Reclaiming, Story 5: Welcome to Paradise

Carolyn Stein grew up with music like Avril Lavigne and The Marianas Trench – classic, trashy pop punk. But she never considered herself much of a punk rocker, until she took a little trip to the East Bay to a tiny venue called 924 Gilman Street. But soon after Carolyn discovers this venue, she learns that it may be at risk of closing. What will be lost if this venue closes?

Welcome to Paradise was produced by Carolyn Stein, Ana De Almeida Amaral, and Max Du, with support from Laura Joyce Davis and the Stanford Storytelling Project.

Transcript for Reclaiming, Story 5: Welcome to Paradise

Ana: This is State of the Human, the podcast of the Stanford Storytelling Project. Each episode, we take a common human experience, like teaching or breathing or joking, and bring you stories that deepen our understanding of that experience. My name is Ana de Almeida Amaral. Today's episode is one in a series about reclaiming what's been lost.

Ana: This series will feature stories about reclaiming neighborhoods, music venues, childhood obsessions, languages, and ways of seeing ourselves. It's about holding on to the tension between what we were and what we are. and who we've become. It's about returning to our origins, but this time with a more nuanced perspective.

Ana: Welcome to State the Human.

Ana: I live in a pretty magical place. On Thursday [00:01:00] nights, I join a group of 20 students as we bring our instruments out into the garden of our house to make music under the stars.

Crowd: This guy decides to head to New York City. This guy would. For hours, all we 

Ana: do is sing songs. Sometimes really badly, as we laugh and enjoy a moment of creating together. 

Crowd: I

Ana: just moved into Columbay a few weeks ago. It's a dorm on campus that is a consensus based cooperative house, meaning we cook together, we clean together, and we make all of our decisions together. I know what you're thinking, and [00:02:00] yes, it's just as hippie as it sounds. Only vegetarian food is made here. And when you walk through the house, murals cover every hallway.

Ana: Also, the top floor of our house has a clothing optional policy. It may just sound like a weird house full of California college kids, but the culture of community and subversive ways of being in this house has been passed down for the past 50 years. And it has made Columbay the heart of student activism on campus for generations.

Ana: From the anti apartheid movement to present day free Palestine organizing, Columbay residents have a legacy of collective action and organizing for social justice.

Ana: Columbay is truly a magical place, like its own world away from the individualistic and drowning culture that dominates the rest of Stanford's campus. I love coming home to [00:03:00] Columbay and I could not imagine living without this place.

Ana: In today's episode, we're talking about another place that has been a home to generations of people who subvert the dominant narrative by screaming and moshing to music with their voices. That's not for everyone.

Ana: Punk got its start in the 1970s with a bunch of teenagers who wanted to resist and change the dominant culture. Punk Paradise came to West Berkeley in 1984 through a small music venue called 924 Gilman Street. But like many utopias, this one quickly became distorted. And after 40 years, the venue finds itself at risk of closing.

Ana: Today's episode is about how the venue has reclaimed its origins and how punk rockers protect their [00:04:00] paradise. This is Welcome to Paradise by Caroline Stein.

Carolyn: It was March of 2020, right before everyone was sent into quarantine. I kept telling myself, I'll see everyone again in two weeks, I'll see everyone again in two weeks, repeating it like a prayer. I needed some kind of escape, something to make me feel like I had control again. That weekend, my friend Carlos invited me to a show at a club called 924 Gilman Street, or the Gilman, as the Berkeley locals call it.

Carolyn: As I watched the sun set over the bay bridge from the car window, I felt like I could breathe again.

Carolyn: Carlos and I met through the Stanford Marching Band. Carlos had been telling me about the [00:05:00] Gilman forever. When he talked about his first time there, it was like hearing a kid talk about Disneyland. 

Carlos: So we're driving up to the venue and one of my friends is in the front seat and he turns back to me as we're going across the front of the venue and he goes like, isn't this great?

Carlos: Doesn't it look like s And I'm like, yeah!

Carlos: They did these things pretty regularly called Ska Nights. It's Friday or Saturday nights where it's mostly just all ska bands. And we get in one of the opening bands. They got up on stage and they're like, yeah, we're really not a good band. We're like the worst bands ever. And everyone just kind of went wild for it.

Carlos: There was such like a wonderful chaos about it that there was just, it made me want to be there just all the time.

