Permits also had to be obtained, though it was decided to make the venue alcohol-free, thus making it easier to do all-ages shows. “Tim wanted to make it an all-ages venue that lasted, that kept going,” says Murray Bowles, a computer programmer who had been attending local punk shows and, with Yohannan’s encouragement, had started photographing them. “Because there were plenty of bar kind of places that were around, but they were generally only around for a few years, partly because they had underage drinking. I went to the first Berkeley City Council meeting about it, and, oddly, they were arguing about Tim’s insistence on their not serving alcohol; the people of the city council were kind of wondering why he was insisting on that since it was perfectly okay with them.”
Then there was the matter of how the club would be run. Participation from the community was actively encouraged. “Isn’t it time we created a real alternative?” read a flyer promoting the endeavor. “Come and find out for yourself how this project can involve you.”
Portman was among those who attended Gilman’s planning meetings, as the Mr. T Experience had formed the same year (the band would later record a song about the venue, ‘At Gilman Street’). Portman had discovered punk through listening to local radio stations, especially college radio stations, and leaned toward “the kind of punk rock that was more or less pop songs, roughly recorded pop songs … The Ramones, The Buzzcocks, The Undertones, that whole type of punk rock.” Since junior high he’d toyed with the idea of setting up a band with his friends. “Three or four guys would be hanging around together, and they were ‘in a band’, but it was mostly theoretical,” he explains. “You design your logo, you come up with a track listing for the first three albums, you chart how the band breaks up when everybody dies in a plane crash, and so forth. The idea that you would try to actually play in front of people was always kind of scary to me in those days. But eventually you acquire instruments and you form a band, then probably 10 years later you learn to play your instruments and then it’s all downhill from there!”
Eventually, Portman did start up a real band, the Mr. T Experience (the name being inspired by a character on TV’s The A-Team, a muscular African-American who sported a mohawk), and welcomed the opportunity to have another local venue to play. “Gilman was a central feature of your life if you were trying to be a band, because you were always looking for places to play and you wanted to be involved,” he says. “You had to pay your dues though. In the run up to opening, they had these meetings every week that you felt like you had to go to if you were gonna get booked there, and I cannot even describe to you how tedious they were. It’s like they were run by these guys from the Sixties who were drawing from their experience of forming Maoist communes and so forth, so there was a lot of strange bureaucratic nonsense; rarely was someone able to finish a sentence without some kind of crypto-hippie standing up, waving Robert’s Rules Of Order and saying, ‘Point of order! Point of order!’ There was a real division between those people, and the ‘kids’, the people in bands, in their early twenties. The main reason you were there was that you wanted a place to play, not necessarily that you wanted to overthrow the government and remake society on a more egalitarian, smellier basis. That was their trip. We were just like, if they’re gonna have a place to play we should be involved in it, ’cause it’s a place to play. I went to a lot of meetings, and I’d just sit there; I was in college at the time, so I’d bring my homework, do my Latin while they were arguing about Robert’s Rules Of Order. It was a real experience.”
Portman admits he couldn’t resist tweaking the sensibilities of those who took such matters so seriously. “I have kind of a contrarian streak, and I had even more of it back then,” he says. “And so I really enjoyed baiting them, I would ridicule their pseudo-leftist pretensions. That was the year of anti-Reagan rock; at that time everyone had to have a anti-Reagan song, and every other song was about El Salvador. So we used to say, ‘This is a song about a girl’ to introduce practically every song — and most of the songs were love songs or breakup songs, but the reason we started saying that is because it would just drive ’em crazy! And sometimes we would fake ’em out, like say, ‘Hey, this one’s about El Salvador … no, I’m just kidding, this is a song about a girl.’”
