Hopefully Productive Doldrums

That's what's supposed to happen in August, right? The hottest of the weather seems to be over now, and when I was taking the garbage out late last night, I could have sworn I felt a hint of autumn in the air, yet at the same time the calendar says there's more than a month and a half of summer yet to go.

Not that it's making all that much difference to me right now, as I'm mostly locked indoors, spending the day psyching myself up to write, and then, toward evening really getting down to it. I'm determined to finish Spy Rock Memories by the end of summer, and by end of summer, I personally mean by the vicinity of Labor Day, not the equinox. Will I make it? I'm getting close to halfway through Part 8 right now, which I plan on finishing before leaving for Baltimore and the Potatomen show/Insubordination Fest next weekend.

But staying focused is hard: last night I put out a call on the internet, hoping someone could help me figure out when a particular Operation Ivy/Lookouts/Isocracy/Crimpshrine show in Arcata took place, and that expanded into a full-fledged multilateral conference on the state of punk rock in Humboldt County, past and present. Well, mostly past. In the course of researching, I also dug up an old article I wrote about Laytonville for the Anderson Valley Advertiser in the spring of 1989. It's kind of rude and judgmental, but also kind of funny, so I posted it on the other blog: http://larrylivermore.com/?p=2212

Well, that's enough procrastinating for now. Onward and, um, something or other...

Oh Man, It Was Easier In The Old Days b/w The Usual Collection Of Whiners

There's a rather lively (and lengthy) discussion going on over at the PPMB about how easy it is or isn't these days for bands to make a living from their music.

The first few pages consist of the usual bitching and arguing over the morality of illegally downloading music, and unless that subject particularly interests you, you can safely skip past them and start here. But it's when the topic shifts to "illegal downloading is killing the music industry" (how many of you are old enough to remember when it was "home taping"?) that things get interesting.

We regularly hear from bands (and labels as well) that it's next to impossible to make a living from music these days, unlike the putative golden era of the mid to late 90s, when, apparently, a band needed only to move to Berkeley, play Gilman a couple times, get signed to Lookout, and start raking in the loot.

Oddly enough, during my early years at Lookout I had to listen to much the same kind of naysaying: "Nobody ever makes money from punk rock;" "We'll always be playing basements and garages;" "Five years from now nobody will even remember our dumb little band;" "Real musicians have day jobs." (Okay, that last was a particularly annoying bumper sticker, but the sentiment, specious and dishonest as it might be, always lurked just beneath the surface of musicians' self-deprecation.

What made these discussions truly odd, given the hindsight of history, is that many of the musicians I was having them with have since become millionaires (multimillionaires, even) from playing that silly punk rock music that nobody would ever want to hear, and their dumb little bands are not only forgotten, but are the stuff of legend and have gone on - in the case of Operation Ivy, for example - continue to sell far more records now, almost 20 years after breaking up, than in their heyday.

Young people who came of age in (or were born in) the 90s seem to labor under the impression that a massive, accepting audience for pop punk or punk rock was part of the natural order of things in those days, and have the hardest time grasping that in the mid to late 80s, when the whole Gilman/Lookout/East Bay nexus was taking shape, things looked far grimmer for DIY musicians than they possibly could today. That vast network of touring venues and independent distros that seemed to make everything easy in the 90s didn't magically appear out of nowhere; it grew up organically from the painstaking (and often painful) efforts people made in the 80s, at a time when it genuinely did appear as though punk rock remained relevant to only a dwindling handful of diehards. The idea that a newly formed band who might have a single 7" out could hop in a van and make a coast to coast tour seemed wildly ludicrous when Operation Ivy rolled out of Berkeley in 1988; today hundreds if not thousands of bands follow in their well-worn footsteps.

Of course there's the other side of the equation: where are the young bands of today who compare in quality to Op Ivy, Green Day or Screeching Weasel, to name a few? Do they even exist? Tough question, because with so many more bands around today, it's harder for any one band to stand out. Also, with today's bands trying so hard to ape the stylings of their forbears, it's less likely that they're going to come up with something new and distinctive than in the days when there were hardly any bands around worth copying.

What's my take on this? The same as it was in 1987: despite all obstacles, despite constantly changing conditions, a band with something to say, the skill to say it, and the tenacity and perseverance to keep saying it will find its audience sooner or later, and bands that would rather feel sorry for themselves will always find excuses for giving up on their dreams. I suspect it's always been that way, and I have no reason to think it's likely to change now.

