“I Was There!” Turn It Around: The Story of East Bay Punk and the Resistance to Eulogy

ABSTRACT

Considers the importance of acquiring and preserving material space in creating “punk citizenship” at Berkeley, California’s Gilman Street Project in the 1980s. Gilman’s rules of conduct become an unexpected means for community building through membership, empowering participants in shared responsibility for the venue’s maintenance and survival. While counter-genre music programming and anarcho-syndicalist governance facilitated engagement among coordinators, workers, audience, and performers, Gilman’s direct democratic structure also rendered it vulnerable to genre and identitarian divisions, which anticipate punk’s mass culture absorption as consumer product in the mid-1990s. Concludes with online social media’s challenges to critical artistic production, organizing, and activism.

KEYWORDS:

• Architecture
• cultural expropriation
• Gilman Street Project
• melancholy and nostalgia
• Punk music and culture
• youth movements

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Corbett Redford, Bill Schneider, and Green Day for providing a theatrical screener of Turn It Around: The Story of East Bay Punk, which made timely completion of this work possible. Thanks also to Popular Music and Society’s anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions, and to Nathan Gorelick, Todd Goddard, Numsiri Kunakemakorn, Chris Lee, and Lydia Mongie for their contributions to earlier versions of this work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Unless otherwise attributed or cited, quotations are taken from the Turn It Around film.

2. As Barrett explains, this generational link was not unique to the Bay Area but visible in various ways across the United States where, during the 1970s and 1980s, New Left commitments to “consensus-based decision-making, voluntary participation, and relatively horizontal leadership structures” led to repurposing underutilized private and public spaces for collective use (25). On the one hand, economic decline in the 1970s opened urban industrial zones to new uses, as with San Francisco’s The Farm in 1973, while vast swaths of commercial and residential space were abandoned and subsequently occupied by squats, as with New York City’s ABC No Rio in 1980. On the other hand, participatory movements created the grassroots political pressure necessary to launch cooperatives in public space, as with the University of California, San Diego’s Ché Café, also founded in 1980.

3. By the mid-1980s it was difficult to sustain a simple consumerist notion of voluntarily paying to attend a punk show in the Bay Area due to the “pay to play” system at work in most licensed venues. Under this system, local bands had to buy advance tickets for their own shows and then resell them to friends, coworkers, and others in their social circle in order to break even on the performance. In this way promoters and venues were essentially paid twice for shows, and following the pattern of all multilevel marketing schemes, musicians were transformed from artists into entrepreneurs who were compelled to exploit interpersonal (friend, family, romantic, workplace) relationships for profit.

4. One of the Feederz’s most notorious pranks was their 1982 anti-school and work manifesto, “Bored with School,” of which 5,000 copies were printed on State of Arizona Department of Education letterhead, purportedly signed by the state’s superintendent, and distributed at Phoenix-area high schools. V. Vale wrote in 1978: “when they first played the Mabuhay a few weeks back they appeared in clear plastic body bags, genitals visible…. The next night, Frank Discussion wore an army coat covered with insects – their short abrasive anxiety-wrenching songs satisfactorily repulsed the cliched perceptiveness of most of the audience” (90).

5. Indeed, Barrett notes that in its early months, Gilman shows were not advertised at all, reflecting Yohannan’s “hope[s] that the punk community would support the club regardless of which bands were playing” (33).

6. Ska and hip-hop fans made similar moves in the late 1980s, and for a brief period, Gilman conceded to host themed shows that catered to their specific audiences.

7. Although he came of age in the Bay Area’s political rock scene in the 1960s and 1970s, Callahan was also an important figure in the early 1980s punk/alternative culture scene as a founding member of worldbeat band the Looters, and later as founder of San Francisco’s Komotion collective, which ran from 1986-1997.

8. While outside the scope of this article, it is worth citing Callahan’s explanation of the consistent structural control over music consumption even as production technologies become more widely distributed via the Internet: “[T]hese changes, including the promise of greater creative freedom, quickly revealed their limitations. Promotion and distribution remain in the hands of those with the capital and political clout to dominate all channels of communication…. [T]hough the music industry is changing, these changes do not benefit most musicians, and least of all do they represent a ‘victory’ for the revolution of the Sixties” (260).

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John Charles Goshert

John Charles Goshert is Professor of English and Writing Program Administrator at Utah Valley University, where he teaches courses in critical theory, LGBTQ literature and culture, and contemporary American literature. His articles on relationships between experimental aesthetics and radical politics have appeared in various journals, and he is the author of Entering the Academic Conversation: Strategies for Research Writing (Longman, 2011). He performed security and live sound duties and played in a number of bands at the Gilman Street Project from 1987-1996, and remains active as a music composer and performer.