“Gilman was sort of like a socialist co-operative grocery store in atmosphere except that it was a punk club,” recalls Jesse Michaels, lead singer of Operation Ivy, who would be one of Gilman’s most popular bands prior to the arrival of Green Day. Michaels was also involved with Gilman as a volunteer. “It was a collective, a community-organised club, and it was supposed to be a totally democratic situation, but Tim more or less ran it. He was a communist, and tended to infuse everything he did with heavy-handed left-wing rhetoric. For that reason, there was no advertising at Gilman for the first year, no drinking, no racism, etc. It was a good thing in some ways, but very un-rock’n’roll at the same time. Everybody noticed that it was a bit stiff there at times. On the other hand, the organisation was tight, unlike other punk clubs, bands were paid fairly, and security problems — like skinheads — were dealt with instead of just ignored.”
And despite his mixed feelings about the organisers, “the most important thing is that it was a place to play,” says Portman. “There were places like it all over, but this was the one that was here. I would say that one of the things it did successfully, one of my goals for it which actually did happen, was that it was a place where it was a little bit safer to be a goof-ball, which is all that I knew how to do. Hardcore bands played there, but it was a little bit less alienating. The fact that there was a place to play did mean that the kids who would go had the same experience that a lot of us had; you’d see these people on the stage and think, ‘Wow, they’re terrible, I could do that,’ and so then they’d start to form their own version of it, and that’s how the scene developed.”
Gilman finally opened on New Year’s Eve, 1986, with Impulse Manslaughter, Christ On Parade, Silkworms, AMQA, and Soup — who would have the honour of being the very first band to play on the Gilman stage — on the bill. Shows were held on Fridays, Saturdays, and occasionally Sundays. Initially, the idea was that attendees wouldn’t know who they were going to see. “Tim’s plan had been that no one would know who was playing,” says Bowles. “There would be a music committee, and they would figure out the bands that were good for you to hear. And you would just come to Gilman and see what happened.” But audiences were less interested in taking a chance than Yohannan had hoped. “At the beginning, more often than not, there were shows that there were hardly any people at all,” Bowles says. “It was only later, especially with OpIvy and Green Day, that there were really big shows. And eventually, the not-knowing-who-was-going-to-play principle wore down, because bands would flyer anyway. And if you were a band enthusiastic enough to flyer, then your friends would know about the show, and then gradually MaximumRockNRoll started having their own flyers, and then it was all like a normal club.” Aside from one other detail; in the spirit of supporting independent artists, bands affiliated with major labels were not allowed to play the venue.
Membership was required, but the fee was a mere two dollars, and shows themselves were an equally reasonable five; those who didn’t want to pay that nominal amount could volunteer to work in some capacity at that evening’s show. Though not especially large (the stage itself is wedged into one corner of the room), Gilman exudes a potent atmosphere, with seemingly every inch of wall space covered with graffiti. Bands set up tables on the side to sell their records and T-shirts, there are “free boxes” of used clothing, and a room designated as the “stoar”, stocked with candy and soda. Despite the no drinking/no smoking policy, attendees slip outside — particularly between sets — to indulge, or, these days, cross the street to go to the Pyramid Ale House for a beer. And though music remained the focus, there was no shortage of other freewheeling hijinks. A 1987 story in Spin noted, “Past evenings have been livened by a game of ‘Twister’, a running ba
ttle between two people in mock-FBI mufti armed with automatic Uzi waterguns, and a scavenger hunt that turned up everything from ‘Garbage Pail Kids’ to a picture of someone’s mother in a bouffant hairdo.”
Gilman also had their own documentarian in Murray Bowles, who was there most weekends with his trusty Canon. Taking Tim Yohannan’s suggestions, “I learned that you can’t just stand in one spot all the time,” he says. “You have to move around. I gradually got used to it, going from place to place and getting bumped into and stuff. And eventually I learned how to take pictures holding the camera over my head instead of actually looking through the viewfinder. That was a big plus. My camera, a little Canon range finder, had a 28mm lens, so everything was wide-angled, so you didn’t really have to point precisely at what you wanted.” Bowles’ photos initially appeared in publications like Ripper, Thrasher, and MaximumRockNRoll, then, after Green Day’s success, in larger publications like Rolling Stone, and the book Fodor’s Rock & Roll Traveler USA, not to mention countless album covers.
