Gimme Something Better (61 page)

Fat Mike:
We were on tour with East Bay Mud, or Fifteen, in Columbus, Ohio, in ’88. Some member passed out with his shoes on. Usually he gets written on. But luckily we were at a girl’s house, and she was an artist, and she had a lot of plaster of Paris. So we cast his leg up. He was very disoriented when he woke up.

Aaron Cometbus:
NOFX duct-taped someone to the ceiling.

Billie Joe Armstrong:
We played in Rhode Island at this skate ramp. I think one of the kids who ran it, his father was in the mob, because there were all these kids drinking 40s outside, and the cops drove by without saying a word.

We had a few days off, so this girl said she would have a party at her house. Her dad had a massive collection of antique bottles in the living room. We knew they would come crashing down, so Aaron, Mike, Sean, John and I put duct tape across all the bottles. John was missing a cymbal stand so this girl who was hosting us took a piece of rope, and people took turns just holding it up. As soon as we started playing, the house just got completely wrecked. That was the first time I ever saw Aaron get really drunk.

I urinated from the top of the stairs on this young couple that was getting together for the first time. People were throwing everything out of the refrigerator onto John. So John got naked and wrapped his whole body in Saran Wrap, running around being Saran Man.

John was trying to get together with this girl but he couldn’t remember her name, so he got a bunch of eggs and walked around to each person going, “Say your name.” When you said it, he would smash an egg over his head. Nobody really had any etiquette when it came to dating at the time. There was all kinds of stupid shit. I remember waking up the next day, and someone was running through the house with a chain saw. And there were chickens all over the floor.

Lenny Filth:
There was a couple of summers where there’d be four or five Bay Area bands all on tour, crisscrossing the country, just missing each other. One year I remember we were two days behind Neurosis. We’d show up to this barnhouse in middle-of-nowhere Kansas—nearest neighbor had to be a mile away—see Neurosis stickers and flyers still up. They had played there two nights before.

Andy Asp:
Nuisance rode to Little Rock. We had the day off. Somebody asked us, “Do you wanna play at the governor’s mansion?” Bill Clinton had just left Little Rock to go to Washington, and the next guy, Jim Guy Tucker, had taken over. In order to make his daughter feel at home and make friends—she was a punk kid—her dad agreed that they could do this all-ages punk show out on the back lawn. She was probably 15. Several bands played from Little Rock. And us. They built a little stage and had a P.A.

The neighbors all called, but it was outside the city jurisdiction. They had no say. Troopers were guarding the gate. They were letting tons of kids in. It made all the press: “Something of a Nuisance at the governor’s mansion in Little Rock.” We made all the newswires for that reason.

Davey Havok:
A lot of times the place you were supposed to play didn’t exist anymore. Or some guy puts you in this weird little bar and you’re playing in front of four or five barflies in Missoula, Montana, and the flyer is a cocktail napkin with “Swingin’ Utters and AFI” written on it, pinned to a corkboard.

Andy Asp:
A tour that normally would’ve lasted 25 days might stretch to 45 days. Because you had days off, the booking was sloppy. The kid’s dad pulled the little garage show. It was definitely spotty.

Fat Mike:
We siphoned gas, sold acid to pay the bills.

Mike K:
You have these weird fantasies of the road trip, and then, like, okay, I think our next show is in Florida. Then we’re going to have a show in Chicago. And we’re broken down in a desert and it’s 115 degrees at ten in the morning. And Bill is getting heatstroke because he slept in his truck, and now he’s throwing up. And all we have to eat is olive oil and falafel balls.

Dallas Denery:
It is the most boring thing in the world, except for two hours every other day. It’s real obvious why entertainers end up being drunks. It’s just tedious.

Greg Valencia:
I slept between the rug and the equipment. For three months. I still, to this day, sleep like this.

 

 

Richard the Roadie:
Most roadies then were just fucking slackers. A lot of them would just go along as your loser friend that wouldn’t leave the living room. I’ve roadied with probably between 25 and 35 different bands. There’s some bands like Citizen Fish, I’ve done like 17 tours with them. I liked crowds up to about a thousand people. After that it really goes into this other world. If you’re a musician, it’s everything you wanted. But it gets kinda boring if you’re not a musician.

