Gimme Something Better (51 page)

It was really hard. It was in all honesty an overdue humiliation. Because a lot of those more desperate years, we were trying to prove to Larry that we were doing good things. We worked with some great bands. And made some great records. But ultimately, those good things didn’t outweigh some of the bad things.

Kerplunk: Chris Appelgren at Lookout! Records offices

Our relationship with Operation Ivy ended pretty soon after.

With the same kind of situation. The one silver lining to the cloud for me is that the four of them have really come together in figuring out what should happen now with Operation Ivy. Jesse got up and performed with Rancid at the Warfield, those kinds of things.

Zarah Manos:
I worked there after Livermore had left. The thing about Chris, he likes to have a good time and he likes everyone to be happy and to like him. You can’t hate on somebody for that. It might have gone down really shitty, but I really think his intentions were right. He wanted people to have a place to work, he wanted to keep it DIY. He thought that more money was coming in, that he could employ more people. And it didn’t go down like that.

Christopher Appelgren:
Lookout!’s not putting out records anymore. We had to let our staff go at the end of the summer in 2005.

Larry Livermore:
I don’t even know the technical ownership. Someone runs sort of an office in San Francisco. They administer the Web site, answer the mail and phone. I don’t know what else they do.

Dallas Denery:
Something clicked around 1988. Op Ivy became very popular, more so than any other band at Gilman Street. There would be a line around the club.

Sergie Loobkoff:
Who knows what would have happened, but it seems like Op Ivy would have been bigger than Green Day, bigger than Rancid. Because they stood out so far above every other local band that ever played there. They had that magic little pixie dust.

Matt Freeman:
The first time me and Tim met, we both grew up in Albany and there was this thing called My Indian Guide. We were five years old. You’d do crafts or whatever, kids and fathers kind of stuff. I went over to his house and he had these two older brothers, Jeff and Greg, and they were just intimidating. I remember Greg was doing pull-ups.

Tim Armstrong:
Albany was a mile square, 14,000 people. It’s right next to the People’s Republic of Berkeley, but in the ’70s Albany was very working-class, not hippie. We grew up right across the street from the Golden Gate Fields racetrack. We would go there every day, me and the kids from the hill. We were 10, 11 years old. The first time I seen a pimp, all-purple suit. First time I saw a real knockdown, throw-down fight. It was exciting and it was just super shady.

My brother Jeff got into punk early on. I was 13, and we had a Radio Shack portable record player, and we listened to the Ramones’ fuckin’
Rocket to Russia
record when it came out. Twenty times in a row, every day. I’d never heard anything as great as that. My older brother Greg liked more hardcore music, Black Sabbath. But the one thing that all three agreed on was the Ramones.

Matt Freeman:
Jeff worked at 7-Eleven. Everyone hung out up there. He would play the Ramones constantly in the store. He had one of the biggest record collections I’ve ever fuckin’ seen. A lot of roots bands out of L.A., like the Blasters, X, Los Lobos, that rockabilly band Red Devils.

Gavin MacArthur:
We all went to Albany High. I was walking by one of the music practice rooms, going to class, and Tim and Matt were in there playing, just riffing out. I remember thinking, “Wow, that’s cool—they’re sitting there in the high school practice room, jamming.” I stood out there and listened to them for awhile, it was kind of groovy. I never thought that you could actually go to the high school and rock out.

Tim Armstrong:
My first band was called COD, which was Kevin Kechely and my brother Greg on drums, in ’82 or ’83. We were like Black Flag, Exploited. Kevin was a character, lived across the street from 7-Eleven. He had a mohawk, was at every show.

Aaron Cometbus:
Tim had a ton of different bands one after the other, most of them with Matt. Surf Rats, Ratt Patrol, the Uncool, the Noise. Not punk bands, but they were good. Then came Basic Radio, which was a great mix of everything: surf, ska, a bit of punk, some Old World sounds, too, almost like Klezmer. And this wild rocker second guitarist doing blazing metal guitar solos over the whole thing.

