Gimme Something Better (54 page)

Ben Sizemore:
Then Lint was in this band called Generator that was a little more metal. He played with Dance Hall Crashers and he quit them.

Christopher Appelgren:
I saw Generator at Gilman. There was lots of excitement and anticipation for their first few shows. They had rewritten this Downfall song that went, “Are you gonna be there when the storm comes?” And Generator had rewritten the lyrics: “Are you gonna be there for the inner-city holocaust?” I remember being really bummed out. Inner-city holocaust? I hope I’m not there for that.

Tim Armstrong:
Downfall never really released anything officially. Generator never recorded a thing. Those two projects fell apart. I couldn’t keep these two bands together.

Matt Freeman:
It was a weird scene. You talk about how great Operation Ivy was, and we were cleaning Gilman bathrooms three years later, just to fuckin’ practice.

Tim Armstrong:
Cleaning the sick-ass fuckin’ toilets. But we got to practice for free. That was the way it should be, man.

Ben Sizemore:
There was this whole culture of punk houses in West Oakland.

Jesse Luscious:
Dementia House, 1640 House, which had a ton of parties. Maxi Pad, Little Arkansas, Fifth Street House.

Anna Brown:
The Madonna Inn, the Ashtray, the Pill Hill House, Fairview Upper and Lower. Punks would move in, and eventually the landlords would have had enough and evict the punks.

A. C. Thompson:
There was a push to do shows in houses because clubs, even all-ages clubs, were too formal. Because keeping people a foot away from the band was just too much.

Anna Brown:
I probably spent every weekend of high school at the Ashtray, smoking cigarettes and listening to records. The house was a complete disaster. There was a giant hole that went from the kitchen all the way down to the basement, like the wood floor had rotted away. All the windows were smashed out.

Jesse Michaels:
I lived at the Ashtray with Jake from Filth and Lenny from Isocracy.

Martin Sprouse:
They were total smart-asses. They created this whole fake dirt punk thing. I think the Filth logo had two crossed hypodermic needles or something.

Jesse Michaels:
We would exaggerate it. We would cut ourselves in a semi-joking way. But at the same time we were really, really into it. So it was ironic and yet not ironic at all. It was ridiculous to spray-paint “Big fat lines of meth” on your wall. But we were into it anyway.

Anna Brown:
There was graffiti on all the walls. This guy Joe Pestilence lived there for awhile. When they wanted him to leave they didn’t ask him. They just started writing on the walls, “Joe Be Gone.” Eventually he left.

Jason Beebout:
The house was so close to another house that there was a window that opened up to a brick wall. These rats took it over and filled it full of hay and made a nest. We played a party at the Ashtray. It turned into a fight, and James Washburn grabbed a skinhead and threw his head through the fuckin’ window. The rats went flying everywhere. That was exciting.

Lenny Filth:
We had our own little rat zoo. You gotta remember, at the time I was a heavy drinker, too. I think I was blacked out during the whole fuckin’ Reagan administration.

Kate Knox:
The Maxi Pad was this two-story, three-bedroom house. It was me, and Adrienne and Todd, who started Spitboy. An all-women punk house. By then I was over my thing about only being friends with guys.

Wendy-O Matik:
Maxi Pad was a big part of my life. I knew all the women in that house and all the women who came and went out of that house. I met people from all over the world there.

Kate Knox:
We tried to make it an open, European-style squat punk rock home. Anybody was welcome. There was one bathroom—the “myn’s room”—and there were usually seven or eight people living there. We had bands staying in the living room. We had people tattooing out of the closet. At one point, I had 13 Germans staying in the attic.

They showed up three days after an old man, who was getting head from a prostitute, gunned his car through our living room. The old man picked the prostitute up at McDonald’s at 11 in the morning and, for some reason, decided that our driveway was a good place to get head.

Lenny Filth:
It wasn’t a bad place to take a hooker, really. Down this little alley. Maxi Pad was all the way in the back. None of them would have cared. The man just needed to learn how to drive correctly.

