Gimme Something Better (45 page)

Martin Sprouse:
To us it wasn’t about making rules, it was about keeping the place going and legit. We were dealing with the city, dealing with cops, dealing with neighbors, dealing with Nazis. All those rules weren’t to tell people how to do it. But just to keep the club going and make it safe. Everyone made fun of that, but who cares? Gilman’s still going.

Adrienne Droogas:
After awhile Tim stepped back and said, “Okay, do this however you guys wanna do this.” They would have people who were 18 or 19, setting up the shows.

I think that they saw it as a chance for punks in the scene to become active, instead of it being this thing where you’re just coming and witnessing. It’s like, why don’t you come here and participate in making that show happen in whatever way you want? Go do whatever you wanna do, spray-paint on the walls, bring in a piece of art, nail it up, do whatever you want, but if you make a mess, just take care of it. If you fuck something up, fix it. That’s what they were really trying to encourage.

Tom Jennings:
For about a year and a half I was the main coordinator for shows. It was hard work—annoying, stupid and wonderful. I heard 30-plus bands a month for 18 months.

Kamala Parks:
Having it be all-volunteer means that people get burned out. When you volunteer, you expect something back, and if you’re not getting that something back, then it does make you bitter.

Maximum RocknRoll
was a much easier project to run based on that principle. Tim had it down pat how to do things, and if someone flaked out, it was easier for him to pick up the pieces. Whereas it was much harder with Gilman, when you have shows every weekend.

Martin Sprouse:
We had meetings on top of meetings on top of meetings. We got old Berkeley hippie people coming in, ’cause we were pushing it as an alternative community center to begin with. And the arty music scene. A lot of eccentric weird people coming in, a lot of local bands. We were trying to do this thing from scratch.

Matt Buenrostro: I remember having a moan about the rules. I said something like, “Can’t we just say, ‘No drugs, no alcohol. Let’s rock and roll!’ ” Tim Yohannan just ignored me.

Jesse Michaels:
People were talking about whether there’s too much anti-feminist graffiti in the bathroom. “Should we paint over the graffiti?” “No, that’s impinging on free speech!” Just incredibly trifling Berkeley bullshit.

Adrienne Droogas:
Tim would say, “Well, we really need the manpower to do this.” And someone would go, “Um, we need the people power.”

Jason Beebout:
“Two Blocks Away.” That’s one of the things we figured out at the meetings. If you wanted to drink at the club, it had to be at least two blocks away, so there wouldn’t be any bottles littering the front of the club.

It was actually Tim Yohannan’s idea. “We’re gonna get this fuckin’ place shut down if we don’t explain to people that you have to go two blocks from this place or the cops are gonna bust us.” And off the cuff, he said, “Isocracy should write a song about it—Two Blocks Away.” We were like, “Done!”

Lenny Filth:
That was the whole joke about the “talking bushes.” You’d walk by and you’d hear people giggling and drinking and smoking, see smoke comin’ outta the bushes. It was like, “Ah, the talking bushes are alive again tonight.”

Jeff Ott:
The policy on alcohol at the beginning really split everything in half. A lot of people who were into English bands and dressing up more really backed off from it. They would come to shows and drink outside in the car, and people who were volunteering security would be like, “You’re in trouble.” I think we could have just had a light that went on if the cops pulled up outside. We could have never even had the policy at all.

Maximum RocknRoll
was like, “This is the prototype for a club in America.” I think people really misinterpreted that. The people who started it thought that if we keep alcohol and drugs out of the place completely, we won’t end up getting shut down by the police. In a way it was wise. But there was probably a less divisive way to have done that.

To this day I get e-mails from kids like, “Oh yeah, Gilman Street, you’re all straightedge, right?” Hello, I was strung out and 105 pounds at this height. I think I had one crooked needle that I used for a year and a half because there wasn’t a needle exchange yet.

Dallas Denery:
We played with MDC once. They always brought glasses of orange juice onto the stage with them, and Gilman was always concerned that there were things mixed with the orange juice. Afterwards, whoever was cleaning the stage would be picking up all the cups and smelling them. Like, “Was this a screwdriver?”

