Gimme Something Better (24 page)

Jim Lyon:
I went to Tennyson High School with four members of Social Unrest. I remember Danny and Jim playing a lunch show at school. The band was called Leather Nun. I was nicknamed Tape Recorder because I would make up songs and make them listen to them on my tape recorder.

Bonedog:
Besides Social Unrest, there was no scene in Hayward whatsoever. They had the full-on band T-shirts and spiked hair and studs and all that. Nobody else at the school looked like that. They were outcasts.

Ray Vegas:
My first show was actually a Social Unrest show at the Mabuhay Gardens. James Brogan—who became the guitar player for Social Unrest and later started Samiam—he took me to see them, and that was it for me. It was Social Unrest and the Naked Lady Wrestlers.

Creetin K-oS:
I remember going to hang at the Mab one night and seeing this teenage boy lying on this cool old Cadillac. He was my age, about 15 or 16 at the time. He was totally decked out in punk garb, although not looking like the rest of the crowd of the day. He probably didn’t know the right people to get in the club, given his age. He seemed content smoking his cigs and blurting various nasty remarks at tourists and passersby. I was floored. That is when it all clicked for me.

Bonedog:
I started talking to the kids in my high school, and they told me where they rehearsed. I’d go down in industrial Hayward and watch Social Unrest rehearse every Tuesday and Thursday for years.

Danny Norwood:
We rehearsed in a storage place. Where you could actually drive your car in. We were the only band in there. And we brought carpets and soundproofing stuff. It was actually the first place I ever lived after I left home.

Jim Lyon:
I would sit in front of their garage door and listen to them writing the song “Making Room for Youth.”

Creetin K-oS:
It was an accident or destiny that I joined with Social Unrest. I knew a couple of the guys from school. I did not even know if those guys liked me or just thought me a poseur. Bob, their first singer, ran into me in Sacramento one summer. He was not happy with SU and was going to quit. He thought we should start a band. At the end of the weekend, I called SU to tell them their singer quit and I wanted the job. We were packing the Mab in less than a year.

Jim Lyon:
Kevin Reed, who would become the vocalist for Teenage Warning, lived down the street from Creetin K-oS and Maire, their drummer’s girlfriend. I ran away from home and rented a couch from Creetin for $100 a month. The house always had Nina Hagen or Siouxsie blaring out of the speakers. We would raid vegetable gardens in Hayward and bring them back to the pad to have Creetin make dinner. We lived on apples for about a month.

Danny Norwood:
When Creetin first joined the band, he sounded a lot like Johnny Legend, but he developed his own style, which reminds me of something Middle Eastern. We started pretty much like the Ramones, and then we got faster and faster as we got to be better musicians. He is kind of a shy guy, except for when he gets onstage.

Creetin K-oS:
I will be the first to admit Mr. Rotten was a big influence on how I sang punk rock. No hiding it. He was a hero and a villain. I loved the whole U.K. sound.

Greg Oropeza:
When the South Bay scene finally took root, it was mostly made up of aging New Wavers and lots of young skaters.

Danny Norwood:
We did the Agnews State Hospital in Santa Clara. All the state hospitals were looking for entertainment back then and no one else wanted us to play. Our other guitar player at the time, Doug Logic, had a nervous breakdown. It just weirded him out, playing in front of the mentally challenged. There was some LSD or mushrooms involved. South Bay punks came to the show and the attendants were very friendly and gracious. We were pretty well behaved except for the LSD. We didn’t exploit them. But it was a little bit unsettling.

We played with MDC a lot, with Flipper sometimes. Flipper would always stand back there and mock us the whole time. They were probably four years older than us, and thought we were pretty much just run-of-the-mill. So every time we’d finish up a song, they’d go, “Onetwothreefour!” Every time. “Onetwothreefour!” Anticipating.

Ray Vegas:
Social Unrest was the first real band I was in that people came to see. When we were onstage there were 200 people at the Mab, or at the On Broadway. I’d never see girls. They were always in the back ’cause everyone was thrashing. They were all dudes. But when we were on tour, there were girls.

