Gimme Something Better (32 page)

Kegger:
They used to put on a lot of queer shows at Epicenter in the early ’90s. Until it flooded. Assfort from Japan was playing. Everyone was getting rowdy and this young punk kid jumped up and grabbed on to the sprinkler system and it broke. Me and friends tried to save the library by throwing the fanzines up on top of the shelves.

Floyd:
We couldn’t operate as a show space after the flood. That really shot a lot of the enthusiasm. There was a small loyal core to the end, but not the manpower to keep it going.

Ruth Schwartz:
Tim didn’t want to make any money. He was a communist at heart. Money was the root of all evil. I’m okay with people making a living. I don’t care if they make a living off of their art, I don’t care if they make a living off of their DIY businesses. I think it’s okay. And he didn’t. He thought it corrupted it automatically.

Maximum RocknRoll
paid for the house and the utilities, and he would defend and justify that. I thought it was more honest to just admit that
Maximum RocknRoll
paid Tim Yohannan. By giving him electricity and computers, and a bed to sleep in, and his car and his gasoline, and all these other things. And that it was dishonest to say nobody gets paid. If somebody gets paid, then everybody should get paid.

It’s one of the punk rock tenets of that genre of people. We spawned this PC attitude that money is inherently bad. I have my detractors as well. I think people do bad things with money. But I don’t believe that it is inherently bad.

He was a very talented capitalist, actually. But at a certain point it just becomes hypocritical. He was like, “It’s okay, I’m giving it away.” “But you’re not giving all of it away.” Sometimes he just had more money than he knew what to do with, and he would justify different ways of getting rid of it. I argued with him in a kindly natured way on that point for many, many years, until the end when it got nasty. Then we couldn’t even talk to each other anymore.

Jason Lockwood:
When I was a kid, you were basically forbidden to publicly enjoy the Misfits.

Kelly King:
The Misfits came to town. There was big hype about how great they were. They were from New York. They had that foot-and-a-half-long piece of hair hanging down in the front.

Tom Flynn:
It was 1982. It wasn’t the first time they came. It was the first time they came here as the starring band.

Kelly King:
At the Elite Club, which is now the Fillmore.

Tom Flynn:
It was a big audience, maybe a thousand people. One of those nights where there were six or seven bands on every show. They started playing, and immediately started yelling at the audience. I remember Glenn Danzig said something like, “I can see why they call this the land of the homos!”

Greg Oropeza:
“The city of buttfuckers!”

Kelly King:
“S.F., you’re a bunch of faggots!”

Tom Flynn:
I had liked the Misfits. Most people at the show were into it as much as me. When he said that, I was like, “What a moron!”

Toni DMR:
They were being really hostile, hocking loogies, kicking at people. They kicked Rachel in the head with their steel-toe boots.

Kelly King:
They just got rained on with beer cans. Somebody hit Danzig in the eye with a can full of beer.

Tom Flynn:
They had only played three or four songs.

Kelly King:
The drummer jumped off the stage and attacked Tim Sutliff, of all people. He was pretty much the smallest kid there. Tim was just covering up his face and backing up and that guy Doyle took his big ol’ guitar and just swung it down with both hands like an ax and broke it over Tim’s head.

Jello Biafra:
They left him in a pool of blood. The worst thing I’d ever seen at a show in my life by far.

Toni DMR:
I saw Tim’s head split open. His skin split and flapped down to his ears. Split his entire fucking head open. You could hear the collective gasp of everybody, “Oh my fucking god!” And then all hell broke loose.

Kelly King:
I totally freaked out and attacked Doyle. I jumped onstage and landed on top of him, but he was a muscle guy and just pushed me off. Then Wes Robinson and all his security guys grabbed me and the band disappeared backstage. I was just completely hysterical. I had done coke and I was drinking heavily, smoking pot—so I was totally out of control. They were holding me against the wall, saying, “Okay, just settle down, just settle down.” And finally I was like, “Okay, I’m cool.” They let me go, so I ran back onstage and started kicking in the drum kit. They grabbed me again and Wes was complaining that he was going to have to pay for the broken drums.

There was a big pool of blood. I smeared my hand in it and wiped it on my leather jacket. I don’t know why. I was just completely out of my head. I ran to the back of the club and Tim was there. They were holding towels on his head. This big security guy put his hand out to stop me and I grabbed his fingers and bent them over backwards. They finally had enough and shoved me outside onto the sidewalk, and it was raining. I just sat down against the wall and started crying. Somebody handed me a Lowenbrau Light. I chugged it and got into the back of Sam McBride’s car. I held on to that empty bottle all the way back to Berkeley. I had never been so freaked out in my life.

Tom Flynn:
They came back out onstage—just the singer and bass player and drummer. And they started trying to play again, but then people just started throwing bottles. Danzig looked over and said, “Well, fuck you guys,” and left.

Toni DMR:
I think they ended up locking themselves in a room somewhere.

Rachel DMR:
We were hanging out in the back alley by the church, waiting for them to come out with their equipment. But they got wind there was a mob out there ready to kill ’em.

Kelly King:
I think Tim’s mom sued Wes, but she never tried to press charges. The Misfits got away with it. Wes never had to pay for anything and Tim almost got killed.

Greg Oropeza:
This led to a ban of the Misfits, an informal agreement between bookers.

Jello Biafra:
MRR
went after him about it and put a rather nasty cartoon about them about the incident, changing the Misfits infamous hairdos into penises, drooping across their heads. Mr. Danzig is not known for a sense of humor.

Tom Flynn:
KALX used to play the Misfits all the time. After that show I’m sure they had some sort of board meeting.

