Here sighs, with lamentations and loud moans,
Resounded through the air pierced by no star.Dante Alighieri, Inferno
The address was 2618 San Pablo Avenue, Berkeley, a flat stretch of road with tyre shops, liquor stores and nothing that looked like a music venue. The building had been a neighbourhood bar with a stage in it since long before anybody in the East Bay owned a Motorhead record. For four or five years in the middle of the 1980s it was the most important room in American metal, and it was still a neighbourhood bar with a stage in it. That combination is the whole point of Ruthie's Inn.
The chapter on the Bay Area covers the bands and the records. This piece is about how the Bay Area sound came together at Ruthie's Inn, who put the bills together, what the audience did in front of the stage, and the other addresses on the same circuit, because a scene is not one club. It is a network of rooms that will take a young band's phone call.
A bar on San Pablo Avenue
The man who made it matter was Wes Robinson, a Black promoter who arrived at punk out of jazz. He was born in Texas, met players of the order of Pharoah Sanders and John Coltrane while stationed in New York with the army, and came back to the Bay Area in the early 1960s to put on the music the licensed clubs would not touch: a speakeasy in a downtown Oakland loft, a Jazz Symposium series with Sonny Simmons and Alice Coltrane on it, two years of the UC Berkeley Jazz Festival while he took a master's degree, a band called Hoodoo that he managed, and a run of East Bay theatre productions in the early 1970s. By 1975 the commercial turn in jazz bored him and the new punk bands did not, so he went looking for a room he could book every week and found Ruthie's. It was a bar first and a venue second, which is why it could afford to put on music that nobody else wanted. The punk bills came first. Flipper were taped there on 6 August 1983 for what became Public Flipper Limited, and Bad Brains, Dead Kennedys and Social Distortion all played the room before a single downpicked riff was heard in it.
Nobody who was there describes the place as comfortable. No licensed capacity for the room appears to have been published anywhere, and the absence is itself a fact about the premises: a neighbourhood bar with a stage in it, not a hall with a ticket office and a fire plan on the wall. The Keystone Berkeley, a few blocks away, held five hundred and printed the number. At Ruthie's the photographs are the record, and what they show is a band and an audience standing on the same piece of floor, singers held upright by the front row, bodies going up onto the stage and off it all night. How the room behaved was a function of how little of it there was.
Wes Robinson's booking policy
Robinson's rule, as far as one can reconstruct it from flyers and from the people who played, was that he did not sort bands by genre. He sorted them by whether they would fill the room on a Tuesday. So a thrash band from Richmond went on before a hardcore band from Texas, and the two audiences had to share the same fifty square feet of floor. Other promoters treated metal kids and punks as separate markets with separate nights. Ruthie's put them on the same bill and let them work it out.
By 1984 the metal nights were the main business. The club ran as a thrash and hardcore room from roughly 1983 to 1987, which is a short life for something with this much written about it, and almost exactly the window in which the genre stopped being four bands and became a scene with its own economy of demo tapes, fanzines and flyers.
The bills, 1984 to 1986
| Date | Bill | Note |
|---|---|---|
| 17 Feb 1984 | Megadeth, Abattoir, Trouble | Megadeth's first show; Kerry King on second guitar |
| 26 May 1984 | Exodus, Slayer, Possessed, Blizzard | Advertised as The Heaviest Metal; Possessed third on a four band bill |
| 22 Mar 1985 | Possessed, Death Angel, Hirax | Death Angel still of school age |
| 24 Aug 1985 | Metallica, billed as The Four Horsemen | Warm-up for Day on the Green |
| 7 Sep 1985 | Possessed, Death Angel, Black Dethe | Seven Churches released that November |
Read that table as an economy rather than a list of gigs. The flyer for 26 May 1984 promised The Heaviest Metal and delivered four bands for the price of a cinema ticket: Exodus headlining at home, Slayer up from Los Angeles five months after Show No Mercy, Possessed third on with a singer who was still at school, and Blizzard opening. Within a year Exodus had Bonded by Blood in the shops and Possessed had Seven Churches finished, and between them they had moved what the word extreme was expected to cover.
Seven Churches came out on 4 November 1985, cut at Prairie Sun in Cotati across a single week of the school holidays that spring, when Jeff Becerra and the guitarist Larry Lalonde were both sixteen. It is the clearest evidence of what the room's booking policy did to the music. Possessed were not playing to a metal audience or a punk audience. They were playing to whoever Robinson had let in, and the record sounds like a band trying to be faster and uglier than the last band on the bill rather than faster and uglier than the last band on the radio.
Ruthie's put metal kids and punks on the same bill and let them work it out.
