Nobody Likes You

by Marc Spitz

  Ironically—since most punks seem to have an avowed hatred of all things “hippie”—the communal/radical spirit of the Bay Area progenitors such as the original Beats (who congregated at the City Lights bookstore in North Beach) and the Haight Street Dead-heads was eagerly and gratefully picked up by the first wave of spike-haired punk rockers. “If you strip away the thin veneer of punk in the Bay Area scene, there was always a hippie undercurrent,” observes Dr. Frank Portman, who would go on to front the Mr. T. Experience, one of the first, and certainly one of the most fun, acts from the early 924 Gilman Street wave.

  “When me and my weird friends first got out of high school and were able to jump in, it seemed like the radical side of ’long hair as a rebellious statement’ and all that went with it was evaporating,” Biafra remembers. “And we were heartbroken. ’Oh my God, we were born too late; we missed the sixties!’ But when punk hit I thought, ’Oh wait a minute, I was born at the perfect time.’ Even the older folks from the Beat generation like Bruce Connor, the filmmaker and photographer, jumped right into the punk scene because he liked the energy. And Allen Ginsberg put up the money for the first issue of Search and Destroy.”

  Search and Destroy was a monthly ’zine published out of San Francisco; thanks to consistently sharp writing and an influential cluttered type, cut-and-paste design style, it soon found a wider audience among punks in major cities, colleges, and smaller enclaves across the world. Proto-punk acts such as Roky Erikson and the Flaming Groovies were celebrated, along with non-musician honorary punks including filmmakers David Lynch, John Waters, and Russ Meyer, or writers like J. G. Ballard and William S. Burroughs. Local labels could stay alive through ads and mail order, and local bands were given a forum as well.

  “The San Francisco scene was more intelligence-driven and more political in part because the main ’zine was Search and Destroy,” Biafra continues. “Which kind of dared people to come up with interesting things to say in the interviews. Still the best punk ’zine I’ve seen to this day.”

  Along with Los Angeles–based Flipside (which also began in 1977), Maximumrocknroll (MRR) ranks as the most influential punk ’zine of them all. MRR began as a local radio show hosted by a transplanted Northeasterner named Tim Yohannan. Yohannan was raised in Northern New Jersey and attended Rutgers in the late sixties. “We were war protesters together,” says Lenny Kaye, also a Rutgers student. “Was he a socialist then? Yeah probably. But so was I.”

  Yohannan’s father, John David Yohannan, was a former U.S. Air Corps officer during World War II. He was eventually named a Professor Emeritus of English and comparative literature at City College in New York. He’s the author of Treasury of Asian Literature, which remains in print fifty years since its publication. “I visited him at his parents’ house once,” Kaye says. “We sat there and listened to Moby Grape’s first record, and I noticed that he had a very interesting habit. He liked to cover the sides of his albums in green tape. I don’t know why.”

  Despite having an academic father figure with military experience, Yohannan was a natural born agitator and organizer. “Toward the end of our senior year, we were in the anti-ROTC demonstration together,” Kaye continues. “We were both suspended and had to do community service so we could graduate. Tim told me in later years he wished he’d just told them to go ’Fuck off’ and not done it.”

  Having just turned thirty, Yohannan was a good ten years older than the audience of punk rock kids who devoured the loud, fast, and difficult to find tracks from local and international punk acts. The fact that his audience probably scratched their heads at the radical polemics that he and his DJ crew Ruth Schwartz and Jeff Bale spouted on air didn’t seem to matter. Yohannan knew these were hungry ears, and he was going to fill them as he saw fit. It would be good for them in the long run should anything sink in, he reasoned.

  MRR was taped and shared across the country and eventually officially syndicated. Some of those very tapes would later find their way into the hands of suburban punks like Billie Joe, Mike, and their Pinole High School friends: the Dead Kennedys, Black Flag, the Germs, and Flipper blasting out of sticker-customized boom boxes and car stereos in suburban parking lots state-wide. The success of the radio show encouraged the publication of the ’zine. Its original look was, also like Search and Destroy, cluttered and Xeroxed black-and-white type, smudgy photos, and lots of cartoons. Its tone: gossipy, catty, but always self-serious.

