The Clash also did an album signing at the Tower Records on Durant. I got my album and record sleeve signed by both Joe Strummer and Paul Simonon. Years later, I also got Sandy Pearlman (who produced the album) to sign the record for me. I also found my ticket from the show ($5.50), three reviews from the newspapers, a listing of shows from Bill Graham Presents (The Clash, Elvis Costello, and The Police all within a month) and a newspaper clipping of Joe's death. The flyer is a very RARE document from The Clash's original assault on the United States.

We turned up the following night and Mick was delighted to find we were playing at the old Filmore West, a fine, ramshackle wooden building. The people running it were ramshackle as well. I warned the band about the Acid Test. Who better for a spiker than a star catch? The stage would not have passed our London health and safety man. Who cared? The joint was jumping as Coon muttered darkly about the ‘ramifications'. The lack of organization was made up for by enthusiasm. It was a astorming gig from the second the band ran on to the disintegrating stage. The Clash rocked out and the crowd was with them. Joe's delirium showed. He climbed from the stage into an opera box, waving and twitching.

Wheeling down the freeway later, we agreed we had don eit right, happily discussing our free show."

From "A Riot of Our Own, Night and Day with The Clash"
By Johnny Green and Garry Barker

Joe: This is Frisco, right? That wild show we did for that new youth movement… a charity show for this youth organization. It was kind of like a squatters' beatnik neighbourhood scenario, this.

Bob: In San Francisco the group played a benefit gig for the homeless. There was a lot of trouble with Bill Graham over that - Graham was promoting the official San Francisco concert, but they had this alternative gig going on as well. It's interesting that the first show The Clash played in the USA was a benefit.

Caroline: Part of the policy in every town to which we went - and to persuade the record company of this was a nightmare - was to play a benefit gig for whichever youth group in the town needed a benefit, and then do the commercial gig. We tried to do it as often as possible, and get the local bands to play as well.

Mick: We played a benefit at the Temp, next door to Jim Jones's temple - the guy who went out to take Kool Aid with his followers in Guyana. There was lots of trouble with that, because Bill Graham didn't want us to do it. It was great that night.

When we first went to San Francisco, Joe and I, we went to that place where we played the benefit, and it was like the last vestiges of a real hippie night: with a little imagination you could see what it must have been like.

The Geary was opened up to punk and new wave shows by Olufumni Presents, a Third World cultural group headed by flamboyant rasta, Ashia.

OP put together quite a few memorable new wave shows at the Geary, along with much reggae and multi-ethnic performances before financial and legal headaches forced them to move another location.

Enter Paul Rat. Rat had previously been involved with booking shows into the Pride Foundation's 330 Grove Street venue. This locale housed the Gay Community Center, a variety of social service programs for gay people, an art gallery and one of the better new wave show spaces in town. After a long and enervateing court battle, the 350 Grove building was slated to be demolished to make way for parking lots to service the new 533 million Performing (read: dead) Arts Center.

One of the milestone events at the Geary was, oddly enough, its initial new wave concert. The CLASH interrupted their first US tour to play a benefit for New Youth Productions. The show was unprecedented in that there was no advance planning and no publicity other than spray-paint wall graffiti and some postering (they read: "The Only English Band That Matters")

The rumor is that the Baptist Church will purchase the old synagogue, which is delightfully sandwiched between the People's Temple building and the remains of Bill Graham's original Fillmore theatre.

So, another tourist attraction is born, and it looks like clubs (cool but not the same as a hall), theatres with seats (it is to entertain thoughts of vandalism), cheesy nightclubs with drink minimums and charmingly Cro-Magnon security ("OK, I won't dance, but can I just kind of wiggle around in my seat, please?") and, last, least, new wave discos (atrocity.).

Until the next venue comes along, we'll just wait here, in the front office. Can I make a call? It's local.

Damage in the personnae of linda vigil and brad

l went to find out what's appening one evening after their regular weekly meeting... Sara and Sadie provided us with a partial list of active & honorary members of the New Youth group - (Active) Lauren Falk, Katlin Heines, Vince DeRanged, Michael Marx, Alexis Scott, Peter Umpingco, Kirsten Roth, Treska Behling, Robin Brewer, Steve T. , Suzy Keikman, Jaz Douchette, Mark P., Ariana, Jim T., Jay, Linda Nakamura, Jill, Snap, Lindell, Jonathin Powers, Sadie Wrong, Gordon Coathanger, Sara Salir... (Honorary) Will Shatter, Mike Atta, Pam Woods, Dede Morin, Javier Escovido, Joey Shithead, Randy Rampage...

DAMAGE: What's New Youth Productions?

