Punk Side Story

Larry Boothroyd: Santa Rosa always has been the biggest city between here and Portland, but it doesn’t feel like a big city at all. Lots of great bands, musicians. The club was the one thing missing. So house parties, warehouses, that was the Sonoma County way. Just small scenes. And slowly they came together, and the bands started to get to know each other.

Ralph Spight: These punk shows in Sonoma County, people would come out of the fucking woodwork.

Larry Boothroyd: Kids driving a long distance.

Ralph Spight: Another thing about being from a small town was that it was risky to shave your head and get a mohawk. We would get fucked with.

Larry Boothroyd: There was a lot of rednecks, and they always knew where the punks would be. Rednecks would come and really be violent. I remember Stevie, this cute little 12-year-old with a mohawk, got beat up by rednecks with a shovel.

Ralph Spight: The early ’80s is when people were playing fast. When hardcore ramped up the whole fast thing, when that music started to get mixed with metal, is when it got lost for me. It really felt like everything was conspiring together to make you stupid. To some degree Victim’s Family wanted to mess with that. I didn’t like how things were. Especially music.

I take it back to Minor Threat. I heard Minor Threat do one song where it would be half-tempo, and then double-time. “Oh shit that’s cool!” I really was into this idea you can do one part that has nothing to do with another part, and just figure out a way to connect them. I think that’s what made us a punk band, more than the way we sounded. We almost had to try to sound like a punk band. We’d piss people off because we would do weird time signature changes.

Andy Asp: We lived in Sonoma County and it was a pretty small scene. Our big local band was Victim’s Family. They kept it brief. Pretty out there. Good players. They were a great band.

Ralph Spight: I became kind of an expert at constructing fast guitar solos. It’s going to be like four bars here, two bars is worked out, and there’s one bar in promulgation. I would just compress everything into really small things. It was right in the beginning of when people were starting to do guitar solos. So I was doing all the Eddie Van Halen hand tapping shit on the first two records. People really got into it.

Tim Armstrong: Victim’s Family was amazing. I used to stand right at the edge of the stage in front of Ralph Spight and watch him play guitar. That guy was like my fucking hero.

Larry Boothroyd: Both Sonoma County and San Francisco are very supportive of anything new. There were more people starving for something fresh. Hardcore was at its end, the crossover was happening. On Broadway was closing, Dead Kennedys were breaking up. Gilman was starting. There was a sense that it was changing.

Ralph Spight: We had more problems when we went out on tour. We were playing this show in Kentucky and there’s hundreds of punks there. Nobody knew us, nobody gave a fuck. We came out and played “Liars, Pigs and Thieves,” which was our slowest, most grinding terrible song. The place cleared out. That was an example of how it would be for us on tour. We’d do all this wacko shit, and a third to a half of the people would be like, “Fuck you guys, man.”

Larry Boothroyd: Our take on punk was, it was supposed to be about breaking down the dinosaurs, or the establishment. As soon as something felt old, it was time to make it new.

Noah Landis: Victim’s Family were an amazing band. Their musicianship just blew me away. All the guys in Neurosis, we saw them every time we could. I started a band with my buddy Charles that was kind of influenced by that, called Blister.

Gavin MacArthur: Victim’s Family. They were absolutely incredible.

Dave Mello: We all loved Victim’s Family. They were our favorite band. They had put a really groovy jazzy twist on it, and made punk very musical and very harmonic and melodic and jazzy. With drums on the back beat.

Ralph Spight: At a certain point in the ’90s I realized I was never going to be a fucking household word. But we had built a pretty good following all over the world, and that was good. We never set out to do anything but have a rad band. That’s all we fucking cared about, man.

Gavin MacArthur: We used to go see Victim’s Family all the time. They were a huge influence on the early Schlong.

Dave Mello: Right at the time when Operation Ivy broke up, I was playing with friends that I had a serious connection with musically, my brother and Gavin. And we ended up playing in Schlong.

Gavin MacArthur: We didn’t really have any plans to do anything. We just enjoyed getting together and writing songs.

Dave Mello: We were also into John Zorn, this crazy jazz guy who was playing things for a couple seconds, playing grindcore, and all of a sudden RAAAURR! and then it would change to a jazz thing. Cartoonish, like Carl Stalling, Looney Tunes music. We wanted to sound like that. Like, what would annoy people the most?

