Gimme Something Better (53 page)

 

 

Jesse Michaels:
Upon reflection I regret in any way popularizing fucking with people’s yards. Some things aren’t meant to go beyond the handful of idiots who do them. This is one of them.

Noah Landis:
Watching Op Ivy get more and more popular was pretty exciting. Not only were they really great, they were really great personalities. To watch Dave play the drums was like, “Heck, yeah!” You couldn’t even take your eyes off him.

Martin Brohm:
They called him Animal. ’Cause that’s how he played drums, like Animal from the Muppets. He had this big goofy hair, this little scrawny kid, he was everywhere. He was so fun to watch. It went from top to bottom in that band.

Fat Mike:
The first time I heard them I was on tour and someone had their 7-inch. It just blew my mind how great it was. I got back here and started hanging out with Lint a little bit, and we starting doing some shows together.

Frank Portman:
People just really, really loved them. They really had some star quality. They were a great band in the ways that great rock ’n’ roll bands are great. They evoked a spirit. I would maybe prefer the Fall to the Clash. I was touched more deeply inside by Crimpshrine than I was by Operation Ivy. But the world is big enough for every version of show business.

Anna Brown:
Their first and only tour was in Matt’s car. They built a crate on the roof, put their amps in it, and put all the rest of their shit in the trunk. All the way across the country in a four-door passenger car.

Matt Freeman:
A ’69 Chrysler Newport, green with a 383. It’s actually one of the longest production cars ever made. I bought it for 900 bucks from my fuckin’ neighbor Mrs. Cogden, who was blind in her right eye so the whole right side was all bashed up. You’d look at the driver’s side, “Oh, what a nice car.” You’d look at the other side and there was like dents, the mirror’s hanging off.

Tim Armstrong:
We were the first Gilman Street band to tour. Crimpshrine, Fang had toured, obviously. But they weren’t Gilman acts.

Matt Freeman:
Us four and David Hayes. Kamala Parks booked it. That was a shoestring budget. We would go to supermarkets and get cheese sandwiches and eat on the hood of the car.

Jesse Michaels:
Driving around in a car with five people for a month and a half is absurd. Absolutely absurd.

Dave Mello:
If anyone had heard us at that time, especially on the East Coast and Midwest, it was because of the
Turn It Around
comp and
Maximum RocknRoll
. In Delaware we played a house party and their parents made the kids sit down. So they had pits where they were just crawling around on their butts. We played a show in Lexington, Kentucky, for four people.

Jesse Michaels:
There was all these little places. Some of them were actually clubs, some were basements, community centers, punk houses. Invariably every place had terrible sound. We played this show where kids in this punk house put on the movie
The Decline of Western Civilization
and had a pit going in the house, while they watched the movie.

Tim Armstrong:
Kenosha, Wisconsin. David Hayes slept in the car that night, and so did Dave Mello. I slept upstairs by this fuckin’ door. I felt like it was raining. I woke up, “Where am I? I’m in Kenosha, a punk house, it’s raining?” It’s not raining. The door was open and this burly-assed skinhead was pissing out to the backyard, but it was coming in and I was getting sprayed by piss.

Martin Sorrondeguy:
I remember when Op Ivy came to Chicago. That was an amazing show. They grabbed the mic and started talking about, “This is about you, this is about everybody, it’s about punks, skins, this, that.” There was this real sense of inclusivity. This new wave of the early Lookout! stuff was a whole new scene developing. It was a reclamation of what a lot of the old people were slowly and surely killing. These new kids were coming in and goin’, “Forget all that, this is what it’s about right now.” We all took to it. Everybody sensed it.

Larry Livermore:
They were the first Lookout! band to go out to the rest of the U.S.A. They called back from their first show and said, “The kids already know all the words to all the songs.” Which was weird, because the record had been out maybe a few weeks at most.

Jesse Michaels:
Larry’s a great guy but you have to take what he says with a grain of salt. Did the audience know all our words? No, a couple people in the audience sometimes knew a chorus. That being said, it still was pretty impressive, because how did they find this shit out?

