Gimme Something Better (64 page)

Homosapiens: Pansy Division 7” 1993

Billie Joe Armstrong:
We were playing a show in Madison Square Garden, and we found out that Bon Jovi was playing. And we were like, “No way, we’re not playing the show. Not with Bon Jovi. We’re not gonna do it.” They were like, “Come on, you guys gotta do it. You guys gotta do it.” It was funny ’cause Weezer and Hole were playing on that gig, too, and they decided not to play. Then Courtney told the people, “If Green Day plays, we’ll play.” And then Weezer was like, “Well, if they play, then we’ll play.” And we said, “Well, if Pansy Division plays, we’ll play.” So we got Pansy Division to play with us, at Madison Square Garden. In front of this almost prestigious kind of crowd, 12,000, 15,000 people, Jon singing “Cocksucker Club.” Okay, now that’s cool. 001-496_PGI_Gimme.indd 418
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Ray Farrell:
Maybe parents wouldn’t understand it, but then Pansy Division becomes something that these kids could relate to. They may not come out of it convinced that they should be gay, but you have to really appreciate the humor that band had, in the way they did it.

Jon Ginoli:
Our songs are kind of cute. We were just not punk enough for a number of people at
Maximum RocknRoll
, but our songs are never about conquest. They were all about mutual desire. It’s not like, I’m going to do this to you, I’m gonna give it to you, baby. It’s like, you’re hot, we’re going to do this together.

Kids get so much anti-gay propaganda and so much anti-gay peer pressure. Here is a gay band in your midst, being as blunt and outspoken as possible. And people responded to that. So having access to the younger ears, we had to be as uncompromised as possible and do our thing and be honest and not condescending. If some parents were upset, well, whoop-de-do. We’re countering propaganda just by being ourselves. And to me that’s punk rock.

Aaron Cometbus:
A bunch of us in Berkeley were professors’ kids. Professors’ kids who never went to college ourselves. A few of the professors were pretty high profile. Not mine, though. He taught economics at the crappy state school in Hayward. My mom was famous in her field, which was basketry and textile art. But it was a very small field.

The slightly older kids in my neighborhood started burning disco records in the schoolyard. I followed them into this wonderful new thing they had found, which was a somewhat confusing mix of Alice Cooper, Jimi Hendrix, Devo and the Dead Boys. Confusing but cool.

Of that crew, one went down in punk history by getting his head split open by the Misfits. Another went on to play in bands, but nowadays his father is probably more well known in punk circles: Ronald Takaki, the Asian-American historian. It’s pretty sad for a punk when your dad is more popular than your band. But this wasn’t the only case of it happening.

Noah Landis:
Aaron was around when I was 12 and first finding punk. He had his greasy hair and his little journalist notebook. He would interview me about the band I had with the kid next door. This was before it was called
Cometbus
. He would make these things out of paper, like a 16th of a sheet of paper, and it was called
Still Too Small
. You’d flip through this little thing and it would have scene reports of bands and things that people were doing. It was annoying that it was so small. But he just found his path and kept at it.

Ben Sizemore:
Aaron played drums in Crimpshrine and was just a real character. Type of guy who knew every nook and cranny of the East Bay. Where to get coffee at three in the morning in East Oakland. Knew the good dumpsters to dive in, stuff like that.

Janelle Hessig:
Aaron was exactly the same as he is now. Maybe a little less disappointed or something back then. He was a big, Lurch-y guy and he smelled really bad.

Robert Eggplant:
Aaron used to be known for convincing people to go on adventures in the middle of shows and missing all the bands.

Ben Saari:
He was two or three years older than me, which when you’re 15 is hugely older. He really looked out for me, showed me around, stuck up for me. I was the new kid from the suburbs, I didn’t know fucking anything, I was an easy target. Aaron always made sure that I was invited to everything, and introduced me to the idea that I could do stuff on my own. I could book shows, I could be in a band, I could write. He was sort of an intellectual scholar, while a lot of people just wanted to get high.

Bucky Sinister:
He had this way of living when he was 18, and he hasn’t changed his mind about it. He’s still living now the way he lived then. He lives a very ascetic, minimal existence. He can move easily. He can go from one place to another. If you want your geographic freedom you can’t have a lot of stuff. And I think that was always a motivating factor.

It’s like, how much do you want to work for your stuff? So why don’t you work less and do more? Aaron got a lot done. It’s not like he was just a slacker, or a drug addict or whatever. That’s why people would let him crash at their place, because he was providing, he was giving some kind of entertainment back. And chronicling a lot of it.

Ben Sizemore:
Aaron put out
Cometbus
pretty religiously, since the early ’80s or so. Great writer. He was always around selling zines.

Bucky Sinister:
It was very personal. As far as zines go, it was definitely autobiographical, but he’d reach out, he’d interview people.

Fat Mike:
Cometbus
was interesting—all the tour diary stuff.

Bucky Sinister:
People wanted him to do signings and readings for
Cometbus
, and he was like, “No, never.” He still has never done one. People wanted to put him on TV, interview him, all that kind of shit—no. He won’t do it. Doesn’t want to. He sticks by it.

Anna Joy Springer:
Aaron was my friend, and I saw one of his
Cometbus
zines and I was just like, “Oh, so you have pictures of women in here, and then an article written by one woman, but everything else is written by guys. That seems really fucked up.” He was just livid, and called me a bitch. But that was a moment when I was feeling like the scene had nothing to do with me. We actually became lovers later. And he now knows more about dyke and feminist literature than I do.

