by Marc Spitz
Patrick was getting his degree at UC Berkeley while Cheryl stayed at home with Mike and his sister Mycla. But pressures and youth got the better of the couple, and soon they were fighting frequently.
Pritchard and his sister witnessed one particularly ugly verbal sparring that resulted in a call to the local police. Shortly thereafter Cheryl moved to Rodeo with Mycla, and Pritchard remained with Patrick in El Sobrante. But he missed his mother and soon followed her to Rodeo. Even as tensions between the Pritchards eased somewhat, Mike withdrew into himself. Once described as “fearless” by his mother, he was sullen and barely communicative when he first met Armstrong.
Even more than any empathetic bond, or love of semi-absurd British metal, Pritchard and Armstrong are connected in a way that seems oddly cosmic, as if they were two halves of one person.
“I think they just allow each other to be themselves,” Anna Armstrong Humann says by way of explaining the bond. “There’s no judgment. And it was easy to look at Mike and make fun of him. ’What a weirdo. Dresses funny. Hyper kid.’ But I think Billie Joe just accepted him for who he was and Mike accepted Billie for the kid that he was.”
Mike wasn’t the musician that Billie was. He’d only recently shown an interest in guitar, but soon the pair would be logging hours in Armstrong’s room with “Blue” and a handful of albums. “Mike really wanted to play guitar,” David Armstrong says. “One day Billie had Mike over, and me and my buddies were about to go out for the night and we saw them sitting on me and Billie’s bed, which I’d separated into twin beds by then. One was sitting on one side, and one was on the other. Billie was teaching Mike chords. That was about six o’clock. I got home at two o’clock in the morning, and they were still there. And Billie looked up at me and said, ’Hey, Dave, watch what Mike can do.’ And Mike knew four or five songs from start to end. That’s the connection they had. I don’t think that Mike knew a note at the beginning of the night. But when I came home, he could play [Ozzy Osbourne’s] ’Crazy Train,’ and a couple of Van Halen songs. And he knew them well. That’s the way they could communicate.” Soon Mike was taking lessons with George Cole, and the afternoons became not only long jams, but song-writing sessions as well. The two boys provided each other with a confidence that had been seldom available and certainly unsustainable in both of their daily lives.
“There was a sense of freedom where no one is looking at you and no one is critiquing what you’re doing,” Armstrong explains. “And you don’t have to better what you’ve done in the past because you don’t have any past. It’s the very beginning and you’re just listening to everything for the first time and saying like ’Wow, look what I can do! Jesus Christ. Where the fuck is this coming from?’ “
From the beginning, Armstrong and Pritchard’s telepathy was evident in their “stage” chemistry. “I’d look over at him and know what to do,” Pritchard once explained to the Alternative Press. Their shared, somewhat drill sergeant–like approach to rehearsals made them a tight unit even before they had any rhythm section. “We were always very diligent,” Mike recalled. “When we weren’t doing anything else, we were always practicing. Every day.”
After leaving Carquinez Middle School, Mike attended Salesians High School, an all-boys Catholic school in nearby Richmond, California. Billie, like his brothers and sisters, entered John Swett High School in Crockett. John Swett was a small school, with a student body of around four hundred. In his early teens, while deriving an incredible sense of creative and emotional satisfaction from music, Armstrong had not yet devoted all his waking hours to this pursuit. Happily, he probably didn’t even realize that he was conforming, as he embraced his inner semi-jock. Armstrong enjoyed sports.
“He once wrote that he wanted to be either a rock star or a professional football player when he grew up,” David recalls. Billie was a strong swimmer and a quick runner. He played tailback in the local Pop Warner football little league but only made water boy at John Swett. David Armstrong was, like his dad, a big guy, and protected his little brother from any potential bullies who might take advantage of his size and sensitivity, but he couldn’t protect Armstrong from poor taste. “I remember there was a talent show, and he lost to a bunch of football players doing a rap,” David says, and laughs. “Big white linemen rapping. They won and even they told me, ’Man, your brother went up there and sang a song that he wrote!’” Poor sportsmanship was a factor as well. “I’d see him slam his helmet down on the field a couple of times [in frustration],” David recalls. Student life at John Swett and an acceptance of his own physical limitations would soon compel Billie Joe to forgo athletics entirely and embrace music with a fervor that was not only undiluted, it was now infused with an ambition beyond his years. If he wasn’t going to score touchdowns, he would show all rhyme-busting jocks what he could really do.
