Gimme Something Better (44 page)

Jeff Ott:
Like, a hundred Big Wheels. But it was really good. Macho, scary-looking punk rockers riding around on Big Wheels.

Jason Beebout:
Slither decided to help out one day by bringing a fuckin’ 50-pound bag of kitty litter. He just whiffed it up in the air. Everyone was gasping for air and gagging. It sapped all the moisture out of your tongue. It was fucked.

Martin Brohm:
It was horrible. In the middle of summer, 200 kids sweating, and then kitty litter coming down on them.

Dallas Denery:
One show they brought hundreds of cigars and everybody started smoking them.

Martin Brohm:
Cigar night. That was rough. The cheapest fuckin’ cigars you could buy. All going at the same time.

Dallas Denery:
They had to stop the show and open up the doors. And they banned cigars from the club.

Lenny Filth:
We played this one show in Santa Rosa, it was just toilet paper flying everywhere. It was a fun, fun show. One of the biggest shows we ever played. There was like 400 people there. Jason Beebout: People tell me, “Oh, I love Isocracy, I have that record!” You actually listened to the record? Going to the show I understand. It was fun to watch, but I’m not gonna sit there, tapping my toe.

Tim Armstrong:
That Isocracy shit, that was it. Them guys came in with that vibe, it made them really fun. Just throwin’ shit around, everyone jumping on each other. It was a celebration, man, it was fuckin’ awesome.

Sergie Loobkoff:
No one gave two shits about any of the music. It was all about, what are they gonna do? And what funny dorky shit are they gonna say? They barely knew how to play.

Frank Portman:
No real club would have booked something like that. It was sophomoric, but kind of lovable. If you were in high school and there were some goofball drama people who decided to do a rock band stunt, it would be like that.

Mike K:
The sense of humor was pretty sophisticated for teenage kids. Making fun of the ritualization of this tough-guy mosh pit stuff.

Jesse Michaels:
The hardcore stuff got so ridiculous, you couldn’t not make fun of it. Isocracy were especially funny because they were playing hardcore type music but they turned it into a big circus, and it was hilarious and it worked. They were like on acid without acid.

Jason Beebout:
We realized that the only thing that was fun about it was throwing shit at people. Lenny really wanted to be in a band like Neurosis, and be serious, and play heavy shit. Martin and I didn’t really ever care much about anything, we were just there to have fun.

We were all so naive. I had no clue. As far as I knew, punk rock was the guys on TV.
T. J. Hooker
, comb your sides back and spray-paint the top red. And then play, “Bang your head, bang it hard.” I really didn’t know. To just play, and realize you’re nothing like what people were expecting to see, and be comfortable with that—fuck it, let’s just throw shit at them, then.

Mike Avilez:
Back then, I didn’t understand why there were a lot of rules at Gilman Street. Other clubs had no rules. A 12-year-old kid could drink beer. Anything goes at those underground venues. But they all get shut down. Gilman’s been a club for over 20 years and it was all the rules that has actually kept it open.

Kamala Parks:
This no-advertising policy was to me the stupidest thing in the world. In some ways I understood what they were doing, but the punk scene was so small at that point, why in the world would you want to make it even more obscure to go to this place?

Martin Sprouse:
We were doing this secret thing. Meaning like, come to Gilman for Gilman’s sake. We wanted people to come there, no matter who played. The clubhouse thing. It was all music based, but we didn’t tell people what bands were playing there.

Chicken John:
I was with Donny the Punk, in New York. We had heard about Gilman Street. Donny told the Alternative Press and Radio Council and the ABC No Rio people that it would be a good idea if they adopted Gilman’s no-advertising policy. My first response was like everybody else’s: “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.” Donny was like, oh no, it would build community. It would make it so that people don’t just come for the popular band. The idea is that it would be packed every night.

That was the “aha” moment. I learned more in that 30 seconds about the world than any other 30 seconds or 30 years. Not advertising bands, you’re begging for failure. And you only know that you’ve given 100 percent of yourself when you fail. But it’s in the failure that you really learn something, and it makes for a better person, a better human.

Kamala Parks:
It was one of those things that just infuriated me. Especially as someone who booked bands on tour. I’d be pissed off if there was a place that was like, “Well, we don’t advertise, we just expect people to show up.” There was nothing. You were just supposed to go every weekend, Friday and Saturday, and whatever was there was there.

Martin Sprouse:
We experimented with a lot of weird ideas. How bands would get paid, how the money was dealt with, the membership policy, what was on the membership card, why we had memberships, security, cleanup, booking. Sunday night or Sunday afternoons would be more art nights, benefits, everything.

There was some things that just didn’t fly very well, like the keeping-the-bands-secret thing, and having the bands not talk about whether they were playing there. And no-flyer policies. It was worth a try. But bands fucking hated that shit.

We really tried to break it down. We didn’t want any bands coming in there, thinking it was just for them. Where people just pay and watch a band very passively. We challenged that. In some ways it broke down some barriers that might have started building up between band and audience.

The Mindfuck Committee was another cool thing that I wish would have stuck around. Trying to make the shows interesting, trying to mess with things. One thing they did was talking about Apartheid in this really interesting way. Everyone got a South African passport, and people would randomly get arrested during shows. Kind of performance art, kind of political. A lot of great ideas but really hard to implement. Most people just wanted to watch Neurosis play.

Cammie Toloui:
I got involved with the Mindfuck Committee. I remember this one. There was a pay phone inside Gilman and we’d pretend like someone was calling. I’d run into the pit and say, “There’s a phone call for you.” They’d come back and of course you couldn’t hear a damn thing, and they’d stand there going, “Hello? Hello? Who is this?” It didn’t serve any purpose.

