Gimme Something Better (65 page)

Adam Pfahler:
When we first had a really good Gilman show where we were the headlining band and packed it out, that was such a great feeling. It was so awesome. Because half the people there were either in other bands or people that were friends. That’s a really exciting thing that happens when you’re in a band. It’s just a big party that happens to be in a venue.

A. C. Thompson:
Everyone loved Jawbreaker. Except that Blake couldn’t sing, he had a terrible voice.

Bill Schneider:
It’s funny, it took an L.A. band to move up and bring the East and West Bay together. Blake moved out to the East Bay and bridged the gap. I lived with him in a house on 41st.

Jason White:
Jawbreaker lived in the city but they were kind of an East Bay band.

Fat Mike:
Were Jawbreaker East Bay or West Bay? I was gonna name them as one really good band from San Francisco. But I guess they moved here, too.

Bucky Sinister:
They were like a prototypical emo band. What we now know as emo.

Adam Pfahler:
If you were in L.A. in the mid-’80s, some of those hardcore shows, there were a lot of meatheads and it was very guy energy, jock energy. So we were grateful that women were into our band. It was all by design. Something about the way Blake was writing words that appealed to women specifically. In the stories that he told, he wasn’t objectifying women like in so many rock bands. It was more like he was just telling short stories where everyone’s playing an equal part.

People don’t talk about it, but at a certain time in a band’s life, if they get too popular or stick around too long, your friends stop coming to the shows, and you’re playing to strangers. It gets a little bit weird. But we never did a tour in a bus. We were always just in our van.

Econochrist, we met those guys on tour and did a good long chunk with Fifteen and Econochrist and Filth in the summer of 1990. Just the gnarliest, hottest summer, no air-conditioning in the van. Those bands were totally fucking insane. They would just walk right into your van and sit down and light an M-80 and walk away. Or you’d go back to your van and the inside would be covered in Filth graffiti.

Mike Filth:
I wasn’t
that
mean! It was probably Jake or our roadie. That’s more likely.

Adam Pfahler:
The very first time we played in front of a lot of people was when we played with Nirvana.

Bill Schneider:
We were touring with four guys in a ’78 Dodge van. Nirvana had ten buses, and our van was parked next to the ten buses at a loading dock.

Adam Pfahler:
We started the tour in Albuquerque. The place was filled up with a bunch of kids that wanted to see Nirvana. It was more people than I’d ever seen. It wasn’t a rock star moment. It was one of those, “Oh, Jesus Christ, what have we gotten ourselves into?”

Bill Schneider:
They got a really good response. Then it was like, “This huge band really likes our band. Maybe it won’t be all bad. Maybe we should do this.”

Adam Pfahler:
We were doing just fine on our little indie label, selling 30,000 records or whatever, and touring a good amount of the year. We were making a living. We didn’t see any reason why we had to sign. And we were loudmouths about that.

Bill Schneider:
Jawbreaker resisted and resisted and resisted. They had a hard time with it. They had people beatin’ down their doors to sign them because everybody was looking for the next East Bay thing.

Adam Pfahler:
We met Nirvana’s A&R guy, and he started calling up. And then it was like, “Oh shit. Okay, people are starting to call us. How do we do this?” We didn’t even know how it was done.

So we called Dave, who was then working for Cahn Management, who managed Green Day. We said, “We’re getting a lot of calls. How does this work? What do you do?”

We went back and forth. We labored on it, and we knew that a lot of the kids that were on our side were gonna be pissed off if we did this. We knew that
Maximum RocknRoll
was gonna come out fuckin’ two barrels blazing. And well they should. ’Cause that was their thing. Politically, we knew that was gonna happen.

Billie Joe Armstrong:
Jawbreaker got it worse than we did. What happened to them was brutal. It was bullshit.

Adam Pfahler:
There was huge backlash. Because we were loudmouths. When we 180’d and changed our mind and jumped ship, we took a lot of shit for that. And that was the main story of our band. We were hypocrites, and whatever was gonna become of our band, we probably deserved it.

Bill Schneider:
They’re good at beatin’ themselves up about it, but it made more sense than you’d think. They had seen Green Day do it with complete success.

When they decided to do a major-label record, Blake had to have surgery. He had to completely change the way he sang, or wasn’t going to be able to sing for the rest of his life. All these sorta things all lined up at the same time, so that Jawbreaker changed just enough, when their major-label record came out.

Adam Pfahler:
When we signed to the bigger label, we went on a couple of tours with the Foo Fighters. We would play those radio station shows where they get a shitload of bands together, like the Christmas show for Live 105. We did a couple of those up and down the coast. We were playing with Oasis and Radiohead and No Doubt. We really had no business being there.

They would do these promotional things, where kids would wait and you’d sign your posters promoting your record. I remember feeling really embarrassed about that. It was just weird. Because we were coming from the punk rock thing, where anyone in the crowd could walk up onstage at any moment and take your guitar away from you, and you’d be fine with that. Or you could fall into the crowd, and that would be cool.

Jason White:
It didn’t work out for Samiam. It didn’t work out for Jawbreaker. The fact that
24 Hour Revenge Therapy
sold more than their major-label release was telling.

Adam Pfahler:
We did Europe a couple of times. We got on good tours with Sonic Youth and the Beastie Boys. And Pavement and Beck and Rancid and Bikini Kill. But I don’t even think we even played that many shows. We never went to Japan. The only big festival we ever did was the one in Australia. Other than that it was us on our own, just kind of grinding it out.

The only show I remember we all agreed that we would do was the
Jon Stewart Show
. But that never happened. We didn’t get huge. We didn’t sell any records. And no one knows our band. It’s just that we have this great following of this very small group of people who just love our band. And a lot of those people started bands themselves and got popular. That’s why our name is still out there, because these younger bands loved our band.