Bucky Sinister:
Almost every other zine at the time was about either politics or music.
Cometbus
and
Absolutely Zippo
weren’t. They were about personal stuff. Stories, or traveling, or where to get the cheapest burrito, anything. It was like how to live your life, and people would get ideas from them. Now there’s a bunch of that autobiographical kind of memoir punk shit, but those were the first two. Everybody goes back to them.

Aaron Cometbus:
I was living in a little warehouse on the waterfront. It was wonderful and cheap. Paul Curran and I each paid 50 bucks, and the bands that rehearsed there split the other 50.

Bill Schneider:
It was called the House of Toast. I was never quite clear on whether it was a practice space or Aaron’s house. Aaron slept in a closet. He was the guy in the other room that we woke up at four in the afternoon, when we started playing music.

Mike K:
He just seemed like a serious, deep guy. The other people were more goofy. He was the weird grumpy older guy that we knew we were bugging.

Aaron Cometbus:
A couple guys from one of the bands, the Skin Flutes, suggested we play some music together.

Bill Schneider:
The Skin Flutes was our high school punk rock band in Walnut Creek. It was me, Mike Kirsch, some different drummers and Scott Meyer singing. Scott was very much the crazy guy of our group. He was six foot seven, blue hair, dressed completely out there.

Aaron Cometbus:
These guys were in like four bands each, rehearsing all day long, and yet at the end of the day they still wanted to do more, to try more. I liked that. And so, we played together all that spring, Bill, Mike and I. Without a band name, or any plan to take it further.

Bill Schneider:
After band practice, me and Mike would stay and hang out with Aaron. We started jammin’ and writin’ songs.

Aaron Cometbus:
Then I left on tour. I was Green Day’s roadie on their first few tours. Late at night when the rest of the band was sleeping or partying or whatever, Billie and I started collaborating on songs.

Billie Joe Armstrong:
Those early tours were like Green Day-
Cometbus
tours. You couldn’t tell who was headlining. Was it Green Day supporting
Cometbus
or was it
Cometbus
supporting Green Day? Aaron always had a shitload of magazines to sell on the road. It was great.

We started writing songs together on a ferry, going from Victoria to Vancouver. I think I whined to him a lot about girls. Aaron had a very romantic vision of the world, and of the ethics and culture of punk rock. Punk rock is like a bible to him. There is deep, deep meaning to him that goes beyond waving the flag. Almost the spiritual aspect of punk rock. I learned a lot from Aaron. Those songs ended up being some of the songs we used for Pinhead Gunpowder.

Bill Schneider:
Aaron said, “We should all play together.” And that’s how we started Pinhead.

Aaron Cometbus:
Organically, even accidentally. Which is why it was so annoying later when people called us a “supergroup” or thought of the band as something fabricated. It was just a matter of bringing together the natural elements that were already there.

Mike K:
Aaron had gone to Olympia, Arcata, he had moved to some different places. “Pinhead Gunpowder” was a bulk tea at the Arcata co-op.

Aaron Cometbus:
Pinhead was also a conscious effort on my part to cast my lot in with the younger kids, the second generation at Gilman. Already among the original Gilman folks there was a lot of cynicism. There were ambitious people just dying to use the scene as a stepping-stone. There were bloated alcoholics playing fake metal. There were people talking about how the old days were better. It was just like any scene anywhere, except that we had Blatz. We had this tremendous new wave of fresh energy that had arrived to kick our ass. Forming Pinhead Gunpowder was a way to take part in that. For me, it was really a matter of life or death. Do something new and exciting or get stuck with the dinosaurs. Besides, having a band that not only all went to shows but who all danced at shows was for me a dream come true.

Bill Schneider:
We did a couple 7-inches with Mike, and then he moved to the city and we didn’t see him as much.

Mike K:
At some point, we played a benefit for war resisters. Everybody there was really into that old-style punk thing, spitting and throwing cigarettes. Nobody talked about what was happening in the world. It was this total apolitical event that just happened to have something positive attached to it. Meanwhile, people were getting killed.

The question became, is it important to maintain this image, this punk caricature that was created almost to be funny? Or are we going to deal with the facts that have allowed this horrible situation to unfold? I started getting more comfortable with the idea that it was okay to do different things. I didn’t have to turn Gilman into my vision of what it should be. It was okay for me to go in a different direction and pursue the part of punk that I was interested in.

Bill Schneider:
I think that he told us he wanted to quit the band because Green Day was signing to a major label, or something stupid like that.

Mike K:
When the major-label feeding frenzy started, that drove a wedge between a lot of people. But even though Green Day was getting bigger, they hadn’t really gotten to a level where it was really noticeably different. That wasn’t the primary thing. It wasn’t like, “Oh my god, he’s this fuckin’ movie star and I don’t want to be in a band with them.”

Bill Schneider:
Mike was always way more political than the rest of us. He was tighter with the
Maximum RocknRoll
people. So he quit Pinhead Gunpowder, and Jason started playing with us.

Two weeks after Jason joined Pinhead Gunpowder, we took my mom’s station wagon on a two-week tour of the Northwest. Aaron gave us all scabies and I met my wife on that tour. That’s the first thing I ever gave her.

Andy Asp:
I remember playing an afternoon show with Jawbreaker and this band Jolt at a warehouse somewhere in Oakland with four people there. It’s amazing that Jawbreaker has had this wonderful afterlife, that people are still so appreciative. But I remember playing some shows with them where there was
nobody
there.

Davey Havok:
There was the white-belt Spock rockers wearing their backpacks on the dance floor, just bobbing around. That crossed over into Jawbreaker, who were fantastic, combining a little bit of Oscar Wilde with some seriousness. And some great pop.