by Marc Spitz
Creating a genuine sense of excitement over something major and valuable seemed designed to make the hours of difficult physical and administrative work bearable (and inspired a much-needed infusion of material donations). “My father was a general contractor at the time, and he donated materials [to Gilman],” Dr. Portman says. “MRR organized the club the way you organize a commune.”
There were rumors that Yohannan and the ’zine contributed $40,000 of their own money to cover outstanding costs and ensure that the club would open sooner than later. Where the money came from (if it did in fact come from him personally), remains part of the Yohannan myth. “I heard various rumors about Tim having money from somewhere,” Jesse Michaels says. “He worked a union job. But he had a huge house in San Francisco. Gilman Street cost a shitload of money and I don’t really know where it came from. I’ve also heard things like that he was actually funded by the Communist Party, which sounds to me preposterous. But it’s one of the things I heard. I don’t really know where the dough came from.”
The club was officially approved by the City of Berkeley on New Year’s Eve 1986 and opened to the public that same day.
“The first Gilman Show was Christ on Parade playing with Soup,” Tim Armstrong remembers. “I went down there with [future Operation Ivy bass player] Matt Freeman to check it out, and I felt at home as soon as I walked into the place. There was no backstage. It was a punk club run by punks. There was no sense of hierarchy at all. Things were equal. I was overwhelmed. It was as exciting as the first time I picked up a Ramones album. I felt something magical was happening again, but this time I was in the middle of it.”
Once operational, members were obliged to pay dues and attend weekly meetings designed to keep the inner workings efficient and faithful to the original ethic.
“Sunday afternoons,” Portman recalls, with a shudder. “It was just the widest cross-section of people,” remembers Jesse Michaels. “People in their fifties. And people who were like fourteen. Hippies and punks. It was pretty cool. But there were so many meetings. Organizing. You know, socialists just love to have meetings.”
“Everybody went,” Portman says. “And the reason you went is that you wanted to be involved so your band could play there because there was nowhere else to play. I’d go and I’d be doing a crossword puzzle or reading a book, and they would have these crazy arguments. They’d discuss booking. Everyone wanted to be in booking, but Tim didn’t want to make it elite; you know, every committee is equal. You have to prove your worth to be in the booking committee. And of course, you wanted to be on the booking committee if you had a band for obvious reasons. Then there was security. The security committee would discuss how can we have noncoercive security? They had lots of proposals that would range from ’Well does anyone know karate?’ This one guy Brian Edge stood up at one of those meetings and said, ’Well, I have a real problem with forcing myself upon another human being.’ I just lost it. For much of the meetings, I was just on the verge of cracking up the whole time.”
Eventually a noncoercive security method was proposed, although it was exceedingly difficult in practice. If someone started trouble, the security patrol people would place their own hands behind their backs and, en masse, nudge the troublemaker out of the club with their bellies. “I guess the hands behind the back symbolized some sort of strength through weakness thing,” Portman mused.
Although Billie Joe Armstrong was short and Mike Pritchard was scrawny, both of them happily volunteered to help with security to attend shows there. Luckily, there was never an incident. Both teens were mainstays from opening day onward. “We lived and died for that place,” Pritchard remembered. “At the time, it meant everything.”
Armstrong and Pritchard studied the stage presence and song structure of each Gilman band with a precision their high school teachers never observed. It was their higher education, closer to home than San Francisco, and with a little hands-behind-the-back patrolling, it was affordable.
As exciting as it was to be in the city, unprotected, free, wide-eyed, and frequently stoned, unlike some of their punk-rock peers, they always returned to Rodeo. Jobs and school and band practice could not be abandoned, as exhilarating as these weekend rallies were. However, they took with them these spiritually invigorating new thoughts: Reagan is bad. Socialism can work. Speed is intense. Queers are radical. Reagan is really bad. Maybe I should be a vegetarian? (That last one is especially troubling when your mother works in a barbecue joint. Armstrong would eventually eliminate meat from his diet, but at the time, he ate the food his mother put on the table.) Exposure to Gilman was like mainlining a multivitamin cocktail after over a dozen years of cultural malnutrition.
