Gimme Something Better (70 page)

Davey Havok:
When we signed to Nitro Records, a big independent label out of Orange County, someone made the mistake of sending a stack of those little promotional posters to Gilman Street. I could have told them not to bother. We walked into Gilman one day, where we rehearsed, and up on the wall facing the stage, they had made a big dollar sign out of our AFI posters.

We were all living in the same room in a frat house with two other people, and four other people that would kind of wander in and out. And volunteering at Gilman Street. We were really raking in the bucks. We would take our jet to Gilman Street. I mean, it was a Lear. But the Gulfstreams are so unreliable these days.

Ryan Mattos:
I never felt that way about any band. Because if Rancid wasn’t on MTV, if I hadn’t seen people with mohawks in 1995, ’96, I wouldn’t be here. I thought nothing happened after 1980. If Green Day hadn’t been on the radio and trickled down to all those other bands, I wouldn’t know shit.

John Geek:
I hate to set myself up as a spokesperson on something like this, but looking at the history of it, I don’t think ideas about anti-commodification, the stridently underground ideas about punk, were part of the original thought in 1975. That was something that came around with Crass and bands like that a little later on. The rest of it was like, “Let’s get as big as possible and thumb our noses at as many people as possible on the way.”

Which is kinda awesome, too. I can see that that’s punk, in its own weird way. But the kind of punk I’ve always felt more a kinship with—the stuff that can’t be commodified—that doesn’t work on commercial radio. Stuff like Econochrist, Rorschach, Blatz, Filth—dirty and underground, forcing its way into the field of vision like an ugly sore.

Davey Havok:
Major labels are straight up. They’re like, “We’re not your friend. We’re trying to sell records. This is what’s going to happen, and this is what’s not gonna happen.” Whereas most experiences that I’ve had with independent labels, it’s all buddy-buddy. “We’re friends. This is all art, this is all artistic.” Until it comes time to make a business move that can really improve the business matters of the label, and then your friendships change. Which is fine if that’s the basis of your relationship. But when it’s veiled, when it’s cloaked in a pseudo-friendship, it’s really nasty.

Howie Klein:
I loved turning people on to Green Day. But it was really more about the fact that I was an executive at a record company and Green Day was bringing in a lot of money. On a personal level, yeah, the music is wonderful. But on a business level, I had a responsibility to my employees and to my shareholders and to the company. And Green Day was a huge part of that.

Blag Jesus:
There used to be a corporate-label stigma. But there really isn’t anymore because kids can’t really conceive of another thing. They grew up with their favorite bands being on corporate labels, for the most part.

Davey Havok:
We got zero flack for our album on a major label. Because the notion had become obsolete at that point. The culture changed so much. A major shift moved from caring about what labels people were on to just caring about what music they were making. Music has been in such a downward spiral that people no longer can focus on such trivial things as who’s putting out the record, when you have to really search to find bands that are worthwhile.

Jello Biafra:
My attitude towards that was, you’re wasting way too much energy on a bunch of bullshit at this point. We all knew how good this music was when we got into it. There were always great classic songs, if only the masses could hear them. And now the masses hear them, and everybody’s yelling at Green Day, the Offspring and Rancid for being so damn big. It was good music, it was bound to happen. You could either waste your energy freaking out about that, or you could support people you like who need your help deep down underground.

Blag Jesus:
You’ll always have people who are “underground people,” those people in the tipping point who are the connectors, or who grab things and make it cool for other people.

Andy Asp:
The real thing is still the real thing. It hasn’t diminished.

Jason Beebout:
It was an education. I’m happy about it. I got to tour, I got a bunch of money up front, that went to my managers! And I can tell anyone else, that’s exactly what’s gonna happen to you.

Frank Portman:
It is weird to think about. You’re there at Gilman, this disastrous show. “Wow, my father donated these grab bars. The plumbing materials.” The toilets I refused to clean.

Sergie Loobkoff:
I feel sorry for people that didn’t have something like Gilman. It doesn’t have to be music. It could be anything. It could be a Christian youth center in Mississippi. It could be a Satanist cult in Vancouver, or whatever. Just something outside of high school.