We would play musical games. We’d change a beat where it shouldn’t be changed, and see if the other guy would catch on. My brother Pat would play a reggae beat, and all of a sudden I’d just chop something up into a grindcore beat, or a Latin beat, in the middle on an odd time. We started writing songs a minute long. We couldn’t stand playing the same thing for long periods of time. We’d have 60 parts in a two-minute song. If it made us laugh, then do it.

Gavin MacArthur: After about a year of playing together, we had probably 50 songs. Three hours worth of material, and we’d never played a show.

Dave Mello: Our first few shows, a lot of people lost interest in it fast. People didn’t like us. But at the same time, in the early ‘90s, there were a lot of underground bands all networking the States, playing small shows. There was definitely punk elements in these bands, but a lot of country-er sounding punk bands, jazzier sounding punk bands.

Gavin MacArthur: We played with Blister. I remember playing with Green Day at Cybelle’s Pizza in a little strip mall in El Cerrito. That was fun.

Dave Mello: We used to play in Sacramento a lot, where Sewer Trout sprung a whole local scene of geeky punk bands like Lizards, Pounded Clown, Sea Pigs, Horny Mormons. We also played a lot with this band from Santa Rosa named Nuisance.

Andy Asp: Schlong became our brother band for awhile. We met them at a show somewhere in west Marin County. No one was there, of course. Schlong did not seem to be cut from any East Bay cloth that I could discern. They had their own thing. It seemed that they had the ghost of Op Ivy lingering over them because of Dave. But they were more Beefheart-y.

Dave Mello: We went over well in cities in the middle of the country. Cities where kids were bored and needed something to do. I think they related to that short attention span. But in bigger cities like L.A., or our own hometown, we had a harder time.

Andy Asp: We did our first national tour with them. They listened to a lot of Steely Dan. I rode in their van once and was like, “What the fuck are you listening to? Air Supply?” They’re like, “Oh, you don’t like Steely Dan?”

Dave Mello: We loved Steely Dan. They made it sound so sophisticated. Yet when you really read the lyrics, its very ridiculous.

Gavin MacArthur: We made a cover band called the Royal Scam, that played all Steely Dan covers. We played it like melodic pop punk. David Hayes sang for it. The Royal Scam got a pretty good reception. Nobody could really tell it was Steely Dan unless we told them.

Dave Mello: It’s funny to annoy people a little bit. We did the whole Nutcracker Suite at Gilman for their Christmas party.

Gavin MacArthur: We kept the hooks and that was about it. We played the whole thing. It took about 20 minutes. We had one of our friends dress up in a Santa tuxedo. He narrated the story. It was just so stupid.

Dave Mello: If you have someone in the band who is the musical genius, it really helps. Gavin would learn things in a matter of seconds. We gave him the Journey CD box set and locked him in his room with a banjo. Within four hours he was playing all the Journey songs on banjo. It was like, cool! Let’s start a bluegrass band! Which was Three Finger Spread.

We’d come up with ideas just prove to ourselves that we can do it. We were listening to the Fleetwood Mac Rumours album a lot on tour. So we covered “Go Your Own Way.” After that it was like, let’s just do the whole album as fast as we possibly can, and put the whole thing on a 7-inch. We tried to make it sound as garagy as we could. Tumors. One take. We recorded it in a couple hours.

Gavin MacArthur: The biggest drive for me is somebody going, “That’s really stupid. You shouldn’t do that.”

Dale Flattum: Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours. It wasn’t just this half-baked idea. I think that’s what was so great about Gilman. There was an outlet for it. A lot of that stuff just gets lost.

Sergie Loobkoff: There’s something really rad about watching a band doing it just because they love doing it. And no inkling of doing it for any other reason.

Gavin MacArthur: The guy who started Hopeless Records, Louis Posen, saw us at Gilman Street, and asked us to make a video for a compilation. While we were filming the video, Pat Mello had a lot to drink and was doing backflips in the street. I think he started singing “Maria.” Then Pat just said, “We’re gonna record the whole West Side Story soundtrack!” Louis said, “Okay, I’ll put it out.”

I transcribed everything by myself. It took a long time. By the end of it, I knew those songs inside out, every single line and every single note, everything.

Dave Mello: Louis wanted all these big punk stars. He was trying to get Fat Mike to be Tony. I think we wanted Rancid to be the Jets. Voodoo Glow Skulls were going to be the Sharks.

Gavin MacArthur: We asked them and they kind of stared at us blankly. So we had to scramble and find people. Andy came through for Tony, though.

