Gimme Something Better (38 page)

Al Schvitz:
This was in the midst of Reagan’s idiocy. MDC came back to San Francisco from a tour in Europe and we got a copy of
Overthrow
, the yippies’ magazine. On the back cover was a review of our first album: “Album of the Year.” We didn’t really know what the yippies were about, but they loved us. They were doing a 50-city tour, and they wanted to know, could we do any dates? Somehow this evolved into us pretty much doing all 50 dates, and bringing any bands we wanted. This was the Rock Against Reagan tour.

It was a bunch of potheads. It was pot money. Okay, you weren’t gonna get Ian MacKaye to back you, but what the hell, it seemed like a great opportunity. We wound up working with all our good friends—the Dicks, Crucifucks, DRI, Toxic Reasons. We played all these cool, cool venues that we never would have played.

Gary Floyd:
We didn’t have much money for food but we always had cheap, disgusting beer, and we had hootenannies every night. Glenn Taylor was the guitar player for the Dicks at the time and he could play anything. He would yell out “Help Me, Rhonda” by the Beach Boys and I would start making up filthy lyrics about dicks and titties.

Tammy Lundy:
When we were in Madison, Wisconsin, the yippies actually got a couple of helicopters to fly over the gig and drop thousands of joints onto the crowd. We were onstage when that happened and it was raining joints from the sky. It was a miracle. It was like something Jesus would do.

Gary Floyd:
But there were a lot of people who were really stoned making big decisions for the rest of us. The punks and the hippies really did not get along that well. MDC was sort of the go-between, trying to keep the peace. The Dicks and the Crucifucks became very good friends and saved each other from killing everyone else, including Dave and MDC for getting us on the fucking thing!

Tammy Lundy:
We were out for maybe six or seven months. Sometimes we’d have these glorious moments where fishes and loaves fed the multitudes. And sometimes we’d go down this red-clay road in the middle of nowhere, and the vehicles would all get stuck. They didn’t always have their shit together.

Gary Floyd:
They guaranteed us at least one or two meals a day but it was always the same. They got a donation of 100,000 frozen turkey dogs, so we’d show up at some kid’s house whose parents didn’t know we were coming, and there’d be some huge, horrible pot bubbling on the stove. Of course, MDC had their 80-pound bag of carrots.

Tammy Lundy:
If you were going to ride in the MDC van, that was your diet. No meat.

Al Schvitz:
We played the Pot Parade going
up
Fifth Avenue, which is a downtown street in Manhattan—you can’t drive up Fifth Avenue. We went from Washington Square Park to the United Nations building on a moving flatbed truck, with Dave yelling.

Tammy Lundy:
We were staying just a couple blocks from CBGB’s. We would go up to the editorial offices of the yippie magazine and sit with these ’60s icons like Wavy Gravy and Abbie Hoffman. It was totally strange.

Gary Floyd:
Central Park at the band shell. There were tons of cops and hippies and punks and it was a bright day. A bunch of Rasta people were playing onstage. And Crucifix, who had never even spoken to us in San Francisco, ran over to us with their huge foot-long spiked hair and they were really friendly. It was like, “We have arrived at last, Crucifix is being friendly to us.”

We played a couple of songs and then they said the cops were thinking of turning it off. So we played “Dicks Hate the Police.” In the middle of the song, I gave some drunken rant about freedom, and the cops pulled the plug. I could tell that it was going to become very, very chaotic so I turned into mist and blew away. I was drunk. I started a big bunch of shit and I left.

Al Schvitz:
The culmination was this gig at the National all in front of the Lincoln Memorial on the 4th of July in 1983. We got Biafra to fly out with the Dead Kennedys for that one.

Tammy Lundy:
There were a jillion people there, and it was really hot. Police helicopters were flying overhead, taking banking turns, and I remember someone asking, “Are those guns or cameras pointing out the door?” I was approached by a strange, heavily built man in shorts, sunburn, and Halloween mask looking for reefer. When I said I couldn’t help him, he pulled a badge and threw me against our van. Biafra at one point gestured towards the Washington Monument, noting how much it looked like a KKK hood.

Al Schvitz:
When we got back to San Francisco, we played Dolores Park with the Dead Kennedys. Whoopi Goldberg was emceeing it, and Dennis Peron, the weed activist.

Kriss X:
There were thousands. It was exciting as hell! It was like us against the world. I felt like we were all saying a huge “fuck you” to the establishment and the Reagan administration. There was an overwhelming sense of camaraderie in the park that day. I was still young and green, and to be honest, politics were not at the top of my to-do list. But Feinstein was mayor and she had upped all the cops. I remember punks getting hassled almost daily for petty bullshit.

John Marr:
If you were a minor, out on the street after 11 p.m., San Francisco P.D. would haul you in.
MRR
booked a series of curfew shows at the Mabuhay. I still have the flyer. It’s a picture of this punk girl being hauled away by these two cops: “Tired of having your evenings end like this? Curfew shows at the Mab!”

Sheriff Mike Hennessey:
There was no question there were conflicts with the police out on the streets. Punks lip off—let’s face it, that’s part of being a punk. And cops don’t like being lipped off to. And there was drug use, there were kids getting drunk and passing out. The cops would attempt to try to control the group, and this is a type of group that doesn’t like to be controlled. I filed a complaint against a cop one night for bashing a kid’s head up against the grille of a car. But it was mostly, as we would say in law enforcement, mutual combat. We’re here and we agree to fight, and then it’s over with.

Andy Pollack:
In 1984, around the time of the Democratic Convention, San Francisco tightened up. Never to be the same, actually.

Gordon Edgar:
The
Chronicle
detailed the police dropping homeless people off at bus stations at the Nevada border.

