Gimme Something Better (63 page)

Lynn Breedlove:
I was in San Leandro, the most racist town in California, and I knew that I was queer from the moment I fell in love with my kindergarten teacher. As I became a teenager, my pals used to pick me up in their pickup truck and take me to Clover-dale. At the time, I was still listening to Fleetwood Mac and Journey and all that crap. As soon as I opened the door, they’d crank Black Flag and I’d be like, “Turn that shit down!”

Then I got totally addicted. It was hilarious! “Six Pack,” “T.V. Party,” “Gimme Gimme Gimme” . . . Oh my god! Funny funny funny. Those guys were like stand-up comics set to music and it was all about getting rage out, which—guess what?—I had a lot of, being a queer.

In the ’80s I mostly hung out in San Francisco and went to a lot of straight punk shows. I went to see Tragic Mulatto a lot ’cause they had a dyke drummer. I was like, “Ooh! There’s a dyke, there’s a dyke! Oh my god!”

In the meantime, I was at home goin’ to Cal State Hayward and running around the house, fuckin’ yelling into a beer can to Black Flag CDs, doing the punk rock face. I really wanted to be Henry Rollins, but that was a boy thing, a straight-guy thing.

After I got clean and sober, somehow the ten years of speed rage and the Henry Rollins and the fact I actually heard some lesbionic folk songs, where they used the female pronoun—all that came together. I thought, I can do this! Alright, punk rock love songs about sex. I’ll channel Henry and Jim Morrison and Patti Smith, I’ll get all of my pals to come and throw panties. We’ll do this our way. Tribe 8 was the first all-dyke punk band that was singin’ about being dykes. There were bands that had dykes in them, but they were singin’ “you” instead of “she.” And that’s just cheatin’.

Tribe 8. Tribade was the original word for lesbians back in the turn of the century. A tribade practices tribadism—tribbin’, flat crackers, rubbin’ your flat parts together. Flat Crackers—that should’ve been our name.

Matt Wobensmith saw us playing at Klubstitute with Diet Popstitute’s band. Outpunk put out our first record, us and Pansy Division.

Jon Ginoli:
I started playing under the name Pansy Division by myself, just me and my guitar in ’91. I got a few go-go dancers to dance behind me at Klubstitute. Tribe 8, it was their second show. I remember thinking, “Wow! They’ve got a whole band! And they’re all dykes! Man, this is great!” I loved it. I thought, “I wanna do this with guys!” Seeing them, actually, made me want to go out and get a whole band.

Lynn Breedlove:
We meshed the two cultures for the first time. There were no gay bands going, “We’re fags! We’re dykes!” There was only us and Pansy Division. Matt put a lot of energy into publicizing us. He was super organized. He got the
Advocate
to come do a photo shoot with me and Gary Floyd and some other guy that was in a hot queer band. Then Jello gave me a blow job onstage at Klubstitute, proving his dedication.

Jello Biafra:
I didn’t realize how dirt covered it was until it was already in my mouth. Where did they store this thing, the Humane Society?

Wendy-O Matik:
I went to my first Tribe 8 show at Klub Kommotion in San Francisco. Most women at the show took off their shirts. Lynn Breedlove put on a cop outfit and pulled her cock out and got a gay guy to suck her cock, then eventually castrated herself and flung the cock out into the audience. We all went crazy. It totally changed my life.

Lynn Breedlove:
Good Vibrations donated some dicks to us. They have a rejects box ’cause if you order a rubber dick, and you’re in Idaho, and then the dick comes and you’re like, “Ooh, that has too many veins, it’s too realistic, I wanted the Porpoise,” you send it back. The law is that you can’t sell a rubber dick that has already been sold, because god knows where they put that thing. Mere soap and water will never get that cunt juice off.

So I’d just go to Good Vibes and grab a box. I like ’em big and realistic. Because it has to hurt the rapist out there in the crowd watching. When he sees the knife going through the dick, he has to feel it in his own dick. That’s my idea of aversion therapy.

I kept needing to amp it up. Everybody had seen a rubber dick, everybody had seen the blow jobs. The knife was big. Then it got bigger—like 13 inches long with jagged edges. Now what? I got a chain saw.