Danny Norwood:
We hit the road with U.K. Decay in ’81 and played a lot of shows with the Dead Kennedys. They’d take us out of town with them on weekend stints. They were good people. Their manager Barbara Hellbent became our manager at one point, and East Bay Ray produced our records. We were friends with Jello’s then-wife. She helped us with our marketing and sales.

After
Rat in a Maze
, Jason Honea took over for Creetin. We had a really successful tour in Europe in ’87.

Ray Vegas:
It was really weird. Once you crossed into East Germany, there was one little shop on the main road, but you couldn’t get gas, so people were pushing their cars through the border. Me and James had to drop our pants at the border. The women guards laughed at us. These lines and lines of cars and we’re standing there with our pants down to our ankles, five punks in front of this dirty van.

But Yugoslavia was a really big show. We were a good release for them. All the cars looked the same and all the buildings looked the same, totally gray. It was industrial. The kids ran machinery and they all worked in factories.

When we pulled into the parking lot, all these people were looking in the van windows. People were just hungry for it. I can’t say we were the first band to go play there, but it sure seemed like it. People were just way into it. We got letters from people thanking us for just coming out.

Danny Norwood:
This guy came to the show and had a sweater that his mom made. She had knitted “Hüsker Dü” into it, because you couldn’t buy punk shirts. It looked great.

Ray Vegas:
When we were in Spain a guy came to our show with our logo knitted into a sweater his mom made for him, too. Crazy.

Danny Norwood:
Being a punk at the time, you doubted what our government said. Part of the allure was to see if it was really as bad over there as Reagan was saying it was. It was poor. And we got stopped randomly a couple of times for papers—that definitely was true.

Ray Vegas:
But the people we met there were nothing like that. They were just like us.

Billie Joe Armstrong:
I didn’t get into Social Unrest until the last show they ever played and I thought they were just great.

Danny Norwood:
I had to take a break. To regain that freshness I was seeing in younger bands. Taking a break meant I moved away. I moved to Czechoslovakia. Then I moved to the mountains. There was a big period I was just disconnected from it all.

Ray Vegas:
When Social Unrest departed, I was in the next incarnation of Attitude Adjustment.

Danny Norwood:
In ’95, when we started playing again—that was a weird time to come back because it was almost like, “Oh, you’re riding the Green Day wave.” Then we recorded with Billie in his basement. Billie basically recorded, engineered, and produced it.

Billie Joe Armstrong:
Noah from Neurosis came over and helped me set everything up. He had a lot more knowledge than I did. They recorded downstairs and my wife was totally pregnant. She went into labor the day after they finished recording. So that was the sound that was coming up through the floor.

Danny Norwood:
We took a hit for that because those people who read “produced by” thought, “Oh, they’re trying to be . . .” That’s where I saw the Tim Yohannan backlash against Green Day. Billie’s a very cool guy.

We play shows in Southern California, and there are moms and dads there who are ex-punk rockers, who grew up in my era. Now their kids are in bands and they are there with their video camera—still kind of punky looking—filming their new hardcore offspring.

Ray Vegas:
You can’t help to be concerned as a parent. We know what we did when we were that young and we’re lucky to be here now. They’re doing all the same stuff. It’s like, “Oh, my gosh.”

Danny Norwood:
Punk made me reeducate myself. I read more and paid attention to politics. I went back to school. There were a lot of negative things, too, but mostly it pushed me in a good direction. It inspired me never to be ignorant. That’s about as simple as it gets.

I love my family, but I can see the difference between my immediate family and my cousins. In Hayward, I went to school with 20 cousins. They stayed and had kids and got a job in a local factory. That whole suburban thing. It’s not like they admire me because I was in a band, but I got out of California, I waited to have a kid, I just did something different. Punk taught me I could do something other than pay bills, something that might even mean something.

Sammytown:
There’s the term “army brats.” We were all university brats. A lot of our parents were professors at Cal Berkeley. My dad teaches forestry. Turner, the guitar player from Special Forces, his dad worked at UC. Toby Rage, who was a local fixture and roadie for everybody, his dad was a professor. As far as parenting went, there was a lot of crazy ideas. “Let them make their own mistakes and be who they are gonna be.” A lot of us didn’t have any fuckin’ boundaries.