SARA: Basically, New Youth is a group of musicians and fans in the punk rock scene in San Francisco. We got together out of of a desire to put on shows in which the bands and the fans don't get ripped off. We hope to do that by giving fair percen- tages, not taking, like at the Mabuhay, all of the bar plus a large percentage of the door. We think that if we had the bar, that would be enough, or just maybe taking 5 or 10 or 15%, once we have a club. People heard about it by word of mouth because everyone knows or at least speaks to prac- tically everyone else. The idea started in a conversation, then Linda came into it because she was part of Maniacs, which was a group of people trying to do the same thing, starting last summer. They were putting on shows regularly at Grove St. and other places. People started hear- ing about it and finally so many people had personally asked me, "Sara I hear you wanna do this" that I said "OK, let's have a meeting." We had an enormous meeting here the first time with a lot of people giving their ideas. What we came up with was that we wanted to have a large place where there would be room to have a club, where there would be a cheap sort of soup- kitchen type cafe, and cheap rehearsal space for bands, because the dominant re- hearsal spaces in town are, if they're not all that expensive, very hard to get into. We set about putting ourselves to- gether into committees, dealing with legal questions, finance, venue - which is look- ing for a permanent place - show comaitt- ees for whatever shows or benefits we have before that, and a publicity committee. By a sort of windfall we got the Clash to play for us.

DAMAGE: How did that happen? LINDA: A friend of Joe Strummer's, who was also friendly with us, told Joe about our group and asked if the Clash would play a benefit for us when they were on tour here in SF. Joe was very excited ab- out what we were doing and immediately agreed to play.

SARA: All of this was happening only a couple of weeks before their planned tour. We were making 4 am transatlantic phone calls to Joe, sending telegrams, and try- ing to notify the rest of the band.

LINDA: Our friend had told Joe a long time before, but nobody could find Mick Jones, you. know, the whole thing.

DAMAGE: Tell the story about the benefit.

SARA: Even tho Joe and rest of the band had said "Yeah we'll do it". Caroline Coon, who was road manager for the show, had not given any OK on it. She called up a week before, asking what was going on, because the band had just mentioned it to her. She was afraid it might hurt their Bill Graham show at the Berkeley Community Theater. Berkeley was the only show on their tour that didn't sell out, so they put 2 and 2 together and said there's another show in the area and obviously one is the reason for the other. But it wasn't. The BCT is such a fucking bad place to play. Aside from being in Berkeley, I mean, if the Sex Pistols had played at the BCT, I don't think that many people still would have gone. That place just doesn't draw. There were actually about 1800 people at the Geary. We netted $3,600. We brought in a lot of money, but had a lot of ex- penses with that large sound system, the lights and all.

SARA: This guy Rand who was in New Youth was stage manager for that show. About a week afterwards he was at the Deaf Club and some guy came up to him and said he ran a production company and wanted Rand to work for him, because he liked what he'd seen Rand doing at the benefit. But Rand said "No no no, I'm a musician, I'm not gonna do that any more."

LINDA: And he didn't - he moved to LA.

MICHAEL: Even with the sound people doing it for half the normal price, and the lights were cheaper...

LINDA: It was a Bill Graham-size produc- tion. Putting on a show like that is an awful lot of work. It's 10 people running around frantically for 2 weeks. But we were so euphoric over it that we thought we could do anything.

SARA: We're disillusioned about finding a really large place and have come to the conclusion that we have to break down our goals. Instead of finding a music club- cum-community center-cum-rehearsal space- cum-cafe, we're going to try to do just one or two of those things, and find a

DAMAGE: Do you have like one unified politi- cal point of view?

SARA: At one point, when we talked about joining with Rock Against Racism and call- ing ourselves New Youth/Rock Against Ra- cism USA, we found out we really were a diverse group. Until that point we didn't know everyone's political leanings or i- deas. We don't have one unified point of view, tho we probably lean more to the left than the general bluecollar public. There arc some communists in the group, but they're not the majority.

KIRSTEN: Altho we've been accused of

being a Dils fan club, probably because of their communist stance and our commu- nistic ideals, that doesn't really stand. While I'd say that practically everyone in the group really likes the Dils, that goes for a lot of bands. A lot of people in the group have political opinions that don't really reflect that much on what the group does.

DAMAGE: What are your objectives as of now?