Jeff Goldthorpe:
Before the convention opened, 1,000 demonstrators noisily picketed across the street from the hotel where the Moral Majority was holding a “Family Forum” meeting. Across the street were a large number of police. Some demonstrators attempted to escape by circling a few blocks close by and trying to surge into the street. As the picketers moved toward Union Square for a planned rally, mounted police charged into the crowd, swinging clubs, trampling several people and arresting eight. Peace punks did a “die-in” in an intersection a block away, holding up traffic for 15 minutes. Others threw garbage cans into the street and set a dumpster afire.

Gordon Edgar:
War Chest Tour was the ’80s version of anti-corporate demonstrations, where a bunch of punks would rush into some multinational’s office and start screaming about their capitalist evils.

If the Kids Are United: Rock Against Reagan

Mike Tsongas:
The War Chest Tour was one of many predecessors to the Black Bloc. David Solnit hung around us a lot and was one of the primary people who organized the War Chest Tours during the convention.

Jeff Goldthorpe:
On Monday, July 16, the WCT was ambushed by S.F. police. People were surrounded and charged with “conspiracy to trespass.” A few demonstrators that escaped did a retaliatory “die-in” in a nearby intersection and were quickly tackled or dragged off by plainclothes police. It was all over very quickly, but was enough to get a headline in the next day’s
Chronicle
: “Punk Rocker Protest—84 Arrests.”

Mike Tsongas:
It was really surreal. I remember walking down the street with my purple mohawk—Mr. Punk Rock with black eyeliner and studded belts. This white van pulled up beside me and the doors slid open. It was the news, and they were filming me. They followed me for almost an entire block before I ditched them.

Jeff Goldthorpe:
“Punk rocker” was all the explanation needed by most media observers to explain the actions or the police response.

Gary Floyd:
The Dicks played the Democratic Convention at Moscone Center. It was really historic. There were so many people there, not just punks.

Mike Tsongas:
It was the pinnacle of the San Francisco punk scene. Punks from all over the country filtered in for this event.

Gavin MacArthur:
By the time MDC played, it was pretty much a mad-house. There is no way that anything like that would fly now.

Hef:
A bunch of us from Berkeley and Oakland came down. The cops were chasing people around with these motorcycles, riding down the sidewalk on dirt bikes trying to surround people.

Jeff Goldthorpe:
Early in the show, 200 more marched off to Bank of America world headquarters. Demonstrators began to rap on windows as they chanted, and the TAC Squad suddenly moved between them and the building. Continuing down Kearny Street, they were suddenly surrounded again by police on horseback and 87 were arrested, charged with obstruction.

Mike Tsongas:
We got surrounded by cops immediately, even though we weren’t doing anything illegal. They said, “We order you to disperse. You are now under arrest for failing to disperse.” Just like that.

Tammy Lundy:
We got busted walking away from the Bank of America building. All of a sudden these policemen on horseback rode up on us—it felt like we were going to get trampled—and they pinned us up against the wall. It was really scary. I remember my brother saying, “Oh boy, mama’s not gonna like this.”

Courtenay Dennis:
This really quiet, sweet, Filipino girl Joren got knocked over and kicked in the head by a policeman’s horse. There was a lawsuit because of that. I got billy-clubbed. My arm was all black and blue. I got taken to 850 Bryant. As they walked us past the cells, people were yelling and chanting. A bunch of us were so young we didn’t have IDs, and we wouldn’t give our names or ages. I got to make a phone call. My mom came and was all pissed off. It was my 15th birthday. The police started to get freaked out so they brought three paddy wagons to bring us all over to juvy. On the way, I got a bunch of us to rock the paddy wagon back and forth, to try to get it to roll over. My mom followed the wagons to juvy. She said she could see one of them rockin’ back and forth, and she knew I was in that one.

Jeff Goldthorpe:
Those escaping the ambush got back to the Moscone Center concert and denounced the latest arrests. The Dead Kennedys played next.

East Bay Ray:
We got sheets and made Ku Klux Klan hoods, with Reagan masks underneath.

Klaus Flouride:
They were busting people left and right and dragging them off to jail. Biafra just kept saying, “Don’t get busted! Don’t get busted!”

Aaron Cometbus:
David Solnit got onstage and gave this breathless speech. Moving, but sort of hysterical, too, which whipped the crowd into a frenzy. “The cops have just arrested . . . eighty of our brothers and sisters . . . for peacefully protesting against this fucked-up war machine. . . . We’ve got to do something. . . . We have to march on the Hall of Justice and get them out! Now!”

Mike Tsongas:
We were watching the news, on the inside, and saw them marching down to the Hall of Justice. They did a big sit-in while we were in jail. It was an incredible feeling, to see that.

Hilary Binder:
People were screaming and yelling for our release. It was really fun.

Mike Tsongas:
People called the Hall of Justice pay phone, all the “stars” of the scene wanted to offer us encouragement. We passed the phone around. There were people from all over the country with us, people who had different experiences in their own scenes back home, but we were able to share this together.

Gordon Edgar:
As we rallied outside, the police moved in. My weaselly brother made it through the police line at the last minute but I got stopped by a riot baton in my chest. I spent all night in jail before being sent to juvenile hall the next morning. Our protest became the biggest mass arrest in the Bay Area since the late ’60s.

Fat Mike:
I went to summer camp when I was 13, and Joe Escalante from the Vandals was a junior counselor there. At the school dance he was playing some punk rock. I didn’t even know what it was. I went to a record store and asked the guy, “Have you heard a song that goes, ‘Beat on the brat with a baseball bat’?” He gave me a Ramones cassette, and that was the first punk I ever heard.