Gimme Something Better (55 page)

This conference was like an alternative university. People took it very seriously, and in retrospect, I appreciate that a lot. There were the pacifists, the anarchists, the thinkers, the artists, and the poets. And then there were the direct action people.

Tom Jennings:
I was one of the organizers in San Francisco, and published the gathering’s handbook. It was the last in a series that had started in 1986, with the Haymarket Gathering.

Patrick Hughes:
These agitator types showed up, demanding street action. And when we demurred, they started calling us wimps and shit.

Jennifer Rose Emick:
They called it the Day of Action.

Liz Highleyman:
There was a great deal of debate about whether such days should be a part of conventions. In fact, this Day of Action was scheduled after the gathering proper. Because the gathering organizers didn’t want to be associated with the riot.

Tom Jennings:
I took no part in the Day of Action stuff. It seemed at the time to be mostly people looking for excuses to throw rocks, political coloring mixed with a lot of naivete.

Patrick Hughes:
We didn’t want the cops to come bust up what turned out to be over 3,000 attendees from all around the world. Who were fed two meals a day and housed, by the way—all for free.

Antonio López:
They had their own secret meetings. Everyone knew basically what they were planning. But it felt kind of exclusive, like if you weren’t part of that, then you weren’t really an anarchist. I chose not to be involved.

Patrick Hughes:
Their Day of Rage, as it was also known, was to be held in Berkeley on the third day of the convention.

Antonio López:
The plan was to occupy this burned-out hotel in Berkeley on the corner of Haste and Telegraph, and make it housing for homeless. The first wave was to occupy it and the second wave was to defend it.

Liz Highleyman:
Unfortunately, the police got word of the planned takeover. They knocked out the building’s stairwells to make it impossible to access past the first floor, and completely surrounded the building.

Antonio López:
It was a ludicrous plan. Everyone in the first wave got arrested. The support group had nothing to do. This is where it got comical, because there was this roaming mob in Berkeley.

Oran Canfield:
I walked alongside them from Bancroft up to Telegraph. Someone started burning a flag. They were all wearing the black bandanas. It was a motley group of people, for sure—kind of a Mad Max scene, but way more extreme and violent.

Kareim McKnight:
Black Bloc is anarchist. They all wear black clothes and black bandanas to cover their faces. They link arms and form this mobile fighting force. It’s a very intense spectacle. They still play a big role in demonstrations.

Jennifer Rose Emick:
It was three-quarters punk, if you counted the anarchists. It was a parade. Everybody was walking and yelling slogans, the usual kind of thing. And then we noticed people behind us were stringing ropes between stop signs, disrupting traffic. I bent over to pick up something I’d dropped and some girl’s bookbag hit me in the head and it was full of bricks. They came prepared. They were the reason it went ugly.

Antonio López:
I lived about five blocks from People’s Park so I could see everybody from my front porch.

Oran Canfield:
When they turned down the one-way street, the panic on people’s faces in the cars was fuckin’ unbelievable. Those that could, backed the fuck up and got the hell out of there.

Antonio López:
They were all dressed in black, chanting and yelling, but there was nothing to do. They marched right by my house. I walked out on to the street to watch. Just then, coming around the corner off of Telegraph was a Coca-Cola truck.

Oran Canfield:
That’s when shit hit the fan.

Antonio López:
They ran towards it like locusts on corn and surrounded it. The driver was totally horrified. I was close enough to see his face. He thought he was going to get killed.

Jennifer Rose Emick:
He looked out the window and said, “Aww shit!” and hopped out of the truck. Nobody said a word to him. So of course, people opened up the truck, pulled out crates of soda.

Antonio López:
They tore this truck apart. They spray-painted it, they rocked it back and forth, and stripped everything they could. There was just so much anger and excitement. After it was over, it was like they had all had sex or something.

Oran Canfield:
Some people ran back up to Telegraph and were throwing Coke bottles through the windows. They were somewhat selective. They got the Gap, which had opened up recently.

Liz Highleyman:
I get off on the adrenaline rush of running wild in the streets ahead of maddened cops as much as the next person. Unfortunately quite a few homes, cars and small shops were trashed, too, which certainly doesn’t help.

