Gimme Something Better (22 page)

And if any girls start messing with your guy or even the guy that you’re interested in, that was it. I remember one fight that happened in Barrington Hall. I had a crush on Pat Rat forever but he didn’t like me like that. There was some girl that he hooked up with in the bushes and came back in the show . . .

Toni DMR:
She had to go to the hospital. It was really fucked up.

Rachel DMR:
I’ve always felt bad about that one. We got into some pretty stupid fights protecting each other, or so we thought. We made mistakes. We terrorized people.

John Marr:
I will say this, they were
really
dedicated to the punk rock scene.

Toni DMR:
If you were from out of town, part of a skate crew or a hardcore crew or surfing crew or whatever, you were welcomed by us. We’d take you in and give you a place to stay. You could eat our food—you couldn’t fuck us, but you could hang out with us—and you would be safe. You would never be stuck without bus fare.

Sham Saenz:
Carol and Natasha were some of the first people I met. I was 10 or 11. I trusted them. You just got a sense that they cared for you. Carol worked at a hamburger shop on Shattuck and I’d go in there ’cause I was always on the streets and poor.

Noah Landis:
My sister, who was two years older than me, was already good friends with the DMR girls. For whatever reason, they liked me. I was lucky.

Sham Saenz:
They were kind of like the grandmas of the scene. You know how if you bring a friend over to the house, your grandma wants to know, “Who is this guy? I don’t know his family.” That was how those girls rolled. They wanted to know who you knew, where you were from.

I was sitting in the lobby at Ruthie’s Inn. I don’t know what had happened, but Carol basically walked in and there was a dude there, and Tasha had a skateboard, and they just beat the shit out of this guy in the doorway. One of them with the board, the other with her fists. Grandma rule.

Dean Washington:
Carol and the DMR girls booked some great shows. NOFX, Jodie Foster’s Army.

Sham Saenz:
The best shows, and you always knew that if you were paying them for a show it was going to the bands.

Carol DMR:
Tasha did all the flyers, some of the art was tasteless, especially the one for Jerry’s Kids. But she could draw anything. She started tattooing back then and she did some album covers—Special Forces. She moved to Nicaragua. Whenever we go visit her, the phone is ringing off the hook because she still takes all the new punk rockers under her wing.

Rachel DMR:
Patrick and I got married and I had my son around ’84. I just hung up my leather jacket and took care of that kid. I didn’t want him to see the drugs, the trauma, the homelessness, and stress, but I retained the good parts of punk—the camaraderie, the love. Punk really saved my life. At the time I was completely out of control but it saved my life. Those people I met, they are still my core.

Jeff Bale:
There was a period in the mid-’80s where it was really unpleasant going to a punk show because there’d be a face-off between factions of skins and punks. You never knew if you were going to end up in a brawl. It was like a tempest in a teapot because outside the scene, nobody really gave a fuck.

Orlando X:
We were all getting along fine. We would go to shows and hang out together, punks and skinheads, and then suddenly they decided they wanted to be racist and Nazi skinheads. It was the strangest thing.

Lenny Filth:
You didn’t know who to trust. Some skins were cool, some skins would cut your laces, take your boots.

Dave Dictor:
By late ’83 and ’84, there were cracks. Skinheads who had been our good friends and buddies, all of a sudden were talking about white power and niggers and fags. What the fuck are you guys talking about?

Scott Kelly:
Before I came up here, I had my head shaved and was hanging out with skinheads in San Diego. It was a totally mixed-race group but right around ’83 or ’84 the White Aryan Resistance started to get involved. Tom Metzger and all those people came out of San Diego. A bunch of the guys started going super-hardcore white pride, and the other guys started falling off.

Sara Cohen:
I was a hardcore proud American skinhead punk rock chick and I was a fuckin’ Jew. This was before Tom Metzger and his clan came out and started recruiting my friends. There’d be skinheads at every show, and more and more of them would be Sieg Heiling. Those of us who didn’t want to take part in that scene, because of ethnicity or because it was just so fuckin’ retarded, we had to go our separate ways.

