For one of the country’s most celebrated punk rock clubs, 924 Gilman is extremely easy to miss. There are no signs out front, no neon marquee floating above the sidewalk. The only thing distinguishing this nondescript brick building—surrounded by other nondescript buildings on an altogether ordinary street—is the hundreds of band stickers plastered over the front windows, providing tiny bursts of color. To be certain you’ve come to the right place, you’ll need to find the nearly obscured address number above the door. But 924 Gilman Street is much more than an address on a map; it’s where the distinct sound of California pop punk was nurtured and developed, where many of the world’s most influential and beloved pop punk bands played their first shows—and it remains the heart of the East Bay DIY punk scene.
Gilman was founded almost 40 years ago, when a small group of local musicians and show organizers, including Kamala Parks and Victor Hayden, joined with Tim Yohannan—an older leftist in San Francisco and the founder of the punk zine Maximum Rocknroll and its namesake radio show—to open an all-ages music venue, run entirely by volunteers. Housed in a warehouse in an industrial area of West Berkeley, the Gilman St Project, as it was then known, hosted its first show in December 1986 with Berkeley punk band Soup.
This article appears in Issue 34 of Alta Journal.
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Sergie Loobkoff, former drummer for Soup and current guitar player for long-running Berkeley-based emo punk band Samiam, had no idea he was going to be a part of history by being in the first band to play Gilman. “There was no reason to believe that this place would last more than a year or two or five and then disappear and no one would give a shit,” he tells me. “So the fact that we’re talking about it right now is much more of a surprise than the feeling that we were doing something monumental by playing that night.”
Gilman would soon set itself apart from other clubs in the area by empowering bands—more often than not teenagers—to book, promote, and generally manage their own shows. This freedom inspired dozens of local kids to pick up instruments and start their own bands.
“Within a month or two of Gilman opening, new bands, like mushrooms after the rain, were springing up everywhere,” says Larry Livermore, a musician, record label owner, and founding member of the club.
The Gilman St Project was initially presided over by Yohannan. A famously doctrinaire and divisive figure in the local music scene, he abruptly pulled out in September 1988 and shuttered the club. Yohannan alleged financial difficulties, rampant vandalism, and exhaustion, but mostly griped that the project had failed to live up to his lofty and utopian ideals. Rather than let the club die an inglorious death, volunteers came together, took over the lease, and reopened the venue, as a collective: 924 Gilman—or, more typically, just Gilman. Amid these changes, Gilman’s original ideals, ethics, and commitment to being a club for creative youth remained largely intact. And now, as a self-reliant and revitalized community space, Gilman would go on to host shows that, to this day, are the stuff of legend.
AWE FROM AFAR
I was a teenager living in a small town in Southwest Colorado when I first learned about Gilman. In the pre-internet era, I found out all there was to know about the wider punk rock world by obsessively reading zines, which would mention the East Bay club with a reverential awe. I read about Gilman’s DIY organizational model, its prohibition of drugs and alcohol, and its commitment to providing a venue free from racism, sexism, and homophobia. But more importantly, I learned that it was at Gilman that bands like Green Day, Rancid, AFI, and Jawbreaker had cut their teeth and played some of their first shows.
I also learned that Green Day—who, in the early 1990s, were arguably the biggest pop punk band in the world—had been banned from playing Gilman after signing to Reprise Records in 1993. In addition to its other myriad prohibitions, Gilman maintained a strict policy against booking bands signed to major labels. Though I’d considered myself a fan of Green Day, I couldn’t deny how cool—how punk rock—this policy was.
While hardcore punk bands like Black Flag and Minor Threat were known for their speed, aggression, and audience provocation, pop punk bands were distinguished by their bright melodies, vocal harmonies, and catchy hooks. They combined the contrariness of punk with the musicality of pop. The songs sometimes even made use of more than three chords.
Many of the early Gilman bands came and went quietly, without making much impact beyond the borders of Berkeley and Oakland. Some bands—especially Berkeley-based punk band Isocracy—would draw such big and raucous crowds that they’d become almost like Gilman royalty.
“Isocracy were the first superstars of Gilman,” recalls Livermore, “and they held that title for about three months—until Operation Ivy came along.”
No band characterized the ethics, spirit, and sound of Gilman better than Operation Ivy. Founded in the spring of 1987 by four young friends in the East Bay—Jesse Michaels on lead vocals, Dave Mello on drums, Matt Freeman on bass, and Tim Armstrong on guitar and vocals—Operation Ivy melded melodic punk rock with ska. Their highly literate lyrics addressed poverty, social justice, police abuse, and youth disillusionment, while also calling for an end to the rampant violence that was infecting the East Bay punk rock scene. The band’s regular shows at Gilman attracted larger and larger audiences, and they were soon packing the small club beyond its limited capacity of just over 200.
“They started in May, and by August they were filling the place,” says Livermore. “Everybody was astounded.”
After watching an early performance at Gilman, Livermore told the band he wanted to release a 7-inch. Having put out only one previous record, the debut album by the Lookouts—featuring Livermore on vocals and guitar and a teenager calling himself Tré Cool on drums—he released Operation Ivy’s six-song debut EP, Hectic, on his nascent Lookout! Records in January 1988. Hectic’s first run of 1,000 copies sold out within a month.
Operation Ivy toured the United States that year, drawing crowds of varying sizes but growing their national reputation, and Lookout! issued the band’s debut LP, Energy, in May 1989. The record-release party, at Gilman, featured a young opening band, formerly known as Sweet Children, playing the venue for the first time under their new name, Green Day. This show, fatefully, would also mark Operation Ivy’s final official public performance.