Oran Canfield:
The cops had a police line across Telegraph and everyone was going nuts. Then a Coke bottle came flying out of the crowd and the cops came at us. It seemed like they were focusing on the people with bandanas, but they beat the shit out of whoever was in their way. It was just insane.

Jennifer Rose Emick:
They sure beat the crap out of me. I was 17 and I got separated from the group.

Oran Canfield:
There were riots on Telegraph all the time during the rush week of frat parties, but this was pretty exciting.

Gordon Edgar:
At the same time, a whole ’nother group of people were creating a community garden, planting trees and organic plants, and building an irrigation system. It was definitely a big divide within the movement itself.

Patrick Hughes:
Nothing was ever heard of the agitators after that. Makes you think that the whole enterprise was designed to discredit what we were doing and portray the convention as a bunch of childish morons. The Coke truck incident is all that anyone ever talks about.

Janelle Hessig:
Rodeo is a podunk town. A small town where no one expects anything of you.

Billie Joe Armstrong:
Everybody knew each other. It was like small-town Americana in a lot of ways, but there was a problem with methamphetamine. It was a refinery town. A lot of people worked at the C&H sugar factory. There were no record stores or anything. Rodeo was a cool place to grow up, but a good place to get the hell out of at the same time.

Everybody went through the John Swett school district. That’s where I met Mike and my friend Sean. I met Mike in the fifth grade and we were playing music together. We were all best friends. Those guys ended up at Pinole High, and kind of left me in the dust at John Swett. Everything was happening in Pinole, which is a strange thing to say, but there were a lot of bands.

James Washburn:
When I got to high school in Pinole, all the early punks were graduating. Ninth grade is when I met Mike Dirnt. I was totally talkin’ shit about him, talkin’ about how he fucks cows. And it got back to him. He approached me and was like, “Dude, why you tellin’ people I fuck cows?”

He was one of the most ridiculous-looking persons I’d ever seen in my life. Beret sideways, really long hair, like almost to his ass, horrible acne, brown trench coat, moccasins laced up to his knees. He looked like an absolute fuckin’ clown. He had all these bands written in Sharpie goin’ down one side of his coat, like Dead Kennedys, Corrupted Morals, Isocracy. After we settled the cow-fucking thing, we immediately became friends.

Jennifer Rose Emick:
I went to high school there. Mike was a monkey. Just skinny and goofy, always real hyper. He seems so serious now, but he was just the opposite back then. We used to have this tree over our lunch table, and most of the time he was hangin’ from it upside down.

James Washburn:
Billie Joe wasn’t going to Pinole at that time. He came a year later. There wasn’t a whole lotta shows going on. There were a couple punks with big mohawks, but they seemed totally unapproachable. They’re three years older. You don’t feel like you know them, because you’re not
that
fuckin’ weird. Yet.

Billie Joe Armstrong:
Tenth grade is when I really started getting curious about other styles of music. I had a really cool older sister that got me into different kinds of stuff that wasn’t, you know, Van Halen. Mike and Sean Hughes kept coming back home, ’cause they both lived in Rodeo still. Everybody congregated at Sean’s house.

James Washburn:
I started hangin’ out with Eggplant and Mike, and it became like a little family. Janelle and Heather and Billie Joe. Sean Hughes was a weirdo, and he always had food at his house, so we’d always go over when his parents weren’t home and eat all the food.

Billie Joe Armstrong:
There were a lot of honestly great bands happening in such a weird small place. And they all knew their history. There was Corrupted Morals, there was Isocracy and No Dogs. One of the guys from No Dogs had hair that made him look like a chemo patient that someone had thrown up on.

James Washburn:
Todd Pond was so gnarly. He was a skater and the singer of No Dogs. He was the most full-throttle son of a bitch I’d ever known. He was completely nuts, so totally unapproachable, because he’d tear your head off and shit down your throat. Just out of his fuckin’ mind. The guy that would fight to fight. It was like, who the fuck wants to go meet that dude?

