Up The Punks!

Ben Sizemore: There were riots. There were earthquakes. The East Bay hills were on fire. There were blackouts. The first Gulf War and the Rodney King trial. There were huge fucking protests in San Francisco with people burning cop cars down by the Transbay Terminal. It was a crazy time. Being a young, idealistic punker from Arkansas with real leftist political views, I thought it was great. The revolution was just around the corner, man! And I was gonna be there!

Kareim McKnight: I just assumed the whole punk movement was political. At every event, there were punks. The music that everyone was playing was protest music.

Tom Jennings: A singular life-changing event for me was the 1988 Anarchist Survival Gathering, in Toronto. I followed my friend Joey Cain there. He was a member of the Bound Together Book collective.

Erik Forseth: MDC were already banned in Canada, so thety snuck across the border through an Indian reservation, crossing the St. Lawrence River in a boat.

Gordon Edgar: I came back from Toronto thinking, “These people are amazing! There’s so many smart people who are doing incredible stuff with their lives or their activism or their politics.” I planned to move back to the Bay Area to be there in time for the San Francisco gathering in 1989.

Jesse Luscious: I came out for the Anarchist Gathering in San Francisco. I definitely didn’t expect to stay out here.

Oran Canfield: They swarmed in from all over America.

Bucky Sinister: I don’t know how much of this was going on in other parts of the country, but I’d never seen it before. We all knew the anarchy sign, but we didn’t really know what it was. There were people out here who knew the history of Anarchism.

Tom Jennings: I was one of the organizers in San Francisco, and published the gathering’s handbook. It was the last in a series that had started in 1986, with the Haymarket Gathering.

Ben Sizemore: We went to a picnic in Dolores Park and there were 2,000 punks in the park. It was so exciting.

Antonio López: The anarchist conference was held in the Mission, at some elementary school that was leased out over the summer. My most memorable workshop was an anti-TV one. One of the students wanted to videotape it. And the guy teaching the workshop — long blonde hair, very muscular, with Levi shorts cut so high his balls are practically hanging out — was was furious. The student who was taping said, “There’s a bunch of people in Canada who can’t be here and they want to see this.” And the guy said, “If you go to my house you can play guitar or make love or read a book, but you’ll never watch TV. I will never let anyone do anything that has anything to do with TV. And if you don’t like it, get the hell out of my workshop! And if anyone else doesn’t like it, get out!” I actually joined about half the people and left.

Gordon Edgar: I felt like I had so much to learn. I went to a prison activist workshop that really blew my mind, ‘cause I hadn’t given it a whole lot of thought before then. But beyond that, I was excited to be introduced to people from all these different cities.

Antonio López: This conference was like an alternative university. People took it very seriously and, in retrospect, I appreciate that a lot. There were the pacifists, the anarchists, the thinkers, the artists, and the poets. And then there were the direct action people.

Patrick Hughes: These agitator types showed up, demanding street action. And when we demurred, they started calling us wimps and shit.

Jennifer Rose Emick: They called it the Day of Action.

Liz Highleyman: Unfortunately, there was always that element that showed up with destruction in mind. There was a great deal of debate about whether such days should be a part of conventions. In fact, this Day of Action was scheduled after the gathering proper. Because the gathering organizers didn’t want to be associated with the riot.

Patrick Hughes: We didn’t want the cops to come bust up what turned out to be over 3,000 attendees from all around the world. Who were fed two meals a day and housed, by the way — all for free.

Antonio López: They had their own secret meetings. Everyone knew basically what they were planning. But it felt kind of exclusive, like if you weren’t part of that, then you weren’t really an anarchist. I chose not to be involved.

Patrick Hughes: This motley crew also had the misfortune of being exceptionally paranoid and prone to internecine squabbling that invariably led to “Cop plant!” accusations if you disagreed with them. I was particularly singled out as a state agent. One ringleader, who went by the name Sunshine DeWitt, would pointedly leave a room whenever I entered, followed by her sullen affinity group. Ridiculous. Luckily, they held most of their meetings over in the East Bay.

Robert Eggplant: The Anarchist Gathering opened a space by the Greyhound bus station in downtown Oakland called Collective Chaos. It was really a ghetto environment, but they had good shows.

Patrick Hughes: Their Day of Rage, as it was also known, was to be held in Berkeley on the third day of the convention.

Tom Jennings: I took no part in the Day of Action stuff. It seemed at the time to be mostly people looking for excuses to throw rocks, political coloring mixed with a lot of naivete.

