come to Magnolia High School from Los Angeles after her parents divorced. "She made it very clear that I didn't breathe the same atmosphere as her", he recalled 26 years later. "I was trying to tell her we were on the same page, that I was her only ally. But like pretty much all the girls then, she just thought I was a dork, an insect." He wrote the song in response to the slight, later calling it an answer to the Doors' "L.A. Woman". The song's music, written by Frank Agnew, incorporates jarring shifts in tempo between fast, brash punk rock and slower heavy metal, which influenced later California bands. "No one was doing that," Brandenburg recalled, "and the only reason we did is that we were trying to be middle-class punk, but half the band also wanted to be Black Sabbath. Through the years, it seemed to really echo with people. People like NOFX, the Offspring, Rancid, the drummer in No Doubt (Adrian Young) — they have said how much it meant to them." Album cover For the album cover, Brandenburg asked Fancher to have someone design a typeface logo similar to Cheap Trick's. Diane Zincavage designed the cover, and its simple composition—a blue field with "Adolescents" in red type—led to it being referred to as The Blue Album. Release and reception Adolescents was released in April 1981. One of the first hardcore punk records to be widely distributed throughout the United States, it became one of the best-selling California hardcore albums behind the Dead Kennedys' Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables (1980), selling over 10,000 copies. In a retrospective review, Jack Rabid of AllMusic gave the album 4.5 stars out of 5 and remarked that "the debut from these five Orange County kids established the mid-tempo, punk-pop 'Southern Cal sound', led by the long, great, pummeling, Johnny Thunders-derived solos of the two Agnew brothers, Rikk and Frank.... they're super-catchy, heavy-riffing rock & roll, proving again that punk was the true heir to the likes of Chuck Berry, Larry Williams, Bo Diddley, and Eddie Cochran." Legacy Though Rikk Agnew had contributed heavily to the album, tensions between him and the other band members led to him quitting the band just a few months after its release. He was replaced by Pat Smear, formerly of the Germs, and the band planned their first tour to support the album, intending for