Gimme Something Better (27 page)

He started getting really defensive and shit. He’s not a very big guy at all, and we were kinda getting a little into it. Someone else came over and calmed me down. It was like, “Dude—I mean, she wasn’t my friend, but I still think you’re a scumbag. What are you thinking? I don’t care if you were on dope or not.”

Sammytown:
I tried to get my parole transferred. But they wouldn’t let me. They made me come right back to where I got into trouble. I had to reintegrate into society. A lot had changed. Tattoos, Hot Topic. Everything became something else. I do think that it doesn’t cost now what it cost us. But the jocks and the rednecks and the assholes are still out there. I started connecting with people who were in the scene. A lot of people were urging me to do it.

Johnny Genocide:
When he got out of the hands of the California penal system he started playing music again.

Sammytown:
I thought it was going to be different. I had a booker that was booking us. And then he changed his group of friends and he wouldn’t book us anymore. One of the roadies, he had a lot of feelings. And we talked. It was hard. I don’t know if it helped or made it worse. But at least we had to deal with it.

You have to go on. You go to prison and you can still go out and do things. I felt if I had to be here, if they wanted to find me, I’d rather say, “Here I am. If you got a problem let’s talk about it.” Or however you choose to approach it.

Johnny Genocide:
People reacted in near-violence, making death threats, picketing the shows, throwing bottles at him.

Fedge:
I went to the first show back. It was at the Trocadero. They played with the Dwarves. It was a really tense night. People in line were like, “I want to fuck that guy up. That dude killed his girlfriend.” Like, do you know the guy? Did you know the girl? No, you’re just some 15-year-old kid who heard what his brother said.

Sammytown:
When I got there George Lazeneo grabbed me and pulled me in the office and said, “Dude, we’ve gotten ten death threats for this show.”

If somebody’s gonna kill me I’d rather see it coming. I’d rather have it happen here, instead of just walking down the street at random.

Hef:
He got out of prison, he was doing deliveries for a flower shop or something, and a guy who owned an electrical company got him in as an electrician’s apprentice. For a blue-collar job it’s one of the best ones you can get. He had a wife and two kids and he had this nice job. And he started doing heroin again.

Of course they’re now divorced. She moved back with her family in Sacramento. My wife is a totally mellow person, she’s not into any kind of violence at all. She heard this and said, “These people are toxic. I don’t want anything to do with them anymore.”

Fat Mike:
I saw Sammytown at a show at the Pound and he was like, “Hey, Fat Mike.” I said, “Hey, Sammy.” And I kind of gave him the eyes down. He was like, “What’s the matter?” I said, “My wife says I’m not allowed to talk to you.” And he said, “What? I murder my girlfriend, I’m an asshole for life?” And I was like, “Well, yeah, that’s how it works. You’re an asshole for life.”

Mike Avilez:
When I got married, Sammy was our pastor and Fang played at the reception. The whole band was onstage and he said things like, “Do you promise to wear your red wings?” We did a tour with them in 2004. That’s when I really got to see another side of him. It was unfortunate he was still doing drugs at that time.

Kelly King:
A lot of people still to this day hate Sam McBride. It was a terrible fuckin’ thing. And if it was my daughter I would have eventually found him and killed him. But that’s his life and his karma and his deal. I didn’t see him for a long time and didn’t communicate with him. But I never hated him.

Rachel Rudnick:
I saw him play a couple Fang shows a few years ago in Seattle. They creeped me out. None of the old members were there. All these new guys playing.

Tom Flynn:
Sam’s the only one close to being an original member. I saw them once. And all they played were songs from all those records that I was on.

Jimmy Crucifix:
I started playing with Fang. There is a whole new fan base, a whole new group of kids. It’s weird, man.

Tom Flynn:
It’s almost more popular now than it was. It never really tapered off. As far as CD sales.

Rebecca Gwyn Wilson:
To this day, Sam is a chick magnet, which I find bizarre. It seems like some girls have this Richard Ramirez attraction to him.

Aaron Cometbus:
They were around for a decade and didn’t spend the entire time killing people, you know? So I think it’s kind of unfair, especially to the other band members, that that’s all they’re known for now.

