The address was 2618 San Pablo Avenue, Berkeley: a flat run of road with tyre shops and liquor stores on it and nothing along its length that looked like a music venue. The building had been a neighbourhood bar with a stage in the corner since long before anybody in the East Bay owned a Motorhead record. For four or five years in the middle of the 1980s that bar was the most important room in American metal, and it went on being a neighbourhood bar the entire time. Everything worth knowing about Ruthie's Inn is inside that contradiction.
The chapter on the Bay Area covers the bands and the records. This is about the room: how it was booked, who booked it, what the audience did to the floor, and which other addresses were taking the same phone calls, because a scene is never one club. It is a circuit of rooms willing to answer when a band with no record rings up.
A bar on San Pablo Avenue
The man who turned a bar into a landmark came to punk out of jazz, and the route matters. Wes Robinson 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 an Oakland loft, a Jazz Symposium series with Sonny Simmons and Alice Coltrane on the bill, two years running 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. That is the whole reason it could afford to put on music nobody else wanted: the till did not depend on the door. The punk bills came first, and Flipper were taped there on 6 August 1983 for what became Public Flipper Limited, with Bad Brains, Dead Kennedys and Social Distortion all having worked the room before a single downstroke was heard in it.
Nobody who was there calls the place comfortable. No licensed capacity for the room appears to have been published anywhere, and that absence is itself a fact about the premises: a bar with a stage in it, not a hall with a ticket office and a fire plan screwed to the wall. The Keystone Berkeley, a few blocks away, held five hundred and printed the number on the flyers. At Ruthie's the photographs are the only record, and what they show is a band and an audience standing on one continuous piece of floor, singers held upright by the front row, bodies going up onto the stage and back off it all night. How the room behaved was a function of how little of it there was.
Wes Robinson's booking policy
Reconstructed from flyers and from the people who played there, Robinson's rule was that he did not sort bands by genre. He sorted them by whether they would fill a bar on a Tuesday. A thrash band from Richmond therefore went on ahead of a hardcore band from Texas, and the two audiences were handed the same fifty square feet of floor and left to negotiate. Every other promoter in the region treated metal kids and punks as two markets with two separate nights and two separate doors. This one put them on the same bill, in the same room, with no barrier and nowhere to stand apart, and let the floor settle the argument.
What came out of that arrangement was not a compromise between two audiences. It was a third thing, forged nightly under conditions neither audience would have chosen, in a bar too small for anyone to keep a polite distance from anyone else.
Ruthie's put metal kids and punks on the same bill, in a room with no barrier, and let the floor settle the argument.
By 1984 the metal nights were the business. The club ran as a thrash and hardcore room from roughly 1983 to 1987, a short life for something this much has been written about, and almost exactly the window in which the genre stopped being four bands and became a scene with an economy of its own: demo tapes, fanzines, flyers, and a circuit of rooms that would take the call.
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 as 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, Blizzard opening the doors. Inside a year Exodus had Bonded By Blood in the shops and Possessed had Seven Churches finished, and between the two of them they had shifted 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 surviving evidence of what the booking policy did to the music. Possessed were not playing to a metal audience or to a punk audience. They were playing to whoever Robinson had let through the door, and the record sounds exactly like a band trying to be faster and uglier than the band that went on before it, rather than faster and uglier than anything on the radio. That is a different target and it produces a different record.
The night everybody remembers, and why it proves nothing
The most famous evening at Ruthie's is also the least representative of it. 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 precisely what four years of Wes Robinson's bills had done to the biggest band in the building. Audio has circulated as a bootleg ever since, and it remains the best surviving document of what a full night in there actually sounded like.
The circuit around it
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.
Then the Keystone closed, in the spring of 1984, for reasons as unromantic as the state of downtown parking. That single closure knocked the East Bay's middle sized room out of the market in the exact season the thrash bands needed one, and it is a large part of why a bar on San Pablo Avenue mattered as much as it did in 1985. The Mabuhay Gardens and the On Broadway upstairs from it, the Old Waldorf and the Kabuki all took metal bills when the arithmetic 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 measures 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 the trade on San Pablo Avenue, Death Angel, Testament and Forbidden, were playing rooms with barriers and tour buses parked outside them.
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 never advertised its capacity was never going to announce its own funeral. There is no plaque.
What survives instead 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. He had shot a reunion show at the Nimby warehouse in Oakland on 23 September 2006 when he died on 31 December 2006, aged 77. Nobody has finished it.
Which leaves the room where it has always been, in the wider story rather than on a map: a bar that printed no capacity, kept no archive, closed without a notice, and set the terms for a decade of American metal from behind a till on San Pablo Avenue. What it actually produced, and how it came to sound the way it does, is the subject of What Is the Bay Area Thrash Sound?