Weaselfest '08: Back Where He Belongs

It must have been around 1987 when people first started talking about the smartassed and hilarious Maximum Rocknroll scene reports emanating from Chicago and authored by a kid calling himself Ben Weasel. He combined a passionate belief in the music that he and his friends were making with a mercilessly skewering of Chicago punk rock's sacred cows, and before long it would be a rare copy of MRR that didn't contain at least one or two letters praising or (more often) denouncing the irascible Mr. Weasel.

I first met Ben in 1988 when he brought his band Screeching Weasel to Berkeley to play with Operation Ivy at Gilman Street. He was staying at Matt and Lint's house, and I'd barely walked in the door when he baited me into an argument, something which admittedly didn't take much effort in those days. It was probably something to do with the relative superiority of California vs. Chicago and/or his opinion that despite my punk rock trappings, I was too much of a mushbrained, sproutheaded hippie at heart, and it was an argument that would continue in one form or another over much of the following decade.

Screeching Weasel were not yet in their prime, but there was something special enough about them that I immediately wanted to put out records by them. But as it happened, their latest record was already set to come out on another label, and though we talked about it when they came back to California the following year, the band broke up before anything could come of it.

By now I'd become a huge Screeching Weasel fan, but between the breakup and the fact that despite their album selling quite well, he had very little to show it, Ben was pretty discouraged with the band. During the next couple years, we kept in touch by phone and talked a lot about what he might do next. I urged him to reunite Screeching Weasel in some form or another; Ben was of the opinion that it would be better to start fresh with a whole new band called the Gore Gore Girls.

Finally in 1991 Screeching Weasel was reborn and came to San Francisco to record My Brain Hurts. It wouldn't be their biggest-selling album, not by a long shot, but it was an absolutely seminal moment, not just for the band and for Lookout Records, but also for a whole generation (or two) of pop-punk bands. People argue to this day whether My Brain Hurts is the best Weasel album (Anthem For A New Tomorrow is the most frequently cited alternative), but few would deny how vital it was. Sales exceeded any expectations either the label or the band had had, and Ben, who'd written or co-written virtually everything the band had done, and who ran the S.S. Screeching Weasel as a very tight ship indeed, was for the first time faced with the semi-plausible prospect of making a decent career out of music.

For the next few years it was onward and upward. Each successive Screeching Weasel album met with instant success - at least by the pre-Dookie standards of what was still a relatively underground scene, the shows were getting bigger and bigger, and apart from the band, Ben was gaining a reputation as a powerful and incisive writer through his columns in MRR and other magazines.

And this is where I'd like to be able to say that everyone lived happily after, but it wasn't going to be quite that simple. As he began to reveal in his columns, Ben was suffering from increasing anxiety about playing shows and the pressures of being, at least within the relatively insular punk scene, more or less a superstar. At times, he said, it was difficult enough just to leave his house to journey to the corner store, let alone appear on stage before hundreds or thousands of maniacal fans.

It was during that same time that Ben and I began to fall out, our long-running but mostly good-natured arguments finally escalating into a vicious feud that lasted ten years and during which we never spoke directly to each other, though we did occasionally trade insults and accusations via the media. Although I didn't keep up as closely as I once had with his music and writing, I never stopped being a fan and never stopped listening to my Weasel records during those years.

When we finally met again at last year's Insubordination Fest in Baltimore, where Ben was giving a rare performance and resurrecting a number of Screeching Weasel classics, it was almost as though the bad years had never happened. Almost, I say, because Ben still felt conflicted about the whole idea of playing music for people. Actually, it wasn't so much the playing music part that bothered him - backed up by two of today's most exciting pop-punk bands, the Guts and the Steinways, and welcomed back by an adoring and rapturous crowd, Ben thoroughly enjoyed the experience. But within days the backbiting and criticism, often from people who weren't even there, started bubbling up through the internet, and on at least a couple occasions, Ben told me that he was pretty sure he was finished with playing music and was ready to move on to some other way of life.

Fast forward to May 25, 2008, and Ben strode confidently - and, from all appearances, happily - onto the stage in front of a sold-out crowd at Reggie's Rock Club on Chicago's South Side. The audience was going mental before he could say a word, and after thanking them for coming and explaining a little about the set he was going to play, he launched into "Acknowledge," the declaration and cri de coeur that had heralded Ben's turn toward the personal and introspective on the Weasel album Emo: "I am alive, I am here, I am now, I acknowledge the fact of my life."

