Michigan Seems Like A Dream To Me Now

I swear I've used that title before, but what the heck, all the leaves are brown and the sky is gray, and my mother woke me up just past noon calling from California, which is just as well, as in my dream I was having a unending argument with this very exasperating person on the beach.

How's that for a scattershot opening? No? It'll have to do, because while I've been carrying around an outstanding first sentence ever since last night, it seems to have flown away on the wings of sleep and though I still have a number of things to tell you, I can't for the life of me remember how I meant to begin telling you about them.

Never mind, then; I'm holed up in a chilly but otherwise cozy little motel room outside of my ancestral hippie home of Ann Arbor, where I came last night to see my old friends, the Weakerthans, who in addition to the usual gifts of fellowship and great music, presented me with this outstanding t-shirt seen on the right. The show was at the Blind Pig, which I remember complaining about when it opened because it was "commercializing" our hippie culture. This was in 1972, apparently, but by 1973 I was visiting it regularly because it was one of the only places in town where you could get the cappuccino I had grown used to out in California.

Anyway, I'm apparently over any issues I might have had with the Blind Pig, fortunately, and I thoroughly enjoyed the show except for the fact that, as I discovered to my chagrin, Michigan is one of the only places left in the (allegedly) civilized word that STILL allows people to smoke indoors in public places. I mean, come on, people, what century is this already? Also very much enjoyed the opening acts, Christine Fellows (who's also joining in as the fifth Weakerthan on this tour, and one A.A. Bondy, who in the past several decades is the first and only Dylanesque singer-songwriter (well, unless you count J. K. Samson in his solo persona) that I have ever been fully impressed by. I was also excited by the opportunity to introduce him to all of you, on the premise that if I had never heard of him before, nobody else had either, but I see he's playing on Conan O'Brien April 11, the same day he'll be appearing with the Weakerthans back home in Williamsburg. Back home for me, that is, not him.

So, flying to Detroit was a bit depressing. For some reason, tucked in among my keepsakes and memorabilia I used to have a flight schedule from 1966 detailing the flights between Detroit and LaGuardia (including the fare: $16). Back then, when I made my first visits to New York, there were flights pretty much on the hour, and they were in full-sized airplanes packed full of people doing (presumably) important things in both places. Now there's only a handful of flights per day, they're in those little toy airplanes where they don't even have room for overhead baggage, and even then the plane was only half full.

And landing at Detroit Metropolitan (do they still even call it that?) was like time traveling back to the 50s or 60s; at least the terminal they dumped us off at (outside of, that is; we had to walk across the tarmac just like in those old time movies) had scarcely changed at all since the first time I came through there in 1964 or so. The rent-a-car guy told me he was upgrading my compact car to a luxury convertible at no charge, which I didn't see any advantage to, since it's about 40 degrees and fitfully raining and snowing outside, but unless convertibles now have metal tops that don't open, I think he was confused. Pulling out of the airport, I impulsively turned right instead of left and headed toward my old Downriver stomping grounds, where I was strangely appalled at how small and desperate all the houses looked.

Odd, that, since I've been back many - well, at least 10 - times over the years, and I'd never particularly noticed that aspect. Well, the small part, maybe, but desperate? Maybe it was just the last-days-of-winter malaise that I remember settling over the place every year as a boy just before spring burst into sight. Drove past my childhood home and didn't approve of what the new owners had done, like cutting down all but one of the trees and shrubs, went past the school where I got drunk for the first time (and also, a couple years later, got arrested for the first time), past the spot down by the creek where in April 1961 I met up with my first gang, past the other school where we hung out through the summers of 61 and 62, and the drug store across the street, where they'd finally wised up and removed the bench that we always used to lounge around on.

Then, still not having had enough nostalgia, I headed into Detroit proper, or what's left of it, and strangely enough (maybe because the sun had come out by now), it didn't look nearly as bad as it has the last few times I've been there. Oh, also past the park where I first saw the MC5 play on a tennis court in 1965 or 66, and then out Clark Street and onto Michigan Avenue, where things did start looking a bit more like the ruined, post-apocalyptic Detroit that I've come to know over the past couple decades. But even there I saw signs of life, especially in the form of many new immigrants who were blithely strolling past the wreckage as if it never occurred to them to ask, "I left Chiapas/Baghdad/Sierra Leone for this?"

It was almost dark by the time I got to Ann Arbor, but there was still time to look around at what still strikes me, despite its many changes in recent years, as a beautiful and excellent town. Parts of it look like a living museum to small town America of a century ago, and I stopped in one shop to look at some photo books that showed me that indeed, many parts of town had changed very little in the interim. Also found a photo book full of shots of Detroit when I was a kid, when downtown was a place of wonder, a bustling, vibrant city that resembled Manhattan or Chicago rather than the squalid wasteland it's now become.

