concert Factory" for a few months where Uniform Choice played most of their early shows in late 1982. Bates played guitar and sang lead vocals in the beginning until the group landed on lead singer Elliott Colla, a former classmate of Meyer and Hanna's from Corona Del Mar High School. The band experimented with other singers before Colla. Newport Beach local Eric Whittick sang for a short while. And later in the tradition of X-Ray Spex, 14-year-old Jennifer Harper fronted the band for a short time. The band made its first studio demo in September 1982 (Orange Peel Sessions) with Colla heading up vocals. The recordings were engineered and produced by Tom Springston (Tom Tom) of Burnt Party Host and were recorded in Corona Del Mar, California. In 1983 the band experimented with an additional second lead bass player, Brent Turner. Turner only played several shows with the band and left the group to record the album When in Rome Do as the Vandals with The Vandals (punk). Over the course of the first two years the group performed with other established punk acts such as Black Flag, Circle Jerks, Channel 3 (band), Shattered Faith (band), Bad Religion, Circle One and Angry Samoans.

In early 1984, Hanna and Meyer decided to leave the band and Bates enlisted an entire new line-up which would be fronted by Pat Dubar and drums being played by Hanna's friend and classmate Pat Dyson. Meyer went on to play with other groups such as the Finks and Peace Corp. Bates left the group later in 1984 to pursue other endeavors in Hollywood, California.

The group with this final line-up of Dubar, Dyson along with the addition of two well known O.C. hardcore players Vic Maynez and Dave Mello went forward with a new vision as Uniform Choice and continued to record and created what was considered the first O.C. Straight Edge Demos. gaining momentum nationally and performing throughout California and beyond bringing the group to their current level of fame and recognition in the Southern California punk subculture.

Screaming for Change is their most acclaimed album. They also recorded another less well received LP called Staring into the Sun and their demo has been bootlegged several times. Pat Dubar was a graduate of Pepperdine University and created the label Wishingwell Records, which released albums by Uniform Choice, Blast, and Youth of Today, among others. Uniform Choice is historically among the first five Straight Edge Hardcore bands to emerge from Southern California.