Bad Religion — Recipe for Hate

Vinyl, LP, Album, Reissue, Repress, 2009

I always appreciate cameos because cameos justify our love for something. Cameos are designed to be a surprise for the hardcore fan — a nod to the dumb things we love and a justification for why we love them. When famous people show up randomly, uncredited, in the things we love, we know that they, too, love that thing.

George Harrison didn’t just finance a handful of Monty Python movies, but snuck into a gang scene. Kevin Spacey was famously uncredited in the opening scenes for Se7en. Stan Lee can’t help but cameo in nearly every film that’s even loosely associated with him.

More than any, though, I loved the time that Eddie Vedder — at the peak of his power, at a time when Bad Religion had not yet fully broke into the mainstream, before they had released charting videos on MTV and turned into the elder statesmen of California punk rock — showed up randomly in a song on Recipe for Hate called “Watch it Die,” and then yelled the backing vocals in Bad Religion classic “American Jesus.” He wailed a bit in the background, left his mark, and went on like it never happened.

A friend of mine who has loved Bad Religion since childhood — even the bad records — didn’t believe me. He didn’t believe, and had never read, about that time Eddie Vedder showed up. But Eddie did. And it’s there. That teeth-clenched wail, that Seattle bandleader, that sound of the mid-90s.

He just wandered in, said “I love this band” in a few growls and noises, and then walked, no one the wiser.