Lookout! would continue to release records by local bands, including Green Day’s first two EPs and first two full-length albums. The band’s second LP, Kerplunk!, debuted their new drummer, Tré Cool, formerly of the Lookouts. Operation Ivy’s Armstrong and Freeman formed a new band, Rancid.
As the 1990s progressed, both Green Day and Rancid would find mainstream success, selling millions of records and gracing the covers of glossy rock magazines, with videos in regular rotation on MTV. Other Gilman-affiliated bands, like Jawbreaker, AFI, the Offspring, and NOFX, were also suddenly selling tens of thousands of records and being covered by major outlets. The whole music world was looking at West Berkeley.
COMMUNAL SPIRITS
I attended my first Gilman show on August 23, 2025—more than three decades after I’d first learned about the club. Admission was $12. I am, admittedly, well beyond Gilman’s average age demographic, but I tried not to let this fact discourage me from enjoying the concert. At any rate, even if most of that night’s audience looked to be under 21, the four Northern California–based punk bands on the bill all appeared to be my age or older, which I took to heart.
As I walked through the front door, I was immediately greeted by Gilman’s famous guidelines, stenciled in white onto a black wall: no alcohol, no drugs, no violence, no racism, no misogyny/sexism, no homophobia, no transphobia, and so on. Assorted other signs were taped to the wall: a call for volunteers; offers of free mutual aid items, from pregnancy tests to Narcan; reminders about membership meetings. Whatever space on the wall wasn’t covered by a sign was taken over by band stickers and graffiti. A basketball rim had been pulled in from somewhere, and a few kids took turns shooting hoops. A couple of dirty sofas, which seemed to have been there since Gilman’s first years, were placed haphazardly around the venue. The two bathrooms, both gender-neutral, are better off not described. Despite its historic status and legendary reputation, Gilman—to its credit—does not appear to have ever attempted a makeover.
I spoke to two show attendees: Griffin Smith, 23 years old, from Tracy, and Micah Favretto, 20 years old, from Concord. Smith and Favretto come to Gilman at least once a week, regardless of what bands are on the bill.
“There really just is a different feel to it,” Smith told me. “A lot of it is the people. I can just go up to somebody and shake their hand and introduce myself. It’s always a great time.”
“Everyone’s always really humble,” Favretto agreed. “Everyone’s friends here.”
A 19-year-old local named Blue Distefano—wearing a leather jacket covered in spikes and band patches—had been volunteering at Gilman for a year, typically attending up to three shows a week. Anyone who doesn’t have money for a show is welcome to volunteer, Distefano told me, which on any given night might involve working the door, keeping the watercooler filled, or cleaning up after the show. No one (except those who don’t respect the guidelines) is turned away.
“Any sort of band can play here,” Distefano said. “This place is built of all the crumbs of love that have been poured into here.”
The show attracted a modest crowd of about 50, mostly younger but also a handful of older people who looked to be friends or spouses of the performers. The audience mostly stood in place as it watched the first two bands, but as the third act—a garage punk four-piece called Fuzz Attack—played, the crowd finally got a small circle pit going. Seeing these kids bounce around and bump into one another, laughing and high-fiving, I couldn’t help but smile. For all the things in the world we have lost in the tech-obsessed 21st century—community, intimacy, physical connection—the communal and joyful spirit of punk rock, as represented there at Gilman, has survived.
TRADITIONAL VALUES
On May 17, 2015, 26 years after playing their first show on Gilman’s stage, and 22 years after being barred from playing there, Green Day were finally welcomed back. The occasion was a benefit for AK Press and 1984 Printing—two independent book-publishing companies that had recently been affected by a fatal fire in West Oakland. (Gilman members had voted to allow a one-night-only exception to their “no major-label bands” policy.) It was a triumphant return for the East Bay’s prodigal sons.
“I really think of this place as a very important place, to me, and it’s in my heart forever,” singer and guitar player Billie Joe Armstrong told the sold-out crowd.
Hosting up to 20 shows a month, Gilman is still run entirely by volunteers and members, and it is still all-ages, but it now operates as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit under the decidedly unpunk name Alternative Music Foundation. In 2024, after a fundraising campaign, the club was able to make a renovation that doubled its capacity from 225 to 550. Gilman has been the subject of one book and two feature documentaries, and it has a prominent role in the 2025 action-comedy film Freaky Tales, starring Pedro Pascal.
The club remains a beacon for young artists. The Linda Lindas, a Los Angeles–based pop punk band of four women in their teens and early 20s, were on a stadium tour in 2024, with Green Day, Rancid, and the Smashing Pumpkins, when they were invited to play a matinee show at Gilman. They enthusiastically agreed.
“We play all sorts of clubs, and they all just kind of blur together at some point, and they’re all run by the same few companies, and they all look the same,” says band member Eloise Wong. “But Gilman is super, super fun because anyone can go, it’s all-ages, and they’ve been holding up these values since way back.”
While the sound of California pop punk was cultivated and supported inside this small, graffitied warehouse in West Berkeley, 924 Gilman would likely not have survived if not for its radical values. “If there’s a single legacy, I think that it’s the idea that you don’t have to wait for somebody from Hollywood or New York to come and get your message or your ideas out to the world,” Livermore says. “Even if it’s not music—if it’s books, magazines, any kind of art—you can do it yourself, or you and your friends can do it, working together.”•
Santi Elijah Holley is an award-winning journalist and the author of An Amerikan Family: The Shakurs and the Nation They Created. He is a regular contributor to Alta Journal.