Mr. T Experience played Gilman the first month it was open, on January 10, sharing the bill with Short Dogs Grow, Feederz, and Undesirables; Operation Ivy soon followed on May 17, when MDC (Millions of Dead Cops), Stikky, and Gang Green also played. Both Mr. T and OpIvy would end up on a new local indie label that would also help to launch Green Day: Lookout Records (or, to use its logo’d punctuation, Lookout!).
Some 160 miles north of the East Bay, Lawrence Livermore, then 39 years old, was living on Iron Peak, a remote hillside in the Mendocino mountains, accessible only via Spy Rock Road. The nearest town, Laytonville, was 18 miles away, with a population of 1,000; Willits, the next largest community, was positively robust in comparison, with a population of 4,000. “It’s a town full of a lot of artists, free-thinkers, and musicians,” says Winston Smith, an artist who lived in the same area, and who would design the cover of Green Day’s Insomniac album. “People who moved up there from Berkeley or LA during the late Sixties and early Seventies were doing it to leave the big city. It’s a precarious balance between redneck cat-hatters and free-thinking, poet, hippie, anarchist weirdoes.”
Lawrence had grown up in Detroit, listening to rock’n’roll and doo-wop on local radio in the Fifties, then getting swept up by the city’s Motown explosion of the Sixties. “I was inspired not just by the music of Motown, but by the idea that poor and working-class people from the projects could create their own scene instead of waiting for city slickers from New York or Hollywood to do it for them,” he explains. “Then after that, I listened to the British Invasion stuff and all the Detroit garage bands that were trying to copy that style.”
It didn’t take long for Lawrence to become interested in making music himself, though he admits, “I hung around with bands but didn’t have the nerve to try playing guitar myself until I discovered Hank Williams and got an acoustic guitar. I had been playing piano, mostly on my own, since I was a little kid, but once I left home I didn’t have a piano again until I was in my thirties, so I had to make do with a guitar.”
Livermore eventually ended up on Iron Peak as “a kind of ‘I’m sick of the city, I’m going back to the land’ sort of thing,” he says. “Not very logical. My girlfriend and I had a scary adventure in San Francisco one night where this carload of kids wielding two-by-fours chased us halfway across town for no apparent reason, and it was at that point that I said, ‘That’s it. I’ve had it with this city. I’m going to go start my own city somewhere else.’” Once relocated, he also finally began trying to put together a band of his own.
A constantly fluctuating membership initially kept the group from getting off the ground, so in lieu of a band, Livermore launched a publication, Lookout!, in 1984. “It was named after the fire lookout tower atop Iron Peak, which was the most visible landmark — actually one of the few visible signs of human habitation — in the remote canyon where we lived,” he explains. “Originally it was more of a local newsletter for the mountain community where I lived. I occasionally wrote about music, but usually only to make fun of the hippie and reggae music that was popular there, or to further rile up the hippies by claiming that punk rock was better. However, when a delegation of angry pot growers threatened to burn down my house because I was bringing too much attention to the region, I shifted my focus to more regional issues and also started writing a lot more about the punk-rock scene in San Francisco and the Bay Area. And once The Lookouts got going, I of course wrote a lot about them and the other bands we played with, and that sort of grew into covering the Gilman Street scene.” Livermore later became a columnist for MaximumRockNRoll.
The drummer in Lawrence’s on-again/off-again band also happened to be his girlfriend. When the couple split, she conveniently left her drum set behind, and in 1985, a final lineup for Lawrence’s band, also called The Lookouts, came together. Livermore played guitar, and, though in his late thirties, drafted in some young neighbours to accompany him. One was 14-year-old Kain Hanschke, soon dubbed “Kain Kong”; the other was an even younger boy, 12-year-old Frank Edwin Wright III, who lived a mile away from Livermore on Spy Rock Road.
The young Wright was born December 9, 1972, in Germany; his father flew helicopters in Vietnam. When his father’s tour of duty finished, the family (which also included an older sister) relocated to Mendocino county. His father worked as a truck driver and a bus driver, while his wife Linda was a bookkeeper. The region’s isolation left the boy without much to do, which is how he ended up hanging out at Livermore’s home, despite the difference in their ages.
