Gimme Something Better (9 page)

Aaron Cometbus:
I found my first flyer on the way to Hebrew school. Crime, with the Bush Tetras.

James Stark:
It was all flyers, word of mouth. There was no outside media. People were really starving for this stuff. It was still a true underground. After awhile there started to be enough people around with different skills and abilities—“Well, let’s start a magazine.”

Jello Biafra:
Search & Destroy
was amazing. You could open it up to any page and laugh or be inspired. To me it’s still the best underground punk zine anyone ever made. Punk was so wide open that the energy connected all kinds of people from different art fields and different age groups.

Danny Furious:
Vale was an old hippie/activist who was once the keyboard player for Blue Cheer, one of my early faves as a youngster. He was documenting the scene in a rather arty way. I consider him one of the good guys. He never missed a show. A rare individual who never sold out.

Dennis Kernohan:
We played their party on a night that an issue came out, and we ripped it up onstage. “Don’t buy this magazine, it sucks, it’s full of lies!” Vale just started talking to me like three years ago.

Ginger Coyote:
Search & Destroy
was really the first punk zine in San Francisco. I enjoyed it but felt something was lacking. It was a bit elitist and serious. So I decided in 1978 to start
Punk Globe
to help support the bands that
Search & Destroy
overlooked such as the Vktms, No Alternative, Lady LaRue and Mr. A, Mary Monday, Leila and the Snakes, Eye Protection. Along with the people who came to the shows. Sometimes the audience members were more colorful than the bands.

Johnny Genocide:
I give Ginger a lot of credit. She gave a lot of bands publicity that never would have gotten any otherwise. All the bands from this period owe her a debt of gratitude.

Ginger Coyote:
I loved
Star
magazine. There was also
Rock Scene
. Those were the magazines I centered
Punk Globe
after. I also added a taste of the
National Enquirer
and Bill Dakota’s infamous
Hollywood Star
. I also wanted to provide some comic relief. I think people enjoy the gossip because it is not mean-spirited. I always have mentioned people from all walks of life, from Danielle Steel to Joey Shithead.

Aaron Cometbus:
I started
Cometbus
in the summer of ’81.
MRR
wasn’t a magazine yet, but had the weekly radio show, and Tim invited me on. He was incredibly supportive. Then, on the other hand, you had people like Vale, who put out
Search & Destroy
and
RE/Search
. He never missed an opportunity to dismiss and discourage the younger generation. Even in the ads for
Search & Destroy
back issues, he blew his own horn by saying that all present-day mags and bands were just pale imitations. He’s telling you how worthless you are, and at the same time he wants you to worship him and pay his rent! His liner notes on the Avengers LP took the cake. “Before the proliferation of a thousand garage bands, hardcore or otherwise.” That’s how mad it made me—I can still quote it! He said “hardcore” like he was saying “dogshit.” You could hear the sneer.

Greg Oropeza:
The big South Bay fanzine at the time was
Ripper
, where I wrote under the name Sped McGregor.

Rachel DMR:
Tim Tonooka,
Ripper
magazine. He’s very quiet and very dedicated, documenting not only San Francisco history but the East Bay and South Bay. Years later, I asked him, “How’d you do that?” and he said, “Well, while you were out getting crazy, I was doing a job.” He did everything by hand. Sat at his typewriter and typed. I should’ve been helping him.

Tim Tonooka:
The first issue of
Ripper
came in 1980. Initially, our fanzine was focused on the South Bay, but by the third issue its scope was expanded to cover the entire Bay Area. I was largely inspired by
Search & Destroy
, and
Creep
.
Damage
was another great publication at the time.

Ruth Schwartz:
I was involved with the gang at Target Video and
Damage
magazine. Every Saturday night they would throw an after-hours party in their warehouse in San Francisco on South Van Ness and 18th. That was the place to be at three a.m. It was this enormous dance party, in the days when it was still New Wave and stuff, so it was all blended, and people wanted to dance and do drugs. I was there every Saturday night.

Joe Rees:
It started out as an alternative art space. For performance art, the real strange and bizarro kind of thing. I took that three-story building and put in a professional recording studio. I had a live stage on the bottom floor, and also I did my videotapings there, with an audience. We had events there. We had Jello’s wedding, all that shit.

Johnnie Walker:
Damage
magazine had this idea to do the magazine as a radio show. I started doing a monthly hour-long radio show,
Damage on the Air
. A combination of West Coast punk bands, interviews, new records and interviews with visiting British punk acts. We built up to a network of 60 radio stations all over the States taking
Damage on the Air
. It won an award as the best independently produced program of the year.

Joe Rees:
I had a cable TV show in those days, on cable 25 in San Francisco, Wednesday nights. Some of the material would go on there. The irony of the whole thing is that my show, Target Video, followed the Maharishi show. A Transcendental Meditation thing, very low-key and laid-back and spiritual. After about the third week, I came up with this idea. He would be in the lotus position, just seconds before I would come on. So I opened up my show with a machine gun burst, that lasted for about three minutes. I’d have all these images popping in, everything that I disliked, that was going on in the world. But you know what? The Maharishi really enjoyed my show. He thought it was terrific.

Ralph Spight:
I’d been playing guitar since I was 12, and smoking pot and listening to metal. I didn’t know anything from punk rock. Was sort of aware there was underground shit going on. And one day I was driving around Sonoma, I turned on the radio and there’s fucking
Maximum RocknRoll
. It’s fast punk rock, and I was like, “Oh my fucking god!” Really aggressive music, lyrics were talking about stuff I could relate to. I just dove in headfirst. On Tuesday nights I would tape the whole thing, and listen to the cassettes.

Tim Tonooka:
Rather Ripped Records was on Euclid Avenue in Berkeley. The people who worked there, like Ray Farrell, would turn you on to lots of great stuff.

Ray Farrell:
Tim Yohannan came into the store, and this is before Mike Watt extended the John Fogerty flannel shirt thing. It hadn’t gone around the waist yet. It was an actual shirt. He was a bearded guy in a flannel shirt, and jeans and boots, who came in to buy records. I didn’t trust him. I thought, anybody with a beard who’s buying punk rock is obviously slumming.

Al Ennis:
I’d go in there and buy punk records. Ray said, “Do you know Tim?” I said no. “Because there’s a guy who comes in here named Tim, and he buys the same records that you do. Next time he’s in here I’ll introduce you guys.”

Jello Biafra:
I’d seen a flyer at Rather Ripped for the radio show and it listed both known and extremely obscure punk records that they were playing. And I thought, “Oh, this is cool.”

Al Ennis:
Jello was traveling with the Dead Kennedys, and we were glad to have Jello come on. He would have a handful of records from Phoenix or somewhere, and he would get his little segment as well.

Ray Farrell:
Eventually
Maximum
did become more political. Part of it was that Tim was still trying to figure out the context around it. Because we were getting records from the U.K., from all over the world.

Al Ennis:
Tim was very, very left-wing. I was left-wing, too, but he was one of these people that was more left-wing than anyone. We used to have arguments about this shit all the time. Tim was a Stalin apologist. Which freaked me out. He told me that Stalin had to kill ten million people because that was the only way he could make communism work. And I said, “Tim, you can’t believe this.” He goes, “Yeah, everybody in the world was after Stalin. He just did whatever it took to make Russia communist.” That’s as left as you can get.