Billie Joe Armstrong:
Then there was Possessed and Sacrilege, they all played at Ruthie’s Inn. They were a few years older and were kind of scary.

James Washburn:
Isocracy was good. Billie was in Corrupted Morals for a short time. Corrupted Morals just kicked your ass, their early music was just great. I don’t think they ever really got known outside of the East Bay.

Billie Joe Armstrong:
I got introduced to more people through Eggplant. People like Jesse Michaels, and Aaron, and Jeff Ott and Jake Sayles. There were already bands that were playing together that were from Pinole, Berkeley and Oakland.

In a lot of ways, the punk scene was already over. The Dead Kennedys were gone, Social Unrest was breaking up, the Farm was gone, there were no Avengers. We didn’t really have these heroes. So maybe, even reluctantly, some of the people we hung out with and their bands—like Crimpshrine, Operation Ivy, Corrupted Morals—they were the people we looked up to.

We got harassed because we smoked so much pot at the time. I used to sell joints at school for two bucks apiece, so people called me “Two Dollar Bill.” The Berkeley people were a bit over it because of the whole hippie thing. But we were dope-smoking suburban kids. Eggplant, James Washburn, Joey Perales, who ended up playing drums in Blatz—we used to go across the street to my brother’s house and smoke weed, raid his fridge, and go back to class.

Janelle Hessig:
Billie Joe was really funny. He was a hesher. He smoked a lot of weed and had long hair. He’d wear flannels and a backwards baseball hat and was just kind of a burnout.

Billie Joe Armstrong:
I didn’t end up meeting Janelle until I think I was a senior. I knew her friend Rachel really well. I went to the prom with her.

Janelle Hessig:
Absolutely Zippo
was the first zine I ever saw. A lot of inside jokes and stupid comics. Eggplant had a lot of contributors. Billie Joe got suspended from school one time because he was selling
Zippo
on the campus.

Billie Joe Armstrong:
Robert would come to school with a bunch of copies of his zine and he’d say, “Billie, take ten and go around. They’re a quarter apiece.” It was filled with profanity, and the trendier kids in 11th and 12th grade, of course, thought it was the coolest thing ever. My teacher came up and grabbed one, “What are you selling there?” and I said, “It’s my friend’s magazine. It’s a quarter. Do you want one?” The cover said, “Legalize Crack!” I got suspended for five days, something like that.

I tried out for one of Lucky Dog’s bands and didn’t get the gig, but we became really good friends. We were both at one of Robert’s parties, when Robert lived across the street from Pinole Junior High School. So me and Lucky and this guy Mark Moreno decided to go up and play a song or two. Lawrence Livermore was there. I had been going to Gilman quite a lot but I didn’t really know anybody. I was still on the outside, surrounded by all these interesting people.

Lawrence asked what the name of our band was. I said, “We’re Sweet Children.” The next thing I knew, Lawrence was doing a mock scene report in
Absolutely Zippo
, about who played in Eggplant’s backyard that day. Maybe he figured out something was happening in Pinole and El Sobrante. He called us Sweet and Sour Children. It wasn’t a mistake. He was mocking us. That nickname kind of stuck with us. Robert would always say, “So, how’s Sweet and Sour Children?”

James Washburn:
Billie and Mike would play with Raj Punjabi as Sweet Children. Billie taught Mike how to play bass. Mike didn’t know how to play instruments. Billie was incredibly talented, musically. He cut his first record at five years old. He’d already been playing guitar for years and taught Mike how to play. I actually have a recording of them playing and switching instruments back and forth, and they’re playing Crimpshrine songs, Sweet Baby Jesus songs, Isocracy songs.

Billie Joe Armstrong:
Mike was like part of my family. It’s the most natural thing to play music with someone you grew up with. We went to school together, we went through puberty. We’re just sort of in synch.

Jeff Ott:
I stopped doing Crimpshrine then, Op Ivy ceased being a band, Sweet Children started playing shows. It was like a lot of pages all on the same page.

Bill Schneider:
We all knew each other ’cause we’d all go to parties at Eggplant’s mom’s house and play in the backyard. They had their whole other little Rodeo scene.