the kids are alright

OK, this is an odd blast from the past, as unedited as I could make it, considering I scanned the pages and then tried to fix 'em up in Word. This is me writing about going to see a band called the Readymades. The pages say "copyright 1980," although I'm not sure if that's when what I describe actually happened, or if it happened a year or so earlier. About the only introductory comments I can think of is that I was in therapy at the time, and after the events related in the following, I decided $2.50 at punk clubs was cheaper and more useful than $25 on a therapist's couch, so I quit therapy.

So here goes, back in the time machine to 1980 or so. Be kind as you read it ... I was in my mid-20s, working in a factory, I wasn't yet a writer or a scholar or any of those things. (The Basha Band, mentioned below, was the garage band I was in as a teenager.)

The Kids Are Alright

I wanted to go to a punk club, find out what was really happening, so one night I went to see one of my favorite local bands, the Readymades, at the Branch in Berkeley. A group of us had planned to attend a show by harmonica player Norton Buffalo, but at the last minute old Norton cancelled out, leaving us all revved up with no place to go. Since I’d wanted to see the Readymades all along, this was a windfall for me, but the only sucker I could corral into going with me was my friend Steve, who was already so drunk that he would have paid 65 bucks to see Charo take a shit. We drove to the Branch, a scum-hole on San Pablo Avenue that had recently reopened as the Eastbay’s first punk rock club. In its previous incarnation, it was known as the Longbranch Saloon, and was remembered chiefly as the main hangout for Patti Smith in her early days as a singer. (Legend had it that during one of her shows there, the fights that usually made the Longbranch such a great place to hear rock and roll had expanded onto the stage, where a particularly ardent admirer of Patti had jumped up and began a tussle.) We went in, paying the incredible bargain price of 2.50, got our hands stamped, and stumbled through the front door to enter our first punk club. Steve, whose musical taste runs to listening to a direct—to—disc recording of Jimmy Buffett on his 6 million dollar stereo, was entering a world he hadn’t even read about. Luckily for him, he was too drunk to care, as he crashed through the line to get himself a couple of beers.

Me, I just stood in line at the pinball machines, checking the place out. There couldn’t have been more than 30 people there, and this was early enough in the scene so that the New Wave fashions had yet to become de rigeur, so most people were dressed in I-had-a-job-once-three-years-ago work clothes, with a few two-tone hairdos in the midst of it all. Except for the trendy conversation making the rounds (“Have the ’Readies’ come on yet? Have you seen the Avengers?"), the Branch seemed like just another dump where people came to hang out and hear rock and roll. Don’t get me wrong, most of the best rock and roll of the last 25 years has been made in dumps. I’m only noting that this place didn’t appear any different than the ones I had previously been in. And I was looking for a new experience.

The first group was called SST, and when they hit the stage, a scrawny affair about 2 and a half feet off the ground, I noticed that they seemed familiar. I soon realized where I had seen them. It was a few minutes earlier when they set up their own equipment. The last time I saw a band set up their own stuff was the Basha Band in 1970. I laughed, but it was a fond laugh that enjoyed the connections the punks were able to make with everyone’s primitive garage band beginnings. These guys, something told me, were going to be BAD.

I was right.

The singer had apparently just joined the group, and held a paper in front of her with the lyrics scrawled across it as she attempted to sing. The band tried to keep up, and it was a valiant, if ineffective, effort. It was loud and amateurish, and once again I was reminded of the Basha Band. Punk had grabbed at one of the fundamentals of rock and roll: anyone could play it. They could play it badly, of course, but hey, whattaya expect from a bunch of guys and a gal who just met three days before the gig? It was their moment in the limelight, and if they stunk, so what?