“Sometimes I’d drive him there, and come back and pick him and Mike up,” Anna Armstrong Humann says. “And Billie would tell me all about it. That was really when he separated himself from the family. And not in the sense that he didn’t have anything to do with us. It just changed his values and shaped his lifestyle and how he saw himself. How he saw the world. It changed the type of people he wanted to be around. He’d found a community that he wanted to be a part of.”
Plus . . . there were interested girls there. Almost immediately, Billie discovered that the way he was being perceived by women was wildly different from the way it was in Rodeo or Pinole. He hadn’t changed—not physically, anyway. The values had. Talent was sexy, no matter what you looked like. And being a little left of center no longer made you a loser. Outside of suburbia, when the xenophobia ceded to tolerance, it was a cool badge: something to be proud of.
Billie found his first serious girlfriend, Erica Paleno (who now spells her name Arica), inside Gilman when both were only sixteen. “People had to drive us to see each other,” Paleno recalls with a laugh. Like Billie, Paleno was already a passionate rock ’n’ roll fan, and the intuitive feelings she had about her new boyfriend were confirmed once he played her some of the four-track recordings that he’d made with Mike and Sean. “I guess I was one of the early people who thought that they had the potential to be big,” she says. “I knew at a very young age that he was sort of a McCartney type. McCartney’s a bass player, but I’m talking about being prolific . . . and writing those melodies. Whatever the formula is, the grand plan or the DNA that makes up that type of person, Billie is one of them. I’m fascinated and attracted to talent, and that’s what it was for me. Because nobody thought he was a super hot guy at sixteen, that’s for sure.”
Billie Joe and Erica Paleno took advantage of the freedoms brought on by Ollie’s long hours at Rod’s Hickory Pit. While Mike was laboring over fish dinners, the two spent hours in Billie’s room, making out and playing music. Paleno was the first in a trio of muses that would inspire some of Green Day’s greatest songs. “I would steal his notebooks, his lyric books,” she confesses. “I still have them, but they’re tucked away. There’s the original version of ’Christie Road’ [which eventually appeared on Green Day’s second full-length album, Kerplunk!], which he wrote for my mom and me. It’s about meeting him at the train tracks and sneaking out of the house because my mom didn’t let me. I was always grounded.” Whenever they could get a ride to and from Berkeley (when not grounded, that is), they’d hit Gilman and feel that excitement and sense of belonging as soon as they passed through the doorway. “We thought it was so broad-based and open-minded for people who were outsiders like us,” Paleno says. Those outsiders, however, were expected to work for their sense of belonging.
Perhaps Yohannan’s most notorious suggestion was that bands, no matter how popular, had to work the club to play. Although none of the bands I interviewed for this book has any recollection of cleaning toilets, that function quickly became emblematic of Gilman’s abolition of the rock ’n’ roll caste system. There was to be no special treatment inside Gilman’s walls. Whether they sucked or rocked, drew one hundred kids or ten kids, all bands were equal, and had to work for the privilege of playing there.
Headliners would n
ot make any more or less money than the six or seven bands they’d played after. The fact that not any band but dozens of bands, with names like Wimpy Dicks, Vomit Launch, Rabid Lassie, Bulimia Banquet, Fuck Bubble, I Am the Hamster, Nasal Sex, and Child Support still clamored to play was, if nothing else, a testament to Yohannon’s conviction and charisma.
“Some of the ideas were really stupid,” Jesse Michaels says. “There were long arguments about whether or not they were going to have advertising. It’s such a lefty thing. They wanted people to come even if it wasn’t a good band. They wanted people to check out opening bands. A lot of it was just absurd.”
“They would have these kind of tribunals that were sort of watered down Maoist practiced self-criticism where the ascenders would be in chairs in the middle of a circle of Gilman people, trying to account to themselves,” Portman claims, “Tim’s kind of pathetic version of being the head of a dictatorship of the punk proletariat. [The tribunals] were called Attitude Adjustment. Later, they just switched their name to Attitude.”
Eventually, as will happen, the kids became a little frustrated with their mentors. Sometimes, especially when there’s loud rock ’n’ roll, you just want to feel free and escape. “It was divisive,” Michaels says. “A lot of punks thought it was bullshit. There were too many rules, and it was too PC. There was an attitude of ’Fuck that place’ after a while. I leaned toward the progressive side of the punk rock spectrum, but at the same time sometimes it got ridiculous. Someone would overhear someone saying something racist in the club and then there’d be a meeting about it the next day. It was just absurd.”