The reason I went into the bookshop was an odd one: for some reason, while strolling past, I had a sudden inexplicable impulse to buy a copy of Maximum Rocknroll, a magazine I've only seen once in the last five years, and haven't bought in longer than that. It's not so much that I've been boycotting them, it's more that at some point they made one of those ideologically motivated punker-than-thou decisions to the effect that their distributor was getting too successful, so they started doing their own distribution and subsequently disappeared from the great majority of stores that used to carry it.

But for some reason, I knew this particular Borders (did you know Ann Arbor was the home of the original Borders, and that it was once a tiny cornershop itself? Domino's Pizza had its start here as well) would be carrying MRR, and sure enough it was. Having picked up my copy, I was shocked - and, I'll admit, a little pleased - to discover that they were still talking about me. Well, one columnist, anyway, but last time I perused a copy, about two years ago, I was mentioned in two columns, which led me to wonder in a vainglorious way if this was a bit of odd serendipity or if I was a regular subject in a magazine I hadn't been a part of since 1994.

Apart from that, however, it was interesting to see how the magazine has carried on in the absence of Tim Yohannan, different in some aspects, but fundamentally the same, much as Gilman Street did after Tim moved on. Even if it's no longer a magazine I'd regularly pick up and read, it's sort of reassuring to know that it's still there and still carrying on the struggle for... well, for exactly what, I'm not quite sure, but they're struggling nonetheless. Actually, I'm kind of glad to know they're there in a world where so much of what used to be isn't.

Birth Of The Gilman Geek

One of my favorite memories of the early Gilman years was the battle of the bands between Isocracy and the Naked Lady Wrestlers. The photo above isn't of the best quality, but you can see Isocracy on stage (singer Jason appears to be hiding behind Walter Glaser, who's doing the pro-wrestling style announcing, and I don't know who the hell the guy on the far left is) in their moment of triumph.

Off to the right, skulking under a cowboy hat, is one of the members of NLW, who've just been handed a resounding and humiliating defeat by Gilman's favorite house band (to be fair, this was before Operation Ivy rose to prominence). I don't think that's Max Volume, the appropriately named loudmouth lead singer who got this whole battle started by repeatedly heckling and ridiculing Isocracy for being untalented and "amateur" musicians, in contrast to his own band, who were ridiculously talented but never seemed to succeed at anything besides boring the Gilman audience stiff.

As John "Al Sobrante" Kiffmeyer memorably put it after the unanimous verdict had been announced in favor of Isocracy, "When we were playing people were bouncing up and down, rolling around on the floor and peeling themselves off the walls. Then you guys come on and it's like a goddam golf tournament." (I paraphrase, but that was the gist of it.)

The clash between Isocracy and the Naked Lady Wrestlers was emblematic of a cultural divide that opened up rather early in the Gilman era. NLW were older guys who'd been around since the very early 80s; Isocracy were barely out of high school, and had formed their band in 1986 when they still were in high school. Although the people who were the main driving force behind opening and operating Gilman (mainly Maximum Rocknroll people, spearheaded by Maximum Leader Tim Yohannan) were in their 20s and 30s, the place quickly attracted an audience of young teenagers who previously hadn't hadn't been allowed into most clubs that offered live music.

The first time I saw Isocracy, when they shared a stage with us at the old Club Foot in San Francisco, singer Jason Beebout was so scared that he hid behind our bass amp for much of his 10 or 15 minute performance, but by the time they'd been playing Gilman for a couple months, Isocracy was setting the standard for extroverted, exuberant, uninhibited spectacles. Music may not have been their strong suit, as the outraged Naked Lady Wrestlers continually pointed out (the NLW guitarist, by contrast, never passed up an opportunity to drop a note-perfect rendition of the William Tell Overture into the middle of one his solos), but they more than made up for it in showmanship.

It's hard to describe just what was so amazing or hilarious about an Isocracy show; in essence, we're not talking about much more than a lot of smart-ass remarks and random insults coupled with the band's trademark gimmick of bringing in great bags and boxes of rubbish (er, "found art) and throwing it at the audience (who of course threw it right back). But it was a refreshing change from what had by then become the very formulaic sort of punk rock shows we'd been seeing since the late 70s. It was no longer one-way traffic from the stage to the audience; an Isocracy crowd was every bit as involved as the band. By the end of an Isocracy set, there would typically be more audience members than band members on stage, and the audience might well have commandeered the microphones and be outsinging the band as well.