Not that the audience didn’t let them know things weren’t going too well. The dance floor remained empty for the entire set (what happened to all the pogoing I’ve heard so much about, I thought); and those few who weren’t in the bar and pinball room kept up a running commentary with the band. After the first number, somebody yelled out, “YOU SUCK!” to which the drummer responded, “FUCK YOU!”  “YOU NOT ONLY CAN’T SING, YOU’RE UGLY TOO!” commented one crowd member. “FUCK YOU” said the singer. “LEARN THE WORDS!” “FUCK YOU!” The punks on both sides of the stage had broken down the barriers that usually separate the audience from the performers. SST finally left the stage, taking their equipment with them, never to be heard from again.

The Readymades (or Readies, as I was beginning to call them), were scheduled to go on next, and now I saw that even punk had its hierarchy. The Readies didn’t have to set up their own equipment. I woke Steve so that he could have a couple more beers, and started to get hyped up for the show.

Sometimes I feel like a football player before the Big Game when I go to a concert. When the group I want to hear is next up, I start going down their strengths and weaknesses, planning my first move when they hit the stage, getting the adrenalin rushing. For the Readymades, I found myself thinking about the two times I had seen them prior to tonight. The first was when they opened for Patti Smith at Winterland, a night when they put on a surprisingly tight show for a club band playing in a 5500 seat hall. The next time I saw them, it was in a club, but the setting was wrong because there was no dance floor, and the crowd was quietly sipping their two-drink minimum while waiting for the headliner Mink de Ville to hit the stage. After one song, lead singer Jonathan Postal noted, “This is kinda weird for us, we’re used to seeing people get up and move around a bit.” I felt like the Branch might be the perfect place to see them, in their element, as it were.

I was right.

People began to move onto the dance floor in anticipation of the Readies’ imminent arrival, and I went and planted myself right at the front so as to get a good view of the proceedings, still laboring under the delusion that the show was on the stage. It came up about waist high, and I rested against it for a second while I waited. I had jumped up and down a couple of times at the Sex Pistols show, so I considered myself something of an expert on the art of pogoing, and I did a few deep knee bends to loosen up. Steve was leaning over a bottle in the back of the room, so I guessed, quite rightly, that he wouldn’t be burning the floor with his hoofing for a while, at least. Finally, the lights went low and The Readymades came running across the floor, instruments in hand, arid hopped onto the stage.

29 of the 30 people in the club (Steve was still passed out) buzzed with excitement as they hit the dance floor. “HELL0,HELL0!” said Jonathan, “How ‘ya doin’? Are ya ready?” I was. I stood flush against the stage, knees slightly bent in anticipation of my first pogo. CRASH! The guitarist hit the first notes of their theme song, and BOOM! before I could get off the ground for my first leap of the evening, WHOMP! somebody creamed me from behind and I fell forward, the top half of my body lying on the stage while someone kicked the backs of my legs, which had yet to leave the ground for that stillborn first pogo. What was that? I thought, seeing green and red and blue and every other color that had ever pissed me off. I turned around, ready to kill whoever it was that had blindsided me. There in front of me was a sight I won’t soon forget.

Two guys were trying to strangle each other on the center of the floor, tongues hanging out, eyes bulging. Another one was on the floor kicking his legs in the latest steps (The Epileptic Shuffle?) while trying to keep his hands free of the leaping madness that threatened the existence of his phalanges. People were jumping high in the air, landing with their elbows out, and one youngster was careening off every spare body he could find, happy as a bull in a china shop. The few women were right in the middle of the action, giving as good as they took.

It was time to reevaluate my position. I could go back to where Steve slumped, grab a chair, and watch the show. Or, I could take a flying leap at one of the revelers, land on my head, and get crazy. All of my life I had been an observer, dying to get out and DO IT, but too afraid of people’s reactions to make the final step into true participation. But it was obvious that here no one gave a fuck what I did, they could care less, and Steve, the one witness who could haunt me later, had entered Hop Heaven by this time and was going to suffer lifetime amnesia about this night no matter what I did. So the choice was really no choice at all. I jumped...