Even touring bands passing through the Bay Area to play Gilman weren’t spared these edicts. “They were liberals. And there’s no shortage of rules on the left,” says Brett Gurewitz, then of L.A. punk heroes Bad Religion and who’d later found the powerful indie rock label Epitaph Records. “It’s actually the right that likes to abolish rules. People forget that. Socialism has rules up the ass. It was a little bit imposing. As a band, coming in there to play, I had the flu and we were on tour and I was in a van. We’d just driven eight hours to get there. And I was sitting on the stage with a fever and some guy came up to me and said, ’Everyone out. We need to kick everyone out, and only the people who can get their hands stamped can come back in.’ I said, ’I just got here, I’m exhausted, and I’m in the band. Can’t I just stay here?’ ’Nope, you gotta get out like everyone else.’ They said something about my rock star attitude.”
Even odder than forcing touring bands to abide by Gilman rules was the unspoken policy of frostiness toward people who came from across the bridge. Insularity can only be harmful to a collective; but if a hard-core Gilman-er caught a whiff of a San Franciscan, much less one who was fresh from college and who may have a Volvo or a new Beamer parked somewhere up the road, the visitor might be well advised to take cover from a barrage of attitude. According to Gina Arnold, then-columnist for BAM magazine (the Bay Area weekly music paper), “The whole Gilman Street scene hated me. And I was never quite clear on that one. I just wasn’t part of their gang. I was out of college. I was somebody from out of town [San Francisco], although I grew up in the Bay Area. The whole university thing wasn’t their scene at all. So I was just sort of a convenient person for them not to like. I championed quite a few of the bands they liked [in my column], but that just made them hate me more. ’We love Fugazi. You can’t come.’ I see it now as a kind of joke but at the time it seemed very real to me.”
Perhaps the most divisive policy of all was the no drugs or alcohol policy that enabled 924 Gilman to get up and running so quickly in the first place. People gave up drinking and getting high temporarily to see shows at the venue, and they’d say it was worth it; but for many it wasn’t an easy sacrifice. “I’m definitely an alcoholic,” Jeff Ott of the Bay Area punk band Crimpshrine confesses, “but I didn’t feel like I was gonna miss coming to this club, which is really the only thing going, because I couldn’t handle three hours without having a beer in my hand. You know, there was nothing about you that couldn’t be loaded here; it was just you couldn’t physically get loaded here.”
For some reason, the only beverage available inside Gilman (besides water) was a locally bottled soda pop called Hansen’s. Unlike Coke or Pepsi, this was the punk-approved soft drink. Still, there were many punks who secretly preferred something a little harder with their drums, bass, guitar, and volume. “There was a liquor store nearby,” Portman says, “and there was Picante, a Mexican restaurant down the street, which is where I spent most of the Gilman shows that I played at except for the brief time I was onstage. I think you will hear many other bands express the same thing. I challenge anyone to manage hanging out in that place for six hours, which is how long the shows lasted, I challenge anyone to do that without at least some help.”
The no drugs and alcohol policy within the club is most likely responsible for the somewhat erroneous image Bay Area punks have of being total joyless straight-edgers (probably akin to assuming that everyone who ever went to a Minor Threat show in DC pledged abstinence, or anyone who purchased more than one Smiths album was immediately a celibate or a vegetarian). “To this day I get kids all over America going, ’Oh, all you were straight-edge and vegetarian,” Ott says, laughing. “And we always tell them, ’No, we just wanted to have a club where there wasn’t a bar. And we didn’t have to deal with the city and the police.’”
The friction between the MRR punks and the more hedonistic ones eventually became too much for Yohannan to deal with. In 1988, just a little more than a year after the doors opened, the magazine divested itself from Gilman. After closing its doors for a few weeks, the lease for the Gilman Street building was passed on to new owners and briefly renamed the Alternative Music Foundation (although to this day, nobody’s ever referred to it as such).
