At Gilman Street

I have a new iPod clock radio on which the alarm can be set to wake me with music from my iPod instead of the sonorous tones of WNYC, the local public radio station, which I've found from experience are more than likely to put me right back to sleep.

Being opposed in principle to alarm clocks, owing no doubt to many miserable experiences with them during my school and working years, I rarely use them, preferring to operate under the theory that if something is worth waking up for, I'll wake up for it. This theory usually works pretty well, though it does sometimes require making adjustments to my thinking along the lines of, "Well, I didn't really want to go anyway."

But Saturday morning I had promised to attend an early meeting in the nether reaches of Brooklyn (not too far south of Prospect Park, actually, but because of the vagaries of the subway system, at least an hour away), so I reluctantly gave my iPod alarm clock its first trial.

And what do you know? It worked. At 8 o'clock on the dot, the room was filled with the sounds of the Mr. T Experience singing, "Seems like it was only yesterday, nothing to do, nowhere to play..." Although it came out long before MTX achieved what prominence they did, it's always been one of my favorite songs by them. Hell, probably my very favorite, and not because it shows them at their musical best or Dr. Frank in full Porter-Gershwinesque lyric flow, but because it so perfectly captures and encapsulates that fleeting moment in time when for at least a couple hundred of us, the Gilman Street Project was the center of the punk rock universe.

In fact, thinking back to what I just wrote about hippies and Deadheads and their delusions about how their little drug and music scene was going to change the world, I have to acknowledge that I and a few of my friends probably sounded just as nutty on the subject of Gilman Street. All I can say in my/our defense is that our visions were largely drug-free and that 21 years later, Gilman Street is still operating along more or less the same principles - non-profit, volunteer-run, no booze or drugs, no racism, sexism or homophobia - that it was founded on.

Okay, through the years many patrons have undoubtedly strolled, marched or stumbled through those doors already under the influence of drugs or alcohol. And a few of them might have even harbored traces of sexism, racism or homophobia in their hearts, but if they knew what was good for them and wanted to see the show, they kept quiet about it.

Rules were bent many times, but not that often broken. And despite periodic financial crises, pressures from a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood (a process which, ironically, the opening of Gilman probably helped kick-start), it remains one of the very few examples I've ever seen of an organization run along anarchistic principles that actually works, and has continued to work for what, in punk years, is a couple eons.

The MTX song pokes gentle fun at the Gilman purists, of whom I was undeniably one. "And if you've got nothing better to do, there's a meeting every Sunday afternoon, you can talk about skinheads at the show, you can vote on whether you're gonna vote, and you can make a speech, you can rant, you can rave, you can preach..." Anyone who ever sat through one of those seemingly interminable meetings - sometimes they'd have to postpone the show for an hour because we were still voting on whether we were gonna vote" - will recognize that picture.

"It's democracy, it's one big family," Franks sings, and for some of the Gilman kids, it probably was their first experience with the former and a very different experience of the latter. Granted, it was a warts-and-all experience, especially with regard to democracy, since Tim Yohannan, the (mostly) benign dictator of Maximum Rocknroll magazine whose money had made the original experiment possible, thought it would be in the best interests of the club if the members voted unanimously or nearly so in favor of how he thought things should be run, and was willing to keep us there voting until we came up with the correct (his) result.

This caused a bit of dissension in the ranks, but between the fact that he was right more often than wrong and his willingness to stay there until everyone else had either given in or gone home, things pottered along fairly smoothly for almost two years until Tim decided the club was no longer living up to his vision for it and took what was left (not much) of his money, shut the doors and went home. That a new, far less organized group was able to reopen the place within a few weeks and keep it going until the present shocked everybody, including, most likely, the popele who managed to to do it.

There are some who argue, and I might be among them, that Gilman was never the same after that. In some ways it was a lot more fun without Tim hovering over everything insisting it be done "properly," and the biggest and most legendary shows, like the time we somehow crammed a thousand people into a space licensed for less than 300 for Operation Ivy's last appearance, were yet to come.

