Gimme Something Better (43 page)

Larry Livermore:
It took Victor a few weeks, but he finally got Tim to throw in
Maximum RocknRoll
’s fortunes with it.

Martin Sprouse:
That guy who owns the building is the reason why Gilman’s still there.

Jim Widess:
I had a sign up. Tim Yohannan came by. He was personable. Obviously loved kids, had a huge heart. It was definitely a philanthropic idea for him. Clearly he wasn’t going to make any money from it. But he was very dedicated.

He was going to have to get permits from the city. And we both knew there was going to be a problem getting the city to go along with it. As it turned out, it didn’t seem to be that uphill. They presented a good proposal.

I was also hungry for a tenant. Definitely we didn’t want another automobile repair place on Gilman. What Tim was proposing was a perfect use of the space. They would be there at night, we were here in the daytime. Our parking didn’t conflict with each other. He could make all the noise he wanted and it wouldn’t affect us. They were willing to pay the rent we needed. There certainly wasn’t any downside for me as a landlord. Plus, I felt what he was doing was a really important thing for the community.

They were going to have to invest quite a bit into the space to bring it up to code for a club. There was one small bathroom in there which needed to be made into two—and both of them, obviously, wheelchair accessible. And wiring. The plumbing was the major expense for them. Tim carried insurance, in case there were any problems. Everything was very aboveboard. The kids did most of the work.

Frank Portman:
My dad was a general contractor and had agreed to donate some materials. A lot of people’s dads were involved.

Martin Sprouse:
Frank’s dad brought in the toilets, helped do the plumbing. The Guys In Black, these total punk rock anarchist guys, they built all the walls. Tommy Strange, who moved out here from Ohio, helped build the stage. People came in to help do the sound system, put the soundproofing all over. People came from everywhere. Men, women, everything. It was so diverse.

Dave Mello:
Me and my brother dug the bathroom trenches. That was pretty fun.

Lenny Filth:
Me, all the guys from Operation Ivy, all the guys from Isocracy, tons of other people. All the people from
Maximum RocknRoll
, Kamala, we all helped build that place. Put in the plumbing, put up the walls, built the stage, built the loft, all that stuff.

James Washburn:
I made the Gilman safe in my shop class, and then bolted it into the soundboard. I painted it all primer black and put “924 Gilman” on it, “Keep Out.” Welded a big ol’ lock on it.

Larry Livermore:
I almost electrocuted myself doing some wiring. It was 240 volts. Luckily I was in sneakers and up an aluminum ladder, so it only felt like a twinge.

Cammie Toloui:
I took BART from Concord every weekend with my bike and rode over there. I did things like nail screws into the stage.

A. C. Thompson:
I grew up in the suburbs outside of Washington D.C. When you read
Maximum RocknRoll
in ’87 and heard about Gilman, how it was based on this utopian, DIY ethos that you could actually launch a project based on alternative principles and create an institution that isn’t driven by the normal imperatives of capitalism—that was just crazy. There were photos of people working on it, and there was all this hype: It’s run by the punks, for the punks, and it’s cheap and it’s gonna be so cool! And we were all so amazed because somehow this had never occurred to us before.

Matt Wobensmith
: I read about Gilman through
Maximum
and it’s like, oh my god, Gilman is a place you can go and people will be nice to you. In contrast to what I was used to in rural Pennsylvania, which was being beat up by and bullied by these fucking scary-ass Philly thug motherfuckers. And Gilman, they’ll fucking give you a cupcake when you walk in the door. That’s what you thought.

Orlando X:
We volunteered to go around the neighborhood to let folks know that Gilman was opening up, to get their support. People invited us into their homes and asked us about the club, and we would tell them about it. I wore a hat. We didn’t want to freak the people out.

Al Ennis:
I was working at Down Home Music in El Cerrito and I met Tim down at Ashby Lumber. I was buying stuff to fix up my house and Tim was down there buying stuff for this club. He said, “Oh, Al, you have to come by, we’re opening up this club, Gilman Street.” That was my first inkling that that was going on. It was a real community effort, and all these kids were pitching together, and it was gonna be a club! And then he told me, “We’re not even going to advertise the bands! It’s just gonna be, you show up because it’s Gilman Street, and whoever’s there is gonna be a good punk band.” They were gonna give everyone equal pay, it was all total equality. I thought it was very in keeping with what he wanted to do.

Sergie Loobkoff:
I was a lazy little brat. I tell people, “Yeah, I helped build Gilman.” But a couple of people were doing all the real work, and people like me were hanging around.

Billie Joe Armstrong:
Isocracy was like the house band.

Larry Livermore:
They were like the kings of Gilman. They were
the
band until Op Ivy came along.

Martin Brohm:
It was a group of us who didn’t really know punk rock at all. A student named Mark Carroll was the local skater guy. The first record I got from him was Black Flag’s
Damaged
. I was like, “Uh, this is kinda heavy.” So he gave me a Go-Go’s tape instead. I was like, well, this isn’t
quite
enough, you know. I need something in the middle.

Back then, El Sobrante was maybe 10,000. It’s very small townish. People who have never been to San Francisco because they would get AIDS. It’s 15 miles from San Francisco, but a totally different world.

Jason Beebout:
You walked down the street in El Sobrante and there’s heshers, rednecks and douchebags. If you made eye contact with anybody, it was a fight. So I learned how not to look at people.

John Geek:
Exodus, Possessed and Metallica all had members from West Contra Costa County. That was one of the birthplaces of thrash.

Jason Beebout:
Everyone had a story: “I was walkin’ down the street one time, garage door’s open? It was fuckin’ Metallica, practicin’—before the Black Album!”

