Gimme Something Better!

I moved up to Northern California sometimes around 1992, with the intention of living a life more true to who I thought I was (I didn’t realize that at the time–but looking back, yes, that was a driving force) . At the time, I was immersed in mainstream alternative music: Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Jane’s Addiction, Primus, Pixies. About as underground as I got was Fugazi.  Soon after moving to Sonoma County, it felt like I’d stumbled onto a hotbed of rad music. Before I knew it I was checking out shows at house parties, and treking down to Gilman Street and the Phoenix Theater in Petaluma, to see bands like Victim’s Family, Spitboy, Lungbutter, Econochrist, Jawbreaker, Grimple, Nuisance, and yes, Green Day. I saw Bikini Kill in a backyard, lit only by the lights of car beams.  I went to shows at the Phoenix and watched kids slam away at their guitars, making beautiful noise, and started a band myself, I was so inspired. It seemed like everyone I knew was either in a band, or did a zine, or made art. We did not weep at the world because we were too busy sharpening our oyster knifes, in the words of Zora Neale Hurston.

What got me thinking about all this  was the book  Gimme Something Better: The Profound, Progressive and Occasionally Pointless History of Bay Area Punk From Dead Kennedys to Green Day by Silke Tudor and Jack Bouleware. I love reading oral histories, especially about music, and similary inhaled “Please Kill Me” by Legs Mcneil and “We’ve Got the Neutron Bom” (about the LA punk scene) But in the case of this latest one, I felt this sort of  stolen nostalgia, as I read the “inside” story, of a scene of which I was completely outside of, just shy, young kid going to shows in a new place, drinking in the music like a person who has been lost in the desert for forty days and forty nights. Gimme Me Something Better is an apt title for a book about punk, I too was looking for something better when I stumbled upon the punk rock DIY underground, a way to live my life outside of the prescribed notions of success. I still struggle with that.

We did a zine called “I Heart Victim’s Family.” I think there were like two issues, and when we finally got to interview the band, it was like talking to god, we were that obsessed.

Spitboy were visceral, pissed, hard and fast. My god, to see women on stage, making into sound the angst and anger I felt on a daily basis, was like seeing myself in the mirror for the first time.

Blatz seemed to exist for the express purpose of pissing people off, and I loved it. The screeching, the vicious lyrics, the manic frenzied guitar. I never actually saw them live; they’d broken up by the time I made my way north, but they were legends to me. Years later, one of my students at the continuation high school where I taught English, came in wearing a Blatz patch on her sweatshirt. When I told her I loved Blatz, it was like she saw me as a human being for the first time. “Nobody knows who Blatz is!” she declared, and came to school the next day with a burnt copy of their EP, as a gift.

In my next post, I’m going to post some clips from some of the bands mentioned in the book that I’d never heard of including Noh Mercy, this amazing percussion/voice duo out of late 70’s/early 80’s San Francisco scene. Until then….!