But as stressful and intense as that first year and three quarters could be - one kid just back from Israel likened it to working on a kibbutz run by Stalinists - there was also the sense, and maybe this is what Dr. Frank had in mind when he referred to it as "family," that once you'd walked past that front door, you were home. It always seemed like someone's basement rec room to me, someone whose parents were always out for the night, where all your friends could hang out and do pretty much anything they could imagine.

There's a show coming up there next month that I might like to attend, and Erika was teasing me about how if I still lived in Berkeley, I could walk there, but now, because I live in stupid old New York, I'd have to jump on airplane for. And I retorted that no matter how great a show it was, and no matter how vital a part Gilman had played in my life, living in Berkeley was just too high a price to pay.

And I know, too, that if I did live in Berkeley, I wouldn't go to Gilman that often. It belongs to a different generation now; they've got their own bands, most of whom I'm not interested in, and frankly, a lot of the time I'd rather be somewhere where it's quiet enough to carry on a conversation with my friends. Not that I've given up on shows altogether; a lot of the action, especially when it comes to the kind of music I like, has now shifted to the East Coast.

I probably write about Gilman Street and "the old days" too much here, but there you go. Don't blame me, blame my new iPod clock radio.

Goodbye, California

I haven't really lived here in ten years, but I've always kept this small room, more of a storeroom than a living space, really, but it's still provided me with a base in Berkeley, something I'm now on the verge of finally giving up.

Considering all the awful things I've said about Berkeley in recent years, people could hardly be blamed for wondering why I'd want to maintain any ties to the place, but my reasons were twofold: most of my family is located nearby, and I had way too many things - the accumulated possessions of a California existence that dates back to 1968 - to consider shipping them over to England during the years I was living there. Most of the stuff has mainly sentimental value, but it's value nonetheless, even if it wasn't quite enough to convince me to lay out the thousands it would have cost to bring everything to London.

But now that I've got a new home base in Brooklyn, the time has come to pack up all these memories and move them out to the Right Coast. I flew out here on Monday night, not expecting any great drama to arise around this; if anything, I was annoyed at having to leave New York for a couple weeks at one of my favorite times of year. But as the plane crossed into California airspace, I was seized with sudden spasms of regret and fear: was I doing the right thing after all? Was California really as bad as I'd made it out to be? It certainly didn't look that way from 30,000 feet, with the lights of the cities splayed across the darkened land like so many jewels on velvet (sorry, I know it's a cliché, but it really does look like that).

It became painfully apparent that I couldn't casually cut my ties to the place where I'd had some kind of home or connection for nearly 40 years and not expect to deal with some rather intense feelings. I remembered how I first came here, young, scared, dead broke and wanted by the law, and immediately felt safe and at home. I recognized that despite my best efforts to screw things up, California had been very good to me, providing me with the opportunity to make my fortune and pursue my dreams. Basically, my life had been pretty crap before I got to California, and while there were plenty of crap intervals afterward as well, most of them were of my own making.

For the first day I even toyed with the idea of abandoning this whole Brooklyn thing, settling back into my little room in downtown Berkeley, and living here in quiet obscurity for the rest of my life. I could certainly afford it; the rent here is ridiculously low, with all utilities, even high-speed internet, thrown in. It might not be much of a life, granted; we're talking about a 9'x12' room that's so cramped I have to sleep in a loft up near the ceiling and can reach almost everything without getting out of my single chair. And not much light gets in through the windows, the stairways and common areas haven't been decorated (or, it sometimes seems, cleaned) since the 1970s, and the house in general is a classic example of Berkeley's rent control turning what might be a perfectly normal house into a time capsule hippie hovel.

Still, it's been a comfortable place to hang out, or perhaps more accurately, hide out from the world. I first took this room when my original Berkeley room, a bit larger and in the house next door, was devoured by the monster that became Lookout Records. I and two employees/partners ran the label out of that slightly larger room until the Green Day explosion of 1994-95, when the number of employees expanded to the point where there was no longer room for me to sleep there. When I got this new room in January of 1994, I grabbed a handful of blankets, took them next door and threw them on the floor, followed by myself, and slept for something like 29 hours.