Dave Mello: Gavin’s sister Melissa was in a punk band called Raooul, little girls all being really snotty and yelling. Perfect for Maria.

Andy Asp: I got a call from Gavin MacArthur. So I bought the record at a thrift store for 50 cents, and learned the songs I was responsible for. The night before we recorded this, we were at Gavin’s house. I decided to heat up some sake in the microwave. I turned the heat up to six minutes, which seemed like a good idea. I grabbed it and shot it down the hatch. My God, it was like drinkin’ hot lava. One of the stupidest things I’d ever done.

Dave Mello: We took maybe two weeks to learn all the songs, and had a dress rehearsal for a weekend, before we went in the studio.

Andy Asp: At first, I did my best show-tunes voice and they’re like, “No No No” right after the first take. “Sing it like you’d sing it!” Then it became loose. At that time Melissa MacArthur was probably only about 15.

Gavin MacArthur: We recorded it in three days. It was really quick. One day for the music, one day for the vocals, and one day to mix it. People got paid in beer.

Andy Asp: Schlong and their cheap 12-packs of generic beer. It was like a big party.

Gavin MacArthur: We stayed up all night mixing it, slept for a couple of hours, then went to Gilman Street while everybody was still in town and played the whole thing through. That’s the only time we actually did Punk Side Story.

Andy Asp: I was amazed. It was very well arranged and sophisticated.

Gavin MacArthur: We got loads of offers after that. People asked if we’d be willing to put on a stage production of it, but it was just so much work. I didn’t know if we could put ourselves through this again. It was kind of like a temp file. We learned all the songs, recorded them, and then forgot them.

Andy Asp: The epilogue is that in the ‘90s, a buddy of mine went to school in New York and befriended Nina Bernstein, Leonard Bernstein’s daughter. So a few years ago he hands me this letter from Nina, on Bernstein stationary. My name’s on the front. And the first page is this scathing excoriation of “the insult you’ve brought to my father’s work.” It goes on for two pages about how I’ve “insulted the Bernstein name and everything he’s done for American music, and it’s vile.” I’m just reading this like, “How the hell did she find me?”

What I didn’t know is that my friend put her up to this. By the third page, it’s like “Just kidding, I love it! I’m sure my father would have loved it, I’ve already bought several copies to hand out to family friends.”

Gavin MacArthur: I didn’t think about the story much. Until people brought up the point that it was about punks. And it’s totally true. They were punks for the time. They did a lot of dancing, punks do a lot of dancing, too. It’s just a different style of dancing.

Dave Mello: Hopeless Records asked us to do another record. Me and Gavin didn’t really care about making money. We just wanted to be able to put out whatever we wanted. So I threw a bunch of my Operation Ivy money into this gimmick label, bands doing funny things. I put out a record of punk bands covering Sesame Street songs called 31 Bands Trash Their Way to Sesame Street. I had a band called Sick and Tired that covered all Kenny Rogers songs. Records that pretty much no one really wanted to buy. I lost a bunch of money.

Bands say all the time, “We didn’t intentionally go out to make money.” But for Schlong it was the opposite. We strived to fail because we thought that was funny and that entertained us. If somebody really liked something that we did, we would’ve changed it.

Gavin MacArthur: That may have been the death combo right there.

Dave Mello: When Me First and the Gimme Gimmes popped up, it was like “Ahhh! That was my idea!” I was trying to do that — punk bands destroying songs. The Gimme Gimmes cover songs in a tight formulated punk sound, but it’s more punk Muzak than punk music.

I moved to Tahoe and started a record store. I wasn’t playing any music. A while later, one of my friends came up with the idea of Jewdriver, because at the time people were talking about Skrewdriver a lot. Naes is a big Jew guy who looks Jewish, talks Jewish, and has that stereotypical way about him that he really can portray to make it funny. He said, “Why don’t we just do the Jewdriver idea and you write the songs?” So I took four or five Skrewdriver songs and changed the lyrics around.

This one song called, “A Case of Pride” talked about the pride of the white man, so I changed it to “Pastrami On Rye” and made it about the pride of a pastrami sandwich. Neas starting writing lyrics, and we started parodying other kinds of bands. We’d get yarmulkes and throw bagels out in the crowd, just really stupid. We’d have an Israeli flag behind us. Big menorahs. People might think that there’s no more skinheads or racist people. But we still get hate mail from dumb shits every once in awhile. “Go away, you kike,” something stupid like that.