Ben Saari:
Gilman couldn’t happen anywhere other than Berkeley. It took advantage of the triple threat of liberal Berkeley, a fucked-up industrial neighborhood, and the social privilege of the kids who were going there. If it had been a bunch of black kids doing that in North Berkeley, it would’ve got shut the fuck down right away.

Billie Joe Armstrong:
The way I look at it, you can’t just go there. To go to Gilman is to be involved with Gilman.

Spike Slawson:
It’s sort of a free exchange of ideas through music. That was the impression I got. Of what was possible.

Jim Widess:
I take it as a little hidden badge of pride that we can do this. As a landlord, I’m very happy with the arrangement. They’re good tenants, they take care of it, and they pay the rent on time. I don’t want another nail salon in the front. I think we’re also providing something that the community needs, and that does something for my ego, of course. I’m not that fond of the music. But that’s okay.

Jeff Ott:
If I ended up with a ton of money I would absolutely take it and go to other places and start a place just like Gilman, so that other kids could have their own thing. I would be obliged to do that.

Mike Avilez:
You go to the Warped Tour and walk around and you’ll hear 100 bands that try to sound like Green Day or NOFX. It’s just disgusting. They’re missing the angst. To me, punk rock is supposed to be angry and pissed off. Some of this other shit nowadays is college rock. It has a whole ’nother meaning.

Jimmy Crucifix:
I had a punk band come in to Lennon Studios the other day—one of the new ones. They’d never heard of bands like Fang and Crucifix. They’ve heard of Blink 182, Green Day, AFI and all that stuff. They were talking business plan. Songs and structure. They made it so serious. I would go out there either naked or dressed in drag.

Aaron Cometbus:
Everyone acts like in the old days it was pure and now it’s totally different. But look at the early S.F. bands—they all broke up because no one would sign them. Flipper jumped at the chance to be on Def Jam. And Jimmy from Crucifix, he tried out for UFO. It would be hard to get more corporate rock than that.

Mike Avilez:
The new kids do their research on the Internet. There’s a whole group of new bands out there in the Bay Area that are ’87 punk rock. There’s Second Opinion, Instant Asshole, Night-stick Justice, Warkrime and Throat Oyster. The kids are learning and they take that early style and try to play like it. A lot of them are trying to be like Minor Threat.

Davey Havok:
Ceremony seem to be quite the buzz band in the hardcore scene right now. They have 40-second songs that sound like a cross between Negative Approach and maybe early DRI. It’s very interesting. That’s the jam right now. And the look—flipped-up baseball hats, the bandana-tied wrists and head and legs, it’s very interesting. That thrash hardcore is in.

Martin Sorrondeguy:
Punk dies for people at different periods. Somebody from 82’s gonna complain about somebody from ’78 because they said it died that year. It’s an endless cycle. Every kid growin’ up is gonna have their own unique experience. No matter if somebody wrote a song similar to that 25 years ago, they’re living it right now.

Lochlan McHale:
I enjoy hearing punk music everywhere I go. I love seeing kids walk down the street with a Rancid back patch or Green Day or Op Ivy back patch. I’m all for it. For a punk to say shitty things about the community, it’s like, why? It’s one of the raddest things ever.

Chicken John:
Punk wasn’t a kind of music that a couple people played. Punk rock was a fucking movement. If you’d asked me in 1984 how many punk rockers are there in America, I would say, “I don’t know. Hundreds.” If you had asked me in 1988 how many punk rockers are there in America, I would’ve said tens of thousands. How many people have been exposed to the punk movement now? Tens of millions! I mean, just because no one’s given fucking Ian MacKaye a gold record doesn’t mean that Fugazi’s first record didn’t go quadruple platinum.

Jello Biafra:
Punk and hardcore always drew people of all extremes because it’s an extreme form of music. There were people from the extreme left, from the extreme right. There were people who are extreme in their militant party-animal apathy. People say, “Oh, there’s a punk philosophy.” Really? Which one?