  “Tim was just trying to have a magazine that showed what the real underground punk scene was about—in terms of political culture anyway,” remembers Fat Mike, of Southern California pop-punk favorites NOFX (and founder of indie label Fat Wreck Chords). “I read it then, and I still read it. I like the news section. The columns. They kept you apprised of what was going on in the underground. Plus Tim was one of the few people there who didn’t hate my band. We went to Sizzler together a couple of times. Tim loved Sizzler.”

  “The magazine was a real important thing in that world, genuinely important,” Dr. Frank Portman agrees. “Like everybody read it. The scene reports were avidly read.”

  “I wrote three or four of these missives from Portland,” remembers early MRR contributor Courtney Love. “All about Poison Idea and Rancid Vat. But of course being me, I wrote something controversial and got a cross burned on my lawn. I wrote that Tom ’Pig’ [Tom ’Pig Champion’ Roberts, leader of cult heroes Poison Idea] was a neo-fascist or something.”

  “Tim was the emperor of the MRR empire,” Portman explains. “It was first among equals. He was living out his counterculture ideals. You live [at the offices], you work there, and he was against paying anybody. Everybody had to have at least a part-time job. I cannot speak for them, but from what I remember, Tim had the hippie background, but the ethos that was formed by him and his generation got solidified into this aggregate of pseudo-political clichés. Self-conscious ideas of rebellion against society and anti-capitalism. The [MRR] aesthetic grew out of the darker counterculture, where you dressed in black and you said ’fuck’ a lot and you had Che Guevara shirts and you were into Patty Hearst and that kind of world, which is a very Bay Area thing. That was the old guard and the punks became their followers. Tim really saw himself as a corruptor of the young in the best possible sense.”

  Yohannan was a self-righteous fighter by nature and for anyone with that personality type it’s useful to have a nemesis. In 1981 Ronald Reagan was sworn in as the fortieth president of the United States. Reagan quickly became the target for all of the new wave of hard-core’s rage, virtually fueling the entire movement.

  “I went to a lot of Rock Against Reagan shows,” remembers Fat Mike. In the Reagan era, the fashion punks and borderline New Wavers were simply not committed enough to fight the good fight. Reagan was blamed for everything that was wrong with the Bay Area. If it was a dilemma, Ronnie had a hand in it.

  “The people walking around [the Bay Area] talking to themselves; we all blamed on Ronald Reagan,” remembers David Katznelson (then Bay Area punk who later became a Warner Brothers A-and-R executive and producer). “It was his cutbacks of the institutions that housed these people, the halfway houses that threw them all onto the streets.”

  The anger was palpable. Punk soon became a synonym for being enlightened and ready to pledge yourself to the resistance. It used to mean you’d smash windows and sniff glue. Now it meant your eyes were open. You were sober. You were (most likely) a white Black Panther. You were a radical with a shaved head, and a healthy, drug-free body covered in a utilitarian T-shirt. Maybe you had rich parents to facilitate your stance. Maybe you had a pocket full of change from panhandling because capitalism was lame. Punk fundamentalism was born in the post-Reagan age. And, ironically, along with it came punk-oversensitivity syndrome. It was the era of the touchy punk. Armstrong and Pritchard were not even old enough to vote, and yet they were obliged to be aware, merely by commuting into the city, and stretching out their hands to be “X-ed” with an all-ages brand.

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bsp; “I was thinking these hard-core punks were like little old ladies,” jokes Portman. “They can’t stand to hear a song that is not about El Salvador. Sometimes I’d say, ’This song is about El Salvador; no I’m just kidding.’ It was a weird scene. You’d get challenged for your attitudes. I bet it probably was like that in Washington, DC, as well. In San Francisco, it was political correctness in the punk scene from top to bottom. You can adopt that iconography, however, and those clichés and make good rock ’n’ roll.

