Gimme Something Better (46 page)

Sergie Loobkoff:
We’d go to every show, Saturday and Friday, sometimes Sunday. What else are you going to do?

Dallas Denery:
Other bands would show up from out of town, and they couldn’t believe what they were seeing. Sometimes they liked it, and sometimes they would just make snide comments later. Gilman had a different vibe. And that whole vibe would catch people sort of by surprise.

If you went to the Mab it was just dire and depressing. The Chatterbox was a fine place to play, but those places were much more like, people go to the club, pay their money, see the show. Whereas at Gilman Street, there were all these people who sort of decided it was home. Or the center of their world. It was less an “East Bay-San Francisco” thing than a “Gilman Street and every other club in the Bay Area” thing.

New Year’s Resolution: Gilman St. Project flyer

Mike K:
* Everybody was always completely out of tune. But you learned to feel this anthemic quality, even though things were totally a mess.

Scott Kelly:
The whole El Sobrante thing came in, and they latched onto that super hard. That, to me, was when things started changing, when it started getting really fuckin’ goofy. I remember we’d come out of the warehouse, we’re on drugs and listening to Joy Division, and we’d go to Gilman and kids are playing leapfrog and shooting each other with Silly String. And we were like, “What the fuck?”

Aaron Cometbus:
Tim had a vision of all these goofy, silly kids coming together to bring creativity and humor back into punk. A fine little vision, which very few people happened to share. Soon Tim is announcing, “Geekcore is born! Bring on the Big Wheels!” I wasn’t the only one there who didn’t consider themself a geek. But when the compilation of Gilman bands came out, there it was again: “File under Geekcore.”

Scott Kelly:
Tim and those guys loved those bands. Loved ’em. And really supported ’em. All these kids came in with a lot of energy. And, shit, basically they took it. I understand. That’s how I live my life. If you want it, take it.

Spike Slawson:
The energy was great and it was all—oh man, I fucking hate that I’m going to say this—it was all positive energy. It was. And there was this rhythm. The place was throbbing and everyone was soaking wet and it wasn’t a bloodbath.

Dallas Denery:
It’s amazing if you think about the number of people who were in that area who had interesting musical ideas, and had this place to play. These shows would happen, and there would be the usual review of some dumb concert in the
Chronicle
. I would just think, “How can you not be paying attention to this?” It seemed like when Gilman was happening, essentially nobody else in the rest of the Bay Area knew it was happening.

Blag Jesus:
I saw experimental things at Gilman, I saw weird things there. I saw a band there that played punk songs on turntables. Because it was a collective, you got crazy shit cropping up in there.

Larry Livermore:
A band called Slapshot from Boston. The singer was called Choke. He used to play with a broken hockey stick in his hand, that he would wave at the audience, menacing them with it. There was a few hardcore fans that wanted to get right up there and be all macho with Mr. Choke. So a bunch of Gilman geeks started playing leapfrog, in what normally would have been the pit. Making goony faces, and acting really mock-horror and terror every time he would yell and growl. It was very hilarious.

The singer would just get madder and madder. “This ain’t no punk show, this is fuckin’
Romper Room!
” He had another speech at the very end, where he was happy to play for anybody, anytime, but not for a bunch of fuckin’ geeks. This was typical of the Gilman spirit. But Tim was really mad. He said we hadn’t shown respect. He yelled at us afterwards, that they were a serious band.

Jeff Ott:
The guy who’s now called Michael Franti used to be in the Beatnigs. They would play Gilman sometimes.

Kareim McKnight:
“They don’t eat burritos in the White House!” I’m black, and it was amazing to see someone like Michael Franti onstage and pounding it out.

Jeff Ott:
Beatnigs would accidentally light shit on fire, by having all these grinding wheels and sticking metal in them, all this crazy shit.

Kevin Carnes:
One time we actually set up on the floor. The intention was to have people play along with us, put the music in the hands of the people, right? We set up all this stuff, and as people came in, they literally had to walk right up to this sculpture, and it was like pieces of metal hanging from it, that later on you might end up playing a little bit, at least touching it, because some guy shot sparks off of it with a circular saw, and another guy played it with mallets, and another guy burned a little piece of message that was attached to it.

Scott Kelly:
Frank Moore. How’s that for disturbing? At an all-ages club.

Jason Beebout:
Frank was this quadriplegic performance artist who had a cable access show. He would sit there in his wheelchair, they’d play music in the background and he’d sing along. But he’d just make vocalizations. He had a little pointer on his head that went to a board with letters and phrases, so he could speak that way. He usually had women dancing naked with chicken blood.

Scott Kelly:
Quadriplegic. Young, naked girl dancers. Fire. How do you do that? Shouldn’t everybody who runs this club be in prison for doing that type of shit?

Zarah Manos:
I remember Adjective Noun. Drummer got offstage, went into the bathroom, took somebody else’s shit out of the toilet, ate it onstage and barfed! I’m not kidding. Adjective Noun, if a band could do more, be more, they were it. They were the worst and the most disgusting. I feel sick talking about it.

Christopher Appelgren:
Juke were always an amazing band to see live. When nearly everyone was vegetarian and vegan, they set up a hibachi out in front of Gilman and cooked steaks before the shows. They also managed at one point to get a pig’s head and have it on a stake onstage.