Jeff Ott:
Basic Radio was like, if they happened now we’d probably call it world music. They were kind of a punk band, kind of a ska band, kind of a reggae band, kind of a rock band. Dudes could play saxophones and all kinds of different instruments and shit.

Tim Armstrong:
I loved Basic Radio, I still like it, I just think there was no real home in the mid-’80s for that kind of thing happening. We only played like 15 times in two years. Hotel Utah, house parties, Berkeley Square. A couple of recordings that didn’t really come out well.

Jeff Ott:
When I gravitated toward Telegraph Avenue as a homeless guy, Tim was an employee at one of the pizza places. He professionally hung out.

Tim Armstrong:
I was working at Fat Slice Pizza on Telegraph. They did not want me playing the Dead on the P.A., ’cause you get the fucking Deadhead hippies coming in off Telegraph and dancing around.

When Basic Radio was falling apart, I didn’t know what I was gonna do. I’m a fan of New York music, so I said, “I’m gonna take a Greyhound bus from Oakland to New York.” In December of 1986. It took three days. My god, you talk about shady. And very regional, man. I heard accents I’d never heard before.

I ended up going to the Sunday matinee show at CB’s, unbelievable scene happening. Murphy’s Law had put out a record and it was coming out of the woodwork, everywhere you went, you heard that fuckin’ record. New York was happenin’ big-time. I was like, “I’m gonna move here.” And then I went to a fanzine store and got a
Maximum RocknRoll
. There had been a lot of talkin’ about the new club that was gonna go down—on Gilman Street! A punk rock club! I grew up right there. I had to go home. I wasn’t fuckin’ New York. I get chills thinkin’ about it. I got back on the Greyhound, another three fuckin’ days. No fuckin’ money. I had crackers and water.

Matt Freeman:
You actually brought me back a Rolling Rock beer. You carried it all the way. I’d never seen Rolling Rock beer before.

Tim Armstrong:
We went to the first Gilman show, it was Christ on Parade, and a band called Soup with Tom Hammond. I knew Tom for a long time, his parents went to high school with my parents. So there it was, man—Tom Hammond’s band, Christ on Parade, who I loved, new club, Gilman Street.

Jesse Michaels:
I grew up in Berkeley. My first encounter with punk, a friend of the family had the B-52s record and I went crazy over that. I still love them. And then about a year later, when I was like 11, I heard other stuff like the Ramones and Devo.

I came from a very academic background. My father was a well-known writer and my mother was in grad school. My dad taught at Cal, and one of his students was Jennifer Blowdryer, who used to work for
Punk Globe
. She loaned him some records, which I got my hands on. And I got this book called
Punk
, which was about English punk bands. Before I ever really had much of the music, I had devoured the photos. I even decided I wanted to sing at some point, just from looking at the pictures of singers.

Aaron Cometbus:
I met Jesse Michaels when we were eight or nine, maybe even earlier. Jesse and his brother were the kids who lived across the street from a friend of mine. One day me and Jesse are blowing up tubes of toothpaste on the schoolyard, then a few years later we’re still little kids but now doing a fanzine.

Jesse Michaels:
Aaron was a very, very obsessive kid. When he was into comic books he was obsessed with comic books. When he was into art he was obsessed with art. I think that’s a characteristic of a lot of punk rock people. If it wasn’t punk rock it would have been ghouls and goblins and role-playing games. It’s that type of fringey, super-interested personality. And he definitely qualified as that. He already had fanzines and records and stuff. The walls of his room were covered with flyers.

We worked on a zine together. I was maybe 12 or 13. We changed the name every week, or every issue. It was mainly his thing, but I did my bit, too. And that eventually turned into
Cometbus
.