Antonio López: The plan was to occupy this burned-out hotel in Berkeley on the corner of Haste and Telegraph, and make it housing for homeless. The first wave was to occupy it and the second wave was to defend it.

Liz Highleyman: Unfortunately, the police got word of the planned takeover. They knocked out the building’s stairwells to made it impossible to access past the first floor, and completely surrounded the building.

Antonio Lopez: It was a ludicrous plan. Everyone in the first wave got arrested. The support group had nothing to do. This is where it got comical, because there was this roaming mob in Berkeley.

Oran Canfield: I walked alongside them from Bancroft up to Telegraph. Someone started burning a flag. They were all wearing the black bandannas. It was a motley group of people, for sure — kind of a Mad Max scene, but way more extreme and violent.

Kareim McKnight: Black Bloc is anarchist. They all wear black clothes and black bandanas to cover their faces. They link arms and form this mobile fighting force. It’s a very intense spectacle. They still play a big role in demonstrations.

Jennifer Rose Emick: I bent over to pick up something I’d dropped and some girl’s bookbag hit me in the head and it was full of bricks. They came prepared. They were the reason it went ugly.

Bill Michalski: I think the whole punk rock influence on radical politics in the Bay Area is a bad thing. The cliquishness tends to alienate anyone who’s not punk. A lot of people have radical politics but they’re not into punk rock music. The Black Bloc — of course they’re gonna follow that punk rock model. There’s a lot of other people that would be down for that kind of shit, but not the aesthetic of it.

Jennifer Rose Emick: It was three quarters punk, if you counted the anarchists. It was a parade. Everybody was walking and yelling slogans, the usual kind of thing. And then we noticed people behind us were stringing ropes between stop signs, disrupting traffic.

Antonio López: I lived about five blocks from People’s Park so I could see everybody from my front porch. Channing is this two-lane divided road. The typical practice in those days for protestors was to march in the middle of traffic and shut it down.

Oran Canfield: When they turned down the one-way street, the panic on people’s faces in the cars was fuckin’ unbelievable. Those that could, backed the fuck up and got the hell out of there.

Antonio López: They were all dressed in black, chanting and yelling, but there was nothing to do. They marched right by my house. I walked out on to the street to watch. Just then, coming around the corner off of Telegraph was a Coca-Cola truck.

Oran Canfield: That’s when shit hit the fan.

Antonio López: They ran towards it like locusts on corn and surrounded it. The driver was totally horrified. I was close enough to see his face. He thought he was going to get killed.

Jennifer Rose Emick: He looked out the window and said, “Aww shit!” and hopped out of the truck. Nobody said a word to him. So of course, people opened up the truck, pulled out crates of soda.

Antonio López: They tore this truck apart. They spray-painted it, they rocked it back and forth, and stripped everything they could. There was just so much anger and excitement. After it was over, it was like they had all had sex or something.

Jennifer Rose Emick: They drove it up to People’s Park, handing out all the Coke.

Patrick Hughes: Hardly the stuff of legend, if you ask me.

Oran Canfield: Some people ran back up to Telegraph and were throwing Coke bottles through the windows. They were somewhat selective. They got the Gap, which had opened up recently.

Liz Highleyman: I get off on the adrenaline rush of running wild in the streets ahead of maddened cops as much as the next person. Unfortunately quite a few homes, cars, and small shops were trashed too, which certainly doesn’t help.

Jennifer Rose Emick: When we got up to Bancroft, people started pulling out bricks and sticks. I remember somebody smashing out the window of the Continental Art Shop and thinking, “Hey, that’s pretty fucked up!” The guys who were breakin’ windows were dressed funny, wearing striped shirts and blue jeans, kind of stickin’ out. Everybody decided that these guys must be cops. There was a lot of paranoia. Then the actual cops showed up with riot gear.

Oran Canfield: The cops had a police line across Telegraph and everyone was going nuts. Then a Coke bottle came flying out of the crowd and the cops came at us. It seemed like they were focusing on the people with bandanas, but they beat the shit out of whoever was in their way. It was just insane.

Jennifer Rose Emick: They sure beat the crap out of me. I was 17 and I got separated from the group.

Oran Canfield: There were riots on Telegraph all the time during the rush week of frat parties, but this was pretty exciting.

Gordon Edgar: There was something of a split. At the same time, a whole ‘nother group of people were creating a community garden, planting trees and organic plants, and building an irrigation system. It was definitely a big divide within the movement itself. Attacking the Coke truck is what everyone remembers from the Day of Action. Which is really kind of sad.