Janelle Hessig:
When Richard first started hanging out and lived in Sacramento, he was pretty quiet and sweet. Then all of a sudden he started being “Richard the Roadie” and started hanging out more.

Richard the Roadie:
I got into a mechanic trade school and realized there was this amazing opportunity. Nobody knew shit about cars. Then I got this job at Vantastic, this hoopty-ass van service that transported disabled people, run by this woman Vicky. She had 17 punks working for her. It was pretty fucking amazing. Jesse, Jake, Joey, everybody had a job there. And she paid so little that punks would work for her and that’s about it.

So for five years, if you were disabled or needed transport with a lift van, there was a punk showing up at your door. But you’d go to a show somewhere, and you’d see a Vantastic van. That’s how the band got there. Somebody once got caught in Pinole stealing building materials, and he was dressed up in this white party dress, drunk, in a company van.

A. C. Thompson:
Richard the Roadie was an amazing, amazing guy. He didn’t take his boots off for a year. He was on tour with Paxston and they all had scabies. He apparently hadn’t been afflicted, but his feet were kind of hurting and so, after a year of sleeping in his boots, he took them off at the hospital. His feet had grown into his socks—they were fusing in an unholy alliance—and the medical personnel said, “Wow, it’s really good that you came in today because you’re about to get gangrene.”

Richard the Roadie:
The problem was, my feet smelled so bad I couldn’t take my shoes off. ’Cause any time I did, it would make people sick. I’ve made people throw up. I went to Europe with Avail. We were in a van. I farted, and made the bass player throw up, which was so awesome. Then I changed shirts and left my shirt in the van. He went in the van after a show, thought it was his shirt, wiped his face with it. It smelled so bad that he actually threw up again.

I never thought I was crusty. I just never showered. We had a tour with Paxston Quiggley and the first or second night I got drunk and peed myself. I wore those same shorts for the six-week tour. I didn’t really think about it. I had an Asbestos Death shirt I wore the entire time. This was a summer tour, hot as shit. Which is probably why I never had a girlfriend for years and years and years.

Janelle Hessig:
Richard moved into this abandoned house I had lived in. The landlord eventually came and shut it down. So when Richard was leaving, he booby-trapped the door with a bucket of rancid piss. One of those big-ass plastic buckets.

One night I had a date and I didn’t want to take my date back to where I was staying. I was like, “I know, let’s go back to my old house!” I was taking him on this little adventure. So I took him to the house. I knew that something was amiss because there was a little door in the fence, and it was nailed shut. I wrenched it open and we went in.

You had to go through a trap door to get into the actual house. It was dark in there and you couldn’t actually see. I climbed up the plank and was at the top of the trap door, and it was stuck. I was like, great, they nailed this shut, too? I pushed and pushed and gave it one great big shove and it gave. And it somehow went behind me, and tipped over and my date was standing below me. You could hear the sound. Gallons and gallons. Everything was quiet as the last trickles were coming down. He was like, “I hate you.” It was the worst date ever.

Richard the Roadie:
When I was 16 or 17, I started to hang out with metalheads in Sacramento. They were speed freaks. I just went through this string of crazy houses. Always doing speed, speed, speed, speed, speed. You couldn’t tell, ’cause it didn’t make me social. It didn’t make me wanna have sex. It made me not eat and pick up bugs.

I was buying from these bikers who couldn’t even get colors. And they didn’t even have motorcycles. They were just fucking losers out in this abandoned mobile home. There was some huge Air Force base out there. The cooks were right up in the hills.

It got to this point where we were all getting followed. There was a gunfight at the trailer. The guy I was buying from, he and his dealer went down. The writing was on the wall. I was in a house where everybody was slamming. I was having nosebleeds, throwing up blood, struggling to get sober. I didn’t know anything. My best friend Paul had a room on Capp Street. I went up to visit and spent ten days reading with the window open. That was it. I decided to move to a new city and reinvent myself.

At that point I was reading
Maximum
religiously, going to Gilman. And really saw that I might be able to be a participant. I was helping with shows. So right before I moved, I did a show in Sacramento.

