Gimme Something Better (34 page)

DRI got to be one of those bands that opened for every big act that came through Houston, like Dead Kennedys, Minor Threat, MDC, the Dicks, Butthole Surfers.

Dave Dictor:
We said, “You gotta come out to San Francisco.” You could play to 150 punks in Austin and Houston for the rest of your lives, but there were 500 kids out here on any random weekend.

Kurt Brecht:
Then one day Tim Yohannan called my parents’ house out of the blue. Nicki Sicki, the singer of Verbal Abuse, had given Yohannan our demo tape and he really liked it, and he said, “I want you guys to come out to San Francisco. I think you’d do really good here.” They were setting up an all-Texas band gig at the Tool & Die. It was MDC, the Dicks, us and Verbal Abuse. I traded my P.A. for a van and sold pretty much everything we had just to get gas money to get there.

Bob Noxious:
Their songs were so fast. It was really different and everyone was just blown away.

Tammy Lundy:
I remember Tim Yohannan saying, “What do they feed you out in Texas?” For awhile, MDC billed itself as the fastest band in the world, but it was a contest between DRI and MDC. Spike from DRI used to stand out in front of the On Broadway with their first record and say, “22 songs in 17 minutes!” That’s how he sold them.

Kurt Brecht:
In San Francisco, all the bands were do-it-yourself bands. I learned a lot. It always blew me away that everybody was so nice. Bob Noxious and the Fuckettes taught us about faking the little bus transfers. They had every color of transfer, with every number and letter, on their wall. We got stolen phone cards from Verbal Abuse. MDC took us on tour with them.

San Francisco was a good place to live in your vehicle between tours. It wasn’t hot, so you didn’t wake up sweltering, like in Texas. The main thing you had to worry about was a bathroom and what time the soup kitchen served.

For awhile I was living in a tree in Golden Gate Park. It was crazy to sleep on the ground, ’cause anybody could just come up and stab you or whatever. Up in the tree, I was fairly safe. The branches grew together like a natural bed so you could lie down. It was like my house. They would drop me off there after the show. I even had a cat. I guess somebody had just dumped him out there. So I brought him up in the tree and he slept with me and I fed him.

X-Con Ron:
Then DRI did their crossover thing and fuckin’ hit the big-time.

Kurt Brecht:
MDC wanted to put our 7-inch out on a 12-inch. So we did that. Then Metalblade came around, so we were on the same label as Corrosion of Conformity and Slayer and a lot of those metal bands.

Mike Avilez:
In the mid-’80s I was a metalhead. I saw DRI open up for Slayer in ’85 and that was the ticket. The crossover scene from ’85 to ’87 is basically what got me into punk rock.

Kurt Brecht:
People said that we single-handedly ruined punk rock forever. By polluting it with metal.

Dave Dictor:
It was here in the Bay Area that it crossed over.

Kurt Brecht:
Before that, the punks had their shows and the metalheads had theirs. In San Francisco, the Stone was where all the metalheads went, and the On Broadway or the Mab was where we went.

Kelly King:
Broadway was the border. It was completely separate. You were metal or you were punk.

Toni DMR: You weren’t even allowed to listen to AC/DC.

Tammy Lundy:
DRI really did something different. They didn’t care if people called them traitors. It’s what they wanted to do and they did it well, so good for them.

Kurt Brecht:
The metalheads started coming to the punk shows and it was violent. Especially with the Nazi skinheads who, for some reason, really liked our music. They’d beat up anybody, but they’d really go after the metalheads.

DRI EP 1984

Aaron Cometbus:
DRI had this song “Violent Pacification,” and there was this huge skinhead dude who’d always be there to sing the “Violent” part, then Kurt would sing “Pacification.” It was comical, but the guy was also pretty scary looking.

Kurt Brecht:
It wasn’t just San Francisco. It was all over the country. It got real bad. Certain tours, we’d have to stop almost every night to break up fights. But after a few years, it became accepted that you were gonna see people with long hair at shows. And vice versa.

James Angus Black:
The second tour I roadied for DRI was in a
bus
. It was high class.

Kurt Brecht:
We finally got a manager after playing at the Olympic Auditorium with Suicidal Tendencies. Pretty soon he had us traveling around in tour buses. We just couldn’t believe it. After living in that crappy van for so long, we had a real tour bus and we were playing packed shows every night.

Some punks approached us and said, “You won’t be able to come back to us if it doesn’t work out.” That’s pretty heavy. Like, how many years do you have to suffer and live in your van and eat at soup kitchens before you’re allowed to step foot in a tour bus? Back in the old days, we were starving, living off government cheese. I see pictures of myself back then. I was like a concentration camp victim or something.

James Angus Black:
That one tour was the zenith. And they were back in the vans again.

Greg Valencia:
DRI was the first punk band that I heard that was really punk. There was a big black metal scene in Santa Fe. We were all metalheads. DRI opened my eyes to a lot of things.

Kurt Brecht:
Until Spike was diagnosed with colon cancer we never really slowed down. It had been one tour after another for 25 years. And we never had to do any cover songs.

Bob Noxious:
The beer vats were down on 15th and Florida.

Dave Dictor:
It was a brewery that had been abandoned—this six-story structure with these tremendous beer vats. The top ones were open. They’d mix the beer there, and then they’d drop it down through a piping system to the other vats, where they would store it as it would brew or ferment, or whatever beer does.

X-Con Ron:
It really was too good to be true. As soon as we got here we found out about the beer vats, went over and got jackhammering.

Paul Casteel:
You paid to have someone come blow a hole in a vat for you. The people who owned the building would charge you $150 to install this door—this big hatch—on a beer storage tank and that was used as your home or rehearsal space. These things stunk like vinegar. The open ones were like 30 feet deep.