Lenny, Martin and John had a band. A guy named Leroy was trying to sing for awhile. He wanted to play guitar and that made Lenny irritated, so Leroy was out of the band. And then John told them about me, said I would be the singer. I was 15. I literally didn’t know what was the end or the beginning of a song. It just sounded like fuckin’ noise to me. But I was like, “Yeah, that’s great, man, I’m in.” They had to step on my foot to tell me when to start singin’ and step on it again to tell me when to stop.

Lenny Filth:
Me and my bass player busted into the back of a couple arcade machines at the pizza place that we worked at. We stole all the quarters. That’s how we bought our first instruments.

Martin Brohm:
I’m not gonna say anything to incriminate myself. So no, I was not involved in that at all! We worked in a pizza place, there were a few goings-on there that maybe weren’t legal but benefited us monetarily. Hey, when you’re 18 years old, you’re not floating in it.

Jason Beebout:
We were Russian Anarchists On Dope before we were Isocracy. We practiced for three months in a garage before our first show. Lenny’s stepdad would have a carcass of a deer he’d just slaughtered in the refrigerator next to the Fanta soda pops. It was really odd.

Martin Brohm:
Later on, Larry Livermore interviewed us for
Maximum RocknRoll
. He was talking to Lenny about playing guitar, and Lenny said, “Yeah, things really started coming together when I started playing chords.” Larry said, “Chords?” “Yeah, you know, two strings.” That tells you what we knew about music.

The Thing That Ate Floyd: Isocracy at Gilman

Jason Beebout:
John was a really charismatic person and he found Victor Hayden from Alchemy Records, I don’t know how. Victor came up to see us in Lenny’s garage, in El Sobrante. He was like, “This is outrageous, you guys are fuckin’ phenomenal!” We’re like, “Really? Wow! Cool!”

Martin Brohm:
I think a big part of the appeal about us was—

Jason Beebout:
It was so bad.

Martin Brohm:
Well, that, and just four fuckin’ loser kids from this loser fuckin’ town.

Jason Beebout:
John changed the name to Operation Ivy. He had some code book of military operations, and I guess Operation Ivy was the one when they bombed the Bikini Islands. And then, according to John, he put his finger in a dictionary, blindly. When he hit “Isocracy” it was a political word, so that was perfect. I thought it sounded like ’60s soft rock, like the Association or something.

We practiced at my grandma’s dry cleaners, and we worked out a set. “Confederate Flags” was a big one. “Stabbed in the Groin” was always a plus because we’d switch instruments, and I’d play bass and Martin would sing, and Martin was a really amazing front man.

Martin Brohm:
The lyrics went something like this: “Stabbed in the groin, stabbed in the groin.” There’s so many great songs that never got recorded . . .

As I remembered, it started off wearing pink suits, ruffled shirts, or dressing up as women. And then I think John went and got a bunch of fucked-up stuff.

Jason Beebout:
Just before we played our first show at Gilman, John said, “We’re gonna stop and grab some shit out of a dumpster.” Everything he does, at least part of his mind has a little bit of theater behind it: “This is gonna be hilarious, people are gonna look at this.”

Jesse Michaels:
He was an instigator. John has a lot of energy and was always doing weird things. He had this thing where he would never drive over 55 miles an hour. Just, never, under any circumstances, no matter how late they were or how far they had to go. He also would park the van with one tire on the curb. That was just par for the course.

Martin Brohm:
An Isocracy show would be 40 minutes long, with probably three songs played. The rest of the time, we were throwing shit out in the crowd.

Lenny Filth:
Al would disappear for a couple hours. It was like, “Where the fuck is Al? Set up his drums, Jesus Christ.”

Martin Brohm:
It was mostly John and Jason driving around in John’s VW van, finding crap. I remember they found these huge rolls of plastic wrap, four feet tall and three feet deep.

Jason Beebout:
That was one of the worst. We stopped at a burrito processing plant, got giant rolls of this really thin cellophane. We started rollin’ ’em out, and they became this bouncy blob that took over the floor of Gilman. It was great because you could dive off the stage onto it, like a trampoline. But then if you got tangled up it was horrible.

Lenny Filth:
I was playing guitar and somebody wrapped one around my neck, and I got pulled off the stage by this giant roll of plastic.

Mike K:
I remember being on the bottom of the plastic wrap and being smooshed by Dave MDC wearing an Elvis suit. He jumped off the stage. For a teenage kid, that’s a pretty big guy to have smoosh you.

Martin Brohm:
Matt Freeman went back to help clean up the next day, and this wad of shit was too big to pull out the door.

Matt Freeman:
That was probably the show that pissed me off the most. There was shit everywhere. Obviously someone had tried to put it in bags and they just gave up. It was just like, “Oh man, you fuckin’ people!” Finally I went to the Gilman meeting and I said, “Look, I think that I should get into one show free if I’m gonna do this. And when Isocracy plays I get two shows.” They voted on it, “Okay.”

I took that shit hella seriously. This little person, James the Crack Midget. He lived down the street, he would meet me down there and do this stuff. I was like 22 and he was my buddy. We got along fine.

Tim Armstrong:
That sounds like a TV show.
Matt and the Crack Midget
.

Mike K:
Al would roll his VW bus up to the side of Gilman. You never knew what was going to start pouring out of the side of the thing.

Jason Beebout:
We’d pile everything inside the room, and then John set up his drums, and we started dragging our shit onstage. There was so much anticipation: “What’s in
that
bag?”

Anna Brown:
One time Isocracy threw like a hundred dictionaries off the stage.

Jeff Ott:
Reams and reams and reams of recycled paper.

Christopher Appelgren:
Little tiny scraps of paper with handwritten messages about the band, that would be flying amidst all this other trash and clothes and weird things: “Isocracy Rules.”