Dave Dictor:
I do think there was a backlash against the very politicalness of
Maximum RocknRoll
, Dead Kennedys, MDC. To a certain degree, we were mouthy and we were telling people what to do. I mean, all of us—Jello Biafra, Tim Yohannan and, to a certain degree, myself. I thought everyone needed to know what I knew.

James Angus Black:
You can’t have any kind of socialist community with a bunch of National Socialists. They have no politics at all. They’re just about violence. So it was inevitable they would ruin everything.

Jason Lockwood:
It would’ve never happened in the U.K. But in the U.S., the skinhead scene came out of the punk scene. The BASH Boys were the first skinhead gang, which honestly was like a joke.

Everyone was really into Sham 69, pre-Nazi skinhead-era bands. We were sitting around at our friend’s apartment in Upper Haight and we were talking about starting a band, and we were coming up with names. Somehow the words “Bay Area Skinheads” came out of someone’s mouth. Hey! BASH! I don’t remember who said it. It was me, Curtis, Terry and Bob. That was it.

We were trying to emulate British skins. We had Fred Perrys, 501s, suspenders, Doc Martens, laced sideways. Bomber jackets. We could look very dashing on some days. But nobody had any racist leanings until somebody got ahold of the Skrewdriver album. It had a dramatic effect.

Curtis is Sicilian, he’s a very dark-skinned guy. Bob Blitz is German, but he grew up in San Francisco. Terry was from San Jose and I was from Berkeley. So we weren’t by default very racist people. But I grew up in Oakland in black neighborhoods, which in one respect made it easy for me. I used to get jumped constantly as a kid. So I kinda made it like, oh, I can hate those people, no problem—they used to beat me up! It was a weird slow transformation. After awhile, one day everyone was chanting, “White power.”

Dean Washington:
There were a couple of key names out there that you really wanted to stay away from. It was like your parents telling you about the Boogey Man.

Kurt Brecht:
Dagger was a real tough guy. We were terrified of him. You’d see him in the pit and he would be just destroying people.

Jason Lockwood:
At my third or fourth show, Marc Dagger came flying off the stage, and he was so much bigger than me, when his hand hit me he gave me a cut on my lip
and
my upper brow at the same time. We had all known each other forever.

Marc Dagger:
Me, Jimmy, Beau, Bags, Dickie—we were pretty much the founders of the S.F. Skins. We were never really an organized gang or anything. We were just a bunch of assholes who loved to drink and fight.

The first person I met after I hit San Francisco was James Black. Big Jim. He worked in a bar South of Market and he became the roadie for a whole shitload of bands.

Then I met Beau, Jimmy Mange and Bags. I was pretty much homeless and hanging out downtown. They were with a little street gang down there—just a bunch of crazy motherfuckers. We’d hang out in the Tenderloin, bum change, get beer, go to the park, get drunk, beat people up—stupid shit like that. We were a bunch of fucked-up kids. Basically just tweakers.

James Angus Black:
I’d seen Dagger around and he scared me. But the more I watched him, the more I thought, this guy is like Luca Brasi from
The Godfather
. This is a man of intense power and passion and unbelievable physical strength, wandering around looking for trouble. But he has no focus, he has no one to guide him. I don’t want this guy as my enemy. I’d much rather have him as my friend.

Marc Dagger:
I came from Texas. I was in juvy down there and I split, hitchhiked to L.A. and met Jeff 4-Way from Bad Posture. I hung out with him for a couple of weeks before I got run out of town by the cops and made my way up to San Francisco. That was 1980.

I was probably here about six months, when I met Spike up on Polk Street. I thought she was cool as hell looking. She was all dressed out in chains and spikes, and her mohawk was up. You could tell, man, she was not somebody you wanted to mess with.

Tammy Lundy:
Spike was an iconic figure. So much so, when Kriss X came on the scene, she completely copied Spike’s look. We used to call her Spike Jr. because she used to do Spike drag from top to bottom.

Marc Dagger:
We just kind of clicked, you know. We was never apart after that. She was in the scene way before I even hit town. She used to hang out at Target Video and the Tool & Die. She took me to all those places—Mabuhay Gardens, the On Broadway. That’s when I started to get into punk. I was already pretty frickin’ crazy so I fit in with that crowd.

