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| MAXIMUM ROCK'N'ROLL |
| This interview appeared in MAXIMUM ROCK'N'ROLL issue number 63 August 1988. |
| CRIMPSHRINE is a Berkeley-based band that formed in '77, '82, '84, or '86 depending on who you talk to. They have two cuts on the MRR / Gilman St. 7" compilation and their own 7" EP on Lookout Records. They are planning a tour of the U.S. this summer. The members of the band are Jeff, vocals and guitar; Idon, guitar; Pets, bass and vocals; Aaron, drums. Interview by Brian. |
| MRR : So the band really started getting going when Pete joined in '86? | |
| AARON : Yeah, late '86. We had the band going for a few years before that; we just hadn't gotten out and played; we didn't have a solid bass player. | |
| MRR : The impression that I got was that you already had a plan of what you wanted to do with the band before it even started. Mostly what I'm referring to is the "media" hype, the name everywhere, the graffiti. | |
| JEFF : Most of that stuff wasn't planned, it was like when some woman from the (Oakland) Tribune came to Berkeley High looking for high school bands to write about, and said, "Do you want to be in the newspaper?", and we'd be like, "Yeah, sure". In terms of all the television and newspaper stuff, none of that was like we went out and tried to do it, and in terms of graffiti, we were just basically bored. | |
| AARON : We had plans like for what we wanted to do with the band and some weird ideas, but i don't think we had, like, the "grand scheme". The whole media thing, it's funny because we ended up in the paper and also on this documentary on drop-outs that was supposed to be on ch. 9 (local public television station), and all that happened before the band really got off the ground. Now that we're playing around a lot, the media hype doesn't really seem to be there now. | |
| MRR : Jeff, since you have just gone through a situation where you couldn'y stay at home and didn't want to be "put away"somewhere, you chose to live on the streets, "on the run" so to speak. What are some of the options available to people in that circumstance, what can they do if they're not 18? | |
| JEFF : Number one, a lot depends on where they happen to be located. I can't speak for more than SF or Berkeley, but in SF and Berkeley there's generally free food all the time. SF seemed to be pretty harsh to me. I tried living there for a while, but Berkeley was pretty easy. There's a large campus with basically infinite places to sleep and other street people that are pretty easy to find and get to know, people who know about all the different resources available, things like that. A lot of what screwed me up was that there was a lot of information withheld from me as to what my situation even was. I found out that if you get into any kind of legal hassle at all, it's really important to understand the situation, especially technicalities and stuff like that, cause that's what it all seems based on, a lot of technicalities to throw in your face. I didn't really understand a lot of what was going on, and I think if i did, I might have been able to get things to work for me a little bit. It's all very confusing. I don't know how much I can saay to help people, it's generally just fucked. | |
| MRR : Are there any groups you know of that will give you the "big picture", that will help you out with the technacalities if you get caught in the "squeeze"? | |
| JEFF : I think if its a legal problem then all there really is is ACLU type organazations, which I don't think put out too much energy into some runaway kid. I was also involved with the State Department of Mental Health and Welfare. In a situation like that, if you're faced with being placed into the mental health system, you should understand that you have the right to an attorney, not a public defender, but a seperate attorney. Another thing I noticed is that the public defenders will tell you to plead guilty, regardless if you're innocent or not. My public defender said that they couldn't convict me of what I did because they couldn't prove that I willfully did it. Under state law what I did had to be done willfully, but if I pleaded innocent I was going to have to sit in jail 3-4 months before I made it to court. | |
| MRR : Why don't you give a little background as to how this situation came about? | |
| JEFF : About a year ago, during a period of time when I was living on the streets of Berkeley, me and some friends were picked up by the police for allegedly damaging someone's car and they put me on something called "informal probation", which means you're not on real probation, they're just trying to scare you. They fill out a probation sheet and everything so it seems like you're on probation, but you're really not. I was not told that I wasn't on real probation. Prior to that, I was picked up and put through psychological analysis, testing, playing with blocks and Play Doh and weird stupid shit like that. My parents and all these shrinks that I had come in contact with deceided I needed to be put in placement to get me motivated to work and to get me back in school and to start doing anything besides the band. So they deceided on this one place in Santa Cruz. The night before I was to goI split from home and just hid out for a few months. Eventually I got caught, at our practice space, and because I ran from the placement, they brought up the charges of malicious mischief again, so that they could keep me in jail until they found placement for me. So I sat in jail for 20-30 days while they tried to find a place that would take me. Finally a group home in Martinez(Bay Are suburb) deceided to take me that actually turned out to be a decent place. I was there for a while, and then the state determined that this place never had a license in the first place, so they pulled everyone out and I ended up back with my parents.