Dave Mello:
After the tour we were getting more popular. Touring bands were coming in and they wanted to play with us. We were trying to record an album for Lookout!. We weren’t really thinking of anything else. It felt like this could be something. We didn’t know what it could be. Something scary, even.

Noah Landis:
They couldn’t play where they were supposed to play anymore, because too many people would show up.

Dave Mello:
On one hand you have Matt and Tim who are really excited about this, and Lookout! says we can go to Europe. It was a little bit too much for Jesse. He didn’t want it to go that fast. He didn’t want to have a whole bunch of people liking him, being his fans, and him having to live up to something. He was the front man. It was his lyrics, his message. He was still very young, not really sure of what he wanted to do with the band. We just got off a tour. He didn’t have that great of a time.

So he didn’t want to go on another tour. Both Matt and Tim were gung ho for Europe. That was a big conflict. When he told us over the phone, it was a big argument for a couple days. And then Jesse decided that it wasn’t gonna happen.

Tim Armstrong:
It wasn’t brutal. It wasn’t like, “Fuck you, dick!” It was a premeditated breakup.

Dave Mello:
When it all came down to it, all four of us had to admit that we had a hell of a time. It’s easier to celebrate those two years. It wasn’t just our band, it was all our friends and all those other bands, all those people who were at the picnics.

Frank Portman:
That last Op Ivy show at Gilman was a spectacle. And they were all very excited and emotional. It was like a real show. Like few of those shows were, that I remember.

Dallas Denery:
I had never seen the place so crowded. I was looking around and I was thinking, “Who are all these people?” I didn’t even recognize any of them. Because they had gotten outside of Gilman and the Gilman devotees.

Dave Mello:
Green Day played, and also Crimpshrine—I think that was their last show. It was kinda poetic. Because even though they started a year before, we both ended on that night. They just let everybody in. There was at least 600 people. My mom was packed up against the front of the stage. It was crazy. We had a great time. Played every song.

Anna Brown:
People were literally hanging on to the walls trying to catch a glimpse.

Martin Sprouse:
They broke up a week after their record came out on Lookout! People that just get into punk now can still put on that record, and that record has power. It’s timeless. It still fucking kicks ass on a lot of punk.

Matt Wobensmith:
By breaking up as they put out this masterpiece record, the signature record, it only made people want them more. Andy Asp: What a great punk outfit it was. They only played 100 shows or something like that. They didn’t do a reunion. One single album with a couple EPs. That’s more punk than Sex Pistols or Fugazi.

Anna Brown:
We all felt a sense of real loss because they were just getting really big. Some people were like, “Thank god, they’ll be ours forever.” And other people were like, “It was a shame.”

Dave Mello:
I was sad. I wanted it to go on for a little longer. I was still only 20 years old. At the same time, I felt like I had a new awakening. I wanted to go in a different direction. The same adrenaline kicks I had when Operation Ivy was starting, I also had that when it was ending. I had never been in a band that was that popular. It definitely opened avenues for me.

Jesse Michaels:
I was a lot different from all of my friends, even in the punk scene. I worried more, I thought too much. So a lot of this shit for me was pretty dark. For them it was fun, for me it was escapism because I was just so fucking unhappy. That’s what went into the intensity of the lyrics. As much as making political statements about society, I was kind of lashing out against my own inner problems and fucked-up nature. It was very internal. I don’t even know what I was so bummed out about, probably just weird family shit, who knows.

James Washburn:
It’s just like the Rancid song, you know, “Too much attention unavoidably destroyed us.” That’s what happened.

Anna Brown:
Jesse went through this whole thing for awhile. He dropped out and was soul-searching, going on Buddhist retreats, and he moved away.

Jesse Michaels:
I went to Nicaragua. I just wanted to do something really different. I did have a social consciousness, and wanted to see if I could be of service. It turns out I was completely lazy when I was there. Spent most of the time drinking. It didn’t really work out. But I had good intentions.

I just had a rough time in my 20s. I’m a lot happier now. But then again, you know, we’re talking about punk rock. I don’t want to turn into Sigmund Freud about it, but a lot of those kids were just fuckin’ miserable beat-up kids. Some came from really dysfunctional families and were trying to find a family in punk, often doing it in really dysfunctional ways. We don’t talk about that. We talk about how great it was to see Marginal Man.

