Gimme Something Better (20 page)

Me and Matt put up flyers saying we were looking for band members. This was about tenth grade. We had our first gig with Flipper, January 3rd, 1980 at the Sound of Music. At the time, Flipper were already old guys. They were great. Their sound, their attitude, and their style—it was perfect for that time and space. But they didn’t speak to us, to our generation. There was no excitement.

Jimmy Crucifix:
Crucifix was hardcore punk. The kids were fuckin’ beating each other up out there. No more pogoing and throwing popcorn like they did at the Mabuhay. This was like throwing bottles, getting kicked in the face.

Sothira Pheng:
The ’77 crowd was scared. They were running for their musical lives. We were the Kids. We felt we were the chosen ones, like the Three Musketeers—me, Matt and Chris.

Jimmy Crucifix:
I think Sothira’s always been political because he was from Cambodia and went through a lot of shit.

Sothira Pheng:
At the height of Nixon’s strategic bombing of Cambodia—the secret wars—there was a major attack by the communists in Phnom Penh. Massive shelling, I totally remember that. My dog was shitting all over the place. So my father got stationed in Taiwan and we got refugee status. We went to some kind of refugee camp in Pennsylvania, then we came to San Francisco. My parents went from diplomatic treatment to having to show up for welfare.

I was born in Cambodia, but I didn’t use the Cambodian thing. I never have. Crucifix was never a race band. We weren’t the “black band” like the Bad Brains or the “Mexican band” like the Zeros. We were always Crucifix. We became heavily involved in our own political thought.

Jimmy Crucifix:
They were the real unit, those three guys. I liked them all a lot. I went to see ’em play at the Mabuhay and it was so weird. Sothira was just laying around on the stage.

Sothira Pheng:
Mohawk, knee-high boots, the spikes, the leather jacket—that’s how I remember Jimmy.

Jimmy Crucifix:
When I first got into Crucifix, I felt like an old man. They had a song called “You’re Too Old” and they actually dropped it ’cause I was 22 by this time. I was probably the only one that could really play in the band, even according to them. I showed ’em what to do and it was fun. I thought they were doing a good job.

Sothira Pheng:
Punk rock became our lives. We were living it 24/7. Paul Rat was one of the few people who actually recognized that we had something. He got us some great gigs. You name it—Black Flag, Bad Brains—we were on the bill. I can’t believe he did all that stuff for us. He was our manager until we found out Matt could do just as good a job as him.

We were expected to open up and basically let the headlining acts do their thing, but we’d come on and start breaking all the microphones. They’d get all pissed, these older geezers. That’s when we started our own gigs at New Method—shows had to be under five bucks and all-ages.

We were literally the center of attention. By ’82, we all adhered to the British punk scene and style. Exactly as Discharge dressed—spikes, leather jacket, Doc Martens boots, mohawks. It took months to assemble the jacket, paint it, put the logos on it. And the logos were bands and albums that we loved, Discharge, GBH, Crass. It wasn’t an advertisement. It meant something. It was an interpretation of what the English were doing. I even had my name painted on my jacket à la Johnny from
The Wild One
. We knew it was an iconic thing. We stood out apart from everybody else, we had our own look. People would say, “Here comes those Crucifix boys.”

Jimmy Crucifix:
People used to laugh at us.

Sothira Pheng:
One time we went to play a gig with Black Flag and they started calling us “Exploited!” As teenagers, those were fighting words. It was like, “We love you guys and you made fun of us?”

Jimmy Crucifix:
They got into Crass and the vegan deal, and everything kinda changed. They got into the whole political thing. They went from studded leather to jean jackets painted with black acrylic paint.

The Kids: Crucifix at the On Broadway

Sothira Pheng:
We went on tour in ’82, John Loder from Crass had never even seen us, only heard about us. He flew from London, came to see us in Boston, and signed us.

When we got back from the tour, everybody was congratulating us. We are the kings now. We had tried Alternative Tentacles and they pooh-poohed us. The difference between us and the Dead Kennedys is that we thought we were punk rockers. The Dead Kennedys were playing in a punk band. We had that flag waving. We were more punk than punk.

We created our own genre, our own pool that rippled out and created those satellite bands like PLH, Trial, Atrocity, A State of Mind. They were like our little siblings.

Jimmy Crucifix:
Matt’s brother John Borruso was in Trial. Some of them started PLH. Peace, Love and Happiness.

John Borruso:
There were members in common with Trial and Atrocity. It was all very cross-pollinated.

Jimmy Crucifix:
When they started going that direction, it was like, oh, we’re into peace, love and happiness. It’s like, man, I still wear leather coats. I’m still into drinking and doing drugs. Peace and love—that’s cool, but I already went through that whole ’70s thing with my sister. I really can’t play this music. I can’t preach something that I’m not into.

Sothira Pheng:
You can only be in a rock ’n’ roll band for so long before you become an activist.
Maximum RocknRoll
championed MDC. I thought MDC was a great band but we were local boys and we were basically ditched. Between ’80 and ’84 we were almost totally ignored. By the age of 20, I felt that was as far as we could go.

 

 

 

 

Scott Kelly:
Barrington was one of those mind-blowing experiences. I had never come across a place like that before. It was supposed to be a college dormitory and there’s a 40-year-old biker fixing his fuckin’ Triumph in the front room, just tweaking balls. As far as I could tell, no one that lived there went to school. I remember thinking, “How does this happen?”