Dave Chavez:
We couldn’t believe that you couldn’t drink onstage. We were just such hardcore drinkers at the time. So we did anyway. They didn’t have it together like they do now.

Kate Knox:
Later on, after our friends Nando and Jerme weren’t working security anymore, a girl and her friend got busted drinking at Gilman. And they were 86’d until they wrote a three-page essay, about why they shouldn’t drink at Gilman. They came to a meeting, and read it. Their essay was like, “I will never ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever drink at Gilman, because . . .” People were like, “We want you to read it onstage at the next show.” And they were like, “No! This is fucking bullshit!”

But then there was a show with a gap in between bands, a problem with the equipment or something. And they were drunk, right? So they were like, “Fuck it, c’mon, let’s go read it.” They went up onstage and read it. “I will never ever ever . . .” One of the people that made her do this was Jesse Luscious.

Jesse Luscious:
Branwyn was the only female head of Gilman for awhile. But she and some other people who should have known better were drinking alcohol inside. They put it in soda cups and mentioned it really offhanded to the wrong person. So we had this big thing. I let myself get overheated and I was like, “Yeah, they should have to write an essay and read it onstage.” Which is a stupid fucking idea. I was totally caught up in the witch hunt.

Anna Brown:
I never understood that as a young person. Why someone over 21 would not wanna go to an all-ages club where you couldn’t drink? What was the big deal? Why did you have to drink? But now I feel like, “God, how could you go to a show and not drink?”

Andy Asp:
I really feel for the cops that were around Gilman Street. We were just fuckin’ dickheads.

Larry Boothroyd:
I actually went to jail from Gilman one night. I got caught drinking. This woman cop tapped on my window, I was in the driver’s seat. We had a bottle of Bacardi and a case of beer. We hadn’t even gotten into it, and she poured the whole thing out. She carded us all, and one by one let us all go. Until it was me and my buddy. She asked him if he could drive my car home. I was like, “Yeah? Why?” It turned out I had an outstanding warrant from the Democratic Convention of ’84, where I had a failure to appear. It was three days in jail. I was in with all these crack dealers, and I was completely freaked out. I had never been incarcerated. Did it scare me straight? You’d think so!

 

 

Jason Beebout:
Trying to date girls. You’d go to Gilman, the last thing you’re gonna do is go up and say, “Hey, I think you’re really attractive, you wanna go out on a date?” You’re being sexist or something. I didn’t know how to be sexist. I was like, well, fuck, let’s just avoid it.

Jesse Michaels:
Gender roles were a lot less defined. At that time in my life I was just painfully, painfully shy. So my main experience was just complete shyness. Which is funny ’cause I was the singer for a band, and normally a singer for a band, at least with rock bands, is traditionally sort of a ladies’ man, to a certain extent. I wasn’t like that at all.

Anna Brown:
I copped a giant attitude. Punk girls were allowed to be tough and to stick up for themselves. It’s rough all over for teenage girls, but I think maybe you have a thicker skin as a punk. You let more things slide because you’re in this kind of lawless world. But you also take less shit.

Coming of age as a punk, you are well versed in a lot of feminist thought and theory and lyrics, and a lot of ideas that many girls don’t learn about until they take women’s studies in college. I know a lot of young women who are like 22 before they become aware of the reality of discrimination. All that kind of shit is old hat to punks.

Blag Jesus:
So the Dwarves made this record,
Blood, Guts and Pussy
. The cover is this great photo of two naked girls covered in blood. It’s a takeoff of the Samhain record, obviously food dye, syrup. And we said, “Let’s do that with chicks.” So we got these two naked chicks with a dwarf guy that I used to buy weed off of in Brooklyn. To a lot of people it was objectifying women. Some even took it one step further, like it was advocating violence against women. If you actually look at the cover, it’s much more like the women are in control and bold looking, and the dwarf is like a little guy yearning after them.