By tenth grade, Armstrong, Pritchard, and their best friends Sean Hughes and Jason Relva would take advantage of Ollie’s absence and the run of her house. “They weren’t doing drugs in the house, but they did have a lot of freedom,” David says. “Billie certainly had the most freedom of all of us kids.” The instruments were soon moved from the bedroom out into the sitting room, where the four friends could jam loudly without anyone complaining. “We were the little Van Halen kids,” Hughes says. “The little rocker kids. Mike had a guitar by then. Billie had his guitar, and one day he said to me, ’Why don’t you play bass?’ So I bought a bass. He basically told me what to do. ’Hey, play this. Now play this.’ ” For the first time, the friends started thinking about forming an actual group. “The goal for me was just fun,” Hughes admits. “It was a lot cooler than band class. But for Billie, he was actually into making music. He wanted to put a band together to play his songs.”
Armstrong played lead guitar, Mike played rhythm guitar, a local kid named Raj Punjabi was one of the more frequent semi-members who’d come in and play drums, and Jason Relva (whose tragic death in a 1992 car accident inspired the mid-nineties Green Day anthem “J.A.R.”) would provide general support: an audience prototype. Band names flew around as frequently as botched notes. “We played a bunch of metal songs as Condom.” Hughes laughs. “Then we called ourselves Desecrated Youth. Those songs were a bit more rock. I guess more punkish.” Not that they’d know. While the early eighties hardcore that would later inspire them so completely was in its ascent, Armstrong, Pritchard, and Hughes were obliviously shredding heshers, complete with greasy hair, backward ball caps, concert tees, and Converse sneaks.
Mike Pritchard and Sean Hughes had transferred from Salesians High School to Pinole High in nearby Pinole (pronounced pinol’). Pinole High was the largest school in the area, with a racially and culturally diverse student body of about two thousand. Fed up with John Swett, Billie opportunistically used his big brother Allen’s address to make himself eligible to follow his friends there. By eleventh grade, all three were enrolled, and the band had a permanent name: Sweet Children.
The band took their name from one of Billie Joe’s very early originals. An improbably clean and sprightly example (given their penchant for sludge or arpeggio-laden heavy metal) of throwaway speed pop (with lyrics ostensibly about memories of childhood flirtations, when boys first start becoming interested in girls and vice verse), “Sweet Children” wasn’t much of a song; but it was, for a little while at least, a good enough band name.
Drive past the one-level beige and maroon–painted Pinole High today and there is actually some solid evidence that a pair of punk rock superstars are alumni. Ground has been broken. Among the racially mixed student body, a few sourpuss teens loiter curbside, holding their skateboards close. Both girls and boys wear wallet chains, hoodies, checked nerd-shorts, and big clunky black boots. They will probably not be attending any Spartan pep rallies after school, but many of them, despite appearances, are well-adjusted and college-bound. They only look like burnouts. It’s a lot less socially damning to affect an outcast air in 2006. In 1986, not so much.
“We got fucked with a lot at first,” Sean Hughes recalls. “We called [the bullies] Pods. It stood for Pinole Oriented Dicks.” Even worse, the friends were ignored by the cool kids and, more crucially, the girls. “We didn’t have girlfriends,” Hughes admits. “We tried. Crushes and stuff. You like a lot of girls and find out some of them don’t like you. Some of them call you ugly. Some of them you put on your sniper’s list the rest of your life. I always thought Billie was more charismatic than the rest of us, but even he pulled back a little more. We didn’t come into ourselves until the Gilman scene, a bit later.”
“I don’t think anybody thought very much of them,” remembers Robert Brown, a Pinole High classmate. “The crap I heard was not directed at them but like basically that whole group of people. ’Oh, they’re just losers,’ ” he laughs. “They were nobody.”
“In high school a lot of people were into these different things that I wasn’t into at all anymore,” Armstrong remembers. “Sports and cheerleading.”