Ray Farrell:
It was a Berkeley campus housing unit. Everybody played there. All the bands from L.A. Anyone that had a San Francisco gig would come to Barrington.

Dean Washington:
Dead Kennedys, Flipper, Black Flag, you name it—right there in the dining hall.

Jason Lockwood:
They would lose power so the room would go dark, which was great. You would be thrashing around, floors painted with beer, with people slipping every which way.

Scott Kelly:
We were walking down the hallway one day, and this guy with a big vial of liquid acid said, “Want some acid?” I say, “Sure.” And he sprayed some fuckin’ liquid acid in my eye. By the time I hit Telegraph I couldn’t even feel my legs.

Nosmo King:
A guy goes, “Okay, we’ve got a keg on number three and four. If you’re into speed, that’s on five, and there’s acid on six.” I was still in high school then and I was thinking, “Wow, this is what college is like?”

Jason Lockwood:
It was a co-op. Nobody was responsible for anything, because everybody was.

Dan Rathbun:
It was a four-story building, a block long. And off of each hall were like 13 suites of rooms and each suite had anywhere from three to five bedrooms and a bathroom.

Nils Frykdahl:
I was going to school at Berkeley and wanted to live in the co-ops. I went to the co-op office and they had a little catalog. All the co-ops had little pictures and descriptions of their gardens and other attractive things. When I got to Barrington, there was no picture, no description, it just said, “We suggest you visit for yourself.” I said, “Yeah, what about this place?” And they said, “Oh, you don’t wanna go there. Everybody just leaves.”

Rachel Rudnick:
My first punk show was probably ’82, ’83 at Barrington Hall. I was 12 or 13. It was Trial, Atrocity, Deadly Reign, and 13. I remember going up these dingy staircases and there was a big shit in the middle of a step, and I thought, “No dog is stupid enough to do that.”

Dean Washington:
My buddy Adam had a gutter rat named Lucifer. He became semi-domestic. The rat was huge. Lucifer drank EKU beer, which was really strong. Lucifer inhaled pot all day. As long as someone was smoking, he wanted some. He’d act a fool in his cage if you weren’t blowing a cloud his way. Back then, Adam was a heavy doser of acid, so he’d give Lucifer hits every now and then. Lucifer was pretty much the devil himself, really.

Jason Lockwood:
The cops would raid that place constantly ’cause it was just rampant with drugs. When the cops came all the windows toward the parking lot would fly open and drugs and needles would come sailing out of the windows. It was just ridiculous.

Dean Washington:
They’d have “wine dinners” and the house would vote on what the theme drug was gonna be for the party.

Nils Frykdahl:
That was the euphemism for our acid parties, “wine dinners.” It sounded very respectable.

Anna Brown:
We went to lots of wine dinners. I remember coming out of there with Katie once and we could not find the car, we were so high. We had to walk home.

Scott Kelly:
The hippies paved the way for the whole drug market in Berkeley. When you can go to the high school where Jimi Hendrix played, it gives you a different perspective on things. LSD was a huge part of our very specific scene because of the availability and quality.

Nils Frykdahl:
Berkeley Bob lived in the closet of the study room. Berkeley Bob was a very sweet guy, but a schizophrenic or something. He had really involved conversations with himself. Like three-person conversations in different voices. This was supposed to be the room where you were gonna work on writing your papers or whatever, and, from the closet, you heard, “Listen! Don’t you tell him not to talk.” Which implies three people, you know.

There were little quotes from Berkeley Bob all over the walls. There was a whole mock Cult of Bob with the older members who had degenerated into pure stonerdom. They had recorded Bob at one point on a cassette and had memorized long chunks. They would sit around [bubbling bong sounds], and go into it, something like, “Uh, 2315 Dwight Way, don’t you tell him not to talk. Listen, this isn’t the only pig iron in the business . . .” They would fire off these Bob rants in unison. Initially I was very impressed with those guys. But they listened to the Grateful Dead all the time.

Jesse Luscious:
I had been squatting in West Philly so I was pretty used to a really radical living situation. I felt really at home. Onng Yanngh was, I don’t really know what you’d call it—the entity, the symbol, the embodiment of the house. You’d see it on stickers everywhere. I would call it a religious icon but I don’t know if the people who lived there would. You still see it every once in awhile. People from bands have tattoos of it.

Fraggle:
There was that pagan organization, OBOD—Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids. They had a bunch of parties there. They would have their ritual bell-ringing, and there would be a band playing, and naked people walking around covered with red paint.

Nils Frykdahl:
Wes Anderson came to Barrington with his punk band Slaughter of Small Animals. One of the party coordinators had brought some skinned goat heads from a Chinatown butcher. Skinned and mounted on stakes on either end of the stage. It was a gruesome spectacle.

Dan Rathbun:
This was Halloween.

Nils Frykdahl:
And my brother Per, in an inspired moment, went up and started French-kissing the goat heads, and ended up ripping the tongue out of the head with his teeth. It stopped the band. He grossed out Slaughter of Small Animals. This was a hardcore band from Oakland.

Dean Washington:
Everyone looked forward to summer, because the actual students that went to school would leave and sublet their rooms. All us punks would have full control of the building. So it was the Barrington Compound. We had a full kitchen, and we made meals—well, when we weren’t grinding teeth, or something else.