Gimme Something Better (18 page)

Bruce Loose:
We went until Will died.

Steve DePace:
Will used to flip back and forth between dope and speed. So if he got too strung out on heroin—bang, I’m gonna go to speed now. There’s that three days of hell you go through while you’re detoxing? Well, Will discovered that if you just bang speed, that overrides everything. And he would do that. He would be a speed freak for awhile, and then he’d start banging dope again, and then he’d start banging speed again. How long can you do that?

Rozz Rezabek:
One time Will came over to where I was living, all tweaked up. This was probably in ’87. I’d given him my address. Out of the blue, he came over with big saucer eyes, like eight in the morning, with a basketball, and said, “You wanna play basketball?”

We went and played at this little hoop. It was on a Saturday or Sunday morning. He was so godawful, it wasn’t even funny. I got the feeling that he was walking over to go see me, and he saw a basketball sittin’ on somebody’s porch, and stole it. I know it wasn’t his because he didn’t know how to play. That was the last time I really got to spend time with him.

Steve DePace:
The sad thing is, he was actually sober. He had cleaned up. His girlfriend was pregnant with their child and the plan was, he was gonna move to Marin somewhere and live a regular, normal life. He was working a day job.

Rozz Rezabek:
I was real close with Jean and Nina, who were two of Will’s best friends. I was hanging around with them. They would keep me in touch. “He’s up in Gilroy.” I guess he’d been all clean. Then he came back to San Francisco.

Steve DePace:
This happens all the time with junkies. When they go to do it one more time, they remember, well, I used to do this much, a few months ago. Let’s do that. And now your tolerance is gone. And you do the thing you remembered you used to do, and it kills you.

Bruce Loose:
It’s hard. I can’t speak about this. It’s too personal, it touches too many people’s lives. I was a good friend of Will’s. It was really sad what happened to him. I’m really sad for all the people that were around him. And the path of lies that got left behind were very hurtful. That’s all I have to say.

Rozz Rezabek:
We all heard, Will’s dead. It was like, oh god. And then, “Who’s gonna get together some sort of memorial?” We had an impromptu thing, a bunch of us up on the top of Twin Peaks. Bruce was there. It was really cold and windy. We couldn’t get any of the candles to stay lit because it was so windy. It was bad.

We did a little lame version of “Kum Ba Yah.” We all huddled in small groups. It was like, “Will’s dead. Punk rock’s over. What do we do now?” We all just stood around there for an hour, and nobody knew what to say or what to think. We all kinda sensed that, wow, this was the end.

For a lot of us, Will was the guy. He was always on. It was like that old saying, girls wanted to be with him, guys wanted to be like him. All of us, any quality time you got with Will, I cherished it. I still miss that guy. He was the greatest.

Danny Furious:
Will’s death was definitely a tragedy. He was one of the finest minds I’ve ever encountered.

Kelly King:
They took a hiatus for awhile. Then my friend John started playing bass with them and they got back together and they did
American Grafishy
. I did a short tour with them.

Steve DePace:
We played Gilman once that I remember. If I’m not mistaken, it was 1991, Green Day was the opening band that night. With this guy who was playing bass for us, John Dougherty.

He had this ’69 Harley chopper that he built from scratch. With the coontails coming off and the whole nine yards. He rode that thing right into the club, with his girlfriend on the back, and parked it next to the stage! He’s gone. Heroin overdose. The Flipper school of punk rock drug abuse.

Bruce Loose:
In the real physical history, we did not go out there and do that much. As compared to like, Black Flag. Who was practicing, touring, touring, touring, every fucking day. It’s wonderful to be in a band. But there’s a little more to life than just that monster, on the road 24/7, 365, you know? I’m sorry. I went and fell in love a few times, had a child. As far as I’m concerned those things are more outstanding and longer lasting than that little hardcore scene ever was. Or my memories of it.

Andy Asp:
We did play a show with Flipper at Gilman Street, which was pretty insane. I remember during a song, Bruce Loose running to the snack bar and saying, “I need a fucking beer, where’s a fucking beer?” I looked at him and said, “It’s all-ages, there’s no beer.” Just the look on his face was like, “What the fuck are you guys doing here?”

Bruce Loose:
I remember doing those shows. That Not Flipper show was the first thing that was breaking me out of basically becoming crippled. That was really my coming back, trying to continue my career as a musician, as a creative person.

Steve DePace:
It’s a miracle Bruce is around. Over the course of time, it’s gotten worse and worse. He wrecked his pickup truck. That put the injury over the top and really fucked him up. And that ended our career in 1994.

That whole thing with Cobain and Nirvana, it was well known that they were big huge fans of ours. And I knew that Krist had had a couple of bands and wasn’t doing anything at the moment. Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth was curating a concert in England. He wanted us to come and play. I told him, “We don’t have a bass player. I was thinking about Krist Novoselic.” And he goes, “Brilliant, I’ve got his phone number, I’ll call him.”

Krist told me, “Flipper was the band that influenced me and inspired me to be in a rock band.” He was honored by the invitation to come play with us. It was meant to be a one-concert little mini-tour and then see what happens. And that’s what we did.

Scott Kelly:
Flipper broke every fuckin’ rule in the book. If it was there, they broke it. I mean, purposefully. Destroyed every fuckin’ rule there was, and so, as a result, we had this wide-open palette.

Kriss X:
I still think that they are the worst band on the planet.

Dave Chavez:
Jak’s Team is something that’s been going on since the ’70s, since the beginning of punk rock pretty much.

Nosmo King:
Everybody was forming their cliques. We skated and listened to punk rock. Everyone else went to art school. I had been a surfer skater. I quit surfing because I got tired of trying to find my clothes.