Now, in two or three days if everything goes to plan, I'll be loading the last of this room's contents into a truck and setting off across the country. Normally I'd be looking forward to a transcontinental drive, but I'm kind of already dreading what it will feel like to wave goodbye to California for the last time.

Well, not necessarily the last time; I can always come back, I keep telling myself, if things don't work out in New York. And of course I'll still visit family and friends here as often as possible. But not having a specific place to come back to is going to make that a very different experience. Once upon a time, I would have thought nothing about moving thousands of miles away - in 1970 alone I did it three or four times - but perhaps I'm finally getting too old for this sort of shenanigans.

I try reminding myself that even if I were to stay in California, I wouldn't want to keep living in this room or this neighborhood. Downtown Berkeley was no prize when I first moved here (next door, into what would become the Lookout office) in 1990, and it's been going downhill ever since. Even if there were anywhere to go at night, I no longer feel all that safe on the streets, and the crime stats - almost double the rate of street crime compared with New York City - would seem to indicate I'm not just being paranoid. Today's Berkeley Daily Planet had a story about how a gunman strolled into a cafe directly across the street from the UC campus and robbed six students of their laptops; in New York I've grown used to seeing people sitting out on the sidewalks at two in the morning typing away on their computers without a care in the world.

So I guess I'm going to go, and if my recent experience in leaving other places - specifically Laytonville and London - is any indication, it'll be fine, and you won't catch me looking back or turning into a pillar of salt. But right at this moment, surrounded by the wreckage and detritus of my past waiting to be put into boxes and be carted off to a new home, I'm feeling just a teensy bit anxious. Give me a couple days, though, and I should be cruising up over the Sierra Nevada singing, in the words of Joe King, goodbye, California, it's really been nice, and getting ready for the rest of my life to begin.

Biking To Gilman

So there I was in Berkeley for the first time in a few years without access to a car. True, I never drove all that much when I did have a car, but there were certain destinations - and especially certain times of night - when using public transportation was a miserable and/or impossible prospect.

Remind me, while I'm on the subject, never ever to complain about the New York City subway again. After a couple days of depending on the Bay Area Toonerville Trolley, misleadingly known as Bay Area "Rapid Transit," it was easy to see why the streets of Berkeley and Frisco are largely deserted at night. It's just not worth the hassle of going out.

It used to be that while you had to wait a long time between trains (but hey, what's your hurry, there's nowhere to go anyway, so you might as well just kick back, smoke another joint and munch on some sautéed bean sprouts), but at least BART kept to a schedule, which, if you weren't too stoned to figure it out, meant you could generally show up at the station just in time for a train. No longer, though; in its ongoing crusade to punish the people of the Bay Area for being such gullible dupes, BART has now taken to canceling trains without notice and leaving people hanging out on the station platform for up to half an hour, by which time many of them could have walked where they were going. Except of course that they've already paid to get in the station and there are no refunds.

It used to be that you could take a train straight to San Francisco Airport, just like many real cities, but that made too much sense and was too easy. Now you've got to take three trains, including an 11 minute wait on the platform while other trains that are going almost but not quite to SFO pass you by. Brilliant transit planning, BART guys. Let me guess: you never actually ride the thing, do you?

At least I could get to my mom's and brother's houses in El Cerrito pretty easily. Six minutes on the train and a 10 minute walk at either end made it almost as quick as driving. But even that got a little tedious, so I decided to follow my other brother's example and ride a bike there. The last time - years ago, I must admit - I tried riding to El Cerrito I followed the same route I'd normally use if driving a car, and it was harsh: up and down some very stroppy hills. I was completely exhausted by the time I got there and ended up bringing my bike back on the BART.

But this time I thought things out a little more carefully and on doing so realized that the bicycle freeway - aka the bike path or the Ohlone Greenway - that passed near my mom's house was the same one that passed very near my Berkeley HQ, and that it was pretty much a level run all the way there.