Carolyn: We pulled up to a brick building with windows plastered and graffiti and stickers. I wanted to love this place as much as Carlos did, but all I could think was, this is it? It was a cold night and I was [00:06:00] shivering as we walked from our parking spot. Carlos handed me some earplugs. You're gonna need these, he said.

Carolyn:When we came up to the venue, the doors were wide open. A teenage girl with fiery red hair and cartilage piercings greeted us at the door. She couldn't have been older than 16, but already she looked cooler than I'll ever be. Carlos handed her four dollars, and in exchange, we each got a small membership card with a drawing of our horse drawn carriage on one side, and the rules for membership on the other.

Carolyn:As we stepped inside and my eyes adjusted to the dim lighting, the first thing I noticed were the graffiti and stickers that covered every inch of the walls. Beat up leather couches lined the edge of the room. It's just as cold inside as outside. Despite being a fan of early 2000s trash punk rock music, I was [00:07:00] unprepared for what came next.

Carolyn: As the band started playing, the place came alive. People started flinging their bodies across the room, thrashing into each other like it was a game of pinball. Even with earplugs in, I could feel the music pulsing through every part of my body. I backed up towards the edge of the room. But before I could get there, Carlos grabbed my hand and pulled me into the mosh 

Crowd: pit.

Carolyn: Being in the mosh pit is amazing. Felt like being underwater. I was gasping for breath, scared that I'd sink to the bottom and get trampled. It was terrifying. But then something inside me told me to stop resisting. I relaxed my body. I surrendered myself to the current of the people [00:08:00] pressing in. Suddenly, I was no longer sinking.

Carolyn: But swimming. All of the weight and worry I carried into that place melted away. And then, just as suddenly, I came up for air. All of those bodies dancing and jostling around me held me up. It was floating. I found my footing, stepped out of the mosh pit, and emerged with a new vision for this place.

Carolyn: I saw things I hadn't noticed before. High schoolers in flannels crashing into middle aged men and rainbow haired millennials, poetry on the walls, and the words, sweet children, spray painted across one of the ceiling beams. An homage to Green Day, one of the many bands who got their start at the [00:09:00] Gilman.

Carolyn: As I stared at those words, only one thought filled my mind. I think. I found paradise.

Carolyn: From that moment, I wanted to know everything about this place. Where it came from, why it felt so special, and how it even became paradise. The first thing I discovered was that this hole in the wall club was the birthplace of some of punk rock's most famous bands, including not only Green Day, but also The Offspring, Jawbreaker, and Yeasty Girls.

Carolyn: As I dug deeper, I discovered that the Gilman has always been more than just a club. It's been a whole microculture. Even a lab for making art and [00:10:00] finding freedom. The club was founded in 1986. When a guy named Tim Yohannan, the founder of Maximum Rock and Roll Zine, transformed a repurposed Berklee warehouse into Punk Rock's Bay Area home.

Carolyn: By then, there was already a punk music scene growing in the East Bay. Punk music was loud, political, and anti authoritarian in nature. All words you could use to describe the Bay Area from the 1960s on. So it was only natural that That residents of Berkeley, Oakland, and San Francisco would be into music that captured that spirit.

Carolyn: But there wasn't yet a center for that punk music to be played. The Gilman was born out of that need. It became a space where rebels of all backgrounds skated down the streets of West Berkeley to gather for a night of freedom and pure chaos. As Gilman grew to be a [00:11:00] mecca for the punk music scene, New types of sound came out of that venue.

Carolyn: Sounds that would become unique to the East Bay. Like Operation Ivy, a band of teenagers who mixed hardcore punk with ska 

Crowd: music.

Carolyn: Operation Ivy was short lived. But the band evolved into Rancid, one of the most famous bands in punk history. It was in 1989, between the Operation Ivy and Rancid years, when legendary punk musician Jesse Townley, otherwise known as Jesse Lucius, arrived on the scene from Philly. He's one of those old school volunteers.

Carolyn: who's seen the good, the bad, and the ugly of punk rock. But you would never guess that if you saw him on the street. [00:12:00] When he arrived in Berkeley, he was looking to join an art magazine. 

Jesse: But instead I ended up getting involved with Gilman Street and not leaving for a couple of decades. 

Carolyn: Spanned off and toured with Green Day.

Carolyn: And as the lead singer of Blatz, he would sometimes strip during Gilman performances. 

