Gilman

One more music-related memory, and then I'll move on to something else, at least for awhile. Music was and continues to be necessary part of my life. We all have ways of emotionally navigating the fearsome maze of modern culture, and music is the foremost among mine. Getting the hell out of the city and into the woods is another. This is how I draw some sort of spiritual sustenance into a psyche bleached by contact with the hostile non-environment of concrete, greed, and the general rat-in-a-cage strangeness of city and suburban life.

Of course, being infected with modern culture, lately I've taken my music consumption levels too far, so this year one of my goals is to stick to a budget. So far, I've succeeded, but it is only February. My willpower will be tested.

As I mentioned in the last post, I spent much of the late eighties at Gilman St., aka the Gilman Street Project, in Berkeley. It was basically a youth club where like-minded individuals would regularly gather and experience wave after wave of punk and hardcore bands. Most of the bands that played regularly enough to almost be considered "house bands" were of the humorous variety. Once, the singer from an out of town band, Slapshot, complained that the crowd was like "Romper Room". He didn't get it. Punk is often viewed as being somewhat macho and edgy, so we tipped that perception on its head and acted like a bunch of sugar-addled little kids. Most of the time, anyway.

Here's a photo of the crowd at an Isocracy show, probably from 1987. Isocracy's schtick was to raid dumpsters before their performances, and then rain trash down on the heads of the audience. This was huge fun. We also sometimes had leap-frog pits, rode bigwheels, and in general subverted the public perception of what punk was supposed to be about. For us, it was about rebellion, fun, and served to help develop a social consciousness that I still retain today.

I'm the one with the backwards hat. I think veteran punk photographer Murray Bowles took this. I could be wrong though. Like the photo in the last post, I grabbed this photo from Facebook. This one was posted by my friend Devon, who was my friend back in the eighties, and is still my friend today.