Gimme Something Better (67 page)

Jeff Ott:
Sober people don’t do well with celebrity. Part of me was like, “Okay, they’re totally the same punk band as they ever were, sober, doing big stuff.” But a lot of people who got into the aesthetic of punk, and were more on the English band side of stuff, they were more severe about, “Oh, they sold out. They’re not a punk band.” I would look at that person’s life and go, “Well, you’re not a punk in the first place, so who are you to go around saying anything anyway? You’re a fucking idiot in a costume who’s acting all day.”

Lars Frederiksen:
Every manager we’ve ever had doesn’t want to work with us, because we’ve always done whatever the fuck we wanted to do from day one. Whether it was record labels or whatever, if they said, “Do this,” we’re like, “Fuck you, we’re not gonna.” You want us to do press? We’re not gonna do press for five years.

You can’t just walk around blindly and let somebody else handle your shit, because they’re not always gonna have your best interests. So all that did was made us more insular. It’s hard to kinda break in, to get to us. It’s like, I don’t fuckin’ know you. At that time that’s what it kinda was.

Dallas Denery:
It’s hard to imagine it got to a point where they’re selling more records than the Buzzcocks. I mean, they’re really great. But when you go back and think the Buzzcocks were really great, and the Ramones were really great. And they didn’t even get close to that. That is really surprising.

Lochlan McHale:
I heard Rancid in San Diego through Taylor Steel surf videos. I believe it was off the
Let’s Go
album. Every day we’d drive to school and listen to that album. I went to their shows and met the guys, hung out. Lars and I hit it off. He showed me producing, how to play guitar, the business side, the fun side. Through that I met Tim, and they kinda took me under their wing and it was like, okay, what do you want to learn? Rancid stuff is a history book. It’s real story oriented. It’s a little bit more hooky than New York hardcore.

Eric Ozenne:
Lars and Tim have helped so many bands by getting them shows. Doing record labels that help other bands. They’d take young bands out there on the fringes under their wing, and bring them back in and help them out. People have actually seen money come from Rancid, put back into businesses for the scene. To help them do things, like, say, screen printing. Rancid put a lot of stuff back out there.

Lochlan McHale:
If you look at it, for punk to be good you gotta have something to say. Majority of the people with things politically to say are the immigrants, or people who are facing struggles from the government. So what’s Tim doing right now? Echo Park, a huge Latino community. Those kids have a lot to say right now. The stuff that’s going down with them trying to kick out people who don’t have green cards. Tim’s supporting all sorts of those bands.

Orlando X:
You see Lars out all the time. He still goes out. They didn’t all of a sudden get big and just leave, they’ve all contributed something back. They haven’t forgotten where it got started. So that’s really cool.

Nick 13:
Steve List introduced me and Tim. I was wearing a Crimpshrine shirt. Tim was a big Crimpshrine fan. He gave me his number and said to give him a call, “Maybe we can put your band in a show.” Which he also told every other band about the same slot on the same show.

Stormy Shepherd:
When they tour, every single night they handpick a local opener to play their shows. They do a syndicated radio show online, and they start talking months in advance, saying, “Hey, we’re going to be touring, send us your demos.” Tim and Lars listen to everything, and then they send me a list, by city, of every band that they want to have open.

Martin Sprouse:
They’re still going. They could not put out a record for 20 years, and sell out shows everywhere. People love what they’re about. It’s different than what I’m about. Even though I still have a lot of love and respect for those guys.

Dallas Denery:
If you want to put it in perspective, the Rolling Stones put out a record in 1966 that has “19th Nervous Breakdown” on it. Twenty years later, they’re putting out stuff nobody wants to hear. So in 1987, Op Ivy records its first record. And in 2007, Rancid is still a viable band.

Adam Pfahler:
It’s a pretty amazing story. There’s a handful of things that are still going, that were going back then. It’s pretty inspiring.

Anna Brown:
Now Lint’s this punk institution. He’s like Joe Strummer to a generation of people that are in high school.

Davey Havok:
I was surrounded by music since I was very, very young. At family functions, I would get paid a dollar to sing into a wooden spoon. I’m sure everyone thought it was very adorable, that the little boy was singing “Mister Moon” and “The Dark-town Strutters Ball.” Going to the malls in Sacramento, I was always enamored of all the punks and death rockers. I told my mom, “Oh, I want a mohawk, and I wanna get tattooed,” and she was like, “I’ll put my head in the oven if you do.” When I was 12 years old I moved to Ukiah.