Eric Ozenne:
I ended up joining the Marines. I was in Okinawa, Japan. It was just really lame. I needed to get back to who I was, mentally. This kid from Benicia, California, had an Operation Ivy tape on him. I was like, “You’ve got to be kidding me! You have an Operation Ivy tape? Let me borrow it.” I played this thing over and over again for like a week. And the lyrics and everything about it just snapped me back into a place where I felt comfortable as myself.

I tried to get out of the Marines, which didn’t work. But during that process, I ended up running into all of the degenerate military guys—a lot of them were punks. Some from Chicago, some from Southern California, some from Wyoming. We started hanging out almost every night in a vacant barracks filled with these broken fans, so we called it the Fan Club. We’d sit in there and listen to the Operation Ivy stuff, Gorilla Biscuits, the new Rancid record. I cooked for everybody on a hot plate, so we’d sit around and eat vegan food, and listen to punk and hardcore and mosh around the barracks, throwing fans at each other, just go crazy. We did this for months. It was really cool. I wouldn’t go back into the Marines to do it again, though.

Dallas Denery:
I’m now a 42-year-old college professor in Maine, and I can walk down a street in Portland and see some kid on a skateboard with an Op Ivy shirt. There’s this temptation: “You know, I saw those guys 30 times.” You don’t want to be the old guy trying to relate to the kids, ’cause that’s pathetic. But it’s kind of remarkable, this stuff is 20 years old.

Jesse Michaels:
I don’t know why or exactly what it did. But I feel grateful that it did something.

Tim Armstrong:
My decline with alcohol and drugs started to get really bad. It turned into a sad spiral, but it had to go there. At the end of Operation Ivy, I was already fuckin’ up shows.

Fat Mike:
I’d bring people from the city, “Man you’ve gotta see this band Op Ivy, they’re so amazing.” And they were so fucking bad. Lint broke a string once at Ruthie’s and it took him, it had to be ten minutes. ’Cause he was wasted.

Tim Armstrong:
Everyone seemed to know. I’d never think about anything but right now. We played Covered Wagon with Mr. T and I was so fucked up, I couldn’t play my guitar.

Mike LaVella:
Their famous worst show ever. Where Lint was too drunk to play.

Tim Armstrong:
I felt bad about that shit. It was that show that Larry took me aside and he said, “Look, I come from Ann Arbor, man. I was at Woodstock and I’ve seen a lot of friends of mine go down from drugs and alcohol and never come back. Don’t go down that road.” It was a seed that was planted.

Matt Freeman:
We’d been friends for years, and we’d talk every day. But he’d disappear for a couple days, and I knew by the end of day two, like, okay, he’s drinkin’ again. He wasn’t hard to find. He was up on Telegraph doing some fucked-up thing. There were these places in Richmond that had a detox, and I took him there, like, four times. He’d go and dry out for awhile, and then he’d slip.

Tim Armstrong:
It got bad. Olde English. And then I liked Cisco a little later. My brother Jeff found me on Telegraph, took me to the hospital, my blood-alcohol level was .39, almost .40. Legally drunk is .08 or something. So I was like, dead. They asked my brother, “Is Tim trying to kill himself?”

I was hospitalized three times. By ’91 I had nowhere to live. I had no job, I was just fucking nothing. My mom wouldn’t let me sleep in the basement anymore. I’d go into the Salvation Army program in downtown Oakland. You got a bed. I did that for a couple weeks. I was doin’ drugs, too. But that wasn’t my main thing. I loved to drink so much, I’d just be drunk nonstop.

Matt Freeman:
I never saw anyone drink as hard as him. No fuckin’ joke. It was a learning experience for me, too. He’d say, “Oh, I need some money for food,” and I’d say, “Okay, here’s money,” and he’d go buy beer. I’m like, okay, can’t pull that trick on me again. So I’d say, “Well, let’s go eat, I’ll buy you groceries.” After awhile we couldn’t possibly play music together, because of this. He was too unreliable.

Christopher Appelgren:
There had been Downfall, right after Operation Ivy had broken up, which was an attempt to continue.