After that record came out, some people at Gilman said we shouldn’t be allowed to play. Because of the artwork, and also we had songs like “Let’s Get Pregnant” or “Free Cocaine.” They thought we were advocating drug use, and hatred towards women. That was strange for me, because the Dwarves were very close with the girl bands during our era, like L7 and Hole, and Babes in Toyland and Lunachicks. We were not sexist type people. Sex is not necessarily sexist. Everybody likes it and we’re all in this together, you know?

So they had us play at Gilman. This kid came up to me and said, “Yeah, violence against women is really funny, isn’t it, man? Blood and pussy and all that shit is real funny, isn’t it?” And I thought, this was a typical teenage guy, he hadn’t gotten laid yet and he figured maybe this would win him some points with the feminist girls in Berkeley. I just laughed it off and said, “Yeah, man, you know, it’s all in good fun.”

This kid followed me, and started lighting into me again. I said, “Dude, do you really want to follow me around and give me shit?” I went outside and he walked up again, and was like, “Violence against women is real funny, isn’t it man?” Blah blah. Obviously this guy was going to follow me around all night as his Gandhian protest against me and my music.

He wouldn’t stop bothering me. I had a show that night. So I said, “Dude, just say one more word, man, I’m going to fucking plaster you in your mouth.” Sure enough he opened his mouth and said, “Violence against women is fun—” I smacked him, he fell down.

The people running Gilman came over, “What the fuck are you doing? There’s no violence here!” We were banned for many, many years. There’s always a better way than violence to handle it, but at the time I wasn’t really aware of what it might be.

Davey Havok:
Lotta stuff you could do to get banned from Gilman Street. As a band, as a person. It could be going onstage and saying the word “bitch.” Or saying the word “fag,” just in passing. As long as you weren’t Pansy Division. Pansy Division, of course, gets to. Ah, semantics.

Nick 13:
The era when we started going to Gilman, political correctness had just gone too far. There was this unspoken thing that you had to appreciate this band because they were women, and what they’re playing was just as important as what men are playing. To me that was more sexist, in a way. Why couldn’t bands be judged on the merit if they’re good or not good?

It was almost like women had been historically wronged in rock ’n’ roll, and we need to right that wrong now. Regardless of whether or not it’s any good. That was happening at Cal, that was happening in pop culture, that was happening everywhere at that time. There was just as much “You have to think exactly what I think or you’re fucked” as you’d find at any Republican Convention.

Ben de la Torres:
I did security for about six years. Was head coordinator, was executive director, was involved in booking. One of the best parts of working at Gilman is having the right to complain. There’s this elitist mentality at Gilman. You get to complain about how no one else does the work. We’re like old ladies getting their hair done in a salon. We just sit there and complain about everything. Everyone hates Gilman, and if you work there you get to hate everybody. They hate Gilman ’cause they can’t drink.

Part of punk is hating rules and I understand that. Most of these people are going to places like Starbucks, but they want to come and harass people at Gilman. You’re full of shit. You follow rules when you have to. You come to Gilman and you don’t want to hear more rules, I understand. But it’s bullshit. So they sit outside and complain about us, and we sit inside and complain about them.

Dallas Denery:
The Gilman thing had been swelling up for a long time. There were a bunch of bands that were all affiliated and knew each other, and it had been going on for two or three years before Gilman opened. And then Gilman crystallized it.

Dave Dictor:
Let’s face it, to get a gig at the On Broadway or Ruthie’s you had to know Fang or MDC. It took a place like Gilman, that had five or six bands a night, two or three weekend nights a week, 52 weeks a year, for the cream to rise, for the Op Ivys to rise, for the Samiams to rise, for the people to come out of that world.

Dave Mello:
There was definitely a core of people that really knew how to play their instruments. But then Gilman happened, and we had all these friends starting bands. It wasn’t just people who knew how to play instruments. It was also the people who started bands and taught themselves how to play, therefore creating their own style. That happened a lot.

Ralph Spight:
There weren’t 8,000 bands that sounded exactly the same. Things were small, and there wasn’t a bunch of media attention on it. There wasn’t like, “We’re all going to get big.” There wasn’t that kind of mind-set going on.