Both Armstrong and Pritchard attended classes when they had to—Pritchard was the more diligent student—but they both secretly considered the band’s progression as their primary form of study. That and weed, anyway. In high school, Pritchard and Armstrong first learned that smoking pot made playing music even more interesting. Still, they were two of the most ambitious stoners who ever inhaled. “They were always trying to get my brother and me to see them play,” Brown continues. ” ’Oh, come listen to our band.’ They finally played at school so I saw them then. It was Foreign Foods Day, they called it. They had exotic food and a couple bands play. Sweet Children were one of them. They all played in the quad. Out in the middle of the school. I remember liking them. But most of the people that were really paying attention to them were the other few punks at our school. The jocks and everyone else didn’t care.”
Billie Joe was slowly being primed to embrace the punk-rock scene he was about to enter. Anna was a huge fan of “college rock,” pre-Nirvana alternative hitmakers who really made no hits (not yet, anyway) but whose influence was already wide and massive.
“Billie got introduced to Husker Du and the Replacements by his sister,” Hughes says. “And I remember going to a 10,000 Maniacs show with them. That was pretty different. Natalie Merchant.” It was an R.E.M. show in Santa Cruz (about an hour’s drive from Rodeo) in 1985 that really opened him up. “It was the Fables of the Reconstruction tour,” Armstrong told me in a 2005 Spin interview “Michael Stipe had a shaved head and wore an old overcoat. I thought, ’This is different.’ “
“I left him alone at that show.” Anna laughs. “I said ’I gotta go stand in front of Peter Buck, so I’ll see you later.’ And he ended up hanging out with these punk-rock kids there. You know, with bleached hair and different clothes, and they pushed him up to the front of the stage. I think it really helped him and changed his life about music.” As he did with Allen’s Beatles albums, Billie Joe began studying his sister’s college rock, sitting for hours with a Camper Van Beethoven or Replacements cassette and “Blue.” He taught himself the Replacements’ “If Only You Were Lonely,” and it soon joined Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode” as the highlight of Sweet Children’s set list. Not that the band was following up Foreign Foods Day with a world tour or anything. They were still drummer-less . . . and they had homework. But they also had this thing called punk rock, and it was about to change the way they saw the world. To be a punk was to declare yourself an outsider. Pritchard and Armstrong certainly felt as much at Pinole. Happily, there were others who shared these feelings. You could be an outsider with real back-up.
“There was a core group of people that I found felt the same way (that I did),” Armstrong says. “We were the suburban punks.”
“I remember them being real quiet at first,” Brown says. “Every time I saw them after that, they’d be hanging out with his group (of people).” “We were gunning to be different by then,” Sean Hughes recalls. “Punk-rock attire. Punk-rock attitude.”
When they hung out with the Pinole High punks (realistically fewer than two dozen kids), Billie and Mike felt as if they had their own group. They could compete with the jocks and the brains. It didn’t matter who had more money or better grades. The music was exciting, more so than heavy metal anyway. There was no going back to solo Ozzy after Husker Du and Bad Brains. In a 1992 interview with Flipside, Armstrong confessed that he felt a little like a wimp in hindsight after comparing this new punk music he was into while at Pinole with the glossy pop metal he’d been listening to at home. “Sometimes I listen to those bands now and the guitar sound isn’t quite as full,” he recalls. “But back then, it was like ’Wow, that’s amazing!’ Now I listen to it and it sounds kind of wimpy.”
Punk dress and attitude got them attention or notoriety where they otherwise risked fading into the background.
One night, in a burst of enthusiasm for this new thing in his life, Pritchard shaved his head into a lopsided Mohawk. He spiked it up with some shaving cream and admired himself in the mirror of his mother’s bedroom. He wouldn’t be able to sport it for long, however. The Pritchards were having financial trouble, so Mike got an after-school job as a sous-chef at a seafood restaurant in nearby Crockett called the Nantucket. He would constantly reek like fish, but after a few months, he’d saved enough money to eventually purchase a used pickup truck, which made it that much easier to follow this newly discovered culture wherever it was taking root. And in the winter of 1987, that meant Berkeley. There, in a cold graffiti-strewn space in the city’s Western warehouse district, Sweet Children would learn what can be done with these new feelings of enlightened outsiderism. “There was this kid named Eggplant that first told us about what was going on at Gilman,” says Hughes. “His real name was Robert Burnett. Why did they call him Eggplant? Damned if I know. He was from Pinole, and his sister Phaedra was friends with my sister, so he was over one night and Billie and Mike happened to be there and he was talking about Gilman and these great bands like Isocracy and how we should check it out. Billie was more intrigued by it than I was at first. He really held an ear to him that night.”
