Gimme Something Better (42 page)

Ben Saari:
At Berkeley High, by the end of the ’85-’86 school year we had written “Crimpshrine” on every single locker, every single desktop. There was a reward for whoever was writing “Crimpshrine,” so we got a bunch of those “Hello My Name Is” stickers and wrote “Crimpshrine” on ’em and started handing ’em out in the hallway. Some fucking dupe decided he wanted the 50 dollars. So he turned me and Jeff in, and we got suspended, and that led to me getting sent to the Oakland school system. Jeff ended up getting institutionalized shortly after that.

That was a fucked-up thing. There was this shrink in Albany who was getting kickbacks from an insurance company for institutionalizing kids. My parents and Jeff’s parents were going to her. She locked up a whole slew of punk rock kids.

Noah Landis:
Jeff Ott had horror stories about the way his parents reacted when they found out he was doing drugs. Piss tests and institutionalization and that kind of stuff. I remember going to shows way out in the city at Club Foot—hard place to get to when you’re a kid—and his parents would show up to give kids rides home. So we’d all pile into this little minivan, and then they’d drive through the Berkeley Hills and drop people off at three o’clock in the morning. They just didn’t know what the fuck to do. Their kid is on drugs and going out with other kids on drugs. You piss-test him, institutionalize him, and you drive his friends home.

Ben Saari:
Then Jeff was going to some alternative school out in Concord. Nobody was in regular contact with him. He ended up back at Berkeley High.

Anna Brown:
Jeff would take you up to campus where we would climb up the sides of these buildings. He had devised these weird ways to climb backwards up between two buildings, doing a crab walk.

Jeff Ott:
I was up at Telegraph all day, when there wasn’t a band function. Kids run away from somewhere else, and it was like, okay, here’s a free breakfast, now what? Well, we could go climb buildings.

Anna Brown:
He had memorized every inch of the campus before any of us had ever set foot in there. There is a network of tunnels underneath the campus, steam tunnels where people lived in the winter. We would steal marbles from the Earth Science building and roll them down the hills, or just take a bunch of acid and go into Wurster Hall.

Jeff Ott:
We had a mural done with spray paint by Jesse and this white rapper kid, Josh. “Crimpshrine,” like 30 feet long. Totally beautiful, New York subway style, across the top of Wurster Hall. Up there all night, just tripping on acid, watching them make this thing. You know, “Jesse, make us a mural!”

Ben Saari:
We’d go to the top of the top floor of Eshleman, where all the student activist groups had their offices. We would go there and grab all the recycled paper, and go to the top of the student union and make paper airplanes, if we were coherent enough to do that, and just throw ’em all day. Or if we were too fucked up, we would just wad paper up and throw it down into the courtyard.

Jeff Ott:
At the architecture building, there was a big grate that shot up air really fast. So you could pour water and it would come out and go up.

Anna Brown:
Crimpshrine and Operation Ivy played a bunch of shows in laundromats for awhile. They would just show up at a laundromat and start playing.

Jeff Ott:
Sweet Baby Jesus and some other bands started making little stickers that they put on matchbooks. It was this little cartoon guy and it said, “Crimpsoupocracy.” So we had multi-band matchbooks.

Davey Havok:
We were all so fascinated by “Summertime” by Crimpshrine because it referenced our county, Mendocino County. He was specifically referring to Mendocino the town, which was over the hill on the water.

Jeff Ott:
When Crimpshrine did the first record,
Sleep, What’s That?
was the obvious thing, because I was living outside and Aaron didn’t sleep, except in the daytime a little bit. So then it was obvious to call the next record
Quit Talkin’ Claude
because we were just saying it all the time.

Claude was Ben Owens, he hung out with Op Ivy and Crimpshrine and everybody else. He was from El Cerrito, this 14-year-old walking around with people who are just trying to get drunk or whatever.

Janelle Hessig:
Claude was really crazy-eyed and talked constantly, and would always be twitching and fumbling all the time.