The most famous night is also the least representative. On 24 August 1985 Metallica played the club billed as The Four Horsemen, a secret warm-up for the Day on the Green bill at the Oakland Coliseum a week later, with Cliff Burton on bass and a room full of people who had worked out what the billing meant. They played a Misfits song and they played a Fang song, Fang being a local punk band who worked the same room, which tells you what four years of Wes Robinson's bills had done to them. Audio of that show has circulated as a bootleg ever since, and it is the single best surviving document of what a full night at Ruthie's sounded like.
The moshing question
The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.
William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Ruthie's is regularly called the birthplace of moshing, and that claim needs taking apart. Gary Holt of Exodus has put his name to the strong version of it. Asked where the stage diving and the slam pits in Bay Area metal came from, he answered that it was born there, at Ruthie's, with the help of Wes Robinson and the Exodus Slay Team. Read him as a witness rather than as a historian and the sentence still earns its keep. He is describing the point at which a metal audience began behaving like a hardcore audience, and he is naming the room where he stood and watched it happen.
The invention belongs elsewhere. The word comes out of Washington DC hardcore. Playing Banned in D.C. in 1979 or 1980, H.R. of Bad Brains shouted "mash it, mash down Babylon", and his Jamaican vowels reached the front rows as mosh. By about 1983 metal audiences were calling the slow heavy sections of hardcore songs mosh parts, where the hardcore bands themselves had called them skank parts, and Stormtroopers of Death fixed the spelling for metal with "Milano Mosh" in 1985. The circle pit and the stage dive were established punk behaviour on both coasts before any thrash band copied them. What Ruthie's did was put the two crowds in one room until the metal audience stopped standing still. Call it the place where metal learned to mosh and you are on solid ground. Call it the birthplace and you are repeating a flyer.
The rest of the circuit
One club cannot carry a scene, and Ruthie's never did. The Stone, at 412 Broadway in San Francisco, ran from 1980 to 1993 and took the bigger nights; Metallica played it on 18 September 1982, months before they left Los Angeles for the Bay Area for good. The Keystone Berkeley, at 2119 University Avenue, had been the East Bay's main rock room since 1972, held five hundred, and belonged with the Stone and Keystone Palo Alto to Freddie Herrera's small circuit. It closed in the spring of 1984 for reasons as unromantic as the state of downtown parking, which took the East Bay's middle sized room out of the market in the exact season the thrash bands needed one. That is a large part of why Ruthie's mattered so much in 1985. The Mabuhay Gardens and the On Broadway upstairs from it, the Old Waldorf and the Kabuki all took metal bills when the money worked.
The Omni came later and took the overflow. John Nady, who had made his money selling wireless transmitters to guitarists, bought 4799 Shattuck Avenue in Oakland from the Ligure Club, an Italian social club, and opened it as a rock venue in 1985, partly so that his own band would have somewhere to play. It ran until late 1993, when the Ligure Club took the building back. On 20 April 1990 the Omni staged a Thrash Awards bill with Death Angel, Forbidden, Vio-lence and Primus on it, which is the distance from Ruthie's in a single line: four bands off the same circuit, in a room with a proper stage, three months before Vio-lence put out Oppressing the Masses. By then the bands that had learned their trade at Ruthie's, Death Angel, Testament and Forbidden, were playing rooms with barriers and tour buses parked outside.
Kesha's Inn, and what survives
The end was ordinary. No date for the handover is on record, and neither is a closing night. What is on record is that the room was trading as Kesha's Inn by late 1986 under other management, that promoters went on printing Ruthie's in brackets on the flyers afterwards because nobody in the audience had learned the new name, and that shows carried on in the building into 1988 with the metal nights thinning out of them. A club that had never advertised its capacity was never going to announce its own funeral. There is no plaque.
What survives is scrappy and worth more than a plaque. Robinson ran a festival at the club from 1984 under the name Eastern Front, and Restless Records put out a double album from it in 1986 as Eastern Front: Live at Ruthie's Inn, twenty three live tracks taped in the room. Read the sleeve as a register of the scene rather than as a record: Death Angel and Hirax are on it, so are D.R.I. and Laaz Rockit and Blind Illusion and Heathen, and so are two bands who were about to change their names, Legacy into Testament and Forbidden Evil into Forbidden. Bootleg audio and video of the Metallica night circulate freely. Harald Oimoen and Brian Lew collected more than four hundred of their photographs of the scene as Murder in the Front Row, published by Bazillion Points in December 2011, and Adam Dubin's 2019 documentary of the same name uses club footage from the room. Robinson was making a film of his own about the place, and had shot a reunion show at the Nimby warehouse in Oakland on 23 September 2006, when he died on 31 December 2006 at the age of 77. Nobody has finished it.
