Gimme Something Better (48 page)

Ben Sizemore:
I was working Gilman volunteer security, with Jerme Spew and Atom Thompson, aka A. C. Thompson.

Jerme Spew:
It was a really small show, practically nobody was there. But it was a security nightmare. Seven or eight assholes kept fighting all over the club.

Jesse Luscious:
Jello was there to see the Fixtures ’cause they were on his label. Or they were about to be. All of us regular workers were outside dealing with these douchebags.

Ben Sizemore:
So we were in the process of throwing these guys out, and as we were chasing them off, someone ran out front yelling, “Jello’s been attacked!!”

Jello Biafra:
Basically I’d gone down to see the Fixtures and there was a group of crusties that I’d never seen before, and a lot of other people hadn’t. For some reason they were allowed to do stuff that normally had been banned at Gilman by then. They were stage diving at will, shoving people around. They shoved me into a table several times, and finally one of ’em plowed into me and snapped my leg backwards. Plowed straight into the knee and snapped the whole leg. Kind of in half.

A. C. Thompson:
I was right there inside the building when it happened. It was a guy who was dirty and drunk, who really wanted to skank it up, and he accidentally ran into Jello. Jello’s knee buckled. It wasn’t intentional, from what I could tell.

Jello Biafra:
Not knowing what happened, I stood up on it, then really felt, “Oh my god, I’m really fucked up.” I challenged one of ’em about it. And he said, “Oh, you’re such a rich rock star, you fuckin’ deserve it, don’t you?” Or something to that effect.

A. C. Thompson:
I remember Jello grabbing the guy and being like, “You just busted my leg. You need to tell me who you are because I’m going to make you pay for this.” And the kid was like, “Get the fuck away from me, old man! Fuck you!” The next thing you know, Jello’s going crazy and it’s become this assault on him.

Jello Biafra:
So then like a fool, on one leg, I took a swing at ’em. All his friends jumped me and split my head open with brass knuckles, and may have done more damage to the leg. I have no idea what. I also wound up with injury-induced glaucoma in one eye.

Jesse Luscious:
The regulars at Gilman pulled people off of each other. And we called the cops.

Jerme Spew:
Jello was trying to describe his assailants. He demanded one of their driver’s licenses. I couldn’t honestly tell you which one of them he was demanding. But it didn’t matter, ’cause he was demanding the license of a man named either Cretin, Sphincter or Spider.

Jesse Luscious:
These were like crusty squatter people with facial tattoos, from the Southwest. They were just traveling through, and they were there for the show. It wasn’t like they were planning a crime. They were just assholes.

Ben Sizemore:
I don’t even know if they knew who he was. It’s dark in there. I think they only realized it later that it was Jello Biafra of the Dead Kennedys whose leg they broke.

Jerme Spew:
I saw none of it. The story I got from Jello was that they targeted him. Jello’s version was that they started quoting
MRR
people, like Tim Yohannan. That they were quoting bad things that the columnists had said about Jello, as their ammo for reasoning why they were physically attacking him.

I believe they were attacking him because they were pretty antisocial and not so bright, and didn’t know how to respond to an older punk rocker guy. Especially one who was Jello, demanding information from them, and so they kind of went, “Oh! Attack!”

A. C. Thompson:
The kid ended up running out of the club.

Jesse Luscious:
The cops came, the ambulance came. The police never really caught ’em. They went up north to the Northwest somewhere.

Jello Biafra:
I could have sued the living shit out of Gilman and got the whole place closed down, but I thought that would be a terrible thing to do and it would be wrong. Many people urged me to do that, including the doctors who tried to fix up my knee. But I wasn’t gonna do that. If anything, we need two or three Gilmans in every single town. I’d love it if they multiplied like Starbucks.

A. C. Thompson:
Jello blew it up into this absolutely malicious attack on him, like it was some sort of beef between the new generation of punks and the old generation of punks. Jello had both messianic and persecution complexes.