Patrick Hughes: Nothing was ever heard of the agitators after that. Makes you think that the whole enterprise was designed to discredit what we were doing and portray the convention as bunch of childish morons. The Coke truck incident is all that anyone ever talks about.

Tom Jennings: After ’89, the [anarchist] movement petered out substantially.

Mike Tsongas: When more women came into the anarchist scene, it got better, but it wasn’t enough to save it. It pretty much died out in San Francisco.

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Antonio López: Back in those days, there was always a riot in Berkeley. A few times I saw anarchists attack fire trucks and start punching firemen. Just adolescent, stupid behavior. There was no real political strategy. They just wanted to have a fight and get their ya-ya’s off. That’s when I got really disenchanted and started to walk in the opposite direction.

Ben Sizemore: We just liked the idea of a confrontation with the police. We were young punkers — we didn’t care what it was, we’d just go for the action.

Kareim McKnight: In the mid ‘80s, when the anarchists and the punks came out to protest, we finally realized we weren’t alone. We had backup, and we were coming to throw down just like you. If we wanted to burn shit in the street we’d burn shit in the street. If they came on us, we were gonna defend ourselves. That was the ethos.

Jesse Luscious: I described myself as an anarchist at that point. I’d say I’m literally an anarcho-socialist.

Robert Eggplant: My first memory of Jesse was at Collective Chaos. Some people in the ghetto were really mad at the punks and Jesse opened the door for them. They came in with bats and iron bars and immediately hit Jesse.

Patrick Hughes: Anarchism is the bastard child of failed liberal values.

Kareim McKnight: Back then we would make torches and stuff ‘em in the bushes along parade routes. It felt like we were plotting these really important, powerful events. Everybody seemed larger than life.

Oran Canfield: Bank of America was a regular target for protests ’cause at the time they were invested in South Africa in a major way

Antonio López: The Bank of America was a block from UC Berkeley. The bank had learned their lesson in the ‘60s so they had built these high walls. There was a narrow gap of about five feet on the second story where people would try to throw Molotov cocktails.

Jennifer Rose Emick: People poured soda in the ATM machines as they passed.

Robert Eggplant: There was a really vibrant Anti-Apartheid movement in Berkeley. When Nelson Mandela got out of jail, he came to Oakland to thank people for the activism they did in boycotting UC Berkeley, which was giving money to Apartheid companies. Punk bands played a lot of the big Anti-Apartheid protests. Corrupted Morals and Isocracy played. Special Forces almost played but Orlando got arrested.

Wendy O-Matik: When I heard lyrics that resonated with me politically; when I saw issues like racism, sexism, homophobia tackled overtly and directly onstage, that was fuel for my rebellion.

Robert Eggplant: There was a lot of taking over of public space back then. People built shantytown camps on Sproul Plaza to represent villages.

Noah Landis: We were all very involved in the Anti-Apartheid demonstrations. We were out there with force and attitude.

Although the spring of 1986 ended with the Anti-Apartheid Movement in a mess, the regents realized it would be back if they continued their resistance to divestment. That June, the regents voted to divest $3.1 billion of investments in companies with South Africa ties. Unfortunately, it was a sham and their investments continued to increase, but this wasn’t discovered until the movement had dissipated.

– The People’s History of Berkeley

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Wendy O-Matik: There were also protests on campus about what was happening in Central America. It wasn’t just one country. It was El Salvador one week and Nicaragua the next. We were learning all about the funneling of U.S. arms.

Robert Eggplant: The Iran-Contra stuff was happening by ‘87. Brian Wilson got run over by a munitions train in Concord, trying to block the shipment of arms to Nicaragua.

Mike K: They would ship white phosphorus out of there and send it down to the Contras. Brian Wilson came and spoke at our high school in Walnut Creek.

Robert Eggplant: People were completely sick of Reagan. That was really filtering into Gilman.

Frank Portman: There was this unspoken rule that you had to have at least one song about El Salvador. That’s how I came up with the tag line, “This is a song about a girl.” It would clearly bother the audience. “Wait a minute, why isn’t this about El Salvador? Children are dying for corporations!” Sometimes I’d say, “This is a song about El Salvador — just kidding!”

Robert Eggplant: I had my first encounter with Animal Liberation Front at Gilman. I learned about vegetarianism, which changed the way I ate afterwards.