Jeff Ott:
He would go on the most bizarre tangents. He would find out about this new drug DMSO that somebody just invented—“It makes this and this and this happen.” Then he’d go, “Oh, I’ve been researching Aleister Crowley,” and dadadadada. And then it would be like, “Oh, and this guy, he’s trying to find the grand unified theory in quantum mechanics.”

People were like, “Oh, shut up, Claude. I don’t wanna hear about all that.” So “quit talking Claude” became a phrase you’d use when somebody was talking about something too much. He became a figure of speech.

Cammie Toloui:
Totally out of his mind. I thought he was doing too much acid. One time at the radio show, Claude was doing his best to get a piece of string to go in his mouth and out his nose. There was some point where he was arrested for walking naked down a median in the middle of Berkeley.

Jeff Ott:
I hadn’t seen him in eight years. And I went to pick up my older daughter in Berkeley, and here came Claude walking up the street. I ran over and said, “What’s going on?” And that day he had passed the bar exam. Everyone was fuckin’ telling him to shut up, and he’s a lawyer now.

Mike K:
I remember when Crimpshrine and Operation Ivy played their last shows before this tour. It was this crazy thing, like they were getting into a spaceship. We were thinking, this is part of our culture and what we were part of, and all this was going out and encountering weird alien life-forms along the way. And they would come back with great artifacts.

Andy Asp:
Their legendary Pinto tour. Basically two guys, on Crimpshrine’s first tour, said, “Fuck this! Fuck you! We’re goin’ home.”

Ben Saari:
When Jeff, Pete, Aaron and Idon got to Florida, Idon and Pete bailed. Paul Curran drove out, picked them up in a Pinto station wagon, and did the tour with ’em. In a Pinto—that wouldn’t go any faster than 45 miles an hour. They finished the tour. This is how for real those guys were.

Aaron Cometbus:
A station wagon? No way. It was a tiny-ass Pinto hatchback. In a station wagon we could have fit two bands.

Ben Saari:
When Pete and Idon came back, nobody would talk to those guys. It was like, “You motherfuckers, you bailed. You did the one thing you’re not supposed to do, you got homesick and you quit and you came home.” That went on for months.

Andy Asp:
That story had an impact on our work ethic. Don’t put on any airs if the P.A. doesn’t sound good, or you thought it was gonna be different. Doesn’t matter. That’s the show biz part of it, that you can’t get too high and mighty about: “We didn’t know this Nazi band was on the bill.” Just play the fuckin’ show. The Pinto tour was legendary.

Adam Pfahler:
There was a certain amount of innocence in Crimpshrine. The songs were awesome. It was all very simple and there was something really innocent and raw about it. And there was a lot of strength in that. So when people started getting hooked on dope and stuff, it was depressing.

Sergie Loobkoff:
I was never around Jeff Ott when he wasn’t fucked up on some kind of acid, or really high, or drunk. He was a mumbler and would say non sequiturs to get a reaction out of you. Like people on acid often do.

I didn’t realize that wasn’t his personality as much as his state of mind at the time. He just went into drugs and that defined him. And when I met him as an adult he was really soft-spoken and totally sober. I was like, “Oh wow, this guy has a completely different personality that’s nothing remotely like that.” That’s really trippy.

Jeff Ott:
I stopped doing a band in ’96. After being sober for a year, it dawned on me that for the first time in my life I didn’t have to be in a band. Before that, that was all I ever did. I got high and I did bands. And all of a sudden I was sober. It was like one day I woke up and I was like, “I don’t have to be in a band. Okay, I’m not.”

Frank Portman:
The club was an East Bay idea. It involved a lot of the people who had put on random shows at various places. There was a pizza place on Shattuck called Own’s Pizza. That was how the owner, who was Pakistani or something, spelled “Owen.” One of my band’s first shows was there. It was promoted by Kamala Parks.

Kamala Parks
: When I started doing shows, this other guy named Victor Hayden and I combined forces. I’d book the shows and he’d find places for us to have shows. He was very supportive. He and I worked together well. I was probably about 17. It was a very unlikely combination.