AARON : During the time Jeff was on the run, the band would just do hit and run, unannounced shows, playing a lot out of town. We were hoping to leave and go on tour and get Jeff out of town but our plans at the time got cut short. |
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| MRR : You've also helped set up some free shows for the homeless at Provo Park in Berkeley? | |
| AARON : Yeah, we helped set them up and were scheduled to play at some of them but something always seems to go wrong and we never get to actually play. But the shows themselves turned out good and we'll keep on trying. | |
| MRR : A lot of people take for granted that they have a roof over their heads, a place to stay, and food to eat. Have you all become much more aware of these things and take them less for granted now thats it's really hit close to home through Jeff's experiences? | |
| AARON : We feel we can make some good out of it by using his experiences to try and inform others, to tell people what's up.
JEFF : Ive noticed, like in the people I hung out with when I was living on the streets I was doing things that must have seemed absurd to them, like going through restaurants and taking the leftovers or digging through garbage to find food and stuff. Some of them got into it and stated doing it too, but I don't think they seriously would have considered it otherwise. Also I've noticed changes in my friends attitudes towards panhandlers and such, they're more receptive to them now. |
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| MRR : People seem to have a low opinion of street people, or no opinion at all, they just blow them off. Is there some way people can get past that attitude and just treat them as people? | |
| AARON : Just talk to them.
JEFF : Yeah, if you're living on the streets, you don't have a house to go to, they usually you end up with incredible amounts of free time. A lot of these people don't have that many friends and are looked upon as "untouchables". I was getting a lot of loneliness from the people I was coming across. For the most part, its very easy to just go up and start communication with them, it's not like there's some big barrier or something. It seems easier than just walking up to some guy working in a store or whatever and start talking with him, he's probably gonna think you're weird or something. AARON : People on the street are a lot more likely to accept abnormalities. They are not so quick to judge people. |
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| MRR : An interesting contrast to this is that, Pete, you work as a stock runner in the financial district of San Francisco, so you've worked with the "man in the penthouse" as well as the literal "man in the street". What kind of experiences has seeing these two opposite extremes up close given you? | |
| PETE : I find it hard to relate to people whose topics on conversation are so superficial, like, it's all based on how much stuff a person owns, or the places they're going to travel to, and so on. It has nothing to do with real life experiences, no depth, all surface shit. But in every situation like that, where one feels alienated, they always find their own little clique to hang out with. I end up just hanging out with the bike messengers, who are in the same boat as I am, because we're all the bottom of the corporate totem pole. I think that the street people can relate on a more experience-type level because that's what their life is, it's not like the daily grind of going to work and trying to fit in and all that, it's more like, "How am I going to survive till the next meal, till the next bit of communication I can get with another human being?" It's so far removed from "I've already got everything I need". | |
| MRR : Do you feel that people get so inundated chasing after material things that they can't even stop and talk to each other? | |
| PETE : It sometimes seems that way. But like, I went to The Christmas party and everyone got real drunk, and once they got drunk, their persona dropped, their social mask came off, and I found that I could really relate to them a lot better once they got really plastered. | |
| MRR : You've recently added a second guitarist. How did that come about? Were you looking for a fuller sound? | |
| AARON : We weren't looking for a second guitarist; we were all friends with Idon, and him and Pete had played together for years, so we tried him out and he fit in really well. We weren't consciously looking for a heavier sound or anything, but it did turn out that way, and it let Jeff concentrate on the vocals more.