Nobody went to their shows. There might be 12 people strewn about Gilman. But Nick, the singer, would of course stand right in front of you and sing into a wireless microphone. He would start out with a trench coat, and then reveal underneath, his full-body nylon, nude body stocking with a little leaf over his crotch. Nick was pretty tone-deaf. He was an acquired taste. I think he’s a professor in Utah.

Kate Knox:
Boom and the Legion of Doom threw out fuckin’ raw meat. Blast did that, too. That was pretty funny.

Sham Saenz:
You’d see bands at Gilman like the Melvins, Neurosis, Victim’s Family. These bands pushed the envelope of creativity. They were creating new music and pushing it.

Noah Landis:
Victim’s Family were an amazing band. Their musicianship just blew me away.

Dave Mello:
They had put a really groovy, jazzy twist on it, and made punk very musical and very harmonic and melodic and jazzy. With drums on the backbeat.

Tim Armstrong:
I used to stand right at the edge of the stage in front of Ralph Spight and watch him play guitar. That guy was like my fucking hero.

Dale Flattum:
Seeing Caroliner Rainbow for the first time and going, “Holy hell, these sets have taken this guy the last five years to paint.” All these costumes. They’d be jumping on trampolines. Few other places would really want this. Or embrace it.

Sham Saenz:
I had been kind of bummed out about punk rock by that point. I went through a low phase. Then Poison Idea played Gilman. Jerry A. came out and he was blowin’ fuckin’ fire.

The kids were going crazy, everybody was smashing each other, and picking each other up at the same time, and singing along. Once the show was over, everybody poured out onto the street, blocking traffic. This huge cloud of steam was coming out of the club and off of everybody’s bodies, because everyone was so packed into each other. There was a little skirmish over here. People were covered in blood and laughing, drunk and wiping each other. That’s why I loved this.

Dale Flattum:
Schlong did all of Fleetwood Mac’s
Rumours
. It wasn’t just this half-baked idea. I think that’s what was so great about Gilman. There was an outlet for it. That kind of inspires people to complete things.

Gavin MacArthur:
We were listening to the
Rumours
album on tour a lot. We covered “Go Your Own Way.” After that it was like, let’s just do the whole thing as fast as we possibly can, and see if we can put the whole thing on a 7-inch. Somebody throws out a stupid idea, and everybody laughs and thinks that’s the stupidest thing they’ve ever heard—and of course we’re gonna do it.

Dave Mello:
We tried to make it sound as garagy as we could.
Tumors
. One take. We recorded it in a couple hours.

Sergie Loobkoff:
There’s something really rad about watching a band that are doing it just because they love doing it. And they have no inkling of doing it for any other reason.

Gavin MacArthur:
Pat Mello had a lot to drink, and I think he started singing “Maria.” We were all closet fans of
West Side Story
. It’s just something you can’t deny from your childhood. Then Pat just said, “We’re gonna record the whole
West Side Story
soundtrack!”

Dave Mello:
Took maybe two weeks to learn all the songs. Got everybody to our practice space and had a dress rehearsal for a weekend, before we went in the studio.

Gavin MacArthur:
People got paid in beer. It was really quick. One day for the music, one day for the vocals, and one day to mix it. We stayed up all night, finished mixing it at ten in the morning, went home, slept for a couple of hours. We went to Gilman Street while everybody was still in town and played the whole thing through. It wasn’t any sort of stage production by any means, we just played all the songs, and the people who sang the songs came up and sang them. That’s the only time that we actually did
Punk Side Story
.

Cammie Toloui:
It was the 4th of July at Gilman Street. It was an all-day show with two million bands and people cooking burgers in the front. We were standing around, me and Joyce and Jane, looking at all of the boys. The punk scene was all about boys being up onstage and everyone giving them all the attention. There weren’t a whole lot of women, especially not very many women onstage. The Beastie Boys had become very famous right at that time, which was 1987. So we were laughing, ha ha, we would be the Yeastie Girlz. Jane ran off, sat down and wrote this rap:

In between bands we jumped up onstage holding this piece of paper, shaking, terrified, and did this song. As would usually happen at Gilman, the boys booed. But it was something that really needed to be done at Gilman, because the boys ruled there.

We put out a demo tape that we advertised in
Maximum RocknRoll
. I think the name of our tape was “Suck Our Smelly Vaginas,” which was Jane’s idea. We had this ad that had a drawing of a woman giving herself a speculum exam. No one knew who we were.

We did a Prom Night show that was all girl bands. Everyone was wearing prom dresses. There’s a main door, and then another door that leads into the main hall, and we changed that doorway into a huge vagina. Lots of red satiny material, I think the pubic hairs were some lacy stuff. People actually had to crawl through this vagina to get into the show.

Ruth Schwartz:
That’s what a hall like that is supposed to be about. You could be playing Turbonegro and have a vagina at the door at the same time. Something for everybody.

Mike LaVella:
There was a lot of shit that was poignant. Youth of Today, their big thing was supposed to be like, “We have no ego.” When they played, every kid in the audience held up a mirror. And all they saw was hundreds of reflections of themselves.

Hugh Swarts:
They called Friday Alternative Night. Saturday was Punk Night. Sunday, sometimes they’d have plays, or art shows.

Dan Rathbun:
We were always put into the non-punk nights with other bands that were viewed as appropriate underground entertainment, but didn’t fit into punk rock.

Nils Frykdahl:
We once did
The Rite of Spring
at Gilman, which was not so much theatrical as conceptual, with us playing Stravinsky. With music stands, and everyone sitting down on the floor like it was a concert. I don’t know if we were doing clown outfits yet.