Nick 13:
Ukiah is about two hours north of both San Francisco and the East Bay. There were a lot of hardcore communes, mixed with this more conservative redneck hillbilly mentality. It’s definitely a strange place. Ukiah was the final staging ground for Jonestown. Charles Manson spent time in Mendocino County. Those two serial killers, Leonard Lake and Charles Ng. The guy who killed Polly Klaas, they caught him in Ukiah.

It was a place where people came to hide out. These weird punkers or kids from group homes, you knew that they were either running from some drug deal or group home, or someone wanted to kill them. They would show up in Ukiah for a week, and we would always dub whatever punk tapes they had in their backpacks, and then you’d never see them again.

Davey Havok:
I predated Trenchcoat Mafia, but that’s pretty much where I was at. Combat boots, black jeans, silver chains, Madonna silver bracelets, dyed black hair, black T-shirts, black jackets.

Nick 13:
The first few seasons of
90210
—everybody looked like that. You had to have a mullet, you had to wear spandex biking shorts and Oakley shades, you had to drive a mini-truck, you had to listen to Vanilla Ice and Paula Abdul. People looked at you like there was something wrong, because you listened to the Ramones and wore creepers. In a school of approximately 2,000 kids, there were a dozen people that had any interest in punk.

Davey Havok:
We had to leave to get anything, whether it was
Maximum RocknRoll
, music, Manic Panic, pyramid studs, anything. Villains in San Francisco had the Christian Death shirt with Jesus shooting up on it. Daljeet’s had the Doc Martens. Back then, the girls who were wearing the two-toned Wayfarers and the Guess jeans also had them draped over some oxblood Doc Martens. Which was weird.

Nick 13:
I met Dave in high school when he was a freshman and I was a sophomore. He had a Misfits shirt on. He seemed really happy and that kind of annoyed me. My first instinct was to hit him. But he was so personable, and well liked and popular. We’ve been friends ever since.

Davey Havok:
Because we were really secluded, our influences came from all over the place. I was listening to everything from Black Flag and Descendents and Negative Approach and Dag Nasty and Minor Threat, to you know, Bauhaus and the Cure and Joy Division, Duran Duran. Most of what I listened to predated me.

Nick 13:
The only punk show that ever happened in Ukiah was the Lookouts, Lawrence Livermore’s band. Before we got our own bands and started playing our own shows.

Davey Havok:
As soon as any of us was able to drive, we started driving down to see shows at Gilman Street and the Phoenix Theater. I’d go see Dead and Gone all the time, and Neurosis. Those are fantastic bands.

Nick 13:
I went to shows in S.F., because they’d be advertised in the
Chronicle
. Fifteen of us would pile into a van and go to see the Circle Jerks in the city. Like ’89, 90.

Davey Havok:
We started the band AFI when I was 15 years old. We called dibs on instruments. I was the musical theater choir boy so I got dibs on singing, and the rest came together. We named AFI to have an acronym. Because it was such a facet of punk rock and hardcore and thrash. TSOL and MOD and DI and RKL, DRI. So we wanted an acronym band. That allowed us to play with a lot of things. Our publishing company would be Anthems For Insubordinates one year, and then we’d change it to something else. We’d say, “If you want a free patch or sticker, send a self-addressed envelope to ‘Asking For It,’ at P.O. Box . . .”

In the scene back then, everyone had such glorious stage names. Unfortunately, I’m Davey Havok. I have such a horrible name compared to Darby Crash, or Dinah Cancer, or C. C. DeVille. They’re far more ingenious. One of my favorites from the rock ’n’ roll scene, Nikki Sixx, I think that’s hot. Iggy Pop, probably one of the best names.

Influence 13 was the first real punk rock band in Ukiah. They were fantastic, and it was comprised of Nick 13, who is now from Tiger Army, and Jade, who is now in AFI, Geoff Kresge, who was in AFI in its almost original lineup. They were really the first punk band from Ukiah that could write songs.

