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pot valiant - booklet text lyrics

in the spring of 1987, brian jay threw a concert in sproul plaza. the 2.6+acre expanse of concrete and brick is the grand southern gateway for the university of california, berkeley campus. sproul sits near the northern end of telegram avenue, the main artery of berkeley’s storied counterculture community. when berkeley was the epicenter of sevеral overlapping anti+establishment movеments in the 1960s, sproul became the public square for hippie idealism. on december 2, 1964, the berkeley free speech movement gathered 5,000 people in the plaza to protest the school’s archaic limitations of student expression. before joan baez performed, 21+year+old uc berkeley junior mario savlo implored his fellow demonstrators to “put your bodies upon the gears” of the university machinery should the institution continue to suppress their voices. brian jay was not mario savlo. jay didn’t go to uc berkeley; he attended el cerrito high school, about four miles north of sproul plaza. jay didn’t have a lofty cause that might draw berkeley’s activism community for a show. he did, however, have a band, albeit one that had barely taken its clumsy first steps. jay hadn’t played music before he became the vocalist for the vagrants. before he set his sights on sproul plaza, jay’s group performed just once, but because the vagrants made their public debut at his high school, jay didn’t count it a real show. still, he had more experience singing in a band than organizing a concert, never mind one at such an ill+strious and unconventional place like sproul. but jay had a power to call upon that ensured pesky things like “logistics” and “bureaucratic paperwork” wouldn’t prevent him from trying. he had punk. “the berkeley show is a really weird thing,” jay recalled. “me and my friend eric bailey were like, ‘let’s get a bunch of bands together.’ it was really self+promotion to start, and then it ballooned into, like, ‘let’s get all these people, let’s make it huge.'” jay asked venerable scene documentarian aaron cometbus if the gritty east bay band he drummed in, crimpshrine, would play. he said yes, but crimpshrine didn’t show up to sproul on april 11, 1987. the june 1987 issue of maximumrocknroll included an east bay scene report with cometbus’ mea culpa; already skeptical of the show, he blew it off to work. “and boy did i f+ck up,” cometbus wrote. “not only did we miss out on playing the show, i didn’t even get to see it, and then everyone kept coming up to me for a few days afterwards and telling how great and how fun it was.” cometbus declared jay’s show to be “probably the east bay event of the year.” east bay punk had a lot going for it in 1987. a community+run all+ages venue soft opened in a northwest berkeley warehouse on new year’s eve 1986, and although the first few months at the gilman street project were relatively quiet, it soon became the nexus of the region’s youth+oriented punk community

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