During all this, I started Lickety Split. It was the first and only all-girl bike messenger company in America. Babes would call from all over the world, and say, “I’m comin’ to San Francisco and I need a job. Can I work at Lickety?” We had about 100 women working for us over the ten-year period.

Kegger:
I grew up down in L.A., where the SST boys ruled the scene, always talking shit about women. I had gone to all these hardcore shows in L.A. but it was all dudes. I was so stoked when I got here. I had never seen chicks going crazy.

Bucky Sinister:
Kegger was in the Hags. Oh man, the Hags were fuckin’ scary, man. Jesus Christ. At the time, S.F. butch was flannel shirts and the Indigo Girls, right? The Hags were these crazy metal punk girls and they were all gacked out of their mind with speed. They rode dirt bikes and skateboards.

Matt Wobensmith:
Basically a bunch of tattooed, rough, hard-living San Francisco fucking rock ’n’ roll dykes. I loved the idea that there were roving girl gangs.

Kegger:
Hags SF were a sisterhood of crazy rocker dykes that weren’t going to back down to dudes who gave us shit. There was Stacy Quijas, Car Crash, Mona, Head Hopper, Julian, Fiver, Alice B. Brave (I think she was a Hag), Becky Slane, Boomer and Joan of Anarchy—she was crazy. That was my crew. Wendy-O Matik and Noah from Neurosis were our buddies so we’d go to their house in the East Bay.

We had vests and we spray-painted “Hags SF” on everything. We’d go to Oakland and we’d say, “We’ve come to fuck your women and drink your beer!” We were just obnoxious fuckers. I guess we were trying to outcore everyone. We just fought everywhere. We’d fight on buses.

Bucky Sinister:
The Hags all went out with strippers, these beautiful high femme girls. You would see them hanging out at the Market Street Cinema and some of the nastier strip clubs in the Tenderloin, waiting to pick up their girlfriend after work. They all packed dildos in their pants, visible like in Spinal Tap. The strap-on was still a little taboo at the time—it was before the whole tranny-boy scene. And they would pop up their skateboard and hit you in the face with it.

One night, I was in the Lower Haight and I was on acid, and I start hearing skateboard sounds outside my window. And these nasty, nasty conversations—like Redd Foxx nasty—about some girl they both fucked. I looked outside and it was a couple of the Hags. They were saying the basest things I had ever heard. It was really frightening on acid.

Lynn Breedlove:
Feminism in San Francisco has always been like 15 years ahead of everybody else.

I actually wrote a song called “Menstrual Revolutionary” which never made it onto a recording, thank god, because it was ridiculous. We had friends who would just wear their bleeding pants. Just skanky, you know, the same pants every month.

Jibz Cameron:
I thought Lynn was gross. I didn’t have any reference for what was going on. I was just like, “That gross lesbian, eew!” I have this weird thing with feminism. It felt like hippieism to me. It was whiny and dorky. I didn’t buy it.

Wendy-O Matik:
Lynn didn’t take any shit. If someone was fucking shit up, she’d stop the song, grab the fucking guy by the neck, and toss him outside. You felt really protected.

Lynn Breedlove:
After awhile people would say, “My boyfriend’s scared to come, everybody says that boys’ll get killed.” So then, there were no more boys at the Tribe 8 shows, and the only mixed shows were at Gilman. Tribe 8 shows were always packed, like 500 people.

So what’s the point of this whole story? Oh yeah, Miranda July got her start at Gilman and so did Green Day. And they’re millionaires, billionaires. They’re huge! They’re gonna be president. And Rancid, they got their start at Gilman, too, and they’re on the radio. What happened to me? Why am I not president? Everyone keeps sayin’, “It’s ’cause you’re a dyke and you’re a dick-chopper and people don’t want a dyke dick-chopper for president.” If I had it all to do over again, I would’ve just sang sappy love songs in a major key.

Jon Ginoli:
The first time Pansy Division played as a full band was at Klubstitute. We were nervous. It’s not that we were a gay band, but the fact that we were really in your face about it. We thought, this is gonna piss people off! If we form a band like this, we are just going to be
hated
.

Jesse Luscious:
They are probably some of the most fearless people I know. “He Whipped My Ass in Tennis (Then I Fucked His Ass in Bed)”—incredible song.