Nick 13:
Influence 13 were together for two years. We played gigs whenever we could. Gilman Street was not very cool about putting on out-of-town bands that weren’t touring bands. Dave and I both had this experience. There would be a certain time you would call, say it was five p.m. Wednesday. We would call and they’d say, send us a demo. We’d send them a demo. They’d say call us back at this time—and no one would answer the phone.

Davey Havok:
AFI would play house parties in Ukiah. The first time we played live we had probably seven songs, so we played them all twice, terribly. Half of which were our own, and the other half were like, Black Flag and Descendents covers. We might have thrown in [Green Day’s] “Going to Pasalacqua,” as well.

There were shows in Lake County. Lakeport was the city. It really made Ukiah look like San Francisco. Tilt would come and play. The Wynona Riders, Juke, Fifteen would play a lot. We tried to get Green Day once. I think Geoff was on the phone with Billie, and Tré was there, and Billie was like, “No. Tré says Ukiah sucks. Tré says there’s no scene in Ukiah.” We were like, “Fuck, he’s right!”

AFI played its first show at Gilman Street technically when we jumped onstage at a Rancid show that we all came down to see. Then Rancid put us on first of a five-band bill at Gilman Street, and from that point on, we played Gilman a lot. Basically, us, the Swingin’ Utters and Screw 32 during the early ’90s were constantly playing together everywhere.

Lars Frederiksen:
Davey was a little skinny kid. Always had a skateboard. Davey would always go, “Here’s a tape of my band.” He was a wicked front man, even though he’s talking about his balls or whatever. But you kinda knew that something would happen. “I don’t wanna fuck you, so fuck you.” Cool shit.

Bill Schneider:
Davey was straightedge and had X’s on his hands and a Youth of Today sweatshirt. Even today, he’s just the same guy.

Fraggle:
This little frantic punk who always wore pants with no shirt, with one suspender up and one suspender down.

Davey Havok:
I had a mohawk. Not a lot of mohawks in ’93. We looked ridiculous. I don’t look back at pictures with the mohawk and go, “Yeah, we had it right!”

Billie Joe Armstrong:
I used to ask Jesse Michaels what was going on, and he told me he thought AFI was really good. I remember really liking them. Davey was not the Prince of Darkness that he is now. He was wearing suspenders and he had this Danzig-style devil lock.

Davey Havok:
What we were playing was different than what a lot of people were playing. We weren’t political. And we were accepted. Gilman Street supported us, we played tons of shows around here. But there were a lot of people who totally hated us.

Zarah Manos:
Love AFI, they had great shows. When I was at Gilman, we counted on them for money. An AFI show would be 800 people. There were bands that helped us get the bills paid. You had to have one major show a month that was gonna pull your bank because we had high bills. Once they hit, it was really sad.

Ryan Mattos:
I went to an AFI show at Gilman and went straight to the merch table, and was like, “Hey, can I get that T-shirt?” It said “I Hate Punk Rock” on it. Which I thought was kind of weird. I bought a shirt, put it on, and as I started to walk away, the guy was like, “Hey, is this your first show?” and I was like, “Yeah, how’d you know?” He was like, “Oh, I don’t know, just haven’t seen you before. Hi, I’m Dave.” He was totally friendly to me and nice.

Later I saw him right before they played, checkin’ the microphone, and I was like, “Oh yeah, that makes sense, that’s like their crew or roadie guy.” Then they started playing. And I was like, “That’s weird, why’s the singer selling their merch?” I still wasn’t in the mind-set that punk bands are just people.

Tiger Lily:
Davey Havok contributed to my zine for a period. He had a leather jacket with the blue Germs circle painted on the back. Sweetest guy ever. Sometime in 1994, AFI came on my show at KALX. Most of AFI was in school, and Dave went to Cal, maybe Adam did, too. They did not like it when I asked if they had to go to class after the show. Funny how going to school is so uncool.

Ryan Mattos:
All the AFI guys lived in this big frat house by UC Berkeley. It was a frat house that had lost its charter and started renting out rooms to people. Adam had gotten in, and got someone else in, and slowly started taking the house over.

Nick 13:
It was most of the guys from AFI and a few other friends. I wound up crashing on Dave’s floor for awhile, then I was able to get a room there. That house was basically where I worked until Tiger Army really got going.