I grew up in Denver and moved out to the Bay Area when I was eighteen, partially because I’d heard about this magical “Gilman” place that seemed to go against everything I was raised to believe in. Of course, once I got here I never went because everyone told me not to— they said it was “dead” — and it was probably a good thing I didn’t go because by that time I might not have been into the music, and besides, the fashion mistakes I was making at the time would have likely gotten me killed (think North Face and floppy hats. I come from a terrible past).
Gimme Something Better, an oral history of the Bay Area punk scene compiled by Jack Boulware and Silke Tudor, consists of hundreds of pages of interviews from those who were involved and on the periphery and in between, from Jello Biafra to Miranda July to Margaret Cho, interviews that I hope can help me pretend I had showed up ten years earlier with a better wardrobe.
Their website is also full of excerpts from the book and extra interviews that I just spent three hours reading through.
The juiciest bit, though not representative of the rest, was this rant against the Bay Area from Ian Mackaye.
“Highly developed social progressive communities, they tend to be at some point the hard definition of these communities, the judgement starts to turn on itself. And it undermines the work, ultimately.”
