924 Gilman: The East Bay’s Punk Rock Mecca

Close to the edge of Berkeley, California, sits one of punk rock’s most iconic all-ages clubs. 924 Gilman (named after the club’s address at 924 Gilman Street) has stood since 1986 and is run by 501(c)(3) non-profit organization Alternative Music Foundation, the venue having no owner and the only money coming in through fans who purchase tickets at the front door, fundraising and donations.

Throughout the club’s history, high school students from across the East Bay would head to the venue after school, supporting their friends who were in bands or performing themselves, and creating a community of their own. Green Day (see here) discovered Gilman the same way, and the venue remains part of the band’s lore. Billie Joe Armstrong, Tré Cool and Mike Dirnt would head over to Gilman and play on the venue’s stage, becoming the most famous band to come out of the club’s culture.

For Green Day, the venue continues to hold a strong place in their hearts, the band (now playing stadiums on a regular basis) often fondly looks back on their days hanging around Gilman.

“Back in 1989, we played Operation Ivy’s last show, and they stuck 900 people inside there,” Armstrong says. “Plus, our own shows when we started to headline – the shows were just great. It was our backyard, that’s where all our friends hung out. We were there regardless of if we were playing or not. It’s a really special place.”

The bandmembers, all still local to the East Bay, will sometimes stop by Gilman and walk through their old memories.

“I was there the other night, and it didn’t look like a shortage of people,” Cool says. “I found myself loading drums into a van, which I haven’t done in quite a while.”

The cycle of high school students making Gilman their second home remained from Green Day’s years through early 2020, but the pandemic shifted the venue’s function entirely. A generation of kids was lost, making it hard for Gilman to spread through word-of-mouth much like it had for the previos 35 years. The venue also didn’t have any full-time employees, instead consisting entirely of volunteers that spanned generations – from those who had stayed with the venue back when it first opened in 1986 to local college students.

“When the pandemic happened, a lot of the people who had been involved for a few years left,” says Alex Botkin, CFO and head booker at 924 Gilman. “It’s such a rare thing to have a gap where there’s nothing in a place like this. So people had this moment of like, ‘I’m free, I can leave with no consequences.’ Not that they hated the place or anything, but they had been there through college and graduated and were figuring out what to do with their professional lives.”

While the venue is still low on volunteers in comparison to how it functioned pre-pandemic, they’ve steadily been getting back on their feet. Gilman serves as a good foot in the door for younger kids to get a taste of the industry, allowing them to experience what it takes to run a venue, book shows and get talent up on stage. Botkin, who has been with Gilman since he was in high school in 2015, discovered the venue with his own high school band, Sarcasm. He began volunteering, which led to him getting opportunities to work at Bay Area festival Noise Pop, where he would manage shows at Ivy Room and The New Parish, and now his full-time job is as an inventory manager at 1-2-3-4 Go! Records in Oakland, California.

“A lot of people say Gilman gave a lot more to them than they could give back to it,” Botkin says. “I still don’t feel like I’ve repaid the amount of time and positivity that it brought for me back then. I still love doing it, it’s given me the working experience to now work in larger venue settings, so it’s served as a training ground to figure out how to work in the industry.”

Botkin has also seen a return of old faces, DIY fans and friends heading back to check out what’s been going on and getting involved in the community once again. He and the rest of the volunteers have been working with the city to try and get historical legacy protections for the building, and they’ve been digging through the history. However, for many of their high school-aged patrons, the past doesn’t necessarily carry all that much weight.

“It’s cool now seeing Green Day and they still play a big role in our history, but it’s interesting seeing kids come into the space where that’s not as big a factor for them,” Botkin says.

“The influence of why people are coming to Gilman now is shifting away from this nostalgia-driven element of, ‘Oh, one of my favorite bands started here and I want to start here.’ It’s becoming more that kids are finding out about it because these [new] bands are playing here. Gilman could have only existed for three years in their minds, you don’t have to have the enormous pressure of this legacy that follows the venue.”