Bad Cop Bad Cop: Just Getting Started

Sometime around 2010, Linh Le was a few drinks deep on the patio of a bar in downtown Huntington Beach, complaining about the absence of something she wanted and couldn’t find: a band, made up entirely of women, that she could actually be in. It was the kind of complaint people make without expecting anything to come of it. Jen Carlson overheard her, introduced herself, and they became immediate friends. Within a year, Carlson had co-founded Bad Cop Bad Cop. “I never thought it would come to fruition,” Le says now, fifteen years later, laughing at her younger self a little.

Le wasn’t in the original lineup — that was Carlson on bass, guitarist and vocalist Stacey Dee, guitarist Jennie Cotterill, and drummer Myra Gallarza, who formed the band in January 2011 in the Los Angeles area and immediately started playing as many shows as they could find. But when Carlson eventually departed, she introduced Le as her replacement, a handoff that everyone credits as the moment the group’s chemistry finally locked into something lasting.

Le had grown up in Rochester, New York, moved to Philadelphia after high school, and arrived in Southern California on a one-way ticket with a performance career in mind and a fairly impressionistic sense of what she was getting into. “My impression was just like, okay, I’m moving to Southern California,” she says. “Everybody smokes weed and surfs.” She is not wrong that this is partially true. But Southern California, as she discovered, contains multitudes, and one of them, tucked away at the bottom of Los Angeles, is San Pedro.

San Pedro is where Bad Cop Bad Cop has rehearsed for most of its existence and the town has shaped the band the way places shape people who are stubborn enough to stay. It is a port neighborhood with a punk tradition that punches well above its weight: the Minutemen came from here and there is a lineage of raw, uncompromising music made by people who were never particularly driven by a need to be discovered.

Dee understands the inheritance. “It’s the home of Mike Watt and some of the best, coolest punk music from Los Angeles,” she says. And yet, in the same breath, she is honest about the band’s relationship to that tradition: “San Pedro has a sound, but we don’t as much. We’ve always kind of been on the outside of bands from Pedro.”

Outsiders in a place that has always prided itself on being outside. This is, perhaps, the most Pedro thing about the band...

Read the rest of the story at San Pedro Today