Chapter Two
THE GILMAN STREET PROJECT
Before 924 Gilman Street opened on New Year’s Day, 1987, the Bay Area was not the most welcoming place for a lasting punk scene to take hold. Even in the late seventies, when punk was the rave in New York, Los Angeles, and London, the region had the only semblance of a local movement. That the early San Francisco punks largely copied what they interpreted from somewhat exploitational television news magazine profiles and editorials to be a punk way of dressing and behaving says much about the initial lack of identity.
“The Sex Pistols were on 60 Minutes [on the eve of their U.S. tour in 1978],” recalls Dirk Dirksen, a veteran of local theater and television productions, who would go on to promote and emcee the area’s formative punk shows. “The very next day you’d see the change in appearances. The longhairs cut their hair off and started wearing safety pins.”
“Whereas New York people looked more like the Ramones or Television or Blondie or something,” remembers Jello Biafra, former leader of the area’s most famous early punk act, the Dead Kennedys, “San Francisco was the first place in the United States where most of the people were sporting the British spiky hair and chains and pins.” Biafra carefully adds, “This shouldn’t suggest that there were even enough punks to constitute a scene early on.”
“It seemed like the Haight was pretty dead,” Penelope Houston, who fronted another influential local act, the Avengers, says. “There was the Warfield and Winterland but those were venues for major, major bands. The Tubes were around; they were kind of the reigning band of San Francisco at that moment. But pretty soon after I arrived in 1977, I started noticing strange bands playing around this place called the Mabuhay Gardens.”
The Mabuhay Gardens was a red velvet–draped Filipino social club located on Broadway in the seedier section of the city’s North Beach area. “The n
eighborhood had gone topless,” Dirksen remembered. When he first approached the club’s owners about using the stage, he was intent on providing a venue for the local underground theater movement but quickly discovered there were three times as many nascent punk acts than avant garde theater troupes who were eager to perform. “We figured these people deserved a venue as much as anyone,” Dirksen says.
The Mabuhay (or “Mab,” as it was referred to by most) served food and therefore was technically a restaurant open to all ages. Attracted by great local acts like The Nuns, Crime, Flipper, and the aforementioned Avengers, the club became the nucleus for exciting Bay Area rock ’n’ roll. When the Sex Pistols themselves came to town on January 14th of ’78 to perform what would be their last concert ever (until their 1996 and 2003 reunions anyway) at the Winterland Ballroom, hippie-era mega-promoter Bill Graham stacked the bill with Mabuhay bands. “He wanted to make sure he could fill it,” Dirksen says, laughing. “So he booked The Nuns, Crime, and the Avengers.” Graham’s relationship with local punks was condescendingly cordial at best.
“Oh, he was very hostile to punk underground, and the punk underground was hostile to him in return,” Biafra confirms. “The reason being that the guy wanted to control everything. He couldn’t stand the thought of any other promoter letting any band play even if it was in somebody’s bathroom. There were a lot of police raids on non–Bill Graham venues, especially punk rock shows.”
The surprise success of the Mabuhay inspired a few dozen smaller punk venues, both public and private, to open throughout the Bay Area. “There were some cool little places,” remembers local artist Winston Smith (who designed sleeves for the Dead Kennedys and later for Green Day’s Insomniac album). “One was called the Deaf Club; it actually was a space for deaf people. But they liked the punk scene there because they could actually hear the music by putting their fingers on the table. They probably thought they were listening to Guy Lombardo or something. But at least it was something they could hear because the vibrations went straight to the wood. There was The Sound of Music; there was a place called the Zone. A place called Tool and Die that was great, it was just in someone’s basement on Valencia, I believe. And a place called the Farm, which had actually been a communal farm and had kind of been turned into a big auditorium.”