  The Mabuhay Garden’s upstairs room, a theater space known as the On Broadway, soon became a showcase for the more aggressive and faster mutation of second-wave punk (known as hard-core). These hard-core shows started to attract an even younger crowd than the early Mabuhay bills. As punk grew, the number of kids coming in from the outer suburbs expanded as well. It was inside the On Broadway that many of the MRR-reading high school kids, who would make up the first wave of 924 Gilman Street bands, first congregated.

  “We went there every single weekend to see these bands and got a pretty good education in what it was all about,” Portman says. “There was another place called the Vat because it had all these old beer vats. We played there. It was really associated with this band Condemned 2 Death because I think they lived there. So you were a ’Vat rat’ if you hung out at the Vat.”

  Some hard-core kids never went back to the suburbs. They’d stay in the city, squatting on corners, panhandling, and tweaking out on the biker speed that soon became the chosen drug. The scene was not for everyone but it did finally achieve its own identity in the eighties.

  “It was dirty; it was skanky,” says Courtney Love, who spent some time on the nascent hard-core scene before moving to Minneapolis. “I went out with a guy who ran the Tool and Die but going all the way over to Berkeley on the BART [Bay Area Rapid Transit]? Forget it. Too much panhandling for me. I was a new waver. There was no romance to it. No place for girls. No place for the kind of boys I liked. The stench of beer. The smell of the speed labs and the little alleys. I can’t even go to San Francisco now because it reminds me of that.”

  For every dropout punk squatter, there was an MRRer pledged to construct. “Maximumrocknroll did something that was almost unheard of from the moment they started publishing,” Biafra points out. “They came out every month right when they said they were going to and that was because Tim knew how to stay organized and crack a whip.”

  “I thought Tim was this champion of this kind of punk rock music that I secretly didn’t particularly like, which was hard-core, and I learned later that he really hated hard-core too,” Portman laughs. “But he believed that it was the way to attract the youth to his cause. He knew a potential when he saw it and so he got involved. At that point, it started to get actually organized.”

  “By the time the Gilman Scene started, the shock of the new was probably starting to wear off of punk,” Houston observes, explaining the necessary cultural segue from classic punk into utilitarian, and often Socialist, hard-core. “I mean, I try to explain to people what it was like walking around San Francisco with blue hair and people’s jaws dropping and stuff. By the eighties there didn’t seem to be any danger in it. There didn’t seem to be any of the original cultural shock. It seemed to be more, to me, of a high school or teenage expression. And I don’t want to place any judgment on the value of that to anybody, but it didn’t have any bite as far as I was concerned. I was sort of over it. The East Bay was not happening at all in the seventies. Maybe there were a couple of bands from there [playing in San Francisco] but not much was really happening on that side. But then in the eighties . . .”

  A large city to the east of San Francisco, Berkeley has a long history of providing a haven for the counter culture: creative firebrands from Allen Ginsberg to author Phillip K. Dick to cartoonist R. Crumb to filmmakers Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas to Black Panther Huey P. Newton to heiress turned guerilla Patty Hearst. Still, in the early eighties, with the exception of some on-campus parties at the University of California, there weren’t that many punk rock shows. But as the On Broadway scene expanded, promoters and bands searched for venues on the other side of the Bay out of necessity.

  “Before Gilman opened, we started putting on shows at this pizza place called Owns Pizza in Berkeley,” Portman says. “Owns Pizza was the beginning of the whole Gilman thing. Basically, we were all setting up shows in places like that. Pizza places.”

  After a point, the idea that the city was a perfect place for a permanent punk venue, where Bill Graham had no pull and the surplus of garage-practicing punk acts throughout the Bay Area could have a reliable, safe, and clean environment to play, took off. There would always be punks as long as there were teenagers. Why float around from venue to venue and deal with each attendant hassle from the owners or the cops or the neighbors? Why not have something that would stand for years?

  It would be at 924 Gilman where this idealism and the pop melodic punk of the Ramones and the politicized early hard-core of the the Dead Kennedys (and touring acts like Black Flag, the Bad Brains, and Minor Threat) would collide violently to create a new sound and a new ethos, both of which would heavily influence Green Day in their formative years.