Dean Washington:
He has a killer stage presence, and that’s what people like. Your band can be lousy as hell, but if you’ve got a singer with tremendous presence, he’ll literally have the crowd by the throat. Hypothetically speaking. Not that he’d
do
anything like that!

Tom Flynn:
He seems grown up. He’s still a punk but I think he regrets his crime.

Sammytown:
A lot of the things that were really important, they’re still really important. My friends, and the family I choose. Watching out for each other, and taking care of each other. And not buying into society and the bullshit, the fuckin’ crap that we get spoon-fed every day. I still question everything. My beliefs haven’t changed at this point, and I don’t really see them changing. I’ll be a punk rocker ’til the day I die.

Aaron Cometbus:
The first punk shows in Berkeley were, I believe, at a place called the Dew Drop Inn on San Pablo Avenue, put on by the False Idols. But that was before my time.

Buzzsaw Bill:
And then we changed bass players, so it was a different band. A different band has to have a different name.

Jello Biafra:
I kept seeing this name Naked Lady Wrestlers on bills and thought it was a traveling troupe of women who wrestled naked. They even got booked at the Stone. I thought, yeah, this must be a wrestling thing.

Buzzsaw Bill:
We recognized a lot of similarities. Punk rock is to music what pro wrestling is to real sports. It’s a matter of entertainment.

At the same time, we were watching these wrestlers on TV. It was so cheesy. And yet so entertaining. Of course the wrestling was horrible. But the talk, oh my god. So we were trying to come up with a name for a band.

Max Volume:
We got it from a sign on Broadway, where it said, “Naked Lady Wrestling.” Across the street from Big Al’s.

Buzzsaw Bill:
One of those strip clubs.

Max Volume:
Our first gig was at the Mab, a big gig with the Dead Kennedys.

Buzzsaw Bill:
We had our personas. It always pissed Dirk off that we would never be out of character.

Max Volume:
When we were getting onstage, he said, “Next up, ladies and gentlemen,” and then he leaned over to me and said, “What’s the name of your band again?” And I said very quietly, “The Naked Lady Wrestlers.” And he said, “Next up, the Naked Lady—” And I started yelling at him in the other mic, going on about how I was gonna plant a shoe factory in his ass and, “What are you gonna do with the world’s greatest guitarist?” etc., etc., etc. I started yelling about how “nobody cares about all these bands playing their Campfire Girl chords—we’ll dump them like yesterday’s garbage,” etc. That was our first gig.

Buzzsaw Bill:
The epitome of cool was to play a song, and then go right into the next song, and then right into the next song. And not say anything. So Naked Lady Wrestlers would talk for 15 or 20 minutes, about how great we were.

We got our music, adapted by Mr. Volume from TV shows. Our stage act was definitely from Georgia Championship Wrestling. We ripped off a lot of the speeches from religious shows.

Max Volume:
One of my favorite speeches, and this is from the last night of the On Broadway, “You know, I saw a cheap imitation of the Bolshoi Ballet out there. I want you people to know I don’t appreciate dancing at all. Nobody dances on my dime! You wanna dance, you go to a disco.”

Buzzsaw Bill:
If a mosh pit would suddenly break out in front of us, we would stop. And proclaim there would be no dancing while we were playing. People needed to pay strict attention.

Klaus Flouride:
Naked Lady Wrestlers, probably the funniest fucks in the whole fucking thing. The punk community just hated them!

Johnny Genocide:
Max Volume is the most talented guitarist on the face of the earth, period. This band is one of my top five all-time favorites. They were so ahead of their time, their music went over most people’s heads.

Johnny Bartlett:
The guitarist was this amazing surf guitarist. I talked to the guy, I said, “Those songs sound so familiar, but I can’t really place ’em.” And he’s like, “Well, you know, our main influence is Hanna-Barbera theme songs.”

Jason Beebout:
They’d play the
T. J. Hooker
theme song, they were really good at that one.

Max Volume:
It was a great, great TV show theme song. I think people weren’t giving it the proper amount of shrift just because it was on TV. There’s a lot of anti-television bias in this society. I don’t particularly like it.