Rented a hall, did everything I was supposed to. Rented a P.A. from a hippie. He never showed up, so we used a bass amp. Typical thing, never trust a hippie. It was my first show. Mostly East Bay bands. And it ended up in a mini-riot.

Al Sobrante basically gave me everybody’s number. The show set itself up, except for the weird crappy industrial band who drove everybody away. That of course I did. It was an amazing show. Green Day, Samiam, Econochrist, Corrupted Morals. I paid ’em all 20 bucks. Probably 120 people showed up, 70 or 80 from the East Bay. The East Bay sort of invaded Sacramento.

Sham Saenz:
Me and Ron Nichols from Christ on Parade met Econochrist at Your Place Too, this blues bar that had 25-cent beers and let anybody in. There was some punks sitting there, and we just walked up to them and said, “Hey, what are you doing here?” “Oh, we’re from Arkansas.” “Oh cool, you want a beer?”

We ended up driving in their van to Sacramento, ten people laying on the top of amps. Everybody was laughing and drinking in the back. We get there, and the guys from Green Day were already loading their equipment in. They had this nice VW bus.

James Washburn:
Econochrist, Green Day, Filth, Anger Means—a lot of good bands.

Richard the Roadie:
Skinheads showed up. There was only like five or six or seven of them. But from what I remember they were huge, just absolute monsters.

Sham Saenz:
They were some trippy skinheads to me because these motherfuckers wore overalls. I had never seen this before. Like, are they skinheads or just rednecks?

Richard the Roadie:
In Sacramento I never peed at a show. ’Cause you went in the bathroom and you didn’t know what’s gonna happen. The small scrappy guy would just start fucking with you, and then there’s like eight on you. You’d go to the parking lot, there was a row of skinheads just knocking people down.

So these guys came to our show. In my head, these guys were like eight feet tall with swastikas on their foreheads. They stood onstage and fucked with the bands. They just had the run of the show.

Sergie Loobkoff:
Basically everyone wanted the show to get over, so everyone wouldn’t get their ass kicked. Green Day and Samiam switched off, we played two songs, and they played two songs.

James Washburn:
The skins, in a classic skinhead maneuver, went the wrong way in the pit, swingin’ their fists. Most people didn’t want to start a fight over that.

Ben Sizemore:
A Nazi skinhead from Sacramento, Iron Mike Ortiz, had stabbed a ska guy and killed him, and went to prison. We knew that had happened. So there was some real fear.

Billie Joe Armstrong:
We didn’t know if they were good skinheads or bad skinheads—Nazi or SHARP. But in the middle of the second song, I saw Lenny push this guy. The thing about Lenny was, sure, he was in this artistic punk rock scene, but Lenny’s from El Sobrante. You can take the kid outta El Sob but you can’t take El Sob outta the kid. They started pushing each other, and I remember him screaming, “Come on!”

Ben Sizemore:
One of them punched Lenny from Filth, and then it was on.

James Washburn:
The lights came on and within seconds it turned into a huge fucking brawl. Everybody was just swingin’. It was like holy shit, every single skinhead was fighting one or two punks. There was not even 10 or 15 feet in between fights that had nothing to do with each other. I’d never seen anything like that before.

Sergie Loobkoff:
They were really tough, mean skinheads, and most of us were nerdy guys, never-been-in-fights type of guys.

Martin Brohm:
It was typical Sacramento. The reason they came is ’cause it was a bunch of Gilman bands. Goofy, faggy bands, going up there to play.

James Washburn:
Mike Dirnt punched a skinhead with everything he had, every ounce of his being, every bit of his body weight, and the guy just shook it off like it was a bug. I think Mike thought he was gonna fuckin’ die.

Richard the Roadie:
It just totally escalated. Ben from Econochrist was fighting one of ’em. Todd from Spitboy was trying to hit somebody over the head with a 40.

Martin Brohm:
It was a war zone. I remember seeing a knife come in. Some guy picked up one of those metal pamphlet things, and slammed some guy in the head with it.

Ben Sizemore:
We were throwing chairs and stuff.