Wright already had an interest in music. At age nine, he’d taken up the violin, but as he told Drum, “No noise came out that sounded good, so I kind of gave it up.” Nor did the music on the only station the family radio picked up (“Hall & Oates, Huey Lewis, all that shit”) catch his ear. He was far more interested when Livermore offered him the chance to play on the abandoned drum set. “Even though he’d never played drums in his life and was only 12 years old, I thought he had the right attitude to be in a punk band, and that was more important than musical ability,” Livermore says. Frank had already been nicknamed “Tré” by his family, a variation on the Spanish word for “three”; Livermore added the surname “Cool”, giving the name an additional meaning, playing on the French word for “very”, tres (Tré Cool = very cool).
Livermore says the age differences made little difference to the group. “It wasn’t that different from playing with people my own age,” he says. “I think musicians tend to be fairly juvenile anyway. I know I was. Occasionally I had to be a bit parental, especially with Tré, because as a 12 year old, he just didn’t have the attention span for long practises and was hyperactive — still is, apparently. But it didn’t take him long to discover that he really enjoyed the drums and was good at them. From then on, the main problem was getting him to stop pounding on them long enough to have a conversation.”
The drums proved to be a perfect fit for the energetic pre-teen; as he recalled to liveDaily.com about his father’s response to his wanting to become a drummer, “He said, ‘Well, if you can rub your stomach at the same time as you pat your head, at the same time you’re jumping up and down on one leg and kicking the other one out in a circle, and saying ‘The Pledge of Allegiance …’ And then I did all that just like, bam, you know.” Initially, he wasn’t allowed to play with the set’s full count of cymbals because of the noise he made; as he improved, they were returned to the kit, one by one. Tré’s father eventually bought him a kit of his own for his thirteenth birthday.
Tré’s practises were described by his mother as “pretty noisy, but a definite improvement on the violin.” In fact, Tré improved to the point where he found himself in great demand as one of the area’s few drummers. Though still in junior high, he would play with high school and college bands and orchestras, broadening his repertoire by playing a wide variety of music, ranging from classical to big band music to reggae. “A lot of the time they never had drum charts s
o I would just go off a trumpet chart,” he said. “It just got me ready for other things. It just opened my skills.” As a result, his influences were equally wide ranging; in one interview he cited both Gene Krupa and Marky Ramone as “drumming heroes”.
Meanwhile, The Lookouts were also busy, playing local parties “where all the parents and kids would come,” says Livermore. “And we played at a campsite/general store parking lot down by the high-way.” By 1986 they began getting gigs at the smaller punk venues in the Bay Area, so the opening of a club like Gilman was a welcome development. “Prior to Gilman Street opening, the original San Francisco punk scene had kind of dwindled down to a pretty low ebb,” says Livermore. “There were big thrash/metalcore type shows, but the DIY punk stuff was mostly happening in warehouses and garages and really small clubs. It was always a challenge to find somewhere to play, but once Gilman opened, the scene practically exploded, with all these kids starting new bands and their friends coming to see them play and being inspired to start their own bands. I loved just about everything about Gilman. Like it says in the Rancid song [‘Journey To The End Of The East Bay’], the place was sacred ground to me. It was a place where all the misfits fit in, where you could make up the rules yourself, and nobody — well, almost nobody — was there to tell you that what you wanted to do was impossible.”
Livermore then launched a third venture under the Lookout name, a record label, initially co-owned with David Hayes, then Patrick Hynes, that he started with $4,000. The Lookouts were the first act to release a record on the label, their 1987 album One Planet, One People boasting such songs as ‘Don’t Cry For Me Nicaragua’, ‘Fourth Reich (Nazi America)’, and, in a nod to their roots, ‘Mendocino County’. The album’s record-release party was held at Gilman (where the group had first played on January 24), Livermore sporting a black eye received from a “local lunkhead” who’d tried to stop the band playing at another show the night before. The other band members used makeup to draw their own black eyes in solidarity.
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