Jesse: It was really familiar to me. It was covered with graffiti and people with funny hair and funny ideas and ripped up clothes were hanging out and good bands were playing that weren't just kind of overproduced 80s commercial garbage.

Carolyn: The Gilman didn't just provide a space to mess around and play live music. It became an important space for protests and political expression. People were looking for a space to kick and scream, not just for the hell of it, but to express outrage about ongoing U. S. wars or lack of police accountability.

Carolyn: But sometimes, that resistance took the form of fighting punk [00:13:00] rock's darker side. Jesse says that as a collective, the Gilman's sought to be a safe space for people of all backgrounds since day one. 

Jesse: We, we had, we had major problems. Um, we had Locals who would come and hang out across the street, and we would move them on, and they would come back, and they would threaten to go get the gun in their truck.

Carolyn: Especially during those early years. Back then, it wasn't uncommon for Nazi skinheads to show up to punk shows, trying to stir up trouble. If you were lucky, the worst thing they would do was a Hail Hitler salute instead of clapping for the performers. 30 of them showed up one night when Jesse was helping run an anti racist action show.

Jesse: But this time they showed up to a show with 300 people who were specifically there to fight racism. And so they got chased down the street and beaten up. That was a wonderful thing. 

Carolyn: The Gillman brought awareness to the racism and fascism that had found its way into the punk rock scene. They played a big role in bridging the gap between groups that were wildly different but shared a [00:14:00] passion for music that embraced being cultural misfits.

Carolyn: This is the root of what we find at the Gilman today. 

Jesse: So there's a little less antagonism and there's a lot less violence overall in the scene. There's a lot more awareness in all parts of the scene. 

Carolyn: When you enter the venue today, One of the first things you see among all of the graffiti is a large sign that says no violence, no racism, no sexism, no homophobia, and no transphobia.

Carolyn: The message at the top of their discord channel sums it up well. No f 

Charlie: ing behavior. Gilman and activism definitely go hand in hand. A majority of our staff is queer. Largely trans, like all of that. 

Carolyn:  This is Charlie Illa, a longtime member and manager of 9 2 4 Gilman Street. Charlie has been involved in a lot of activism at the Gilman.

Carolyn:  He's led political workshops to help people navigate elections and decode ballot measures. This is something that Carlos said is one of the things he loves. [00:15:00] 

Carlos: Punk in general has always been a place for people that have been historically marginalized. There's a history of social justice and equality and social and racial unity.

Carlos: And so you take one step into the place and that just becomes instantly clear. The Gilman's existence is a form of activism. In and of itself, 

Carolyn:  it was at the Gilman that Carlos first heard day labor, a ska band, where he saw people who looked like him. 

Carlos: The friends that I'd first come to the Gilman with, they'd been trying to sell me on day labor for a while.

Carlos: And the thing about day labor is that, oh, they have a lot of Latino members, so they use Spanish in their lyrics. They, they, they write their lyrics about English and Spanish, so like as soon as. Performing. They just brought the house down. It seemed like people were there just to see day labor. It was, it was amazing.

Carlos: I was, I mean, I was already hooked on their music, but there was, there was no turning back after that. They were one of my favorite fans, like from that night on. And they still are. And so being able to have a form of music from my punk subcultures that I can share with my [00:16:00] parents and have them be able to, to vibe with that and relate to it in.

Carlos: In the same ways that I do, it's this moment where so many parts of my world just come together, all at once. 

Carolyn:  Activism at the Gilman today doesn't just look like political workshops or binging up skinheads, it's about prioritizing local artists. The more I understand what the Gilman has done to bring together marginalized communities, The more I began to understand why Carlos loved this place so much.

Carolyn: But like so many small music venues, the Gilman is struggling to survive. In the face of rampant gentrification, the Gilman could go the way of other legendary music venues like 285B. Kent in Brooklyn, Slim's in San Francisco, and Mr. T's Bowl in Los Angeles. Generally speaking, gentrification is when developers go to a lower income area and build the area up by bringing in different restaurants and attractions that tend to be more [00:17:00] expensive.

Carolyn: This process often causes rents to increase significantly, which means that many long time residents and businesses have often get displaced. Charlie said he's seen these changes from the beginning. The first time Carlos took me to the Gilman, I did notice the Whole Foods and Tesla repair shop, but I also noticed the homeless encampments just a few blocks away.