Aaron Cometbus:
It wasn’t just that the Misfits bashed in Tim’s head. They had also busted into an exhibit at KALX, which at the time was located in UC Berkeley’s Lawrence Hall of Science, and stole a bunch of skulls, which totally jeopardized KALX’s existence. Then they spray-painted a bunch of “Fuck you, Berkeley faggots” stuff on the sidewalk outside of Universal Records. They added insult to injury.

Jason Lockwood:
Timmy Sutliff wound up being my best friend. We would hang out between the tennis courts behind the junior high. That was one of those hangout spots for the East Bay punks. One day, Tim pulled a two-inch sliver of wood from the guitar out of his scalp. It was months after he’d gotten out of the hospital.

Greg Oropeza:
We had a show at Club Culture in Santa Cruz with Samhain. I was one of the promoters, but had no idea it was Danzig’s band. When he walked in, I had a fit. I was yelling, “No way, they’re not playing!” pleading my case to my partners. Danzig came up to me and asked if he could talk to me down by the river for a few minutes. I thought maybe he wanted to brawl, but he just wanted to have a beer and explain his side of the story. We sat on the banks of the San Lorenzo River and he explained that the night at the Elite Club was the worst night of his life. He said he was horrified by his bandmate’s actions, and would never play with him again. He said it was all an act that went too far and regretted it deeply.

Kelly King:
I was bummed out for years that nobody did anything. Doyle could have killed him. He’s lucky he didn’t.

Dave Chavez:
Sick Pleasure was the first hardcore band in San Francisco.

I got a call from Mike Fox, who wanted to do a hardcore band “like they’re doing down south.” That’s the way he put it. Nicki Sicki and a friend were out here from Texas. Mike had met them in front of the Mabuhay, on the sidewalk.

We were just mesmerized by Nicki, the way he looked. He was really thin and his eyebrows were shaved off and his hair was spiked. He had half a mohawk, it was just like a half head. He had a really crazy look in his eyes.

We asked him to go behind the mic and he just made this squawking sound. Like a toucan or something. “Waaaahhhh!” It was really loud and grating and we were like, “That’s it.” We didn’t even care if he could play a note. He just had the look and the really weird voice.

Nicki Sicki:
We got the Sick Pleasure name from a jacket I had. A picture of a syringe on the back and the name above it.

Dave Chavez:
Nicki wrote about the life he was really living, so it had kind of a Chicken Little effect. Here’s this little guy in this big world, living on the street. I think one of the lines was, “My only friend’s my knife.” There was a real street thing to it. “I Just Want My Parents to Burn” is about a kid from Texas who actually burned up his parents in his house. It’s just something that happened in Nicki’s neighborhood. I don’t think the songs were as nihilistic as people took them to be.

Nicki Sicki:
I’m not saying my lyrics are good or bad, but I do write what I know, and live what I write. You don’t write lyrics like “I’ve got herpes” to impress people.

Just an American Band: Verbal Abuse at Berkeley Square 1982

Dave Chavez:
When I was young, I really liked R. Crumb comics and that in-your-face, fuck-you attitude. Not really political. That’s what I saw in Nicki. Sick Pleasure had that kind of obnoxious slant.

Nicki Sicki:
When we were on tour once, I farted so bad Dave quit the band and got out of the van in Wisconsin with his bass and started walking home to Oakland.

I quit Sick Pleasure ’cause I was about 16 or 17, and my girlfriend had a kid. We shot speed every day and nobody worked. I was scared I’d kill the kid or something.

Dave Chavez:
I turned 20 right around the time the band was breaking up. Mike just immediately started Code of Honor with Johnithin Christ, the singer from Society Dog. I started playing with Code of Honor at their fourth gig, but I didn’t really get along with the singer too well. I didn’t understand what he was trying to sing about. What it was, was Scientology. Mike was into Scientology. It was very strange. But a lot of people thought that Code of Honor was gonna be the next big thing—the guys from
Flipside
told me we were gonna be the biggest band in the country. I was just like, “Yeah, whatever.”

After Nicki left Sick Pleasure he went back to Texas and started Verbal Abuse. It was like a continuation for him. Sick Pleasure had been a little too psychedelic and weird for Nicki. He wanted something more straightforward.

Nicki Sicki:
No one was really playing fast in Texas. This was right before the Dischord thing started.

X-Con Ron:
Texas hates us because MDC left, Verbal Abuse left, DRI left, the Dicks left.

Nicki Sicki:
We came out to play in San Francisco and decided to stay. Every time I’ve been in the same city as Dave we end up together. I love that guy.

Bob Noxious:
When the Texans started coming out here that was really, really good, man. It brought a lot of new blood into the scene. I liked them.

Greg Oropeza:
Ribzy once played a basement party in San Jose with Verbal Abuse. The only light in the whole basement was a single bulb hanging over the drum set. Right in the middle of a blazing set, Verbal Abuse’s drummer hit the bulb with his drum stick, plunging the basement into total darkness. They kept playing without skipping a beat. It was one of the raddest things I had ever seen.

Nicki Sicki:
I’ve never done a band with anything more than the idea of having fun, and when it stops being fun I move on.

Dave Chavez:
Verbal Abuse is Nicki Sicki. He wrote all those songs on bass. The Verbal Abuse that we did without Nicki Sicki doesn’t really count. But he left. Again. Both times we had a good thing going, it was really building momentum, then
whoop
—singer disappears.

Nicki Sicki:
They tried to give me 25 to life for fucking speed. I ended up with five.

Dave Chavez:
Nicki is what he is: He’s a true unique entity. That’s why I still love playing with him.