Gimme Something Better (19 page)

Steve DePace:
Just a tiny little fucking sweatbox. You had to be punk rock to play that place.

Ray Vegas:
The toilet was at the top of the stairs and it would usually back up in the course of the evening. Someone would flush it and water would just flow down the stairs.

James Angus Black:
No air, people smoking like crazy. If there had been a fire, forget it, everybody dies. The Tool & Die was a death trap.

Dean Washington:
You had a room packed full of people who hadn’t showered for Lord knows how long. By the time you got home, if you had a home, your parents would be like, “What’s that smell in here?” “Nothing, Mom, Dad, what smell?” “It smells like cigarettes, wet ashtrays, booze, and an array of other things. What did you do last night?” “Oh, I just spent the night over at Nate’s house.” “Well, sweetheart, where does Nate live?” Nate lived in the trash can on the side of a bar.

Bill Halen:
I met the Jaks. Nosmo, Paul Casteel and Tom Scott. Nosmo was a pretty boy, one of those guys who would try to steal your girlfriend. But, oh god, he was funny, and just a great skater and a great bass player.

Nosmo King:
We would steal beer from the Tool & Die. We were with a bunch of cute girls and it was after two and we were broke—Jaks are always broke—so we opened up the hatch in the sidewalk in front of Tool & Die. It wasn’t even locked. We stole four or five cases of beer, took ’em to Dolores Park, drank ’em all, and went back down to get more. I told Bill later, “Man, really sorry about ripping you off.”

Bill Halen:
My Jaks teammates were all beer-stealing bastards. We did a couple of
Thrasher
shows on the top floor. They brought in JFA.

Nosmo King:
It was skater-friendly. We had a ramp, a little half-pipe that could be moved around up there.

Dean Washington:
By the time I got there, I was never in any condition to skate. My buddy Max Fox, who sang for the Boneless Ones, got a bright idea once. We had been skating all day so he still had his knee pads on. He ran and dropped to his knees, but the knee pads just ripped down. So he slid—oh, how he slid! You could see little pieces of flesh embedded in the brick. It was like, “Ooooh!” That was fuckin’ cool.

Bill Halen:
We always thought the cops were coming. We were so paranoid. We would take all the beer cans and shit out to the street in plastic bags. Then we’d go back upstairs. But we’d want to do some more speed, right? Because we were starting to come down and we had another show to do. Oh fuck, wait, did anybody see my bag? And someone was like, “Yeah, I hid it in a beer can because I thought the cops were coming.” Dude, you hid the speed in a beer can?! So we’d have to go back outside, pull all the bags back into the Tool & Die, pour them out over the floor, and search through all the cans. Of course it was in the last bag. So we’d do the rest of the speed and set up for the next show.

Jimmy Crucifix:
I spent a lot of time there. Tool & Die was like hell. It was crazy partyland.

Toni DMR:
Everything was just off the fucking map. Nothing was just like, “Oh, we’re going to go to the park today and then we’re going to a movie.” It was like, “We’re going to slam a bunch of dope, we’re gonna go to a hardcore show, we’re gonna kick some fuckin’ ass and we’re gonna be really obnoxious.” I mean, Carol was sharpening needles on the back of a matchbook!

Jimmy Crucifix:
When everyone left we listened to Judas Priest, the Scorpions, all that shit. Our getting-high music. Everybody had their pick. It would be me, Nicki Sicki, Bill Halen, Courtney Love, Mike Ness. Everybody’s done dope at the Tool & Die and everyone had their getting-high music. ’Cause it had to be just right. Me and Bill would put on the Scorpions and do our drugs. Then Courtney Love would do her drugs and listen to Fleetwood Mac or something.

Bill Halen:
It started with a little bit of meth, a little bit of heroin, and then, as the ’80s went on, it became more and more heroin. We were staying up all night. For days and days.

Jimmy Crucifix:
Then we’d go skateboarding at five in the morning. At the Dish out in Hunters Point—Paul, John Marsh and the whole Jaks gang—listening to the drive-by shootings as the sun was coming up. The after-hours were fucking hardcore.