Kate Knox:
He had one of those old Lincoln Continentals with the bench seats from the ’70s—pure steel. Engine’s running and she was all, “Pay me first,” so he pulled out his wallet, she grabbed it, and took off. So he reached across the door, stepped on the gas by accident, flew down the driveway and we got a fuckin’ Lincoln Continental in our living room.

Lenny Filth:
It was a good thing nobody was sitting on the couch.

Kate Knox:
When we finally got the guy’s daughter on the phone, she said, “Again?!” It was the second time he’d gotten busted with a prostitute. We ended up getting an insurance settlement from it and we paid our rent for months.

Richard the Roadie:
Kate is an absolute international production. She started the B.O.B. Fest, this whole German and European thing, with punks coming over here as tourists.

Kate Knox:
It became an international punk rock festival. B.O.B. is based in three punk rock sister cities: Bremen, Germany; Bath, England; and Oakland. In the late ’80s, I went over to Europe with Fang and we ended up in Bremen. Immediately, there was this amazing affinity. Like Oakland, Bremen’s a smaller city. Something just clicked. So this traveling circuit started. People would come from Germany and go through customs and say, “We’re going to Oakland.” And the officials would be like, “Why are you going there?” In the ’80s, Oakland was so not the tourist destination.

Adrienne Droogas:
Econochrist had this house on Arlington called Little Arkansas. That was the big party house that everyone would go to and hang out after the shows, party ’til six in the morning.

Bucky Sinister:
Oh god, it was just a little piece of old Arkansas to me. The first time I met the Econochrist guys, I was trekking through this party and I heard those accents. I just about started to cry ’cause I still had a bad drawl back then, and I didn’t feel like I fit in. I just really loved being around those guys.

Jason White:
Little Arkansas made it easier for me to come out here. Because as soon as I met someone and they asked, “Oh, where you from?” I’d say Arkansas. And it would just be, “Oh, another one.”

Lenny Filth:
We all lived within a five-block radius of each other. So you’d see everybody just about every day.

Anna Brown:
After the Ashtray shut down, everybody moved over to Little Arkansas. They had epic drunken throw-downs all the time.

Ben Sizemore:
There was a party every night. I was one of the few people that was straightedge. Basically, you could do any drug you wanted, except heroin was frowned upon. But you could snort pounds of speed and drink as much as you want.

When I moved out of Little Arkansas, I moved in with Lint. He lived in this boardinghouse in South Berkeley, at Harmon and Adeline. It was him and another younger dude, and an Arab kid that worked in the store, and a couple of old men.

Tim Armstrong:
A lot of people went in and out of that place. The Adeline House was like the Middle East, ’cause downstairs the owners were Arabs, and Stanley was this old Jewish cat, 70 or some shit. He hated the owners, and the owners hated him. They would talk shit about each other, just racial slurs. They were hard on each other.

Zarah Manos:
I called it the Rock Star House because that was where the Rancid guys lived. Ben Sizemore lived there, then some of the Dead and Gone guys moved in. I got to live there for a month.

Ben Sizemore:
It was fucking dirt cheap. Slowly we took it all over, except for Stanley, the old man down at the end of the hall. Poor guy.

A. C. Thompson:
Everyone tightened the lids on all his food so he’d have to exert effort and hopefully do himself in. They’d put their penis in his mayo. People took his door off the hinges and peed in his room. Once, some people came looking for him and they said, “We know he lives here because it says ‘Fuck Stan’ on your front door.” He was so mistreated there.

Fraggle:
I started Dementia House. It was a little rickety house with a white picket fence and trees in the front. It had a basement that wasn’t attached to the foundation. So it was like sitting on the ground. You could walk up the stairs and the house would shake.

Richard the Roadie:
Fraggle always ran a household. He was a teeny bit older. I wouldn’t say more responsible. But he was able to deal with renting a big house, having this revolving cast of characters.

Fraggle:
The first party was December of ’89. We put out flyers. The turnout was insane! The bands played in my backyard—Econochrist, Blatz, maybe Downfall, maybe Filth. I remember looking out our front door and the entire street was nothing but people. And the cops were just standing out there.