I'd ridden the path many times before, but only as far as Gilman Street, which is what, for old times' sake, I'd done on Friday night. I was hoping to run into Jesse Luscious there, being that he'd posted on the PPMB that he might be stopping in to see Social Unrest. He didn't show up, as it turned out, but quite a few other old-timers did, including, of course, SU guitarist James Brogan, who I also knew from his days with Samiam.

Then there was Gary Gutfeld, formerly of the Hi-Fives, who seemed a semi-unlikely candidate to be playing drums for such a proto/über-punk outfit like Social Unrest, but who acquitted himself masterfully (I shouldn't be surprised, really; Luis Illades, best known for his efforts on behalf of the poppier Pansy Division and Plus ones, turned out to be a totally solid punk rock drummer when he linked up with SF's re-united Avengers).

I was thinking it must have been nearly 20 years since I'd last seen Social Unrest, and if it wasn't quite that long, it's got to have been at least 15 or 18. And while I was remarking to someone on how remarkable it was that a band could still have so much youthful punk rock energy after 25 years, it suddenly occurred to me that they've been around even longer than that, more like 27-28 years. Wow.

I was especially impressed by singer Creetin K-os, who looked and carried himself like the kind of half-glam/half-gritty rock stars who used to front punk bands back in the glory days, and of whom Operation Ivy singer Jesse Michaels once said, "Basically, I ripped off his vocal style to a major degree. If people hear Creetin K-os sing, they'll be like, 'Oh, I see where he got all his shit.'" The guy's obviously a few years older than he was when he first fronted SU, but without getting right up front and examining him closely, you'd be hard pressed to tell.

It being "punk" night at Gilman, the troglodyte element was a little more evident among the audience. Actually, there was no more than a handful of serious old-fashioned moshers trying their best to make a circle pit while simultaneously trying to slam into and knock down as many innocent bystanders as possible. One particular goombah, who couldn't have been more than 5'4" but was built like the proverbial brick shithouse, especially delighted in blindsiding and sending sprawling anyone unwise enough to let his or her eyes stray toward the stage instead of the pit.

Forgetting momentarily how old and comparatively scrawny I am, I briefly mulled over stepping into the pit and sorting him out, but fortunately sanity returned before I took any such action. Back in 1987 or 88, when I was skinnier and crazier, but also 20 years younger, I single-handedly muscled a large obstreperous skinhead out of the pit and out the front door before he or anyone else realized what was happening. I've never understood how I got away with that, unless it was simply a matter of the guy simply being in shock that he was being manhandled by a guy half his size.

Gilman being Gilman, nobody did anything about the homicidal slam dancers except grumble to themselves or surreptitiously shove back when no one was looking. It kind of reminded me of the club's attitude toward smoking: it's one of the last public places in California where people are allowed to smoke indoors, even though smokers are now a tiny minority.

It wasn't always that way: a few years back, the joint reeked with great clouds of cigarette smoke as mobs of teenagers declared their freedom from mom and dad by puffing up a storm. But for some reason, that's no longer the case, which makes it all the more obvious how one single smoker can stink up the air for a couple dozen other people nearby.

But no one would dream of telling Mr. Smoker to take it outdoors, because that wouldn't be "punk." Ah well. I had to move a few times because some clueless dink parked himself right next to me with a slow-burning and especially stinky cigarette which he then used to strike elaborate poses meant apparently to illustrate just how cool he was but, um, failed miserably. Hey, that's Gilman. You take the tacky with the ultra-cool.

Anyway, the bike ride there and back was so pleasant and easy that the next day I high-tailed it over to El Cerrito over an as yet unexplored (except on foot) stretch of the Greenway. I thought it was especially cute how at Eureka Street in EC they even had an on ramp just like car freeways, complete with a mini-sized Yield sign. Again, the ride took me about the same amount of time it would have taken if I'd traveled by BART or automobile.