Although much less militaristic, the original ideals of the Gilman Street club remain indivisible from the music and the public perception of the Berkeley punk scene. Yohannan, who died of cancer in 1998, has become synonymous with punk rock idealism: There is a genuine alternative way of living. Yohannan achieved what he intended to do. Even posthumously, he molds young minds. “We were at every fucking show from the very beginning,” Tim Armstrong said. “I’d be playing basketball with Tim Yohannan before the show, dancing to my friends’ bands during the show, and cleaning up the place at the end of the night. I felt like it was mine. My place. For once I felt like I was with a tribe of my own. My whole life, I was an outsider, a misfit, but at Gilman, I could be myself. I could say what I wanted to say, dress how I wanted to dress, and play the music that I loved.”
“Tim actually put his idealism to real social use,” Lenny Kaye observes. “His collective there was based around music, but it was a real collective. And that’s something that’s given lip service to rather than actually put into practice. To this day, you have these mutant kids who don’t really have a place in the world. You’re not like an intellectual. You’re not a sports guy. You’re not anything, but you feel some sense of drive and expression building within you, and you need a place to check it out. That’s what Tim founded at Gilman Street. A place where kids could come and meet like-minded human beings and form bands—one of the greatest social inventions known to man beyond marriage.”
Chapter Three
LOOKOUT!
In 1987, Armstrong and Pritchard were welcome to attend punk shows at Gilman Street, but they had no luck as far as getting a slot even low on a bill for Sweet Children. Yohannan had heard their homemade tapes and dismissed them as simply “not punk enough.”
There were other obstacles in Sweet Children’s way. Mike’s mother, under pressure to raise a family as a single parent for a while, finally decided that they would have to leave Rodeo. Faced with the prospect of losing the only thing in their lives that mattered before they even had a chance to really perform, the pair conspired to come up with ways for Mike to remain local. Billie Joe finally asked his mo
ther if it would be possible for Mike to stay with them for a while. Perhaps he could live in the garage, which Andy had long ago converted into a homey space. Ollie sensed this was more than a whim. She liked Mike, who always took care to check his spastic impulses and act respectfully around her. At the start of their junior year at Pinole, Mike’s mother and sister left Rodeo and he stayed behind. He and Billie Joe were brotherly, and now they lived like actual brothers. The close proximity enabled them to devote even more time to the band: specifically, how to penetrate 924 Gilman’s punk-patrolled borders. There was only one small issue:
“His room reeked of fish,” Anna Armstrong Humann laughs. “But he worked hard and he took care of himself. When his mom left, he made the choice to stay here and finish school. And he was the only one of the three guys [in Green Day] who would. Billie Joe didn’t have a huge amount of support either, but Mike really didn’t have anything. He was just self-motivated.”
Isocracy (named after a state of government where everyone shares equal power) were punk enough for Gilman. Their notorious sets would often culminate with the band showering the audience with garbage they lugged over from the nearby dump. Isocracy’s drummer, John Kiffmeyer, was four years older than the persistent teenagers from Rodeo. He was lean and handsome, while Mike was gangly and Billie still had baby fat. “I had a huge crush on him,” Anna Armstrong Humann confessed. Sweet Children already worshipped the bands they saw every weekend, but bolstered by some weed, they invited Kiffmeyer to play with them one night in Pinole.
“John was going out with Eggplant’s sister,” remembers Sean Hughes. “I knew him because he came over our house one night and ate a bunch of the frozen dinners we’d been saving. So a month later me and Mike and Billie were walking through Pinole and this guy in an army jacket rides up on his motorcycle. He’s still wearing the helmet and he asked us, ’Hey you guys ever been to Gilman Street? You ever heard of a band called Isocracy?’ And I said, ’Yeah, one of those guys ate my frozen dinners!’ And he said, ’What did he look like?’ And I said, ’He was wearing a blue bandana?’ And the guy pulled off his helmet and he was wearing a blue bandana. He said, ’You mean like this?’ ” As inauspicious as this Bugs Bunny–worthy scenario seemed, it would mark some serious changes in Sweet Children, setting them on their path to becoming a professional touring and recording act. “John was a goof, but he had a real serious side to him too,” Hughes says. “He became kind of like our management.”