Punk was never a movement, it was a sound. It was an inspiration, entertainment. More than entertainment to many of us, in a spiritual way. But it is not a movement. A movement has its eye on the prize. What would the prize be here? More punk? It’s something else. Something that drew all types of people, who got all kinds of different things back from it.

Anna Brown:
I gave up trying to be someone else. You can’t do it. Every time I travel, I say, this time I’m gonna go to museums and do cultural stuff. But the best times are still when I end up finding the punks, because those people know what’s going on. We have a certain way of seeing the world. You can travel the world as a punk and people come to see you and you go to see them. That’s what you have in common and that’s actually a lot. It’s radically transformative. I am grateful. True ’til death! Just not death at 25.

Larry Boothroyd: Don’t wait for permission.

Tim Yohannan, editor of
Maximum RocknRoll
, passed away today, April 3, 1998 at home with his friends by his side. Love him or hate him, Tim had a huge influence on punk rock. He will be missed.

 

 

Martin Sprouse:
Tim smoked a lot. Two packs a day. Benson & Hedges Lights. Gold pack.

Mike LaVella:
He could smoke a whole cigarette in about three drags. Really hit that fuckin’ thing.

Martin Sprouse:
But the day he found out he had cancer, he quit. He had a pack of cigarettes sitting on his desk, he just stopped cold turkey. Even though it wasn’t related to his cancer. That’s that weird kind of brain that guy had.

Cammie Toloui:
In the end, when he was dying, I wrote him a letter to just say everything that I had been feeling about what happened between us. A week before he died he wrote me back, telling me how much he loved me and that I was okay, and all this good stuff.

Martin Sprouse:
We had people lined up to take things over. Things were in place. He was sick two years, three years. In the process of bringing new people in, he was there. He was such a control freak. He helped select the people, and helped talk about it, and the debate of whether
Maximum
should go on.

Martin Sorrondeguy:
I knew it was progressively getting worse. I was in Chicago, but everybody knew. It was word of mouth.

Martin Sprouse:
They had tried everything. When he got diagnosed, supposedly it was already in the fourth stage. Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

Martin Sorrondeguy:
I remember one day deciding to call
Maximum
because a friend had said, he’s not getting out of bed much. I was told that he was already losing memory.

Timojhen answered and I said, “Hey, is Tim around?” And he said, “Well, yeah, but he might not know who you are.” But I guess they said, “Hey, Tim, it’s Martin from Chicago.” He took the phone and he said, “Cómo estás?” I knew he knew. So I said, “Hey, Tim, how are you?” And he was like, “Don’t stop sending us your records.”

Martin Sprouse:
There was about four of us there, throughout the whole night. His ex-girlfriend, me, Timojhen and Jerry Booth, an old friend of Tim’s who did the accounting for
Maximum
.

When he couldn’t really talk anymore, he started humming and moving his head a little bit. His eyes were closed. You could barely hear it. We all got up close and realized he was humming a Flipper song: “Isn’t life a blast, it’s just like living in the past.”

Martin Sorrondeguy:
I got a call the day after. It was a really weird moment for me, and really sad.

Martin Sprouse:
We made hundreds of phone calls.

Jeff Bale:
I was teaching at Columbia at the time. I had just talked to him on the phone a couple of weeks before, and he didn’t sound good, but he didn’t tell me how critical his condition was. The next thing you know I fuckin’ hear he’s dead. I felt such a loss.

Jello Biafra:
Ruth called me. I was surprised how upset I was. I quickly found myself focusing on the good times we had, when we were good friends. All the positive things and hard work he did for the community vastly outweighs all the crap he pulled when he went off the deep end.

Martin Sprouse:
He definitely didn’t want any recognition or memorial service. He made that clear to me. At the time, we were juggling a lot of things. I said, “Okay, I’ll make that promise to you.” And I made sure there was no memorial for Tim.

In hindsight, that was Tim’s controlling factor. But a wake has nothing to do with the dead person. It’s how people grieve, get over it, celebrate this person’s life. And deal with each other. It made everything a little bit isolated. All of us were kind of in our own heads. No one was really hanging out. It was really fucked up. Not that those were Tim’s intentions.