Had a nice time walking around EC with my mom, but when it came time to zip back to Berkeley and then on to BART for the trip to the airport, a great foul and chilly wind had sprung up, one of those winds Frisco and the near East Bay often get this time of year that makes it feel almost worse than midwinter. It was also blowing straight in my face all the way to Berkeley, and tearing right through my flimsy little jacket that by all normal logic should have been more than adequate for the last days of May. It didn't help, either, that I'd just checked the weather back home in New York and learned that it was a sunny 88 degrees there.

I wish I could have figured out a way to pack my bike up and ship it out to NYC for something less than the $75 it originally cost me back in 1993. An amazing bike it is, too: I've done virtually nothing to maintain it, it's sat outside through over a dozen Bay Area winters, and yet with little more than some air in the tires and a smattering of oil for the gears, it ran like a charm. I can't imagine what sort of additional comfort people who spend a couple grand on a bike are getting for their money.

Unfortunately, I probably won't be able to figure out any economical way of getting the bike here to NY short of hiring a big truck to drive it and all my remaining California possessions across the country, so in the interim I guess I'll have to look for its $75 equivalent on this side of the country, because after braving the wintry gales of a Frisco "spring," the idea of cruising the hot summer streets of Brooklyn and Manhattan suddenly seems a lot more appealing.

Oh yeah, while I've always enjoyed arriving in New York after a lengthy airplane ride, it's about a hundred times better when you know you're coming home and not just for a visit. It being sunny, warm and the start of what looks to be a long and lovely summer is that much more icing on the cake.

Where Else But Berkeley...

...is a sentence like

The Bush administration isn’t just some inbred motley crew of arrogant extortionist bullies who like to push people around whenever they feel like it; they are the latest in a series of plutocratic American gangsters bent on expanding the Atlanticist Empire with all the economic and military muscle available to them.

almost certain to come up sooner or later during any discussion about the behavior of bicyclists on city streets?

Actually It Just Feels That Way

Living In Berkeley Means Longer Life, Study Finds

Urban Renewal

"Big Plans For Making Downtown Berkeley A Cultural Hub," says the Chronicle, which has been running a similarly headlined story semi-annually for at least 25 years now. You might question why a town with a distinguished history as "The Athens of the West," home to one of the world's great universities, and located smack in the middle of what is alleged to be a major American cosmopolis, would need to be "planning" to become a cultural hub? Shouldn't it be one by default?

Berkeley is forever coming up with plans to "restore" or "revive" or "beautify" downtown; its last stroke of genius was to cut down all the trees and replace them with saplings which, if they're lucky enough to survive 20 years of being backed into cars and being broken off by mentally deranged ferals, just might make downtown look as pleasantly shady as it was before they cut down all the old trees. That bit of "beautification" cost the city over a million bucks (they got some new paving and park benches out of it too, I think), and guess what: downtown is just as unpleasant, unlovely as ever. Vacant storefronts abound, and begging and mugging remain major industries (after 9 or 10 pm, the only ones).

What Berkeley's planners seem never to comprehend is that you can't design or plan or build your way out of a social problem. Nearly all of downtown's problems can be laid at the door of Berkeley's willingness - eagerness, even - to tolerate levels of criminal and antisocial behavior that will turn any neighborhood, no matter how nicely built or designed into an instant slum.

I'm reminded of that by The Devil's Playground: A Century Of Pleasure And Profit In Times Square, which recounts the rise, fall, and rebirth of America's crossroads. When Times Square was it its worst in the 70s and 80s, city officials private foundations argued and agonized over a plethora of urban renewal programs, none of which were to do any good at all until the city finally, under Mayor Giuliani, did what a police commander had pleaded for back in the 1980s: "Go back to the old style of police work, when men on the beat could enforce standards of public decency and order."

The author, James Traub, goes on to suggest that the degree of public and private expenditure that finally went into remaking Times Square may have been unnecessary. Based on what has happened in other neighborhoods which flourished of their own accord once Giuliani made the city livable again, I'm inclined to agree. Make downtown Berkeley a pleasant and inviting place by removing or at least restraining the deranged, demented and hostile individuals who currently dominate its streets, and a similar result would obtain. Or, alternatively, spend millions of tax dollars creating yet another "civic/cultural hub," aka bum magnet.