James Angus Black:
Almost a year later, I ran into Marc on the street and he was all punked out with this big mohawk. And he says, “This is my girlfriend, Spike.” That was the first time I’d met her and, boy, she did not want anything to do with me. But she saw that Marc loved me and respected me so she set about giving me a punk rock makeover right away. Cut my hair, made me cut my mustache, changed my clothes, my shoes, everything. She also knew I had a truck. And anyone with a vehicle, willing to drive people around the punk rock scene, was in.

Tammy Lundy:
Spike was like a whole lot of women on the scene who were afraid to expose their intelligence, but she was absolutely not stupid. And she was in the center of
everything
.

Ninja Death:
I met Spike when I was 15 and living in a squat one block from the Mab. She was security and overseer of bullshit at the Mab. She worked with Dirk, Hobbit, and Michele Rebel.

I was an orphan after my mom died, and I became a ward of the California court. Spike would always ask me to come over to her and Marc Dagger’s house if I was hungry and wanted a place to stay.

Marc Dagger:
Spike and I used to have hellacious brawls. It was one of those things, you know, two people like each other but can’t stand to be with each other. Neither of us would back down.

James Angus Black:
Spike was way stronger, way badder than Dagger. I’d fight him before I’d fight her.

Tammy Lundy:
Dagger was a bona fide idiot and a violent, racist asshole. I never liked him. Spike may have known another side of him. She probably did.

Marc Dagger:
I was called Marc Hardcore before I got named Dagger by the cops. I was tweakin’ one night and the cops pulled over ’cause I was walking down the street with this cane with this eight ball on top. They opened up the cane and it had a sword in it. So they put me up against the wall and started pulling knives out—I had like about 21 knives all over me and most of them were double-edged daggers. So I went to jail. Got out and I was down at Mabuhay Gardens one night, and these two cops came walking up and were like, “Hey, look at him. Come here, Dagger. What’s up, Dagger? Got any knives, Dagger?” Everybody was looking and snickering as they searched me. After that, I couldn’t get rid of the fucking name.

Kriss X:
I remember when Dagger got the offer to sing for Urban Assault. He was like an excited little kid flying all over the house, like a bull in a china shop.

Marc Dagger:
We played with Sick Pleasure, Bad Posture, DRI. We played with everybody, but we played with the Fuck-Ups more than anyone ’cause we got on really well.

We did a tour with the Fuck-Ups. We played Fender’s Ballroom in L.A. and we were at the T-Bird Rollerdrome when that big riot jumped off. We were pro-American hardcore and Wattie from the Exploited was up there and the first song that comes out of his mouth is, “Fuck the U.S.A.” So we filled up this big cup full of piss and threw it in his face. Then he started talking shit and everybody stormed the stage. By the time we got outside, there were riot cops everywhere and it just jumped.

We also played with MDC when they got to town, but we didn’t really see eye to eye. They were so political and we didn’t give a shit. They started doing their hair pink and we just thought that was frickin’ killing the dark punk rock style we were into. All of a sudden it switched. All the bands became fuckin’ politically motivated. We were not into that crap.

Jason Lockwood:
The S.F. Skins were really funny because their whole conversion from punks to skinheads was just shaving their heads. For awhile they used to make fun of us: “Why don’t you dress like American skinheads?”

Marc Dagger:
If you were a BASH Boy, you were just lower in the pecking order. We wouldn’t beat you up or anything, but we’d give you a hard time. They were the juniors.

The only way you could become an S.F. Skin was if you had cojones, man. You were gonna prove to us that you were a bad motherfucker before you were even gonna fuckin’ hang out with us. A lot of the BASH Boys—you’d get into a fight and they’d disappear. They’d run. You’d never see an S.F. Skin run, ever.

Jason Lockwood:
Marc Dagger talked shit, but there wasn’t any real animosity. We intermixed freely and looked out for each other.

I actually helped a group of skinheads try to kill a guy. The S.F. Skins tried to jump Jeff Asshole in Piss Alley and take his leather. Jeff always carried a knife. He was scrawny, but a very scrappy guy. When they tried to jump him, he cut Bob’s face from the back of his cheekbone to near his lip. Everybody was after him after that. I love the logic: We tried to jump you and rob you, and since you defended yourself, we’re going to kill you.