Jon Ginoli:
There’s our song “Curvature” about curved dicks. There was “The Cocksucker Club” about somebody trying to figure out his sexuality. Our most popular song is called “Bunnies,” which describes the early part of a relationship, where you just fuck like bunnies.

At the time, there was a shitty, sludgy, non-melodic style of S.F. punk at the Chatterbox and later the Chameleon. Bands were sort of like biker punk and I just thought, god, this music is just so fucking stupid. That’s what people like around here? I had never gone to Gilman Street before we played there. I’d never heard of Operation Ivy and Green Day and Isocracy and Blatz.

Matt Wobensmith:
Jon came by Epicenter with a demo and I thought it was okay. It had promise. Jon was a little bit older than I was, coming at it from a different angle, but I saw the whole thing as connected. I definitely saw a place for Pansy Division and I was really shocked when Larry Livermore signed them. That was really ballsy for Larry to take that chance.

Jon Ginoli:
The “Homo Christmas” single came out in November. We identified with the pop punk sound, the more melodic stuff. Suddenly it seemed like we were in the right place at the right time. After we’d finally gotten a record deal set up, we played at Gilman. And lo and behold, we were opening for Tribe 8 and Bikini Kill.

What was sad about the night was that even in enlightened Berkeley, enlightened Bay Area, the sexist shit from the crowd, the catcalls—it was so stupid. If you were writing a movie about this and you wrote down that dialogue, it would seem unbelievable. I could imagine this back in the Midwest, but I thought people would be smarter here.

By the middle of ’93, our record was coming out and we did a three-week tour around the country. People came out of the woodwork. The audiences were a lot more straight than gay. This has been true generally—we play a style of music that most gay people don’t care about. But we made money, everything went really well.

I was on my way to Lookout! on BART and I ran into Chris Applegren. We were changing trains at MacArthur station, and there was Tré from Green Day. Chris introduced us. We got on our train and Chris said that Green Day liked our album. I was like, “Wow, I’d love to open for them.” So he gave me Tré’s phone number. When I called, Tré was watching TV and he didn’t sound very interested in talking. He just said, “So, you guys have a van?” I said yeah, and he said, “Oh, alright. Well, I’ll let you go.” I thought, that was a pretty offhand dismissal.

Then six weeks later, he called me up and said, “We’re doing a tour this summer for about a month. Do you want to come open for us?” We were like, “Yeeeeeeaaaaw!”

I talked to Green Day about it. I said, “We’re really glad you picked us. But what were you thinking?” And they said, “We’ve got all these mainstream fans all of a sudden, and we really want to do something to show that we’re not just your average, typical mainstream band.”

Jason Beebout:
They could have done anything, and they were like, “Okay, fuck it—let’s go on tour with a gay band.”

Matt Wobensmith:
I got to be a roadie for parts of that. Pansy Division, the most obnoxiously gay band in the world. Not only was it a great strategic move, and it was great for Pansy Division, I think it helped sort of insulate them a little bit. Maybe helped their psyche.

Billie Joe Armstrong:
We wanted to bring a band that was a good band but had some shock value to it, that was for real. It wasn’t necessarily Marilyn Manson being spooky or something like that. We thought of it as being sort of educational. It was like, yeah, this is something that we come from. This is a place where there’s that freedom and that open-mindedness.

It was great. I remember one show, people were sitting there and watching them play, kids would just be rocking out, not really understanding, and then slowly they would be, “What’s going on?” And then Chris came out on the microphone and said, “Has anybody figured out we’re a bunch of fags yet?”

Jon Ginoli:
The first show, in Calgary, Alberta, was actually one of the worst. There were people flipping off Chris, who’s more flamboyant than I am, and throwing stuff at him.

Green Day’s manager called us about a month later and said, “Look, they’re going to play arenas. And they want you to open for them.” We were just like, “Oh my god!” We started our band with really modest ambitions. We never thought it was going to go over with a general audience.

San Diego Sports Arena with 11,000 people. I’ll never forget that. It was just so disorienting ’cause we’re used to playing to 100 people. I was stuck at the microphone singing. I really wanted to be floating in the air above it, just looking around and taking it all in. Groups of people yelling at us and flipping us off and throwing drinks at us. People moshing and cheering.

I had the most conversations with Tré. So before the show I asked him, “Are you nervous?” and he said, “Fuck, yeah!” That might have been the last time Tré Cool was nervous about anything.