Anna Brown: When the first Gulf War started in 1991, all the punks met at the BART and went to this protest in San Francisco. It was one of the huge protests on Market Street. Every satellite group met with different signs. All the punks were there. Nobody could move because Market Street was so jammed, so we just took off and marched up to the Mission.

The protesters would pull over en masse at the liquor store, everyone would pile in and pick up a six-pack, and it would resume. It was an awesome moment when all the San Francisco punks and East Bay punks met in the middle of Dolores Park, and we doubled in size and suddenly we were 500 punks marching for peace. This was the first war of our lives, and it was really moving. It was just like Wild in the Streets.

The night before the U.S. invaded Iraq, we were all making these signs. Ben Hout came up with “Tonight’s Nightmare is Tomorrow’s Reality,” which is a Neurosis lyric. And then Jade made an amazing sign that said “Carbona Not War” instead of “Carbona Not Glue,” which was brilliant. They all had their own little inside spin on them, but they were meaningful to us.

Kareim McKnight: When Bush Senior visited San Francisco, we turned Cloyne Court into this organizing center. We spent all night making this giant paper mache Bush head. It was amazing! It was 12 feet tall. Then we burned it at the demo. A group of feminist lesbian punks had this awesome banner called the Panama Canal. It was this woman with her legs open and she was bleeding and all these armies were going into her vagina. It was really graphic. We were trying to shut down the motorcade with it.

Wendy O-Matik: We brought televisions out to Sproul Plaza for Kill Your Television and lined them up on the front steps. There were a couple hundred of us with sledgehammers. Speakers were saying “If you think you’re thinking, think again.” We knew it was a drug and that we were all addicted to it in our own way. I didn’t know who Rupert Murdoch was but I knew I wasn’t getting the truth. The police came with guns to protect the TVs. At the end of the day, Sproul was just covered in glass and television bits.

Kareim McKnight: In ’91, there was also a big battle over whether or not the University was gonna put volleyball courts in People’s Park.

Jennifer Rose Emick: The University thought enough time had passed since they shut down Barrington Hall, and that nobody was gonna care about the old hippie park.

Hamish Reid: It was a week-long occupation of Berkeley by some 600 police. Berkeley police, Livermore police, the Highway Patrol, Albany, Richmond, Oakland police, the Alameda County tactical response squad — all with something to prove. You were forced to show IDs when walking down your own street. Twenty or 30 police were on every block of Telegraph watching you.

Kareim McKnight: Everybody came out — homeless people, homeless punks, campus students.

Hamish Reid: The out-of-town cops seemed predictably vicious, out to show the Berkeley cops how to really put down a riot. All those hippies, all those punks. It must have seemed like cop heaven.

Oran Canfield: Rubber bullets flying everywhere, people fucking running and screaming, cops rushing at us. The gunshots were timed so that 20 or 30 cops could run at us with their billy clubs.

Hamish Reid: The wooden bullets were hollow light wooden cylinders fired from a large airgun. The police usually fired them at the ground a few yards in front of the protesters so that they’d splinter and ricochet onto the legs. They stung like hell when they hit unclothed flesh.

Kareim McKnight: That was the first time I met that kind of force.

Sara Cohen: I’m a rubber bullet baby. My dad was with Country Joe and the Fish. He was shot with rubber bullets in People’s Park. My great-grandpa was an anarchist in New York. They always told me, “Teach, be a cop, a lawyer, go into politics, do something and fuck it up from the inside.”

A.C. Thompson: At that point, Food Not Bombs was going on. Everyone ended up eating at People’s Park. There was definitely a fusion of hippies and punks hanging out and, even occasionally cooking the soup together.

Bill Michalski: Food Not Bombs used to have Soupstock concerts. The first ones that I remember were in Golden Gate Park at the big bandshell. Neurosis played a couple times, MDC played. Those shows were really fun because you’d get people wandering around the park like, “What the hell is this?”

Ian MacKaye: A fellow named Ian Brennan contacted Fugazi about doing this one-off gig to mark the 10th or 20th anniversary of Food Not Bombs, at Dolores Park. The police estimate was 14,000. It was insane. It was Fugazi, Sleater-Kinney, and a whole host of other bands. It was pretty visionary. Totally peaceful. No security whatsoever, no backstage. One of the greatest shows we ever played. It was such an affirmative experience. Fuck Bill Graham.

Bill Michalski: There’d be a lot of booths set up, people selling T-shirts or books. Political organizations with all their flyers and books and crap. It was like a melding of politics and punk.

Wendy O-Matik: Long Haul Infoshop had an anarchists’ bookshop and zine library. It was also a great place to go to connect with affinity groups during protests and to hear speakers.

