Gimme Something Better (47 page)

It really worked out. Everybody totally cooperated. Somebody even yelled out, “You’re destroying music!” Which was the obligatory heckle from the original performance of
The Rite of Spring
.

Lynn Breedlove:
You know who I saw at Gilman doing a play in the afternoon—what was her name? Just got the Cannes Film Festival brilliant genius award, dyke, filmmaker? Miranda July! She’s huge now. She was like 18, and putting together these plays at Gilman in the middle of the afternoon. She was super artsy.

Miranda July:
I was not a punk at this time, nor did I ever really become one. But in my own way I was anti-establishment and I really wanted to have total control over my production. I went to a meeting of Gilman volunteers, looking very clean and perky I’m sure, and nervous. But I was given a key to the building, which really meant a lot to me. The people in my play were pretty straight adults, but somehow they were game to spend time in this absolutely filthy, graffiti-covered space. I can still remember the smell.

The play opened during a three-day festival that Gilman had. I think Green Day played that night. I rented folding chairs from a church and set them up in rows. The regular Gilman punks were pretty confused by the chairs, but I think it was basically a success.

Kamala Parks:
It was the first year, ’87. The first time the Feederz ever played Gilman.

Mike LaVella:
I was out in front talking to Tim Yohannan and some kid from Isocracy. And here came Frank Discussion. He had a dead dog around his shoulders, wearing it like a mink stole. And around his neck he had a cat hanging from a noose. Wearing the cat like Run-DMC. Tim saw Frank Discussion before I did, and his cigarette fell out of his mouth and he went, “Oh my fucking god.”

They hit the stage, and, man, it was insane. All these girls got onstage, and they were spitting on him the whole time he’s playing. He had live cockroaches taped to his head. Which I guess was old hat. People had seen that.

He was surrounded by these punk girls, tough-looking hardcore chicks. They were lettin’ him have it. Between the songs they’d take the mic off and they’d say, “We have an open mic policy here. This is bullshit.” I remember Frank Discussion saying, “This is so typical of the bleeding left! You don’t even know where these animals came from!”

Kamala Parks:
He sang his first song, and then he said something like, “Well, I guess Lassie isn’t coming home.” He threw the dog off into the crowd, and it splashed all these people who were like serious vegetarians. That’s what was so upsetting. Where the fuck did he get this dog, and why was blood still coming out of it?

Mike LaVella:
These skins picked up the dead dog and were dancing with it, skankin’ around with this German shepherd. They were swinging it, and now shit started coming out of the dog’s mouth. Bile was coming out and splattering people. People were already fucking horrified as it was.

Happiness is a Warm Puppy: Irate Gilman girls protest the Feederz

Jeff Ott: I just remember going, “Oh my god, that’s fucking gross. I’m glad I’m way back here.” On the other hand, all the vegetarian fanatics were getting really disturbed, so that was kinda cool.

Martin Sprouse:
He paid somebody off to borrow the dog for the night. He said he was using it for a movie prop. But here’s the most fucked-up thing—it still had its dog collar and tag on it. So it wasn’t really a movie prop. That was some family’s dog.

Anna Brown:
I believe someone called the phone number on the dead dog’s collar to tell the pet owners what was going on. They had put it to sleep, and Frank got it from the Humane Society garbage can. How fucked up is that?
Ever Feel Like Killing Your Boss?
is a great album, all the same.

Martin Sprouse:
“Everyone’s getting so mad about the dog, what about the beetles glued to my head?” That was classic Frank Discussion. He was there to fuck with people.

Jeff Ott:
There were all these meetings about it, and Tim Yohannan kept going, “You know, he only did that so all you would be sitting here having this meeting, arguing about shit.” And he was probably right.

Kamala Parks:
A couple of days later, the
Weekly World News
listed this incident, and they had it factually really correct. It was amazing. I remember looking at it and going, “Oh my god, they really are clear about what they are talking about.” So it’s quite scary when you think, okay, they got this incident right. Are they getting the alien stuff right? Does the Bat Boy really exist?

Bucky Sinister:
I was working at Kate Knox’s school. She was telling me, “Poor Jerme, man. Jerme and a couple other guys were in Piedmont cemetery last night. Something happened.” Like, real quiet. I didn’t know where this story was going. Someone OD’d? Someone’s in the hospital?

“In the cemetery. They went in this mausoleum, and Jerme found this baby’s corpse, took it back to his house, and somebody saw him trying to cut the baby’s head off, and freaked out. They called the cops on him, and he took the baby and split.”

No one knew where he was. He was gone. That was how fresh the story was.

Jerme Spew:
Not one of my smartest moves, no.

We went back to the house we were staying at. One of the guys was cleaning a skull with a toothbrush. I was examining this baby’s body, going, “What the hell am I gonna do with this?” It was dry, and I was kind of picking at it. I was already starting to establish that this might be dumb.

Janelle Hessig:
They were cleaning the skull in the living room. Heather Hahn lived there and she freaked out. Like, “You can’t clean that skull here, what the fuck are you doing?”

Jerme Spew:
I don’t blame ’em. But some of the stuff that was said was amazing. One guy who got mad at us, he said, “I banish you and this evil from the house!” What was the great quote? “If you want to do these anti-authoritarian things, go have a fight with your father somewhere else!”

The hilarious thing to me was the assumption that this was something I’ve done to throw in the face of authority and society. When in fact it was just a really dumb prank.

I took my booty from the incident, and was like, okay, I gotta put this somewhere where it’s secure. I had keys to Gilman. And I thought, I’ll go hide it in the sound loft. No one will ever find it. I went inside, I hid it, and went home. I woke up in the morning, and my roommates were still awake in the kitchen, debating how horrible and evil it was.