Frank Portman:
Victor was much like a lot of these eccentric older guys with pompadours who always gravitated towards these places. You just looked at him and you thought, “Wow, what is this weird Liberace guy doing at this pizza place?” I’m not making any kind of accusation. I’m sure he’s a very nice man. But you know how Liberace could play a
Star Trek
villain? He was like that, to me. One minute he’s talking about, “Oh, I really love your band’s set.” The next minute he’s tying you to a giant chess piece. You were always a little bit wary of it.

Larry Livermore:
Victor was extraterrestrial. A little bit spacey, like a hippie. But also very idealistic. He and Kamala were good buddies. Victor found Own’s Pizza. I said, “I’ll help out. Can our band play?” The show went off really well. It was Victim’s Family, Nomeansno from Canada, Mr. T Experience, a really young thrash band from Marin County called Complete Disorder, and the Lookouts. Tré would have been 13. I’m pretty sure his parents came down. Afterwards Victor and I were sort of glowing about how great it was, and he said, “We’ve got to find a place where we could do this all the time.”

Kamala Parks:
Victor and I had done stuff at New Method, we had done stuff at Own’s Pizza, we had done stuff at this practice place in San Francisco. But inevitably the show would get shut down by the fire department or the police department. It was incredibly frustrating, because these people would see big crowds of people, think it was a moneymaker and come to find that it wasn’t a moneymaker, and so then they’d get angry and lose interest.

Victor and I started talking about finding a place. We knew
Maximum RocknRoll
was trying to find a place at the same time, but they were dead set on finding something in San Francisco. Victor and I were focusing on the East Bay.

Martin Sprouse:
Nobody was at odds. We were all friends. I thought everybody was looking for the place together. Victor had been looking at other buildings.

Kamala Parks:
Our plan was, we were going to be completely open with the owners about what our intentions were: “We’re gonna have a punk club here because we’re sick of getting kicked out by the owners, of the place freaking out wherever we were booked.” We wanted it to be completely up to code, and aboveboard. Because it was obviously not working to do it as underground as we had been doing it.

Ruthie’s Inn wasn’t really part of the punk scene. The Mabuhay Gardens wasn’t owned by anyone in the punk scene. You still felt like you were still under the whims and desires of people who didn’t understand us. So when Victor and I were looking for a place, as well as
Maximum RocknRoll
, there was a sense of, let’s be involved on every single level, including running the place.

Larry Livermore:
About two, three weeks after the Own’s Pizza show, Victor got in touch with the Caning Shop warehouse.

Kamala Parks:
Victor actually tried to scare the owner, and told him, “We wanna do punk shows here.” And the guy was like, “Oh! That would be great because I actually don’t want anything going on here during the day, because we have our caning shop.” Victor was like, “There’s gonna be people with mohawks.” And the guy said, “I
like
that idea.” I went and looked at it, and it was the perfect space, the perfect size. At that time that area of Berkeley was really just warehouses. The closest neighbors were a block away.

The idea was that Victor and I would run it. But we didn’t have the money. So that’s when he contacted Tim, and just begged and pleaded and insisted on bringing him to see Gilman. Tim was like, “No, I wanna do something in San Francisco, I don’t wanna do something in the East Bay.”

Larry Livermore:
I think Tim was kind of taken aback at having it actually presented to him. I didn’t know them that well yet, but I know Tim put up a fair bit of resistance at first.

Kamala Parks:
I think Victor actually drove over there and forced him into his car and took him there. And when Tim saw the place and met the owner, I think that’s when the wheels really started turning for him.

Larry Livermore:
We’re looking at June of ’86. Victor said, “I gotta talk Tim into getting behind it, ’cause he’s the only one who’s got the money to make it happen.” We figured it would take at least 10,000.

Kamala Parks:
Obviously Tim’s vision really differed from what Victor and I had thought. It was very similar to
Maximum RocknRoll
, in the idea that Tim was really behind everything and really making the decisions. But modeled on the same principles, which was completely volunteer run. So it involved bringing in a lot more people than Victor and I had envisioned, and running it on these principles. Which Victor and I didn’t necessarily agree with.

Martin Sprouse:
A club, run by the people, for the people. That really didn’t exist. Tim wanted to make it 100 percent independent and consistent. And on the up and up. You know, not a squat. Totally legal.