Tammy Lundy:
I paid $25 a month for my air shaft. It was between floors so you had to climb a ladder half a story. It was exactly as wide as my arm span and 40 or 50 feet long.

Gary Floyd:
MDC ruled the Vats because they were the ones that got it all started. Our bass player Sebastian Fuchs lived at the Vats. So we hung out and practiced there.

Dean Washington:
You had to
really
know somebody to get into the Vats. It was like bein’ invited to the White House. I don’t think there was anybody that played San Francisco at that time that didn’t squat and hang out there.

Dave Dictor:
We weren’t the first people—there were five to seven stragglers already—but we were the first band.

Kurt Brecht:
MDC and the Dicks were there. I think Verbal Abuse was. And then we started living at the Vats in our van. Just camping out there, eating canned foods.

Jason Lockwood:
It was such a weird place. You never felt quite safe there. Especially when you stayed at night. There were a lot of junkies.

Sammytown:
I stayed at the Vats all the time, especially before I had a car. After shows, everyone would go to the Vats or to the Fun Terminal, the Mutants place. We were all on speed—we were all fucking kids so it’s not like we slept anyways.

Ian MacKaye:
Minor Threat stayed there with MDC in 1983. And there were these 14-year-old kids, most of ’em were girls. I remember five or six of them. They were basically four days up, four days down. If they weren’t begging for change to buy speed, they were speeding out of their brains, or they were just fuckin’ flat out for four days. They had one-quarter the waking days of the rest of us. I remember thinking, clearly, this is a bad situation. I think they were being taken advantage of. I just couldn’t reconcile—how can you all profess to be so concerned about the state of the world, when, right here, there is a problem?

Kriss X:
This was in the midst of a big speed binge for a lot of us. I remember being in Spike and Dagger’s vat—Terry and a couple others were there as well. We all got high and then the cops came into the vats with the dogs. They came directly to the door of Spike’s vat and were pounding. It was locked and we were all quiet as church mice, ready to shit our pants, not knowing if they would kick in the door or just go away. We waited for what seemed like hours.

Bill Halen:
One guy had a ship steering wheel as a handle, for his round doorway. It was beautiful inside. He broke up a bunch of furniture and pulled it into the vat. Then he put it all back together inside. Some of the vats were very cool.

Marc Dagger:
We lived up in the yeast culture room. It was actually not a vat—it had a window in it and we had running water. Me and Harley from the Cro-Mags ran security at the Vats. If you didn’t pay your rent we’d do an eviction party on you—throw all your stuff out. And if you were there, you’d probably get whipped. The owners of the place let us live up there for free as long as we made sure everybody got their rent paid and no crap happened.

Toni DMR:
The last time I saw Harley, Spike and Marc had a going-away party for him. He was tripping on acid and fell in a vat and got stuck. At his own going-away party.

Paul Casteel:
I remember one night Bob Noxious and Marc Dagger fell in a vat somehow and they were fistfighting one another. It went on for like two hours because no one would throw them a rope or help them get out of the thing. Every time they came out of their stupor, they would just start pounding one another. The crowd up above treated it like a chicken fight, cheering them on. It was the entertainment for the night. It was like a gladiator scene. These guys were best friends and they were beating the crap out of each other.

Toni DMR:
I’d been up for a week and Spike put me to bed. I remember opening one eye and seeing Victor Harris and Nicki Sicki making pancakes over some butane camping stove. It was so weird.

B. A. Lush:
Laundry was not really available at the Vats but we found boxes of sausage wraps. Cases and cases of them. And they were perfect for socks. Vats socks. Clean socks were a godsend.

Jason Lockwood:
There used to be a barber chair inside the ground floor of the Vats. One night, I had consumed some freakish amount of acid. I came to, feeling really disoriented and unnerved. Sitting right there, it was like you walked into an insane asylum they were never gonna let people out of. It smelled like old, stale beer. I still get angry when people spill beer on me because of that smell.

B. A. Lush:
We were lucky. We were on the fourth floor, with the bathroom. Other people had to pee in bottles.

Marc Dagger:
The Vats were right across the street from the Hostess factory.

Jason Lockwood:
The smell of the bread factories. We used to run over in the middle of the night, bolt people over the fence, and one person would throw bread over. They were all there on racks getting ready to be shipped.

Marc Dagger:
We were all tweakers—so the sugar high, it was great.

Nicki Sicki:
The soup kitchen was down the street, so you could basically live for free.

Kriss X:
There was a dominatrix that lived up on the top floor who used to throw these amazing parties.

Bill Halen:
Upstairs, there were a bunch of bikers making a mess. Some very scary shit. You didn’t venture up there unless you knew somebody.

Tammy Lundy:
We thought the Vats were owned by this wannabe biker guy, but it was actually owned by his mom. Every Wednesday night, his biker friends would come by and throw somebody out. That was their Wednesday night activity. They were called the Uncles.

Marc Dagger:
I had this little rat named Darby, ’cause I loved the Germs. Until I learned that Darby Crash was a frickin’ cock smoker. Anyway, he used to live in the couch where Harley slept. When we were moving out, we picked up the couch and there were tunnels chewed through the frickin’ foam. We found bags of speed in there, money, everything. This rat was just like the person he was named after. He was a little pack rat speed freak.

Jason Lockwood:
I remember bleach-spotting jeans in the hallway ’cause it was all tile. If you leave bleach on your skin long enough, you will learn it gives you a mild chemical burn. Say, if you put on damp jeans that you’ve just bleach-stained. By the end of the day you’ll have red patches on your legs where the bleach was.