We did an interview with the Ramones. They were up at Lawrence Hall of Science for the
Rocket to Russia
tour, I think. We caught them at KALX, while they were walking from the studio down to their car. We pestered them through the glass window and held up signs saying we were Ramones fans. They humored us and did this very quick interview, and then they got us into the show, which was very sweet. It was Joey and Johnny, I think. That was a big deal for us.

Aaron Cometbus:
A lanky, greasy-haired guy with a Ramones shirt worked at the corner 7-Eleven, where I bought comics and hung out playing video games. When he got married, I went to the wedding. Two kids there cornered me. “Is it true you interviewed the Ramones?” they said. One of the kids was Tom, who ended up playing guitar in Soup. The other was Tim, the little brother of the 7-Eleven guy.

Jason Lockwood:
Tim used to play pinball with us on Durant. There was a period when he decided everybody had to call him Lint. You never give yourself a fuckin’ nickname! Someone gives it to you and you resist it like mad. I told that to everybody I knew, and they were like, “Dude, you’ve got Tim in your belly button.”

Tim Armstrong:
We were drinking beer one night, one of those little parks in Berkeley. Lint, it just stuck. People called me Lint for awhile, but then people would be like, “Check it out—I know your real name. It’s Tim Armstrong!” Like, yeah, yeah, that’s my name. So I got tired of the nickname. Some people still call me Lint, though.

Jesse Michaels:
Tim is quite a go-getter. He just goes for it. He just makes bands whenever he wants to. I met him at a Crimpshrine band practice, and he talked about wanting to do a band, and to do something more like Crimpshrine, something more punk.

Tim Armstrong:
Jesse went away to Pittsburgh to live with his mom, and he reappeared at the end of ’86, early ’87. We had played video games a few times over at Universal Records. We never knew each other really well. We were hanging out and I was like, “Yo, me and Matt Freeman want to start a band. I heard you played drums, I want you to play drums for us.”

He was 17 and I was 21. And he said, “I want to sing.” I was like, “Okay, I was gonna sing, that’s fine, I don’t really care.” That was it.

Jesse Michaels:
I was into it. I don’t know how he picked me out. Well, I shouldn’t say he picked me out, ’cause I kinda wanted to do something, too. We sorta found each other.

Jason Beebout:
Jesse asked us if he could use the name Operation Ivy. I think that was after we’d already switched to Isocracy. And Jesse said, “Oh, that’s cool, can I take that?” We didn’t care. It was more fun to name your band than to stick with it.

Jesse Michaels:
We were doing this sort of semi-ska thing, and I thought it sounded a little bit mod-like. Operation, the whole spy thing, in the two-tone ska sense. I thought it might work.

Bonedog:
One time Jesse was painting a big huge mural at Gilman. I went up to him and said, “What are you painting?” “Oh, it’s my new band, Operation Ivy.” It was this big huge thing. They hadn’t even played a show yet.

Jesse Michaels:
By the time we had four songs, we had a show booked. It’s just one of those things. We got Dave, and Matt and Tim put him through drumming boot camp and he became a drummer.

Dave Mello:
I went to Albany High School. Matt and Tim graduated in ’84, when I was a freshman. The speed metal scene was really big. Fifteen-year-old kids were taking lessons from Joe Satriani in Berkeley, and they could really play their instruments. But that doesn’t mean they knew what they were doing, or why they were doing it.

I started playing in a punk band with my brother Pat. He was a 14-year-old kid with a really high voice. We gave him a mohawk. He sang or yelled, and I was playing drums. My mom used to let us throw afternoon shows in my garage across the street from high school. Basic Radio played two shows, and that’s when I really met Tim and Matt. Tim liked the way I played, so when that band broke up I was the first person they asked.

They’d been out of high school for a couple years. I knew that Matt could probably buy alcohol by now. So when they asked me to play I was really excited. Just from meeting Tim, there was something about the guy. If I joined his band I was gonna have fun, and my world was gonna open up.