Bill Halen:
If I hadn’t been so strung out on drugs, I might have done a better job with the club. After Tool & Die went under, I lived in L.A. for a year, hung out with Tony Alva and some of the new Jaks down there. That’s what we were into back then. We were indestructible. Unfortunately, a lot of us didn’t survive it.

Ian MacKaye:
The first time I played Mabuhay Gardens, we went to go see that show the night before, Dead Kennedys and Circle Jerks and Flipper. And it was a pretty fucking phenomenal gig. That was the show where the Circle Jerks brought up all these Huntington Beach skatepunk kind of dudes. The first stage diving kind of stuff in San Francisco. Legendarily. It was a totally insane night, the kids were just going nuts. Ted Falconi from Flipper—I think he hit Dirk with his guitar, and punched another guy in the face. Dirk had a bloody nose. There was so much carnage.

Bruce Loose:
A lot of the first generation of punkers left San Francisco. There was all these bald-headed fuckin’ violent motherfuckers that were not thinking at all. They weren’t having fun doing drugs, they weren’t fucking in the bathrooms, they weren’t even thinking mischief. They were just beating the shit out of everything. And they didn’t care.

Paul Casteel:
After the
Quincy
punk rock show aired, and the
CHiPs
punk show, almost overnight the scene changed. These kids would show up with their heads shaved, Circle Jerks bandanas on their brand-new boots, chains all in the right places, pants pegged up, jackets covered in spikes with some English band like GBH on the back, which they obviously had never seen and probably never heard. These kids were at their second show and ganging up on people that have been around forever.

Winston Smith:
Clubs said nope, we can’t afford it. Our insurance won’t cover punk bands.

Penelope Houston:
Nobody could afford to record an album or manufacture one. It was always just singles.

Jello Biafra:
I felt horrible that there was never gonna be a proper Avengers album. They could have made at least three. They had that many good songs. The Dils could have made two. The Sleepers could have made two, and Negative Trend, UXA, who sort of got to do theirs eventually, one each. The Mutants, probably two, maybe three. But nobody was putting them out, nobody was signing them.

Dennis Kernohan:
It was too early. The music industry was not ready for it. Besides Howie Klein, the real industry people couldn’t get their mouth around the dick of it, you know? They kept missing it.

Hank Rank:
Howie Klein was the most powerful punk rock critic. And he pulled a lot of strings, had connections, pointed people in directions, made opportunities for some bands, and got bands coverage and other bands not. Howie was very smart, very ambitious. He exerted a huge influence over what was going on.

Howie Klein:
The Nuns had a little bit of a chance, it’s why I started 415 Records. We put out their record. And I had great reaction to it. But it wasn’t enough for anybody to make any money from, especially not a major label.

Jennifer Miro:
A lot of the problem was that later we had these drug dealer managers that ended up in exile in South America. It’d make a great movie, I’m telling ya.

Penelope Houston:
So sad. By the time their first record came out, it was more like Jennifer and this other guy, the bass player, had taken over the name the Nuns.

Hank Rank:
Crime recorded some songs and went to L.A. to take it around. I remember being in one guy’s office and he listened to it and said, “This is not a song.” I said, “What do you mean?” And he said, “Well, it’s just, it’s not a song.” That was pretty much the response.

Howie Klein:
No one was gonna sign Crime. I mean, let’s be real.

Johnny Strike:
And then heroin. I was doing it more and more. Frankie started doing it, Hank luckily had a bad reaction to it. These coke dealers at Berkeley Square Records started managing us and paying us like $100 each a week. Things started falling apart. I quit and I ended the band at that point. This was ’81, ’82.

In the ’90s, Frankie decided he wanted to get the band back together again. Me and Hank, neither of us were interested, so he got Brittley and Ripper and some other guy on guitar, all on dope. Hank and I saw their first show at the DNA.

Hank Rank:
It was sad. It wasn’t well promoted. Frankie was all into the look. He didn’t play guitar anymore. He was changing his costume all the time. He got locked out of the dressing room. He was up there, you could see him pulling on the door, trying to make a fast change between songs.

Fritz Fox:
The company that the Mutants signed with was based financially on the sale of cocaine. They gave us a little money and they always had coke. We were very naive. Our record came out and the record company went bust. We found ourselves in debt.