Jello Biafra:
I made the decision that I couldn’t let this keep me away from Gilman. It was my place, too. I liked going there. I liked a lot of the bands that played there. I wasn’t gonna stay away. Plus I had spoken-word shows booked there, two or three weeks or less after it happened. So against all advice I went ahead with the show. Some people in the audience made fun of me through the whole thing. But others were pretty angry at those people for doing it.

A. C. Thompson:
He spoke for three hours, largely about himself. He needed to raise money because he felt he needed to go to a specialist who was
not
covered by his insurance. People were like, “Uhhhhhh, yeahhhh, whatever, dude.”

Mike Avilez:
He was sitting in a wheelchair onstage. Then I saw him a year later and he sang a couple songs with DOA in San Francisco. It looked like he had some metal thing on his leg.

Jerme Spew:
I don’t think there was a grand conspiracy, like things that have been said in
Maximum
.

Ruth Schwartz:
Biafra got the shit kicked out of him, and he never forgave Tim for it. He held Tim responsible. Biafra wanted to say it was because of what happened at Gilman, but in fact it was something that had been building and building and building. But that’s what was going on with him. It’s all so ridiculous in some ways.

Tim wrote an article in
Maximum RocknRoll
about how Biafra had done something wrong. I don’t even remember what it was. In Biafra’s mind, it created an environment where skinheads could come into Gilman and beat the crap out of him.

Ginger Coyote:
The fight between Tim and Jello Biafra was fun.

Dallas Denery:
Oh my god. Here you had two 40-year-old men arguing for issue after issue of
Maximum RocknRoll
, about what real punk rock is. These endless debates. You were just thinking, come on.

Larry Livermore:
I was very angry at the time about Biafra getting beat up. I always blamed that on Tim Yohannan. Not just exclusively. But he helped orchestrate that whole “Jello is selling out to be a rock star.” He made one reference to Biafra living in this $650,000 mansion in the Mission. It was a fairly pricey house by San Francisco standards of those days. But not extraordinary. It’s probably like a middle-class house.

Jello Biafra:
I shouldn’t have let it slide because this notion of me being the big bad evil rich rock star permeated the community. When all I was doing was supporting the same bands they were. And in some cases using my money to put out their records. That was the thanks I got from
MRR
.

I fingered
MRR
for creating the atmosphere that made it cool to violently attack somebody like this. Tim’s response was to attack me personally, and eventually he accused me of faking the entire injury. In print. After two years of rehab and a badass knee surgery later—no, I didn’t fake the fucking injury. I was very, very angry at him over that. It hurt all the more because it hadn’t been very long before that, he was one of my dearest and closest friends.

Gavin MacArthur:
A disagreement between punks? I mean, come on, man. What are you infighting for? Go beat up the CEO of Wal-Mart. Jello’s got his own thing going, A.T. is its own thing, and he hasn’t sold it to anybody huge. He’s still maintaining a small business. That whole thing I thought was just completely fucking lame.

Mike LaVella:
Gilman had so much to do with why I moved here. But literally, the week I moved here was the last week that Tim and Martin Sprouse booked Gilman: “Oh, this weekend are the last shows that we’re doing.”

Cinder Bischoff:
When Gilman closed for a period because that kid broke his leg and sued Tim Yo, the name changed from Gilman Street Project to 924 Gilman. In the period of a few months when they were closed, the people started putting on shows in the back of Phoenix Ironworks. Rock Against Racism, GWAR. Oh my god, GWAR played my house on Halloween. That is so rad.

Anna Brown:
The loss was felt acutely by us all. Tim decided he was gonna shut it down and chalk it up to a failed experiment in collectives. I think he ended up being disappointed by what he saw as a lack of dedication by most people.

Martin Sprouse:
It was a lot of work. Everyone was working day jobs and doing this at the same time. And we were trying to figure out whether we were gonna shut it down. There weren’t enough volunteers. It was the same old people doing it. It turned into, like, “You guys put on the show, we play the show.” It was a very hard situation. It needed more time to grow, and it wasn’t growing fast enough to keep it going.