  “There would not have been a Gilman Street scene without Tim’s organizational skills,” Biafra says. “He was about the only guy in the whole scene who could keep a schedule and motivate other people to get things done on time.”

  “MRR came to us for advice,” Dirk Dirksen says. “[The Mabuhay] was closing after a ten-year run, and they were the new thing happening. So they asked us, ’How do you book bands? How do you run a sound system?’ It was very methodical.”

  Once you cross the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge and put the hills behind you, there’s not much to indicate that anything historic has ever transpired on tree-lined Gilman Street. There are no bronze plaques or statues. Industrious sorts have not made any effort to capitalize on 924 Gilman’s legacy: no skate shop or independent record store. Just a few trading posts and a NO WAR sign in a small pet shop window to indicate that this strip was, and still is, a hub for politically charged punk rock. Visit Gilman Street during the day, and you’ll hear loud, circling gulls by the vast trash collection yard. There will be garbage stink and salt water vapor blowing over the hot pavement as you walk toward Eighth Street. But you may also notice that each telephone pole is littered with staple gun scars and brand-new gig flyers. Gilman remains a stop on any van-touring punk band’s itinerary, and any night of the week, you’ll still see four or five of them on a bill. As it approaches its twentieth year of existence it continues to be faithful to the vision of its founders. This collective, spearheaded by Yohannan, always conceived of Gilman as something that would not merely open and close, as so many other punk venues. Gilman was not something that would burn itself out or be shut down by the city over a line of ignored fine print. From the early planning stages, Gilman was constructed to last.

  “Every punk club always goes for a while and then gets shut down. Tim’s whole thing was ’We’re gonna create this club and it’s going to be solid. Totally cool with the city, all the right permits, drug- and alcohol-free place,’ ” remembers Jesse Michaels, at the time a politically minded Bad Brains fan, who would later cofound and front the scene’s most influential band: Operation Ivy.

  While it would not be uncommon for a gang of punks to simply take over something like a broken down, abandoned raw space and squat there till the cops or the conditions forced them out, Yohannan approached the entire project as if he were opening a supermarket. Zoning law books were opened. Neighborhoods were canvassed for local support. It was old-fashioned politicking, and it succeeded in easing the punk-wary community. Something radical was coming, but it would be positive and it would be completely legal.

  Around the fall of 1986 flyers began circulating locally, asking passersby:

  “Isn’t it time we created a real alternative: A diverse group of Bay Area fanzines, Musicians, Arti
sts, and active members of the alternative scene have come together to create a new environment. It is being built by and for those who become involved in making it happen. A warehouse has been leased by Maximumrocknroll and a democratic structure has been organized to operate a community center. The necessary permits have been attained from the city of Berkeley, and construction has begun. This promises to be an exciting center for a wide range of music, art, cultural, and educational activities.”

  Ads were taken out in the back sections of MRR as well, announcing 924 Gilman’s existence, conceptually at least. Operation Ivy cofounder Tim Armstrong, a Bay Area native, had been unable to keep a band together on the local scene for a few years. Bored with his part-time job at Berkeley pizza parlor Fat Slice, he decided to relocate to New York City where local hard-core acts like the Cro Mags and Murphy’s Law seemed infinitely more exciting. “It just seemed like the thing to do. If I liked New York, my plan was to stay there. I didn’t really know anyone,” Armstrong says. “All I wanted to do was roam the streets of the Lower East Side. That night I hit my first shows at CBGB. The Gorilla Biscuits and Youth of Today. Afterward everyone hung out for hours talking outside about music and stuff going on in their lives. I remember wishing the East Bay had a spot like CB’s. The next day, I was hanging out at a fanzine shop on St. Marks Place, reading MRR, and I came across an ad about a new club opening in Berkeley. When I saw that ad, I knew I had to go home. Looking back now, if it wasn’t for that ad, I would have stayed in Manhattan. I’m sure of it. Sometimes it takes one little thing to make up my mind and get me going. I was soon headed back to the East Bay on another three-day Greyhound bus ride.”