Jesse Michaels:
I thought it was really cool to have a great space, and there was a lot of good things about it. But I thought it was a little bit pretend, because it was so sterilized. Normally a punk club didn’t have so many rules.

Mike Avilez:
No drinking, no homophobia, no sexism. No, no, no. I remember years later, when we played with Dayglo Abortions, the singer said, “Where does it say ‘No Canadians’?”

Marshall Stax:
There was always a thing about no riders, no contracts, no backstage area. All the clubs you went to, the band would come in the special entrance, you wouldn’t see them until they came onstage. Nothing like that at Gilman. The bands walked right offstage and you could walk right up to them. People could get up onstage and sing along with the band. That’s something that doesn’t go on in a normal club.

Blag Jesus:
It breaks down the wall between the artist and the people, and in some ways I guess that’s good. But if you’ve just done 30 shows in a row and you want to take a shit by yourself, it’s not that great.

Martin Sprouse:
The whole membership card thing was giving us a pass to kick people out who fucked up. If you started a fight, there would be no discussion about throwing you out. If you were a racist, there would be no discussion. You’re out. You harassed somebody, you started a fight, “Look, you signed here—fuckin’ out.”

People didn’t understand the membership thing. Like some drunk punk going, “What the fuck you mean, man, I’m not signing this.” But if they wanted to get in they had to do it. And there was like some 15-year-old girl at the door, making people buy membership cards. It was fuckin’ hilarious.

There were some tense times that first year, because we dealt with a lot of racist fuckin’ assholes and skinheads. That whole S.F. Skins, early ’80s thing was still going on in the city. After Gilman started, it was like East Bay rich white-kid skinheads, coming from the suburbs. Nobody could go in with Skrewdriver shirts or anything like that. That was a big deciding policy at the beginning of Gilman. It was like, how do we defend ourselves?

That was a really weird time. We had big talks: “Everyone’s gonna get baseball bats. There’ll be a hundred baseball bats upstairs.” I think that was Tim’s. It sounded great, but you just knew it wasn’t gonna go down like that. It got shot down so quickly. Everyone said, “Okay, we’re just gonna wing it.” Just not let these people in. Let the front door be the main thing. Or push people out. And that’s how it worked for awhile.

Gilman Street membership card

Fat Mike:
Once you toured Europe, you saw clubs that are built on the idea of Gilman but a hundred times better. Because they have bars. The Ungdomshuset finally got shut down, but it was a squat in Denmark for—I don’t know—20 years? There were clubs at the door. In case there was a brawl, everyone would grab a club and fight.

In Europe, punks fight cops. In Berkeley, everything’s a vote. Once at Gilman Street, we were playing with RKL, and three skinheads came. They were big gnarly dudes, terrorized the whole club. There was a lot of volunteers there, and they tried to block the door. And the skinheads just start beating up people. You had 400 people here, against three people? And they wouldn’t defend themselves. What the fuck is that?

Frank Portman:
Gilman tried these experiments, which really took the idea of putting the bands in their place to a ridiculous degree. If you were gonna be a member, be involved in the club, you had to do work. It was like a co-op, a community. At first they didn’t apply it to bands. Then they said, okay, you’re not special just because you’re in a band—you’re part of the whole thing. So they introduced this rule where if you were a band, you had to clean the toilets. Just to show, like, Jesus washing the feet of—it’s hard to keep a band together anyway. But there’s no way in hell I was going to get my drummer to clean a toilet.

Kamala Parks:
As a local band, whenever we would play Gilman we would always donate our money to the out-of-town band. That was generally what local bands did. It was the spirit of Gilman. I thought it was a great idea, personally. You brought everyone into the room and usually they would say, “There’s 900 dollars, and we think that 400 of it should go to this band, and 300 to this band ’cause they’re out of town.”

Frank Portman:
That meeting in the back room, where you have to reach a touchy-feely consensus on why you shouldn’t be paid, remains one of the most perverse subversions of everything about human nature that you could possibly imagine. We did this big show with Bad Religion, there was a lot of money. The Bad Religion dude had this awesome speech, about how they should get all the money. “If you add up all the hours we spend into creating our art, it works out to less than minimum wage. Is what we witnessed tonight worth more than minimum wage? I think we’ll all agree that it is.” I was like, this is awesome, I hope someone’s recording it.

Blag Jesus:
I always saw the money as chicken feed. I’ve had some stupid fights over the years about small amounts of money, but I always had a pretty good handle on the fact that we all were getting fucked. Another $10 or $20 wasn’t going to make any fucking difference. So we never did much in the way of the haggle. I called it a free show, I just figured, fuck it. Anything we got from them was okay. Nobody was makin’ a profit at Gilman.

Kurt Brecht:
We were playing at the Omni and they’d pay us $4,000. You didn’t wanna go back to Gilman Street and play for 200. These rules where every band gets paid the same. It doesn’t matter if you’re on tour from Sweden and the other band is just from right around the corner. Tim didn’t care. Nobody’s headlining. Everybody’s name on the flyers should be the same size.

Blag Jesus:
But there’s a deeper way to look at it, which was that it was more egalitarian in their booking policy, which allowed some other people in. And most venues just weren’t doing things that way.

Jason Beebout:
Samiam played there one time and I asked for money back because they had Fugazi there. I was pissed because supposedly Fugazi was the be-all, end-all of that mind-set. And it wasn’t that way at all. Ian MacKaye was a cock. He came in and stomped his feet and made everyone snap to. It was gross. I was like, “I see how it works. The popular band gets paid and the local band donates.” I understand the mind-set of keeping the club going. But when it was a band making a lot of money on tour, it was like, “Why should I donate money to a band that’s making plenty of money?”