The band started, little by little, to disintegrate. I was in the height of my drinking era. I started climbing up on speakers on the stage and jumping off. The first guy to leave was Brendan. And then Dave left, and John. And Paul. That left Sue and Sally and I. We recorded some new stuff. And it got very sad, very depressing. So the band broke up. That was 1984.

I was on the skids. I was living on the docks. I was living in my car. Then I got a job as a motorcycle courier with a friend of mine. I started my own company. I was really in a drunken, drugged-out stupor. I lived on a sailboat. Got drunk a lot. It was kinda screwed up.

Howie Klein:
I had the feeling that if the Avengers had better technical help, they would have sounded better. The songs were there. They were great. Penelope’s great. It just sounded a little bit too troublesome for a major label to deal with it.

Danny Furious:
The Avengers were frustrated and tired of playing to the same 300 people. Greg and I had an argument during a rehearsal and he walked.

Penelope Houston:
We replaced him with Brad Kent from Vancouver. Also known as Brad Kunt. But basically after six months with Brad, we felt like we’d hit some kind of glass ceiling. The momentum wasn’t there anymore. We weren’t going to get signed.

Another thing was, Danny and I were a couple and we had just started falling out. Danny got pretty heavily into drugs. Jimmy joined up with Chris Isaak. Greg had little bands for a few shows, then he got out of the music scene completely.

Danny Furious:
I had been serving time with Joan Jett. We went to Europe and my dissatisfaction with the music I was playing, coupled with my ever-growing drug addiction, had me quitting the Blackhearts. When my visa ran out, I hightailed it back to S.F.

Jimmy had been putting together a band with Chris Isaak. I was the original drummer, but I chose to continue my career as down-and-out junkie. My bullshit took me back to Orange County, where I met Mike Ness, having the same “interests” as me. I ended up playing with Social Distortion for a short time. Those are the last gigs I’ve done.

Penelope Houston:
Danny ended up moving to Sweden in order to kick the drugs.

Howie Klein:
So, of course, what was the first one to break out of here? It wasn’t Romeo Void. It was embarrassing. Pearl Harbor and the Explosions. So it was more like New Wave rather than punk rock.

Jello Biafra:
Unlike England, where even the Exploited had chart hits and played on
Top of the Pops
, American punk stayed underground and got more and more angry and more and more extreme. And in the artier areas, more and more bizarre. The extreme side eventually morphed into hardcore. Which was something completely alien across the Atlantic. Also volatile, because it had no expectations of becoming commercially popular.

Danny Furious:
Punk was passed on to the next generation, for better or worse. Bands like Black Flag toured and toured and toured and eventually people started to listen. The original bands were all but forgotten.

Rachel Rudnick:
The bus would go from Berkeley to San Francisco. Its last stop, before the Bay Bridge, was the New Method warehouse.

John Marr:
New Method was on the Oakland-Emeryville border.

Tim Tonooka:
It was dicey. Along the way you’d walk past a liquor store with husky transvestites hanging out in front of it. Then you’d go into an industrial building, up a flight of narrow stairs, into a warehouse space where the walls were covered with egg cartons. The air was stale, with meager ventilation from only a few windows.

John Borruso:
It was where clusters of people lived, rehearsed and made art before the live-work concept had been rendered meaningless.

Sothira Pheng:
It was this big old brown brick building and there was a huge sign that read “New Method Laundromat.” There were older artists, but nobody older than 30. Ironworkers had a huge metal shop downstairs and this open space full of junk. We had the whole upstairs, this big sprawl.

Jimmy Crucifix:
I was completely into the New Method thing. It was a bunch of artists but it was a lot of tweakers. I was tweaking then. Tweakers were different back then. It was kind of nonchalant. Brittley Black used to walk around with a suit and a tie and a pen holder that said, “Hello, my name is Brittley,” but instead of pens, it held orange syringe caps.

Sothira Pheng:
Crucifix was the first band that used the spot. It was 100 bucks a month and nobody could afford it. We probably lived there for about six months, but it seems like years. That’s how explosive it was.