Janelle Hessig:
One of his roommates called the cops. There’s been a lot of speculation about who it was.

Jerme Spew:
I went to do errands and came home, and the front door and the back door of the house were open. We were living in North Oakland, not so great a neighborhood. There was this guy out on the porch, friend of everybody in the house, and he was like, “Hey, Jerme, your neighbors say there was nine police cars here about half an hour ago.” I said, “Oh, I know what that’s about. I have to leave.” Three people were arrested.

Tim Armstrong:
It was at night, we were practicing at Gilman. There was a knocking, flashlights. It’s Berkeley P.D. They told me they’re looking for some bones and a dead baby that was taken from a crypt in Oakland, and did you know these guys’ names? I played dumb, I didn’t tell them much. The cops looked around and couldn’t see nothing, so they left. But we know Gilman. If it was there, we were gonna find it. So up above the sound booth, we fuckin’ found a Tower Records bag with a dead baby and a skull.

Janelle Hessig:
Lint called the cops and was like, “I don’t want to get the club in trouble, but we have this mummy baby we’d like to give back to you.”

Andy Asp: The part I remember was that Rancid agreed to help the police if there was no mention of punk. They didn’t want it to get out to the news about these cannibalistic baby-eating, grave-robbing punks. So it just became a grave-robbing incident and not a punk incident.

Jerme Spew:
I was the last person to turn myself in, so I was the “ringleader.” Even though, quite frankly, I still say it wasn’t my idea. I had no money, no lawyer. And I ended up spending three weeks in Santa Rita.

Bucky Sinister:
So he was like this skinny punk kid. Like, six-two and 160 pounds. Of course, everybody was like, “What’re you in for, white boy?” And he wasn’t sayin’ anything. So they went to find out, and it all came back that he had felony counts. One for “malicious dismemberment of human remains,” and “malicious removal of human remains.”

So all they knew was, he’d been caught chopping up a body. Nobody would go near him, except for this one dude, who came up and said, “When you kill a motherfucker you don’t take him home with you later.”

Tim Armstrong:
Everything got fuckin’ kinda hot after that happened. Oh my god, it was the punk rock scandal. It was like O.J. for punk.

Janelle Hessig:
It was in all the papers. They had Jerme Spew quoting Nietzsche.

Frank Portman:
I saw it on that Maury Povich show,
A Current Affair
. That, with the Feederz throwing a dead dog into the audience, yes, we made an impact in the world. With our ripping apart dead dogs, and mummified baby corpses, and so forth.

Greg Valencia:
Grimple played with Insaints at Gilman, ’92 or ’93. The singer Marian Anderson had these two dominatrixes in the crowd. They had this live sex thing. I don’t remember ever seeing anything like that.

Mike Avilez:
They did this really long instrumental song while Marian got this banana shoved up her by dominatrix women onstage. She was naked and pissing onstage.

Kamala Parks:
She’d do it all the time. It wasn’t anything surprising, really.

Daniel DeLeon:
I knew who Marian was for years before I met her. She was the freakiest punk in Modesto. She had a two-foot mohawk and liberty spikes, and crazy makeup and ripped clothes. She was looking for someone to jam with. And that was the beginning of the Insaints.

We moved to Oakland. It was better than living in Modesto. Marian got money from the government every month, ’cause mentally or legally she couldn’t really do a real day job. She was a bit crazy. She started being a dominatrix in Oakland. So she decided to bring that into the band, for live performance. We’d invite other girls that she worked with to do sexual acts onstage with her. Fist-fucking and pissing, we had shows where dildos were involved. Bananas were going all weird different places. It was pretty wild. I just played guitar.

Marian ended up dating Tim Yo for awhile. Kind of a weird couple, her and this old gray-haired short guy. But Tim was great to talk to. I think the only reason why we even have an album was because Marian was dating him.
Maximum
paid for it all, which was cool. I don’t know if he liked our music. I know he liked Marian.

Jerme Spew:
The show got stopped. I went inside, most of the people had left by then.

Daniel DeLeon:
This is what Marian told me. I forget the guy’s name. He was from the Dead Kennedys. The hippie. The 90210 guy. He gave her a bouquet of flowers before we went on. Which probably meant he liked her a lot. She thought it was sweet. Thanked him, whatever.

Then as soon as he saw the performances—fist-fucking and pissing, and all this shit—he went to call the police. The cops showed up and she was covered in wet bodily fluids. And bananas. The cops handcuffed her and took her outside and wrote her up, for lewd acts in public. She was still naked. I mean, they didn’t even let her put on a jacket. They cited her, and then let her go.

Jerme Spew:
Kristen from Naked Aggression, and Mike Lymon, somebody else, told the Dead Kennedys guy, “Maybe you should come with us into the side room before you get the shit kicked out of you.” I went in just ’cause I was curious what was going on.

It slowly came out that he had a crush on Kristen, and he also had a crush on Marian. So he would bring them flowers and stuff when they played. But it turned out he was a born-again Christian. He said that it was the lesbian love that was against God’s word.

Klaus Flouride: This was crazy. “One of the Dead Kennedys members calls the police on Gilman Street!” We were all like, ah, for Christ’s sakes. Talk about spin control. My phone was off the hook. Ray’s phone was off the hook. It was before the Internet, or anything like that.

East Bay Ray:
He’s seriously—he’s clinical.

Klaus Flouride:
The walls talk to him.

East Bay Ray:
It’s not good to talk about this.

Klaus Flouride:
We just let it go.

Daniel DeLeon:
She went to court for a year off and on. The ACLU from the West Coast didn’t want to have anything to do with us. So the ACLU from East Coast did. The charges were dropped. You know how you have to buy a membership card at Gilman? It was technically a private club. So it wasn’t lewd acts in public. It was in a private club. And that’s the only reason why she got off.