Larry Livermore:
As far as Tim was concerned, that meant it was finished. He’d put an awful lot of time and work, and $40,000, into the place. It ended up having a budget four times what they’d originally expected.

He wrote a eulogy to it. He announced that it had had a great run, but it hadn’t really lived up to its potential. So he said, we shouldn’t feel bad that it’s closed. We accomplished a great deal. We can learn for the future. Let’s say thanks for the memories. That kind of thing.

Bill Schneider:
After
Maximum RocknRoll
backed out, a bunch of us got together and reopened it as the Alternative Music Foundation. I was right in the middle of that. Mike Kirsch was pretty active. Pat Wright, Jason Beebout, Tall Tim—there was a bunch of people. One guy, Jonathan, was the main guy, he was a grad student at Berkeley. He really was the one that organized everybody.

There was this creepy business guy named Lou, who we were all pretty sure had really shady intentions. But he was rich and had computers and knew people on the city council, so we were like, we’re gonna use him for our own. And we really did. We wouldn’t have been able to do it without this guy. He was a total creep, just trying to pick up on young girls.

Anna Brown:
Lou was really weird, but there was always some earnest person to oversee what was happening in spite of all that.

Bill Schneider:
Maximum RocknRoll
was very against it reopening. They were offended: “How could these people try to continue what we decided is passé?” It was this funny East Bay-West Bay rift. Tim came in and yelled at us and told us that we were stupid. He was really pissed off that we would have the audacity to reopen Gilman because it’s obviously not gonna work.

Martin Sprouse:
We had meeting upon meeting upon meeting about this. The second group of people that took it over, that came out of the first. It’s part of growing pains, I think, to get to the third or fourth stage, when things kinda changed. This second group kept a lot of the same policies, but were a lot more lax on other aspects.

Larry Livermore:
Tim was genuinely surprised that it reopened. Once they got more reliable people involved, it actually ran better without Tim and his micromanaged style. I think he found that a bit annoying. He came to shows occasionally, but not that often. After that, he had nothing to do with it.

Bill Schneider:
I’ll be the dick to say it. A lot of the people who took credit for Gilman gave up on it. If you read that Gilman book, all the people that are in it, they gave up. It wasn’t even a full two years. They gave it away. They shut it down. They hated the fact that we’d opened again. I’m not holding anybody to the grindstone. But they all saw later. They were able to step back and go, “Oh, wait a second, it worked.” The anarchy worked. It took over for itself.

Richard the Roadie:
A second group opened it up as AMF. And it was really good. But a lot of those people peeled off. There was a huge shift at Gilman. They were just hemorrhaging money. It was just spiraling and going downhill. The shows were still good but it wasn’t being run as an effective club. They were like three months behind on rent, the money wasn’t being managed, bands had stopped playing there, ’cause they weren’t being paid that well. It got nasty.

Larry Livermore:
It was on the verge of closing. One thing I learned from Gilman, no matter how socialistic or cooperative the venture is, somebody always has to take ultimate responsibility. Gilman succeeded, with all of its faults, because Tim was able to step into that role.

I helped encourage this one young but very smart kid to be the new head coordinator. Basically I said to him, “Look, all this cooperative, collective stuff is great, but there has to be somebody that’s willing to tell people to fuck off, and to say this is what has to be done. And I think you can do it.”

His punk name was Mike Stand, but it’s Mike Lymon. He later went on to found a very successful Internet company in Berkeley. He might have even been less than 18 when he took over Gilman, and completely saved it from bankruptcy. He was kind of an unsung hero.

Richard the Roadie:
Mike Stand came through and just changed everything top to bottom. Made it run like a business. There was a big benefit weekend, and it was Green Day, Jawbreaker and Neurosis. All three bands were huge at the time. And they gave all the money back to Gilman. And it basically pulled Gilman out of debt. People say it’s chaos now, but it’s really well run.

Dave Chavez:
Gilman’s always gonna be there, ’til they burn it down or something.