SARA: We started writing up a paper which which says that, conservatively, we're looking at $10,000 as the amount we would need to put together what we originally wanted. Even if we had a dozen more bene- fits, you're not gonna make all that much money. We're not necessarily going to lower our expectations, but revise and divide them. After June 1st we're going to start doing shows. Our policy on non-benefit shows will be to give the bands a guaran- tee which will be part of our expenses. Whatever net profit we make will be di- vided between the bands and ourselves, with us taking a small percentage. We're still gonna see if we can find a large place, but it doesn't seem likely. We're going to look into the availability of a club or a rehearsal space or a small cafe where people can hang out. We'll use what money we have towards that. We've spent money on the legal things and we loaned a large bulk of money to the Geronimo Pratt benefit, and we're not getting any money out of it. We loaned money for the initial rental of the hall. Other groups have asked us to help on benefits. If we don't help them physically we might lend them money to start them on the process of doing benefits.

SADIE: One way or another we wanna do something for the scene, for the bands, and for the audience. We wanna keep this money circulating, going through the scene.

MICHAEL: Hopefully, by diversifying our activities, we'll draw more people into it. In that vein, I'm in a band that's based in Vallejo. We played a high school there last week, and the crowd, which was a really mixed one, loved us. I had felt that it was a stupid and provincial place to play, but I realized we needed to get the music out there. People get disgusted with the scene because they say it's real- ly jaded and cliquish, but every scene is that way. The point is to keep plugging at it in many directions, getting more people involved. It was really inspira- tional.

DAMAGE: I did a window display of photos of the Clash at Rather Ripped Re- cords, and put up a New Youth pos- ter, and within a day and a half CBS and Bill Graham called them and said everything could stay ex - cept the New Youth poster. 1 talked to the Clash after the Berkeley performance and they said Graham told them that if they publicly announced that they were going to do the benefit before the Berkeley concert, he wouldn't pay them.

LINDA: I don't think any of us really know all the shit that might have come down. Once we knew that the Clash wore going to do it and that they were doing it under the penalty of anything - that Bill Graham could have said "Fuck you, I'm cancelling your show in Berkeley" or "I'm not paying you cuz you've bro- ken your contract" - we never knew what was in the contract, we just speculated a whole lot. And we speculated that there was probably a clause that said within a certain number of miles and a certain num- ber of days of this show you can't do a- nother show. So we didn't do any publicity except word of mouth, which got around to a lot of people, and some spraypainting, until the night of the show. Half of us went to the show in Berkeley, and the other half went out at 8 o'clock on the dot and started postering the city. Moe Armstrong was fantastic, and we got lots of good things out on KSAN. Promotion did get out and there was nothing they could do about it.

SARA: We got a lot of shit from certain people in the scene who have a lot of po- wer with record companies or radio sta- tions, etc. We were talking in one ear of the Clash and they were talking in the other. When the Clash were setting up to do their sound check, about 2 hours before the show was to begin, Mick Jones called me over and started haranguing me, saying "What is all this I hear about you buying guns with this money?" That's what someone actually told him! The Clash were in a real conflict about it. They were being told all these nasty things about us that weren't true by any means. Most of the things that were written in CREEM about us were utter bullshit. It was really bad because the Clash did a great thing for us, not only for New Youth but for the whole SF scene. A lot of us felt really cheated by them playing in Berkeley when obviously the center of things is here. What's in Berkeley? The University is Berk- ley, OK, so they're trying to convert peo- ple, whatever. When the Clash did it that night, one of the reasons it was so great was that all the punks of SF were there, plus a ton of other people. All the road crew and even Caroline Coon said it was just like playing for the kids in England, just like old times. That concert was not controlled like at the Graham show.

DAMAGE: What happened after that?

STEVE: After tho Clash fewer people start- ed coming to the meetings. OK, we had $3,000 but what can you do with that when you're looking to rent a place? Bill Graham says it costs half a million. People were say- ing we were an elitist group or something.

MICHAEL: All that was left after the eu- phoria of the Clash was shitwork, working on becoming a non-profit corporation, look- ing for a place. Real estate is so tight in this city that it became real discour- aging. All the news you got was bad.

DAMAGE: What do you want to say to people who'll read this rag?

SARA: No more dead time!... Maybe be- cause I'm doing it, I think what we're doing is good for lots of reasons. The one thing that bothers me is that people are so willing to slag without confront- ing the problem. It's easy to say so-and- so looks funny or so-and-so's really fucked up or so-and-so ran off with so- and-so and all tho New Youth money. What's the solution? When people have things to say, we're here every Tuesday night at 6 pm. If people wanna come scream at us, good. We'll scream back. It's stu- pid taking sides when New Youth is all of us.

STEVE: Obviously the whole scene needs a space, which is what we've been trying to get together. We're not trying to do- minate the scene or anything like that. Instead of everyone taking cheap shots at each other, which happens a lot, we ought to all be working together. Roger Bygott

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