Dallas Denery:
I would bump into Matt Freeman every once in awhile. He was always telling me about the new band they were trying to get going.

Sergie Loobkoff:
All the bands right after Op Ivy that Tim and Matt were in didn’t do well. People didn’t like them.

Tim Armstrong:
Ian in Fugazi had said something to me that really stuck: “It’s always good to start a band with your friends.” That was the idea for me and Matt. But it took a year for Matt to start Rancid with me. He wouldn’t do it.

Matt Freeman:
He managed to stay sober during the MDC tour. It was fun playin’ MDC songs, but it wasn’t my band, I worked for them. Five dollars a day or whatever it was.

Dave Dictor:
Matt played, and Tim was our roadie. Lived in a van with them for three months. I think they’re good souls.

Matt Freeman:
I learned a lot bein’ in that band. But unless it was with Tim, I’m never going to jump in full steam. I don’t really wanna play with anybody else.

Tim Armstrong:
I got sober at the end of ’91 and ended up moving into the punk rock house on Adeline Street. I didn’t have a job. Operation Ivy started selling some records. A little royalties were coming in.

Ben Sizemore:
This kid Brett moved into where we were living.

Tim Armstrong:
Brett Reed would always hang out on Telegraph. He was a skater, punk rock kid, just learning how to play drums. So he was perfect.

Janelle Hessig:
Me and Hollie ran into Tim on Telegraph when he was first putting Rancid together. He was trying to come up with a name for it, and he was like, “It’s either gonna be called Rancid or Base Head. I kind of like Base Head because it’s like a double meaning. Like a crackhead, or like a bass head, like a cabinet.” We were like, “Definitely Base Head. Go with Base Head.”

Ben Sizemore:
I remember giving Lint shit, like, “Rancid? That’s kind of a cheesy name.” And he got all pissed off at me.

Tim Armstrong:
So we started up the band. We made a single on Lookout! But Lookout! had changed to me, it didn’t feel the same. David Hayes was gone.

Matt Freeman:
We wanted to make that 7-inch, and we had to guarantee the loss they might take with our Operation Ivy royalties. And also, we didn’t sound like Operation Ivy.

Christopher Appelgren:
Lookout! did their first 7-inch. There was a plan that we would put out a series of 7-inches, and then an album or CD. But there wasn’t a lot of enthusiasm.

Larry Livermore:
I was not being very open-minded. Although I had told them I would put out any record that they did, post-Op Ivy, I was not very forthcoming about it.

Tim Armstrong:
It was different. It was the sound that we were around, our environment. I was living with Ben Econochrist. It was a different vibe. It wasn’t ’87 anymore.

Christopher Appelgren:
At the time they were just this scrappy, metallic punk. They hadn’t embraced some of the more melodic elements. The conversations we had at the time, it was almost a backlash to Operation Ivy. They wanted to be tougher, so as not to get called ska boys.

Larry Livermore:
I had some arguments with Tim. I think they wanted to put a gun, a pistol on the cover. In the style of NWA or something. I was like, “That’s just not a good message to send.” He was like, “Oh, you don’t know what it’s like, living down in south Berkeley, you live in north Berkeley.” I was one block north of University, basically downtown Berkeley, which is no paradise either. That was the kind of back-and-forth going on. I was like, it’s okay, I’ll put the record out. But I felt used in a way, to put out that 7-inch first, to promote them.

Christopher Appelgren:
Tim and Matt came by the office and said, “We’re gonna do a record on Epitaph. Mr. Brett really likes us. He’s offered us a great deal, but basically he’s just really into the band, and really excited about it.”

Larry Livermore:
Tim and I had a big shouting match out in front of the house, which was the closest to bad blood we’d ever had. But it worked out well for them. Epitaph probably did better for them than I could have done anyway.

Let’s Go: Matt Freeman and Tim Armstrong of Rancid

Tim Armstrong:
We got along with Gurewitz from the very beginning. He always loved Op Ivy. I loved Epitaph. The records they were making, and NOFX, Pennywise, Bad Religion, the Offspring. The new thing that was happening. And we were the only band from Northern California.

Sergie Loobkoff:
People were sort of laughing, like, “What are these guys doing? These guys aren’t punk rockers. Op Ivy wasn’t punk. Tim and Matt’s bands in high school, that wasn’t punk.” And then they came out like gangbusters. Like, really punk. It took a little while before everyone realized what a great band Rancid was.

Fraggle:
They grew really fast. They went from opening at Gilman to being second only to NOFX shows two months later.

Jibz Cameron:
Tim was like, “Yeah, I want to make money.” He didn’t have any bones about it. That was cool. I think he was kinda bummed about Operation Ivy. And he’s such a rock star. He’s like a natural that way.

Tim Armstrong:
Listen to me, that’s a misconception, that we had this hunger to get back on it. I’m living my life. We had a drummer that could barely play. We were playing Fraggle’s house, playin’ Nando’s house, playin’ Gilman Street for a year before we got $100. I just wanted to do it, man. It wasn’t until Lars actually joined that this shit started to get crazy. When we started getting really big again.

Billie Joe came and played a set with us, played guitar. And that worked out, but obviously he’s in another band. That’s when we decided to get Lars.

Lars Frederiksen:
I already knew who Tim was. There was an instant connection. He came up to me and he said, “Hey, how you doing, I’m Tim. I really like your guitar.” Just the coolest guy. The way I grew up, you kinda sniff people out. “Hmm, not too sure about that one.” But instantly,
boom
.