Jesse Luscious:
Then Fraggle ran a house called Pill Hill Zoo Haus, which was on Pill Hill. It’s literally a hill covered with hospitals and old-age homes and dentist offices. And there was this huge three-story house built into the hill. They had shows inside, they had shows outside, they had barbecues.

Fraggle:
Right across the street was the convalescent old-age home. To the right was the Berkeley Clinic. And down the end of the street was the hospice where you go to die.

Hef:
Fraggle would buy a keg of beer and charge you a few dollars for as much beer as you could drink. On Sunday afternoons.

Fraggle:
As long as you had the cup, you could come back for more.

The great thing about punk shows is, people go dance, get drunk and fall down. The cup gets crushed. But we never made a profit. We always just bought more beer.

Richard the Roadie:
It was wall-to-wall apeshit. Sometimes you’d go to those parties in Oakland and it was kinda creepy or weird. But Fraggle, you’d go to his house and it’d be fun.

Fraggle:
One of the last shows we had, the cops came by at noon. I think it was Screw 32, AFI, Dead and Gone. We never had problems with cops before, so we didn’t think anything of it. They were like, “How come you didn’t invite us? Next time, you have to invite us,” and then they left.

Then somebody got in a fight in my backyard. There was this guy full-throttle kicking this other guy while he was on the ground. And the entire party piled into the backyard and kicked the guy out. A couple hours passed, everybody was having a good time, then someone came in and said Nando got arrested. The cops said, “This party’s over! Anyone on the street is gonna get arrested.” I was trying to get everybody in our house. A cop tried to come in, so we locked the door. Then he called for backup.

Soon, there were 19 squad cars outside—it was like a 1960s L.A. riot scene. Orlando was upstairs trying to call the news media. Marcus was up there shooting cops out the window with a
Star Trek
phaser. I walked outside and said, “Okay, the party’s over.” And he said, “Okay, good, you’re under arrest.”

I don’t have my finger on the pulse anymore, because all the shows I work now are 21-and-over so all I see is the old fogies. But I think punk is very cyclic. Things will die down, then there’s a whole new batch of kids to pick it up again.

Janelle Hessig:
Fraggle looks almost exactly the same today. I’m sure his spine is just fucked up because he wore 30 gold chains around his neck. Every novelty punk accoutrement—tons of skull rings on all his fingers, multi-colored bi-hawk, little ax earrings.

Fraggle: Metal should be worn, not heard.

Ben Sizemore:
There were riots. There were earthquakes. The East Bay hills were on fire. There were blackouts. The first Gulf War and the Rodney King trial. There were huge fucking protests in San Francisco with people burning cop cars down by the Transbay Terminal. It was a crazy time. Being a young, idealistic punker from Arkansas with real leftist political views, I thought it was great. The revolution was just around the corner, man! And I was gonna be there!

Kareim McKnight:
I just assumed the whole punk movement was political. At every event, there were punks. The music that everyone was playing was protest music.

Jesse Luscious:
I came out for the 1989 Anarchist Gathering in San Francisco. I definitely didn’t expect to stay out here.

Oran Canfield:
They swarmed in from all over America.

Bucky Sinister:
I don’t know how much of this was going on in other parts of the country, but I’d never seen it before. We all knew the anarchy sign, but we didn’t really know what it was. There were people out here who knew the history of anarchism.

Ben Sizemore:
We went to a picnic in Dolores Park and there were 2,000 punks in the park. It was so exciting.

Antonio López:
The anarchist conference was held in the Mission, at some elementary school that was leased out over the summer. My most memorable workshop was an anti-TV one. One of the students wanted to videotape it. And the guy teaching the workshop—long blond hair, very muscular, with Levi’s shorts cut so high his balls are practically hanging out—was furious. The student who was taping said, “There’s a bunch of people in Canada who can’t be here and they want to see this.” And the guy said, “If you go to my house you can play guitar or make love or read a book, but you’ll never watch TV. I will never let anyone do anything that has anything to do with TV. And if you don’t like it, get the hell out of my workshop! And if anyone else doesn’t like it, get out!” I actually joined about half the people and left.