Dave Chavez:
It started with four guys in Petaluma—John Marsh, Tom Scott, Kevin O’Connor and Biff, whose real name is Chris Wilkinson. Jonathan [Nosmo] from the Toiling Midgets was probably the next person to join. Then Paul Casteel from House of Wheels and Black Athletes.

Paul Casteel:
My first experience with Jak’s Team—we were playing a show at the Sound of Music with Toiling Midgets, and the back window popped open and these five guys with skateboards piled in through the window. That was a recurring situation.

Dave Chavez:
You would see ’em at the Mabuhay and they had these long police flashlights. And they’d be sneaking into the girls’ bathroom, trying to look under the stalls. Just total juvenile delinquents.

Zeke Jak:
Jaks were the cool guys that everybody looked up to. They had vests. You could identify them. They were all good skaters. I started hanging out, skating, trying to improve as much as I could. I would skate China Banks. I loved doing psychedelic skating, back in the day. I was so focused, I would nail every trick. Speed kind of came into play after the psychedelics, and once again I found myself down at the Embarcadero, skating all night long, for days and days. It was always about street skating because we didn’t have parks here. It was punk rock and street skating.

Nosmo King:
We are “beer-drinking brothers from different mothers who will ditch any date to go out and skate.” We didn’t even have colors back then because we couldn’t decide what we wanted to look like. Biff had this suede leather jacket with “Jak’s” in studs and I had this sir jacket, which was really cool, that had “Jak’s” on the bottom in electrical tape. Well, it looked kind of cool.

Zeke Jak:
A sir jacket is like a gas station attendant jacket with a mandarin collar that all the cholos wore in the Mission a long time ago. They’re not really cool.

Paul Casteel:
There was the Dish up on top of Hunter’s Point. We used to go up there almost every night after shows and have parties until the sun came up. The Dish was a small reservoir bowl with a lip you could do tricks off of. It’s real archaic by today’s standards of public skate parks. If you went there during the day, you’d have bottles flying at you.

Nosmo King:
It was, “Oh, these white skaters want a skateboard park. Let’s put it in the most dangerous neighborhood in the city.” But that didn’t deter us.

Bill Halen:
You always put your favorite bands on the back of your vest. My favorite bands at that time were Flipper, Verbal Abuse, Black Athletes and Crucifix. The Black Athletes appeared on the first
Thrasher Skate Rock
comp.

Paul Casteel:
The logo “Absolute Music” was something Kevin O’Connor came up with. He was looking through the dictionary one day and he found “absolute music.” It’s music with no preconception. It’s just spontaneous. It’s been part of the colors since then.

Nosmo King:
And 43? It’s always been a magical number. Look at Nascar, what do they start off with? 43 cars. It just comes up all the time. It’s like 4 plus 3 is 7, 3 minus 4 is 1. It comes up in the Bible all the time. And Jak’s Team, we love to give 43 percent. A lot of people give 100 percent. I get a job, I’m just going to give you 43 percent.

Zeke Jak:
Numerology by Nosmo King.

The Exception: Chi Chi at Dolores Park

Paul Casteel:
Dave Chavez and his brother Joel are East Bay Jaks. I skated Dave’s ramp in his backyard that was made out of tin cans and street signs. The ramp went right up the side of the house, so we would use his mom’s windowsill as the coping to do tricks off of. It was 12 feet off the ground. That was the Berkeley punk scene.

Dean Washington:
It was like, “Holy shit, it goes up the side of your house!” After you spoke to the mom, you walked along the side of the house and this ramp was so caveman-like. It was the most insane thing I’d ever seen. I thought, “Awww, this thing looks reeeeally dangerous.” And it was. The transition was just so fast, but I’m thinkin’ I can do this. I dropped in and I slammed so fuckin’ hard. So I watched him do it and I did it again and
bam!
“I think I’ll just take some photos and watch you skate the bowl.” Really, that ramp was legendary. It’s in lots of books on coffee tables, and in old
Thrasher
issues.

Paul Casteel:
It was kind of like a family. Tales of Terror used to hang out there a lot. The Jaks would hang out there.

Nosmo King:
We started recruiting. We were hopping trains up to Portland and Seattle, collecting members. It didn’t matter if you were black or white. You could be stupid or drunk, but you had to be honest.

Paul Casteel:
Drinking beer is a big part of being a Jak, but there’s clean and sober Jaks and there are gay Jaks. There’s Jaks all the way to Canada and Hawaii.

Jimmy Crucifix:
I was actually on the Jak’s Team in L.A. with Tony Alva and that whole gang, but you got this thing on your back that says “Jak’s Team.” There was some guy down in L.A., he did something to somebody in a gang, and me and a friend were skating down the street and we had the colors on and this gang of people, man, kinda fuckin’ racked us up. So later on that night we went to Santa Monica pier and threw the colors off. Ever since then, I don’t put nothing on my back.

Bill Halen:
Jimmy Crucifix was the first person I met in San Francisco. Jimmy introduced me to Paul Rat, and through Paul I started working with Dirk Dirksen at the Mab and On Broadway, doing the lights and the stage. When I took over the Tool & Die in ’82, I started bringing in bands from Los Angeles, from Boston, all over. I never charged more than three bucks. Some nights we would have ten bands. The best deal in town.

Dean Washington:
The Tool & Die was this dank basement on Valencia with brick floors. They drilled holes in the basement so they could pour in sand to soundproof the room. There was only one way out—a little, tiny, narrow, steep stairway.

Bill Halen:
There was no room for a stage because the ceiling was maybe six and half feet high. I had to wrap the stanchions in foam to keep kids from breaking their heads open.