Carolyn: It was the same image I'd seen in San Francisco, the same image that has dominated Bay Area headlines for the past few years. As the rich move in to transform the neighborhoods, Low income residents get priced out and are forced to leave or even lose their homes. And when patrons of the Gillman get priced out, the culture gets priced out too.

Carlos: People that have grown up here and been here for years, they're getting priced out and they have to move away from the place that they call home. And it's not as easy. In a word, it's And some of the old neighborhoods that I grew up seeing are basically unrecognizable. Even now, I'm [00:18:00] still having a hard time getting used to, and it's one of the things that I dislike most about the Bay Area.

Carlos: It's always going to be home. I don't want to leave anytime soon, but at the same time, it feels like so much of the positive change that it's brought to the world has come at the cost of its own soul. 

Carolyn: Gentrification is also not only a threat to the Gilman's existence, but creates challenges for the members to stick to their core values.

Charlie: It's been hard to not, like, compromise our own values as a collective to make more money, you know, and ultimately we still want to be a space that's for the community, kind of above everything else. 

Carolyn: But the Gilman has limited options. Charlie says Gilman has never had a show that's more than 20, and even if someone doesn't have the money to get in, they can still be let in as long as they help clean up afterwards.

Carolyn: When Carlos took me there in 2020, I had to buy a membership card to get in, but the cost of membership was only 2. That little card also gave me access to the membership meetings that happen on the first and third Saturdays of every [00:19:00] month at 5 p. m. Forever and always. From a business standpoint, the low prices undoubtedly hurt the Gilman.

Carolyn: Raising the prices would keep the physical space alive, but it would also mean the death of what has made it so special from the beginning. As I listened to Carlos and Charlie's concerns, I began to think about what a Bay Area without the Gilman would look like. Charlie and others have done so much work to preserve it, but if it disappeared, how many people would even notice?

Carolyn: I began to wonder how Gilman has survived for so long and how they are staying afloat. I expected to hear stories about telling gentrifiers to piss off and spray paint the outside of the Whole Foods. Something looks But that's not Gilman's strategy. At first, their approach sounded more Kenny G than Green Day.

Carolyn: According to members of the Gilman community, this is not a story of street protests and demonstrations, [00:20:00] but rather a story of city politics and getting involved directly with the Berkeley City Council. 

Jesse: We survived because we became a known entity to the city of Berkeley. We taught ourselves how to be a political entity and a cultural entity.

Carolyn: This became particularly important in the late 90s, when the Gilman got a new neighbor, an electronics company called Dicon. 

Jesse: And they complained to the economic development part of the city of Berkeley that our people were scaring their late shift so we had to be closed down. And we were like, oh no, no, no, that's not gonna happen.

Carolyn: When the Gilman members heard about the possibility of their venue being closed down, They banded together. Initially, Daikon refused to talk to the Gilman [00:21:00] members, but eventually, the company showed up to the city council to talk to the Gilman community about their concerns. After talking things through, Jesse and other Gilman volunteers shifted their hours and came up with an agreement that made everyone feel comfortable.

Carolyn: While showing up to city council meetings was always an option for the Gilman, some members decided to take it a step further. For Jesse, that looked like joining the Berkeley Rent Board. From 2008 to 2018, Jesse spent his time on the Rent Board advocating on behalf of tenants in venues like 924 Gilman Street.

Jesse: Okay, so one of the reasons I was able to run for office is because I can stay awake when incredibly boring things happen. Come up like land, use 

Carolyn: the road to get to the rent board wasn't easy. Many people in the punk community viewed Jesse's efforts to run for office as a form of betrayal. 

Jesse: I had friends who would kind of put up their nose at me and sneer like, you're running for office, you're gonna become the [00:22:00] man.

Jesse: And I'd be like, well, better me than the people who are there now. And so, and that's the age old question, right? Do you become part of the machine or do you, uh, fight outside the machine? Against the machine? 

Carolyn: As more upscale restaurants and boutiques tried to move into spaces around the Gilman, Jesse's work on the Rent Board gave him more opportunities to preserve the area surrounding 924 Gilman.

Jesse: And I was like, look, if you put a high end restaurant across 8th Street from Gilman, their patrons will not like our patrons. All 220 of them or whatever who are outside between bands. Smoking cigarettes and being loud and having funny hair. Like, I don't care how Berkeley they think they are. They're not going to like that.

Jesse: And that's going to get us shut down. 