PB Floyd: Long Haul was a movement space for meetings that started in 1979. In the spring of 1993, it was facing eviction, so Slingshot rented an office at Long Haul and joined the struggle to stop the eviction.

Robert Eggplant: Xarek introduced me to Slingshot. Xarek is a female-to-male transsexual who was involved with the pirate radio station at Hellarity House, and got me to put on some shows at Long Haul.

A.C. Thompson: That was when the pirate radio thing really jumped off. This is before the fucking internet. People can’t even comprehend what it was like. Free Radio Berkeley.

Aaron Cometbus: There was also Tree Radio Berkeley live from Ho Chi Minh Park, Flea Radio Berkeley from the Ashby BART flea market.

A.C. Thompson: This big, half destroyed house in Oakland, slathered in a coat of messy, purple paint. And they had an antenna. Free Radio Berkeley was real pirate radio. Totally illegal. Nobody else had really done it. This old hippie Stephen Dunifer started it.

Robert Eggplant: Stephen Dunifer had started broadcasting in the Berkeley Hills, then landed at the Genoa Street House in the mid-‘90s.

A.C. Thompson: Myself and some others had a show on Sunday mornings. It was so great, breaking the law, totally defying the government, and actually creating media that talks to your friends for a couple miles around. We would play three hours of punk music and grindcore and death metal, interspersed with Chomsky CDs because, when you’re in your early 20s, Chomsky is the shit. And because people are dying to listen to that on a really scratchy FM reception at nine o’clock in the morning. It made KALX and KPFA seem tame.

Robert Eggplant: There was a big battle with the FCC. Dunifer lost the court case but found a loophole. So the name changed from Free Radio Berkeley to Berkeley Liberation Radio. They were broadcasting from a tree in Ho Chi Minh Park. One of my housemates was involved. They moved into Hellarity and are still there now.

A.C. Thompson: Critical Mass was really happening at that point, too. The East Bay Critical Mass was so fucking fun. Ten or 12 years later, it looks predictable and hippie-ish, but at that time, it was just wide open. People would hold open the doors to McDonald’s and ride their bikes in through one door and out the other. Then they would pull the flag off the flagpole and ride off with it. They would surround Safeway delivery trucks and spray-paint the sides. They would ride through supermarkets and take melons and other food to eat and throw at people. Just go crazy.

At one point, everyone said, “Let’s ride past Gilman and onto the 80 Highway.” We turned a left onto the 80 Highway, going south, on a Friday at rush hour. We fanned out and covered all four lanes. There’s nothing in the world like being on a highway, on your bicycle in the fast lane, with 75 other people. It was incredible.

The fun ended when we all rolled up onto the bridge and got penned in by police on either end. Berkeley police have this reputation for being enlightened or wussified. But a cop came up and hit me repeatedly in the face with something metal in his gloved hand and then dragged me by the hair and slammed my head repeatedly into a light pole. There was so many of us, they took us to a gymnasium next to the jail. We were eventually released and our charges were reduced, or dropped.

There was this juxtaposition in the East Bay. One day you would attend a political protest or a Critical Mass riot. The next day you would go to Winchell’s Donuts, and when the guy behind the counter wouldn’t let you go to the bathroom even though you really had to shit, if you were me, you would drop trou and shit on the bench seat. You would think that was really funny and a fine political protest. That was how those two spheres fused for me.

Rebecca Gwyn Wilson: Some of the East Bay were really crazy, grubby people. They reminded me of English punks — very nihilistic and purely anarchistic, like Rimbaud. Then there were the East Bay nerds, the stenographers: “Okay, we’re going to write all about what’s going on here.” It was like these two factions, these total bums and these total nerds.

Jesse Luscious: When I came out here, I did a zine called Berkeley Sucks — that was part of my initial reaction to the East Bay. This place sucks. I didn’t really mean it but, when I said it, it pissed people off, people who should not have been pissed off. It was wonderful.

Ben Sizemore: A lot of cool shit came out of the punk scene. There have been punks involved in every major lefty movement since 1977. My friend Joel Wing, who was in Corrupted Morals and Dance Hall Crashers, he teaches high school English at Oakland Tech. I think that’s really radical. I know a lot of punks that do social work or harm reduction, like needle exchange or public health stuff. Kate Knox still runs an alternative high school for troubled teens. There’s still countless punk activists. The WTO protests in Seattle or the Worldwide Squatter Movement in Europe? Punks.

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