Some of the older punks tut-tutted about how "these kids" were making a mockery of long-standing punk traditions, but they were soon outnumbered by the influx of yet more kids, every other one of whom seemed to want to start a band and play at Gilman, too. Teenagers across the Bay Area seemed to have had a blinding revelation along the lines of, "Hey, if little Johnny Doofus from sixth period English can have a band and play on stage at that new punk rock club, why can't I?"

I'm not sure when the term "Gilman geek" started getting tossed around, but I'd guess it was within the first few months of the club's opening. I'd also imagine that it was originally applied to some aspect of the Isocracy phenomenon, but it might also have come out of the Slapshot incident. For those of you not familiar with Slapshot, they were a straightedge hardcore band from Boston who wore matching varsity jackets and whose singer, a charming and refined gentleman known as Choke, used to menace the crowd with a broken-off hockey stick as he bellowed and hectored them about whatever straightedge hardcore bands used to bellow and hector.

The night they played Gilman, a small knot of X-handed hardcore kids stood up near (but not too near) the stage where they stood, awestruck, watching Mr. Choke, um, once again, bellow and hector. But meanwhile, a larger group of Gilman kids (and not quite kids, like, for example, myself) had reacted to the all the abrasive shouting by playing leapfrog in what would normally have been the pit. This infuriated Choke, but when he yelled at them to "stop screwing around," they responded by pulling faces and jumping up and down like so many armpit-scratching monkeys.

By the end of his set, Choke was beside himself. "I've played all over this country, and in some other countries, too," he said. "I'm ready to play for anybody, anytime, anywhere that wants to see us and gets into our music. But I didn't come here to play for a bunch of fucking goofballs." This elicited a rousing round of ironic cheers, at which point Choke shouted, "This place is punk rock Romper Room!" before stomping off.

And he was right, the only difference being that he thought that was a bad thing and most of us thought it was a very good one. It was a big part of what made Gilman so special and so different from most punk rock clubs: the fact that you could act as silly or as carefree as you wanted and not have to worry about conforming to some rigid ideal of what "punk" was supposed to look or sound like. I think a lot of this was due to our members being so young and relatively free from preconceptions, but it was probably also because our club was completely non-commercial and (at least inside and in the immediate environs) alcohol and drug free.

Ironically, and, I thought, a bit sadly, the era of the Gilman geek lasted only a couple years before a counterreaction began to emerge. Once bands like Green Day started gaining recognition in the larger world and the whole "shiny happy smartpunk sound" (as one of our detractors had it) showed signs of crowding out most other forms of punk rock, there was a tendency on the part of many Gilman old schoolers (those same kids who'd been 16 or 17 when the club opened but were now entering their angst-ridden 20s) to revive the dark and nihilistic styles of early 80s hardcore, complete with dyed black hair, grim faces, and serious drug habits.

It may have started as a joke - certainly Absolutely Zippo fanzine, with its championing of "da punx" and its legendary Jesse Michaels cover drawing of a desperate scenester pouring drugs into his arm through a funnel, was mainly satirical - but as with most such jokes, people soon start forgetting to laugh. There was much debate about whether the band Filth, who looked and sounded like the Exploited or GBH from ten years earlier, were serious about their Ur-punk lyrics (their "big hit" bemoaned "thousands long" list of former punk rockers who'd sold out and abandoned the cause) were merely having a Zippo-style laugh.

Singer Jake Filth insisted he was dead serious, but then he'd cut his punk rock teeth viciously heckling the almost universally loved Operation Ivy even while maintaining a close friendship with at least part of the band. When Lenny, from the now broken-up Isocracy, joined Filth, it seemed to signify a real sea change in the prevailing Gilman aesthetic, not least because suddenly Lenny wasn't smiling anymore.

There would be periodic infusions of new kids, and new bursts of wacky, zany geekdom throughout the 90s, often seen most in evidence at the annual Punk Rock Prom or at Joel Qpunk's birthday bash, but in recent years, such events seem fewer and farther between. Granted, I'm only able to get to Gilman a couple times a year at most these days, but as of late, I often haven't even bothered going when I am in the Bay Area because the great majority of shows seem to be of the generic hardcore/grindcore/deathmetal sort of stuff that I thought had been mercifully put out of its misery back in the late 80s/early 90s.

Hey, it's not really my club anymore, and it's been at least 10 or 15 years since I actually volunteered to work at a show there, so I don't have any business complaining. So please don't read this as such. Think of it more as an elegy for a time, heartbreakingly brief as it turned out, when we, regardless of our ages in the real world, were a bunch of crazy kids who thought - fully expected, even - that we could live that way forever.