JEFF : I think we're much less limited musically now. IDON : I noticed a distinctive change in the sound that CRIMPSHRINE was putting out a few months before I joined the band and I think I fit in well with that change, evolved things a bit more, made things a bit more progressive. It rounded out the change in the sound that is still happening. |
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| MRR : Another issue you deal with on your EP is racism. Do you think that everyone has some prejudice/intolerance in them? How do you deal with thise aspects in yourselves? | |
| AARON : I think you have to be really introspective and go, "Okay, how do I honestly feel about this?" and you might find some things that you're not to happy about. Just thinking about it helps, asking yourself why you feel about it the way you do and if its based on something or if it's just something you've accepted without ever really thinking about it. In our songs we try to get people to question everything you've grown up just accepting, and figure out if the way you feel is legitimate. I think everyone is prejudiced in some way and once you realize that, you can't change that right away but you can give them the benefit of the doubt rather than doubting them in the first place.
PETE : Sometimes when you do give the benefit of the doubt though, it ends up real disappointing. Like, I've walked through areas that are supposedly bad news for whites lots of times and nothing ever happened, then one time , for no apparent reason, I was beaten silly. You want to continue to give the benefit of the doubt, but sometimes it's hard. AARON : If people are fucked to you and you can somehow go above it and say, "Okay, these people are dicks but i'm not going to judge everyone by that." then there's a big step in eliminating intolerance right there. JEFF : I think if you can eventually deal with the disappointment that Pete's talking about, then eventually I think you'll find that you're dealing with people like, "This is a person, that's a person, this is a person, this is a neighborhood, that's a neighborhood." Once you deal with everyone individually, you stop putting them into little labels. It's hard to deal with something that's been ingrained in you for so many years even though you know that it ain't right, but I'm convinced that it's not impossible. |
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| MRR : It seems like people are questioning things at a much earlier age than when I was growing up. Is that something you've thought about? | |
| PETE : I think it has a lot to do with people's rights being constricted so much in the last 8 years, that how can you not stop and question?
JEFF : And it's not just a matter of rights. If you take a step back and look around, we're living in a totally absurd situation, and that's day to day life. |
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| MRR : Aaron, you started putting out a fanzine(COMETBUS) when you were 13 years old. What inspired you at such an early age? | |
| AARON : I saw these other early zines and got real inspired and it just seemed natural to me to want to get my views out. I was raised to be self-confident of what I was doing and to be creative. | |
| MRR : Do you feel that you learned a lot from doing the zine? | |
| AARON : I learned a lot just reading and writing and working on the fanzine, a lot about art and graphics. It was kind of like my schooling, which is ironic because I almost didn't make it through high school because of the fanzine and all the time I spent on it. First period was mail answering, second period was graphics, third period was transcribing interviews, etc. School was a place where I did the zine, and that's why the 'zine folded once I got out of school. And in dealing with other bands for the zine, interviews, etc., I was able to learn why bands broke up, what some of the problems were in keeping a band together, and that helped in forming, and hopefully, keeping this band. It's also interesting now being in the band because I can see things from the "other" side, from the band's standpoint. | |
MRR : You have a tour coming up this summer, any thoughts about that?
| AARON : It'll be interesting once we get away from everything here, to see what we miss, what we take for granted. You start to think about things differently when they're not in your face. I'd love to be on the road all the time. I'd love to just go slower and crawl across the country, take a year to go across and come back, but it looks like the money thing (lack of) won't make that possible.
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PETE : I'd like to see different places just to see where other people are coming from, what their influences are, what their conditioning has been, how they cope with things where they are. I think it would be interesting as well as educational, because I've just been conditioned with the hippy-dippy liberal Berkeley thing. You can only learn so much from one background, and even if you only get a small taste of a bunch of different ones, it'll help a lot. AARON : I really want to play for people who haven't known me fpr a long time and don't have total preconceived ideas of what we're like. |
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