Almost 20 years to the day after I first saw Screeching Weasel in California, I felt like I was watching Ben's triumphant homecoming. It had to be especially poignant for him, looking out at a fanatical crowd, members of which had come from a dozen or more states and a couple other countries to witness this moment, and knowing that he was doing so in the town where it had all started and where, face it, he hadn't always received such unanimous approbation. "When's the last time you saw Screeching Weasel?" I asked Patrick Hynes, my longstanding friend and partner in Lookout Records, who'd come out from California for the show.

"1993 at Gilman Street," he unhesitatingly told me, and I knew instantly which show he was talking about, because I'd been there too. Before we could say another word, Ben and the band tore into "Dingbat," the opening song from 1988's Boogada Boogada Boogada, the years fell away, and we along with everybody in the house were going crazy. There was barely a pause for breath before "Cindy's On Methadone" from My Brain Hurts, and there was no longer any doubt that this was going to be a truly magical experience.

Not surprisingly, the classics from the early 90s got the biggest response, and it would have been easy for Ben to put together a set of nothing but "greatest hits" (though perhaps at the risk of a few cardiac arrests among the no-longer-quite-so-young segment of the audience). But he seemed determined to provide an overview of his entire career, including tracks from last year's well-received solo effort These Ones Are Bitter and some Riverdales songs from the upcoming re-release of Phase 3. It all flowed together beautifully, and the pacing made it all the more effective when he unleashed some of my (and, I suspect, quite a few other people's) all time favorites like "What We Hate," "Teenage Freakshow," and, in one of the very few times I've actually seen it performed live (I was fortunate enough to be there when it was first recorded), "The Science Of Myth."

I've always been a My Brain Hurts man myself, but Anthem is a close second, and there was an ample helping of songs from it as well: "Peter Brady," "I'm Gonna Strangle You," and one of my personal favorites, "Falling Apart." After a brief interlude in which Mamma Weasel, Erika Crumbly, Weasel Radio's Owen Murphy, Matt Lame and several others took over the stage to hurl 500 donuts at the audience (don't ask; like many of the things being shouted back and forth and even the backdrop of a wizened old sailor on the USS Intrepid, it's a bit of a PPMB in-joke), Ben wrapped up what he later acknowledged as "the longest show I've ever played in my life" with a blinding five-song encore that finished with "Cool Kids" and had everyone in the room feeling like they were one.

I'm a big fan of redemption narratives, and for me that was exactly what I was privileged to witness. It felt as though Ben's years in the wilderness were over, that at last he was at peace with his gifts as a singer, writer and performer, and was able to share in the joy that they've brought to so many people over the years. It often seems that the longest and hardest, but ultimately most rewarding road is the one that takes us back home to where we've belonged all along. It would be presumptuous of me to suggest that I know - or indeed have any idea - what the future holds for Ben in terms of his career, but I will note that he's already talking about doing a couple - maybe even three or four - more shows later this summer. Based on what I saw Sunday night, he'll never be short of an audience. Nor should he be. The man is a genius and a treasure. Long may he run.

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.

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.

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.

Tim Armstrong: A Poet's Life

Sometimes it's hard keeping up with my old friend Tim Armstrong. From time to time he'll turn up in the same town where I happen to be. We'll hang out, he'll tell me all these things he's thinking of doing or planning on doing, and then suddenly he's gone again, slipping away into the Tim-zone, which for all I know exists in a parallel universe. One day I might get ten text messages from him telling me everything he's doing or thinking or having for breakfast; then a whole year could go by without a word.

The last time I talked to him, he was going to make a new record. He didn't mention that the whole thing was going to be done in a matter of months, or that he was going to give it away for FREE. Well, free if you're content to own it digitally; I guess you still have to pay if you're one of those physical media people who have to have an actual product in your hands to truly relate to your music. Personally, I think digital downloading is one of the best inventions in recent years. I was so sick of all those CDs and records piling up in my room and happy to see them turned into little squiggles of code on my computer and iPod.

Anyway, I checked out Tim's new album, A Poet's Life, which is now available to listen to (you'll be able to download it in a couple more days) at the Rancid Myspace page, and it's really good. That's especially high praise coming from me, considering that the album is very ska-ish and I've never been an especially big ska fan (crossover ska-punk stuff like Operation Ivy and Rancid is another story). Actually, that's not necessarily true; I loved the Specials, and thought I'm not as familiar with it as I ought to be, I was fond of the 60s bluebeat stuff that was so popular in Notting Hill when I first arrived there long ago.

Tim's stuff has more of that old school sound than anything I've heard in years, and is almost the complete opposite of the slicked-up 90s commercial ska that put so many people, including yours truly, off the genre. It's catchy, it's danceable, it's... well, let's just say I like it a lot, and I think there's a better than average chance you will too.