My son and I are huge Rancid fans and we just got back from a self-guided “Journey to the End of the East Bay.” What a trip! It was so fun.
924 Gilman Street: Where Operation Ivy, Rancid, and Green Day got started.
We stayed in an AirBNB in Berkeley and walked for miles in between Berkeley, Oakland, and Albany. We walked the entire length of Telegraph Avenue (4.5 miles). When Tim was struggling with alcohol during the Operation Ivy-era he would go here and get wasted. In the book “Gimme Something Better: The Profound, Progressive, and Occasionally Pointless History of Bay Area Punk from Dead Kennedys to Green Day,” Tim is quoted as saying his brother found him here so drunk that he took him to the hospital and his blood-alcohol level was so high the doctors thought he was trying to kill himself. In Albany, we walked to Tim’s high school, Albany High School.
Gilman Street from the back of Rancid’s first album: Gilman Street is a pretty normal street for most people. But for East Bay punk fans it’s very meaningful. Notice there’s no picture of Lars. He wasn’t in the band yet.
Golden Gate Fields: Tim and Matt grew up near this old horse racing track. They sing about this place on the album Rancid (5). The property is still there, but it’s permanently closed.
Campbell, California: The city of Campbell is not within walking distance. It’s in the South Bay and about an hour drive south of Berkeley. Rancid fans will recognize this city from “Roots Radicals,” where Lars kicks it off by singing, “Took the 60 bus out of downtown Campbell…” I wonder if Ben Zanotto is still around. 🤔 I don’t know, but I can say that the 60 bus is – we saw it! The city of Cambell is surprisingly nice. I was estimating it to be rundown – a wasteland that produces hardened punks – but it certainly doesn’t look like that. I wonder if Lars felt like an outcast here. He said he dropped out of high school here in his song, “To Have and To Have Not.”
Sharmon Palms Lane, Campbell, California: Sharmon Palms Lane is a very short street (like two blocks). It’s where they shot the video for this song, and we could recognize the houses in the video with the ones still there. Did Lars actually live on this short street? I’m not sure. Maybe someone else knows.
When we got to Sharmon Palms Lane, we were totally surprised by the similarity it had to the cover of the album “Indestructible”. The palm trees look very similar. Unfortunately, my son didn’t make his mohawk that day. This would have been an awesome picture!
Harmon Street: In Tim’s sideproject, Transplants, he provides directions in the song “Sad But True”. But directions to what or why is a complete mystery. The lyrics are as follows:
“In a dream you take a trip down Shattuck to Durant, up the hill, to the steps, Sproul Plaza and Telegraph. You pass Channing, you pass Derby. You go to Ashby down to Adeleine. Take MLK to fifty-fourth and go down to Genoa yeah and follow the BART tracks to Harmon street ahhh Harmon street”
I mapped out the route. This is exactly as the directions describe it, but as you can see, it’s extremely roundabout. Now, drunk teenagers hanging out, doing nothing but just walking around can certainly walk roundabout in this type of pattern, but this is way too far for a bunch of teens to make in one go. It’s around five miles. It starts in Berkeley, goes into Oakland to the south, and then back into Berkeley. I personally couldn’t see any sites that stood out along this route, except passing through the most popular part of Telegraph Avenue. Harmon Street is just a normal residential street, like Sharmon Palms Lane, but older and a little more rundown. One idea I just had as I write this is maybe it was a route someone used to pick up their friends in a car as they were going to someone’s house on Harmon Street. Maybe that’s why it’s kind of circular. Then again, that theory doesn’t work well because Sproul Plaza is a plaza within the Univerisity of California, Berkeley, campus, where a car could go. So I don’t know!
There’s so much more that could be written about Op Ivy and Rancid’s history and landmarks within the Bay Area. Maybe someday someone will create a landmark tour webpage for Rancid like this one for Green Day: https://greenday.fm/band/landmark-tour/. As for us, we toured this area ourselves from our own research and it all just came together nicely!