East Bay Ray:
People that were too much into punk didn’t get that they were punk.

Klaus Flouride:
They were making fun of them! And people don’t like that: “I’m doing my punk band and this guy’s making fun of me. And he doesn’t even look like a punk, he’s dressed like a goddamn soldier.”

East Bay Ray:
Punk’s an attitude, not an outfit. Where’s the rulebook on punk? Naked Lady Wrestlers were a great punk band, even though they didn’t sound punk or look punk. They just destroyed certain preconceptions.

Buzzsaw Bill:
I think it was the fact that we’d go out there and tell ’em how great we were. That wasn’t very fashionable.

Max Volume:
The guitar solos got on people’s nerves, too. Eventually, we started to do drum solos in every song.

Johnny Genocide:
The Fuck-Ups were always this underdog band. They weren’t good looking, didn’t care about writing trendy songs or what people thought of them. They were the essence of the punk spirit.

X-Con Ron:
My favorite Bob Noxious story: They were at the On Broadway, Bob was up there onstage lecturing the crowd, giving them shit. Leslie, his girlfriend, came up and said, “Oh, shut up, Bob. You know you like to lick my pussy nice and clean all night long, so shut up!” He just turned beet red. It was one of those punk rock moments.

Al Schvitz:
“Lick the pussy clean.” That’s the real deal.

Bob Noxious:
Everyone would ask us, “Where’s the Fuckettes? Did you bring the Fuckettes?” They loved it.

Jimmy Crucifix:
Victoria and Leslie. French girls. Very scary.

Bill Halen:
They were sisters. Little girls with leather jackets. If anybody bumped into them, they would kick them in the shins really hard.

Bob Noxious:
If you went to see the Fuck-Ups you didn’t know if we were gonna be drunk or if we were gonna start a fight on the first song. All the politically correct bands didn’t like us. We did everything we could to be bad. Fuck, got our name in the paper, you know?

I grew up in Mountain View, California. For lack of anything else to do, we’d go up to San Francisco and eat acid and go to these three-dollar shows that had the Dils and the Avengers and the Zeros. The first time I saw the Dead Kennedys was for like a buck down at the Temple Beautiful. I just fell in love with it. We cut our hair. We started a band called the Undead with Joe Dirt, and went up to the city one night to play a show at a gay bar. I never went home.

Joe Dirt was in Society Dog. He came up with the name Fuck-Ups and I thought it was the greatest name ever. I have it tattooed 11 or 12 times all over my body. It’s just a little hard to get into a kiddie pool, you know, with my kids.

Leslie Fuckette:
We grew up in a nice little house outside of Paris and went to terrible nun school for 12 years. My parents uprooted us and moved us to the States when I was almost 18.

We became the Fuckettes because the Fuck-Ups were playing the Sound of Music in the Tenderloin. You had to be 21 to get in the show, unless you were in the band. So we did backup vocals on one song.

John Marr:
The Fuckettes traveled in groups of three. One totally drunk and two supporting her.

Leslie Fuckette:
Me and my sister Victoria and our friend Virginia. We all lived together with Bob. We didn’t want to work so we collected GA.

Dave Dictor:
There were a bunch of scams you could get by on in San Francisco. General Assistance was one. You could clean buses four days a week for the city. For 25 hours a week. They would give you $310 to $312 a month, and then you could get food stamps on top of that.

Leslie Fuckette:
We all lived in a van for awhile, then we lived in a storefront on 18th and Guerrero. There was no hot water, no kitchen.

Bob Noxious:
Leslie was my girlfriend and pretty much the ruler. She was like four foot eight—very small, very frail build, but tough. Her sister was considered the cute one ’cause she’d get really dolled up. Virginia was considered the butch one ’cause she was a little overweight and cut her hair really short. So we had the brains, the brawn, and the ugliness, you know? But they were real good people.

John Marr:
I always thought the Fuckettes were the San Francisco equivalent of the DMR, only rougher.

Fat Mike:
That’s what was different about San Francisco. There were girl gangs up here. There were more girls fighting here than in L.A., or anywhere I’d ever seen.