I started drinking and smoking weed when I was 11. Started dealing drugs. Started to get arrested. I ended up in juvenile hall, and went to jail. GTA [grand theft auto], vandalism, just basically being a kid, running amok. Mainly it was crimes of fun. Steal a car, run around and crash it, shit like that.

Tim Armstrong:
I’d known Sam for a long time, ’cause we’re Albany. First time I ever seen a punk rocker was Sam. I’ll never forget it. We were up on Gateview, the next street up. Just dorky kids hanging out. He came out of the hills—earring, short spiky hair, colored—and walked by, didn’t even register that we existed. I just watched him. And I went, “That kid is fucking cool. Wow.” He was probably 15.

Sammytown:
I was the only boy in high school to have my ear pierced. I had purple hair and I was already starting to get tattooed. In three months I got jumped four times by the jocks. I dropped out of the ninth grade. My parents were like, “What the fuck?”

Speed was the drug of choice back then by the punk rockers, and a large percent of the population shot up. Especially in the East Bay. There was a lot of young kids all running around shooting speed and eating acid. I started using heroin when I was 15, and I remember being very much looked down upon in the punk scene because I was the only one.

Tim Armstrong:
My brother Greg was a drummer before he joined the army. He was in a band with Sammy. A bunch of Albany punk rockers in a band called Shut Up. Very, very regional, very specific. Shut Up had a song called “Fuck All the Albany High School Jocks.” I was stoked that my big brother was rolling with these guys. And Sam went on to join Fang.

Tom Flynn:
The first band I was in was Fang, in Connecticut. I got here, and then about a year later, a friend that was in the band moved out here also. We decided to be a duo. One of us would play drums and the other of us would sing and play guitar, and we’d switch.

It was a weird band. We liked being minimal. But also, I wasn’t good at meeting people. The only place we could play was the Sound of Music.

In 1981 we played Texas, played Kansas City, drove all the way up to New Haven, and played in Boston. Two people and a station wagon. We looked pretty unassuming. Nothing abnormal. Just a couple of young guys.

I was afraid if we got a bass player, I’d have to play what they wanted to play, and I wanted to be in control. I put a note in Universal Records and it said, “Drummer wanted to jam,” something retarded. “Sex Pistols and Flipper.”

Sammytown:
My best friend Joel Fox, the drummer from Subsidized Mess, went and tried out for Fang.

Tom Flynn:
We told Joel to join. Sam said, “You really need a singer. I can sing.”

Sammytown:
I was an arrogant little fuckin’ bald-headed 15-year-old brat. Tom was like, “Come back next practice and we’ll try it out.” And so I came back and he said, “Here’s some lyrics.”

Tom very much had a cynical take on things and so it sort of set the tone. “Skinheads Smoke Dope” was more about hippies than anything. Even “Destroy the Handicapped”—Berkeley was probably the first city in the world to ever need handicapped ramps. It was such a PC place. I was very much anti-that. Not on purpose or with any kind of agenda, but because growing up when and where I did, that just came out.

Noah Landis:
I was going to Berkeley High and Fang was like “our band.” In some ways I felt really lucky to have them. Because they were for us and they were just amazing and unique and funny. They didn’t take themselves too seriously. They always put on a great show. For what punk rock was, when I first found it, Fang summed it up. In terms of attitude.

Hef:
Tom had a very unique style of playing the guitar, and the songs were written around his guitar. It was punk in that it was rebellious and different and all that, and it was hardcore. But musically it was very slow.

Dean Washington:
I was at every single Fang show. Some of ’em were more memorable than others, and some were total and complete blackouts. Beer and speed induced. “Yeah, that was a great set!” You didn’t hear a fucking single bit of it. “You guys
ruled
tonight!”

Tom Flynn:
At some point I realized, “Oh, we really have a following.” It was kind of weird. I was used to playing places where no one would show up. It never got to be huge. A big show was 200 or 300 people.