Carolyn: Jesse and other Gilman leaders went to the city council to advocate against the proposed Yuppie Street. Since the city council already knew Jesse as a member on the rent board, that gave him some leverage in his advocacy. As a [00:23:00] result, the developers ended up dropping their project, which was a huge win for Gilman.

Jesse: If you told me in 1989 that we'd be able to. I 

Carolyn: asked Jesse if the threat of gentrification ever faded to the background for him. His answer? Never. 

Jesse: The 

Carolyn: Gilman has anchored itself in the tide of gentrification, continuously working to endure the next wave. I'm amazed by how the Gilman community has navigated gentrification so far.

Carolyn: But I do find myself wondering how they'll survive. One night, as I'm reminiscing about the mosh pit and the feeling of crashing into sweaty people, I search up images of 924 Gilman Street on Google. I find a picture from an old show and notice a sign spray painted in big white letters. It says, [00:24:00] Nothing is more punk than being self determined and respecting the self determination of others.

Carolyn: And that's when it hits me. I need to go back. So Carlos and I take another trip across the Bay Bridge. Some things have changed. They no longer give out membership cards. Now they just have a touchscreen with a credit card reader. But otherwise, the place is the same. Punk rockers with tattoo sleeves and ripped up denim vests crash into each other in the mosh pit.

Carolyn: And their kids follow. One guy catches my attention. A 40 something year old photographer wearing a pair of New Balance shoes that my dad also probably owns. I strike up a conversation with the guy, he's a self described techie by day, music photographer by night. He's taking photos of people sitting on the couches at Gilman.

Carolyn: He says that the Gilman is everything to him. So I ask him the same question I'd ask Carlos and Jesse and Charlie and myself. What makes [00:25:00] Gilman so special? And why does it matter if it lives or dies? He turns to me and then points around the room. Look at the people sitting on the couches, he says.

Carolyn: They're the ones who make this place so special. When I think back to my first time at 924 Gilman Street, perhaps the thing that I left the mosh pit with was a sense of community. And that sense of community is really what made me fall in love with this place. Everything from the beat up couches to the chaotic spray painted pictures, and even the music itself.

Carolyn: Standing at the edge of the room, watching as people jumped and danced and crashed into each other in the mosh pit, I'm taken back to my own experience, in the same spot. I felt free in a way that was new to me. It took coming back to the Gilman to realize what it was I'd felt that night in the mosh pit.

Carolyn: As I felt myself falling, only to feel people around me. It's [00:26:00] that sense of community, the feeling that there are people all around me who understand why even as strangers, we need each other. Why we need this space. But it's not a guarantee that the Gilman will survive. What is clear, is that what this place stands for.

Charlie: I like to think that spaces like Gilman are important and that people know that spaces like Gilman are important and will help us stay open. And this sounds kind of cheesy, but Gilman has always kind of been a more about the spirit and soul of the collective rather than an actual function. So even if we have to close our doors, the people involved, the work that we do, the passion that people have for music will still exist.

Charlie: It just probably will have to find another avenue, another place to cause a ruckus and make noise and make a mess. 

Carolyn: The Gilman is a space where people can bring their grievances and joy and frustrations, and they're all [00:27:00] welcomed here. I found the Gilman at a time when I needed to escape. a life that felt out of control.

Carolyn: When the whole world needed a place to scream over everything that was going wrong. So a place to express how things are not okay in a way that was chaotic, raw, and unfiltered. You could express any motion that came up without having to explain it further. It's still a place where I can find that today.

Carolyn: I recognize that this type of place with chipped paint and beat up couches isn't for everyone, but for me, it's paradise. 

Crowd: That was Welcome to 

Ana: Paradise by Caroline Stein. You've been listening to State of the Human, the podcast of the Stanford Storytelling Project. This episode was produced by Carolyn Stein and me, [00:28:00] Ana Delmeda Amaral, with support from Laura Joyce Davis, Dawn Frazier, Megan Kalfas, Melissa Deardahl, and Jonah Willengans.

Ana: For their generous financial support, we'd like to thank the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, the Program in Writing and Rhetoric, the Office of the Vice President of the RIT, You can learn about the Stanford Storytelling Project and our podcasts, workshops, live events, and courses at storytelling.stanford.edu.

Ana: You can find this and every episode of State of the Human on our website or anywhere you listen to podcasts. For State of the Human and the Stanford Storytelling Project, I'm Ana Delmeda Moral. Thank you for listening.