It was glorious. We crashed into one another, we sweated, we hurt, everyone’s bodies bounced together in a pagan ceremony of mock violence and communal body language. You could move to the outside of the group and just twirl around, hitting at the fringes of it all, or you could dive into the center for some rockem-sockem action that cemented your membership in the group as surely as a fraternity initiation, you could even grab the musicians, guitarist Ricky Sludge jumped into the audience for a solo and everyone was on him, pulling his legs, trying to play his axe for him, it was madness, it was everything our parents told us not to do, yes it was adolescent, and I loved every minute of it. When the Readymades left the stage after playing their encore, The Kids Are Alright, I was exhausted. I woke up Steve, and we went home, to rise again another day.

I don't know if this needs a postscript. Jonathan Postal went on to become a photographer (website here). The singer in SST was Irene Dogmatic, a fact I didn't know at the time ... hard to get a full sense of her life via Google, but what I've found seems fascinating (among other things, she appears to be famous for her drawings of dogs). Perhaps I'll get visitors via the wonders of Google that know Irene. I have a feeling if I saw SST now, I'd love them more than ever. One thing worth noting is that SST seems to have broken up before 1980 ... or maybe Irene left the band and the person I saw was her replacement? Ah, memories ...

[ETA: Patti Smith, along with Greg Kihn and the Readymades, played Winterland on May 13, 1978, and that was the first time I saw the Readies. When we saw Mink de Ville, they were touring behind their first album, which came out in '77 ... and their second album was in '78. So I'm starting to think I went to the Branch in '78-9.]

Comments

[Charlie Bertsch]

I think I met the singer from Mink De Ville at that Joe Strummer documentary film shoot. This is great stuff, Steven! I love the manifestations of your archival impulse almost as much as I love Pavement. . .

[Chris]

Though your writing today is perhaps more sophisticated, the voice present in this old entry is certainly recognizable as you.

[bflaska]

steve, keep these rolling!

the longbranch, what a crum joint, i'm glad you had a blast there. i went there once and during that same time period you write about.

pre-punk the club had a lot of gram parsons-inspired california & western acts and usually not so good white blues bands. once in awhile somebody good would show up, but by the time you described the club was hosting that new music trend almost exclusively.

the time i went to "the branch", some kind of punk folk act managed to get onstage there that night, doing "duncan and brady" with mandolin. and that's why i was there in the audience, dragged along to watch a factory worker's stage debut. their "duncan and brady" was such a good rendition, i clapped very loudly and shouted "encore!" and i'll be damned if they didn't play that song again right away.

that's all i remember about the night, though it wasn't nearly as fun as your visit, no dunking. this was during the time that i was working from afar sifting through the ashes and recruiting olde english folk artists for a label, only to find a few of the younger and less well known artists had reinvented themselves and started up punk outfits like margo ransom and the space virgins. and the truth was i was beginning to see a connection in attitude between some of the emotions and motifs expressed in them old time string and fiddle tunes (there was a lot of violence sung about, like those all those murder songs) and the attitudes i heard swirling around punk. this is a mighty thin peg to hang an impression on, and has i am afraid very little to do with what you're writing of. but i noticed one or two of the songwriters who helped with mink deville's song list were from not exactly the olde folke crowd but had a working familiarity with it, believe it or not, and if they'd hit their stride as songwriters a scant five years earlier they might have been stuck as singer/songwriters for the folk-rock set of l.a.

i wasn't university i wouldn't be writing any kind of thesis on the topic, but i'm still convinced the real old time guys who originated those ancient tunes could be regarded as the punks of their day. crazy yeah?

[audities]

Yes, more like 79, as I think Postal had split by 80.
I caught the Readymades every chance I got. Recorded their
Heretics radio show theme song & After the Earthquake off
the radio back then. The only released Readymade songs I
know of are the Electric Toys 45 and "415 Music" on the
415 comp lp (Howie Klein/Chris Knab record label started
after their radio show took off).