Brandon, Zach, and Adam Phillips come from an artistic family, their father was a jazz musician and their mother an art teacher. The brothers learned to play guitar at a fine-arts camp that their mother. Brandon was in various bands with his friends which made his younger brothers jealous so in 1991 they got a friend of theirs and they started their own band which Brandon ended up writing songs for and eventually joined. Their friend would quit shortly after and Brandon, who was 14, along with his brothers Zach and Adam, who was just 9 years old at the time, would continue on, performing in local bars. Brandon said "We were fucking horrendous, but I think people liked us because they thought it was adorable, precocious or whatever. We were just playing wretched L7 covers and AC/DC covers and stuff like that. It was like the laziest of the lazy garage rock because at that point the entire mission was just to get onstage and play rock ‘n’ roll."